Joe's Valley

I've been a bit out of contact recently. Mostly doing school work and climbing little. I was a bit sick the last week and a half and so I was taking it easy before my spring break trip. I did do the final competition last weekend at the Spot gym. It went well. I got third place in the qualifying round (behind Daniel Woods and Paul Robinson) and ended up fifth on the ridiculous finals problem that involved traversing a steep wall with a 15 lb weight vest and then stripping the vest and climbing a really hard three move problem. Anyway, it was a fun comp and good training.

I'm in Joe's Valley now and will be here for another week. I arrived on Saturday and climbed a little bit then and also climbed yesterday. Today is the first rest day. I'm really psyched to do Black Lung V13 and was happy with my progress trying it on Saturday. I did the first move once and also did the second move. I've tried this problem many times over the last 6 years but have never had many back to back days on it so I always forgot my beta. Saturday was my first time ever doing the second move though so I was pretty psyched. I'll probably try it tomorrow morning.

Apart from Black Lung, my main objective for the trip is to repeat a bunch of the classic V9-V11 problems I've never done. One of these is Jitterbug Perfume V10/11. Yesterday I checked this one out and was psyched to give it a flash attempt. I pulled on and everything went pretty smoothly and I pulled off the flash. I came close to falling on the crux move left to the gaston crimp. At first I only stuck it with one finger and had to reel in to get the rest of my pads on the hold. It was definitely a cool problem and I was psyched to flash it. Check out the video of me doing it below. (By the way, Jetterbug Perfume is also a great book by Tom Robbins and I highly recommend that you read it). I'm hoping to give some good flash attempts on some of the other problems around. One in particular that I've wanted to flash for a long time is Beyond Life V10/11. I'll probably get on that one soon. Yesterday I also dod the Hulk Sit V9 which was a unique problem with a cool undercling gaston move. It's definitely nice to be back in this area with really fun problems on cool rock. Stay posted for more news and vids from the trip.