Hello!
Due to laziness I never wrote up about my last couple weeks in Chattanooga from my first trip so here goes! For anyone who actually cares to read all of this.
Upon returning to Chattanooga after Christmas I headed to Rocktown to experiment to see how bad my hamstring injury was. Turned out to hurt doing any heel hooks or toeing in too hard so I avoided any climbs where I needed to do that. Had fun times climbing around and having a mini photo shoot while pretending to climb Golden Harvest.
On New Year's eve I wasn’t sure what I was going to do until about 5 PM when I asked a friend what he was up to and he invited me to a party full of climbers. It turned out to be pretty nuts with 150+ people in this one guys house with lots of wax bombs and fireworks! After a few hours Jimmy Webb brought in Nalle Hukkataival and we all got to grill Nalle about Burden of Dreams.
I needed to take a day off due to fingers hurtin’ but I wasn’t sure what to do. I sat around for a little while and got super bored, so I decided to drive around and see what I could see. Naturally after driving around for a bit I found a trail head and thought it would be a nice idea to take a short hike. If you’ve read any of my other updates then you know I can never successfully take a short hike. This was an area I had been to before so I figured I knew my way around well enough. I strapped on my pack and headed out into the woods!
Snow started to fall and it was chilly but that didn’t really bother me. It started off okay with just some casual hills and I stumbled upon some cool historical museum thing that had heating! I circled around and back the other way and ended up coming to a fork in the trail that I had been to before. The last time I went right and it brought me straight back to the parking lot so I wanted to take a left this time for a new adventure. This trail brought me farther down the mountain to this super touristy area called Ruby Falls. Although I was directly below the parking lot, there was no direct trail up so I either had to backtrack all the way to the fork (pretty far) or go up the road. I didn’t know how far up the road it was and I didn’t want to get hit by a car so I backtracked. It took freakin forever to get to the parking lot! On my way down the road, I discovered that the place I parked was only a minute or 2 of a walk on the road above Ruby Falls :(.
I spent a couple days bouldering in Horse Pens 40 in Alabama. The first day it was about 65 degrees and wet, so that made climbing heinous slopers quite hard. I managed to do a few moderates with quite a bit of difficulty. The next day was a bit colder so I hopped on some of the problems I had tried before and sent Bumboy (v3)! Never have I been prouder to climb a v3 lol. World's hardest v3, especially when it’s 65 degrees.
My skin was pretty bad after Horse Pens so I drove back to Chattanooga and took a day to just work out and then a day to completely rest. The weather turned out to be quite cold this next weekend (20-25 high) with some strong winds and it gave me second thoughts at first, but I drove down to the Walmart near Horse Pens anyway. The night ended up being about 10 degrees and I had to wear 4 hoods and 2 pair of pants in my 0 degree sleeping bag to not totally freeze. When I woke up, my car was covered in frost, including the center console above the front 2 seats. Psych was low so I bought some popcorn chicken at Walmart to psych myself up!.
Frosty!
Here I am, happy that I survived the cold night.
How to get psyched!
I then drove over to Horse Pens and put on all my layers, grabbed some hand warmers and set out for the boulders! Once I got into the warms ups I ran into all the locals who like to climb when the cold scares off the weaklings. After I got moving around I actually really enjoyed it! There were a few climbs that felt impossible a few days before and now they felt like jug hauls. Got all the moves on Five-0 (v9) without too much trouble but couldn’t manage to link all the moves together. The boulder starts low off to the right on a sloper and a crimp > traverses along a sloping lip with a lower crimp rail > left heel hook > fancy hand switch around moves on awful slopers and one crimp > big full-extension move out to a crimp to the right > slap hands up into a compression on bad slopers/edges > a few really really hard compression moves > get feet up really high and do big move to jug to top out. Did a few other moderates too.
I went back to Chattanooga and climbed some more at the TBA, did some core workouts, and some other stuff to make me feel like I was in shape. I spent my last couple days at LRC, trying some climbs that I couldn’t get before and some knew stuff too. I did “The Wave” and a few others of less note. I tried Grimace (v8) for the first time and got all the moves first try (including the bit sketchy top out), except for one. I fell on that one move several times and eventually got frustrated and moved on to some other boulders. I went to the way way back part of LRC and flashed some really cool crimpy traverse v5 I don’t remember the name of. I was bleeding sufficiently out of my tips by the end of this day so it seemed like a good time to head home to catch up with family and friends!
That wraps up my first trip to Chattanooga! I’m writing this about a month after it all happened while I’m on my second trip so I may have forgotten some of the details. I’ll try and write some more updates for my current trip! Thanks for reading yo.
Bonus material!
Selfie by "The Flow" Horse Pens.
Panorama at Horse Pens
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