Leadville

Day 15: Double or Nothing or Ice Cream

We went back to the aircraft carrier boulder to see if our stunt doubles could finally send the V6- and V11 boulder problems they had been working on respectively. It would have been the hardest boulder problem either of our stunt doubles had ever sent outside. Mico’s stunt double had been one move away from sending, so there was a lot of hope there. All he had to do was catch and hold onto a rather sharp lip after launching himself from shitty little crimps with less than ideal feet. My stunt double had some extra work to put in but miracles are always possible, that’s what makes them miracles. We got a late start (characteristic of our time in Leadville), stopping in town to pick up a Leadville sticker for my beloved sister. By the time we got to the boulder, we had two hours to warm up and finish the problems before we had to leave for Denver to visit Mico’s geat uncle. We tried so hard and got so far and kept pushing back our departure time. We kept trying to bust through that ceiling, but by the time 2pm rolled around (an hour after we said we’d leave), we had time for one last attempt. I, though a move closer to the top, was still nowhere near sending. Mico, after exhausting all methods for reaching the lip statically, had resolved to try the jump and hold on really hard method. He went for gold, launching himself at the lip, and managed to grab it with his left hand. He held on for a fraction of a second while his legs swung out and I prayed for a spotting miracle, before slipping off. Safely on the ground, he was clutching his left hand, admiring a medium-sized flapper on his middle finger.

Because of his perfect genetics, this was the first flapper Mico’d ever gotten, a testament to the sharpness of the lip. Lesser humans would have been ready to throw in the towel, but not Mico. He wanted to give it one more go. Unfortunately, we had just finished our roll of tape. All the tape we had with us was on his and my hands. Stellar, supportive, beneficent, goodlooking person that I am, I immediately volunteered the tape on my hands. It was a shirt off my back moment. If he sent the problem on the next attempt, I would have felt like I’d just sent V11 as well. If this were a movie, this would have been the moment where everything came together, and against a ticking clock and bleeding hand, Mico sent. Sadly, there was no camera crew; everything in this blog is mostly nonfiction. His final attempt was unsuccessful. My spotting, on the other hand, was very successful. We got back in the car to Denver, pausing only at a supermarket for lunch where we each purchased a tub of ice cream. I did a good job with my pint of chocolate sorbet. Mico, however, struggled to finish his quart and a half of Reese’s peanut butter cup ice cream and had to throw in the towel somewhere around the quart mark. We think we’re going to give the ice cream a rest for a little while. Consuming it in such quantities is very exhausting.

Day 14: Pig in a Can

Please excuse the lapse in posting. It was difficult to keep up the blog while Mico was recovering from his severe bed bug mauling. We concluded that the source of the bed bugs was likely Mico’s sleeping bag. He’d received similar bite marks before on other backpacking trips but, perpetually riddled with bug bites as he is, he’d never thought much of it. We isolated his sleeping bag in a large black trash bag and went to the local consignment store to buy him a warmer, less vermin-infested bag. Over the next few days, we continued to find isolated bed bugs on our things, but Mico’s now no longer waking up with new bites on his legs, so we’re hoping that did the trick/biding our time until the eggs hatch. After a somewhat disappointing day of climbing (Independence Pass climbs seem to be rated with a rubric similar to the Yale grading system, so we kept ending up on four star climbs that probably only deserved three), we returned to our base outside Leadville to drown our sorrows with food. We had lovely spam pizza. Turns out the veggie slicer we got can turn spam into pasta form.

Day 13: When Disaster Strikes!

There is much in this world that we don’t know. How do you rock climb? Where can you find the best stunt doubles (those last ones couldn’t even finish the problems)? Where are the most photogenic boulders for good stunt double photo shoots? I’d hoped that with a BA in Film Studies and a few succesful shorts, Ceri would know the answers to these questions that are so critical to our trip’s success. Some might expect that this misunderstanding would cause a rift in our friendship, but we’ve banded together to learn about the world. What we’ve found so far is that Ceri is likely in the 20% of people who do not react to bed bug bites while still in the 80% that hates their guts. I sadly fall in that reactive 80% but do not respond so violently or profanely to their presence, enjoying a simple smush, as opposed to a shouting match. We also learned, during a touristic trip to a weed dispensary (Ceri, straightlaced as she is, wanted to visit an “artisinal” dispensary where they’d describe the flavor profiles of the different varieties of plant), that weed comes in multiple varieties, some producing an energetic high while other strains induce a dude like trancesdental state. While we can’t personally comment on the different strains at Earl’s (much to the disappointment of the talkative weed venor) we can say that some of what they sell smells like kitty litter. Sadly, we still haven’t learned what that funny fry pan with ridges from the Jon Chen Fry Pan Co. is all about.

Day 12: Our First Day of Climbing

Some people (our parents) have pointed out that this is a blog about our CLIMBING trip but there is no evidence of us actually climbing. You caught us. We have a confession to make. The reason there are on videos of us climbing is not out of concern for safety; it’s not because we feel the need to leave a brake hand on the rope while the other is leading a difficult pitch or because we think it’s a valuable use of man power to have one person spotting the other on a boulder problem. No. As many of you have probably already guessed, the reason that we don’t have footage of us climbing is because we have not been doing any climbing. It’s an emperor’s new clothes type deal. It sounds really badass to say that we’re going on this awesome climbing trip, and at the end of the day it’s all about image and personal branding. We’re realizing that our fans are too clever, so the videos below are to throw you off the scent. We paid some very convincing stunt doubles to climb a V6- and a V11. I’ll let you guess which stunt double was climbing which climb.

Day 11: In Which We Learn Life Is Finite

Despite the crusty shell I’ve worked hard to cultivate over the years, on the inside I’m a girl who loves daffodils and big yellow butterflies. I reveal this not because I want you to think I have a softer side, but so that you can fully appreciate the tragedy that occurred when I hit one of these big beautiful butterflies while driving. The butterfly went splat on the windshield and peeled off as I continued driving. It left behind a mustard-colored trail of what I imagine were butterfly innards. I wanted to stop the car and see if we could offer the bug any medical assistance, but Mico was worried about running out of gas, so we continued on. I consoled myself with the fact that there was probably little we could have done for it. I had been driving about 60mph. As with every sad event, there was a silver lining. The butterfly tragedy afforded me a moment to contemplate myself  and my place in the cosmos. I realized that life was finite and precious and that I could not afford to waste it climbing routes that got below a four star rating or eating healthy food.

 
 
 

We’d like to take a moment to thank a couple of our sponsors who made these videos possible. The Jon Chen Frypan Company for providing us with the cast iron skillet (we still have not figured out how to use the other thing which we think might be a griddle) and Archangeli Oils for the quality canola oil which we nearly finished during our fry everything bonanza. We hope these videos inspired others to follow in our footsteps and dream big because it is possible to fry anything you put your mind to!

Day 10: Bacon and Ice Cream and a Small Amount of Exercise

Today we took a well-deserved rest day. My fingers needed it. 8/10 had cuts on the tips that would start bleeding anytime I touched anything–granite, sandstone, my toothbrush, a banana–the texture of the thing didn’t really matter, just the fact that I was using my hands. Like all good rest days, we got off to a restful start with bacon followed by some core and upper body exercises done from rings we suspended from an unsuspecting pine tree. As with most things physical, the exercises Mico performed with ease, I struggled to complete; the exercises he struggled to complete, I failed to perform entirely. We had a 4+ hour drive from Durango to Leadville but planned to break up the drive with a fun activity. As we drove, we did some research. It came down to berry picking or a 9 mile round trip hike to a hot spring. Since it was our rest day, we thought it best to go with the 9 mile hike which started at just above 9,000ft.

The day ended with a blissful trip to Walmart where we feasted our eyes on the near-infinite power of Capitalism and shared a pint of chocolate cookies and cream cashew milk ice cream.