Margaux Rhymes with Fargo

A few weeks ago, Will and I along with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend spent a long weekend in in Golden, Colorado that involved a lot of climbing, ice cream, pizza, rain, and music (but not necessarily in that order).

The first adventure of the weekend came when we realized our chosen crag for the first day of climbing was across a river from the parking pullout. A particularly rushing river, I must say. After some skeptical inspection, we noticed a steel cable running across the river, ostensibly meant to help climbers such as ourselves get to the other side. Turns out this involves putting on our harnesses and pulling ourselves and our backpacks across the river on said steel cable, all the while watched by all the other climbers and hikers who remained on the car side of the river. I have never felt cooler.

The actual climb itself was super fun: four long pitches, nice ledges to belay from, snacks galore, climbing mostly in the shade, warm and beautiful weather, pretty much everything you want in a day in the mountains.

The best part of the day was the rappel down: one ~60′ rappel, and then a 200′ airy rappel all the way to the bottom. Oh, and did I mention it started thunderstorming right before we started rappelling?

The next days weren’t quite as objectively adventurous, but still awesome. We did a bunch of single pitch sport climbing, I took a completely unexpected 30+ foot lead fall, and I rescued some guy’s carabiner from a route he couldn’t finish. All good times. I did take a bit of a hard fall at the end and injured my forearm/elbow which was a bummer, but now (three weeks later) I’m back to normal, so that’s nice.

We ended the weekend with a Dispatch concert at an INCREDIBLE venue, the Red Rocks Ampitheatre. My one sad photo doesn’t do it justice, so here’s a link to some fun ones. All in all a grand old time!