Me. At the top of that climb in Rifle after hanging on almost every bolt. Yay! Sigh.
Today’s Field Notes is a celebration of mediocrity. It turns out that I’m now an average Boulder climber.
Yay Boulder average!
It’s really easy to forget that everyone doesn’t climb 5.13 around here, or boulder V13 (like Angie Payne, who I recently met — she crushed my hand when we shook hello). But we, the average, are strong in numbers. So why not talk about it.
I wrote most of my column on Friday. On Saturday, I went bouldering in Lower Chaos Canyon with Peter Beal again. I don’t boulder much, thus I full-on suck at it and spent the whole day following all the advice I gave in my column.
We stopped at the Potato Chip for the warm-ups. It took me three tries on each of them to figure out the moves despite the terror surging through my veins and then get the guts to actually top them out.
That thing is tall. And I am Boulder average. But it’s OK — I’m not alone.