Exploring & climbing

Continuing to explore and enjoy the eastern Sierra.  We’ve been here 3 weeks now.  We had our first visitors last week.  Petch (friend from  Strawberry Lodge days),  Heidi and their daughter Rocky stopped for a night on their way to a family reunion in Las Vegas.  It was great to see them and gave us the motivation to finish up a couple of moving in details.  Before they left we all went down to Alabama Hills (40 minutes south) for some climbing.   

Rocky has her own harness & shoes

Malia, Rocky, Paolo

Petch dashed up a couple of climbs and put up top ropes for us all to play on.  Heidi’s sister and family are also climbers.  The kids really liked the scrambling.  They are amazingly comfortable on rock already.  It was a good time and more climbing than we have done in years.

Bite of lunch in the desert

We have identified our favorite hiking/training area for winter (so far).  We can’t get up into the high country until snow melts in spring.  And many of the hikes available now are deserty.

Rock Creek Trail

The one we like follows Rock Creek for 8 miles on a good trail right next to the creek.  You can access it in a couple of places where it crosses a road so we are checking it out in sections.  Near the bottom, it crosses the creek several times with walking bridges.  Buddy freaked when he saw the first one and put on the brakes.  I carried him over the first one.  On the next, he manned up and crossed on his own!  It’s a beautiful place, but north of Bishop, so not real convenient.  It’s nice to combine with ‘a trip to the city’ if we’re not  too tired.  We’ll look for something similar up Big Pine Creek next.

We’re having warm weather this week.  Yesterday was supposed to get up to 72 so we went down to climb at Alabama Hills.  It was T-shirt weather!  Had great fun, will let Chuck tell it.  Chuck:  the difficulty in getting back into climbing is that someone has to lead the climb in order to get the rope up.  So Wednesday we chose the easiest climb we could find, and tried to lead it.  Chuck led it first, then Trish led it and was stoked to have made it to the top!  We were whooping it up, and patting each other on the back,  but our egos were deflated somewhat when we noticed that the dogs had scrambled up the rock right behind Trish!  Wish we had a photo.

I found a fun morning walk/jog loop starting at the house.  It passes a pasture with about 50 horses.  One morning they were all chasing and playing for some reason (Vanessa?).   Another morning a horse in another pasture ran with me on his side of the fence and wanted to be petted.   The other side of the road has cows and lots of calves right now.  I’m seeing lots of flickers, hawks, quail, even a great blue heron (ubiquitous creek nearby).