Sara and I landed in Denver, picked up the rental car (thanks Brit!), and met Nelson in Fort Collins where he was living at the time. We borrowed a crash pad and while he went back to work for the afternoon we scoped out the piano boulders at Horsetooth Reservoir. We got to enjoy the brewery scene with Nelson before heading south to Aurora for our ultimate tournament the next two days for Colorado Cup.
After being seeded 12th and finishing 4th in the tournament, Kelly joined us for the first couple days of roping up on the wall. We started at Lily Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park and had no qualms with taking advantage of the scenic view and snapping a few photos. Sara and I had ran up Middle Toe, and just as Kelly started up the wall the thunder rolled in and the skies darkened. Halfway up, the rain poured down and we ended up having to bail, our first exposure to the afternoon thunderstorms. Leaving the park we were able to set some routes and get some climbing in back in Fort Collins at Duncan's Ridge, but we'd be ready to start our next day earlier with our storm awareness growing.
The next morning we loaded up on coffee and barreled the rental car up the forest road, past Hyatt Mine and parked at the approach for the Monastery. We knew we had to visit this crag based on the high quality and density of routes in our ability, with some great views as well. Not wanting Kelly to come out and get washed off the wall two days in a row, we made sure she got on the granite early. Well, as early as we could with the extended approach in comparison to anything we had done before, but it made for wonderful solitude.
Before Kelly caught her flight home we managed to get out to the Piano Boulders at Horsetooth (now that we knew where a couple close options were). After dropping off Kelly we shot to Boulder to hang out on Pearl St and meet up with Brit and Gorman before picking up Esteban from the airport, who would be joining us for the rest of the trip.
With Stebs in tow we trucked back to the Monastery wanting to get on some taller routes and pretend like we knew the area to show him around. We ended up doing Table Wine and the Steeple, but as we finished up Steeple, the clouds rolled in and started to rain. We put together a make shift shelter where our roof was the rope bag, and after a few minutes the sun came out. We managed to do Monastic Grove next before the storm rolled back in and the rain really started coming down. In familiar form at this point, we left the Monastery and got Stebs up on the wall back at Duncan's Ridge.
For our last day of climbing in Colorado we ended up at Poudre Canyon and climbed County Line as well as She's a Daisy, quite pleased that these routes had positive holds as opposed to the slab routes we had been scraping up for the last week. Nelson joined us to hang out, still adamant bouldering is way better than roped climbing, but we'll leave that discussion for another day.
