So, Bustin Dustin and I have had plans to climb Tricks of the Trade in Zion for a little over a month now. Its a long mostly free route in Zion and by all accounts is supposed to be a grand adventure and has been on my tick list for a couple years now. Well we had a date set, were working out our game plan and were super psyched until (cue ominous music) I was checking it out on Mountain Project, you know ogling and daydreaming when I noticed a funny little bit of text. "Subject to seasonal closures" Fast forward to cursing the damn endangered species act! Honestly I appreciate peregrine falcons immensely but... why do they have to be nesting on the chunk of stone we wanted to climb!!!! Well, I called ole Dustin and fed him the bad news and we started casting about for other alternatives... Washer Woman and Primrose Dihedral? Zoroaster with Greg? Baboquvari? Hmmm what to do? Then somehow from mid air we plucked our new goal, The Original Route. Which original route you may ask, well The Original Route on the Rainbow Wall of course. Holy Hell here we go, 14 pitches give or take, with at least in the 12a region and the rest just moderately easier with what looks like a hell of a lot of 5.11 pitches. Oh yeah and a four hour approach, sweet. Now of course we retain the right to changes plans again but... this could get exciting, stay tuned.
On a side note, after 10 days of no exercise and eating nothing but soup and apple sauce I finally got my stitches out of my mouth, ate a meatball sub, hit up Paragon Athletics (aka the Hurt Locker), and hiked most of the way up bowl side and snowboarded down. Awesome! Pretty sure I'll feel it in the morning but it felt good to work hard again... I definitely felt a lot weaker and slower and tipped the scale at 160, around 8 lbs lost over the last 10 days, but damn its good to be back. Now to start training hard and ticking off some hard routes in Sedona and at the Waterfall, hell maybe even venture out to the Forks for some familiar punishment. Pinche and I got 15 pitches in in a day this summer and we weren't even really pushing it who knows what could happen! (Ticked 27 pitches total on my 27 birthday between the Forks and the Pit so the bars pretty high!)
