Tuolumne last weekend

Rather than begin by boring you with climbing stories, I'll talk about the food first. See photo. Amazing food at the Mobil Mart in Lee Vining just outside the park near Mono Lake. Called the Whoa Nellie Deli - look it up.

It's very unassuming. The owner/chef works the register and wanders around picking up plates and chatting with customers. When we ordered he had suggested that two soups would be too much food, but we went with it anyway, in part because R noted that he doesn't know me well enough to share a soup with me. :-) Funny. We did pretty well eating it all - and the owner came by and remarked on it. He also leads fishing trips, and told the story of asking a client if he wanted to use his pole since the client wasn't catching anything. The guy said no, and never caught anything; he later said, when you asked me if I wanted to use your pole I should have said yes, right? Right. So the owner remarked to us, if you're with someone who knows something it's good to listen to their advice. Funny. The guy also had a sign up on the wall with his photo on it, and it said Employee of the month: April-Nov 2005, April-Nov 2006, and so one. Quite funny. The statement actually came back to haunt me when R the next day asked as I was leading a pitch: can I offer you some advice? And I refused. I thought he was going to tell me how to climb. He actually was going to offer advice on the way he sets up his gear, which I was using. I almost ran into trouble because I didn't listen... Learned a lesson for sure.

This here is an example of what the rock climbing is like at Tuolumne. Slab slab slab. You can see what you do to get off the rock - walk down down down. It's nuts, but I'm getting a little used to it. I don't have good shoes so I have to wear my climbing shoes down - rough on the feet. Those rocks are called...erratics. Really neat. We did in the two days do two climbs which were more like my style - nice cracks and not too much slab. So nice. I was very excited.


And, btw, the Ginko Biloba worked! We'll see if it really works the next time I go to altitude.