After a week at the Forks, both Mike and I are exhausted. The climbing here is super steep and strenuous. This is the Prow area, which although we didn't climb it, it should give you an idea of what the various climbs look like, since they pretty much all look like this. My whole body hurts and I have little gobis (gobi = open wound) all over my hands. I have one minor achievement on my last day: I managed to push and paw up two climbs without whining or whimpering. As I took this picture, we watched two climbers rappel down to do a climb on the Prow, and noticed they had forgotten their climbing rope at the top of the cliff. We found this quite amusing since just two days prior, I had done the exact same thing!

By Saturday, we have taken as much beating as we can endure. So we packed up on Sunday and started the drive to CA. We are camping just outside of Lone Pine in the Alabama Hills and we'll be heading to Tuoloumne Meadows later today.

Paradise Forks

After the wedding, we headed to Paradise Forks which is just outside of Flagstaff, AZ. It's a basalt canyon with some beautiful cracks.

The first day we headed to the Pillow area. And here's a picture on our first climb of the trip. It doesn't look too hard.. but I'm finding the climbing here extremely challenging! The cracks are really smooth inside, so it feels slippery to both my hands and feet. So far I haven't climbed one climb without falling! On the bright side, hopefully this is a good lesson for me in crack climbing. Mike used to climb here when he was in college and actually developed some of the climbs in this area, so he's enjoying being back here.

The area is on Forest Service land, and we found a beautiful camping spot. Right now we're in the monsoon season here, so we've had a couple days where it rained in the afternoon. I'm not sure when we're moving on..we might head down to Prescott or we might head to CA to get to Tuoloumne before it gets too cold.

Taylor, AZ

I flew down to Phoenix on Wednesday, where Mike picked me up at the airport. We spent the next 2 days finishing up odds and ends and helping get ready for Mike's sister's wedding. Here's a picture of the beautiful bride.
On Sunday we headed off towards Flagstaff to climb at Paradise Forks. Unfortunately Mike has picked up an illness, which has hampered our climbing a bit.

My Last Day @ MS!

Has finally arrived! I won't spend too much time here talking about MS, but I'll just say it's been a very enriching experience both personally and professionally.
マリンとマイクロソフトの時代が閉会します。またよろしくお願いします！

Tomorrow I'm heading off to Arizona to meet Mike and start our climbing journey. It's hard to imagine that after today, I'll no longer be coming to work everyday. I am sure I'll adjust. We're first headed to AZ to attend Mike's sister's wedding. Then we'll spend some time climbing around Flagstaff and Prescott before heading up to Yosemite. Tune back in for more climbing stories!