Waterless

It was the kind of weekend that sounds good on paper, except we screwed up a bit. Foro was not with us, because this was a haul-a-lot-of-stuff up the mountain weekend. Every gram counted, and cute was not part of the plan.

We walked up and did a not-so-difficult but impressive climb. For once I took my camera because I’m always terrified of taking my cell phone out for photos on a cliff and dropping it. I know you can add strings and things to the phone, but I don’t trust them. So camera it was.

The first part was good, a nice north facing classic climb. Mostly bolted or easily protected. Nice rappels down, the folks even painted yellow arrows for the rappels since it was a common descent for several routes so the belays were easy to find.

We’d brought the tent and my partner managed a respectable meal that night with what we’d brought with us (and complimented by what we bought last minute at a convenience store.)

The next day I got to choose a climb, thinking that all the climbs in the guide book were on the north face that loomed over us. We start out to find the start… and turned around… and around…the cliff and wound up on a south face. Hot. Hot and miserable. Hot. A bit of wind, could have been worse, put-the-best-face-on-it but hot.

We had a liter and a half of water between the two of us for the whole climb and most of the descent down after we were finished.

We were up in the mountains so it was cooler, but we weren’t that high and the cool air was much, much higher than we were climbing. There’s this thing with water that when you don’t have enough, everything begins to hurt. I have a tendinitis that flares up when I’m dehydrated, and my back got all crunchy with the climb and everything just hurt and hurt and hurt some more. I’d also put on sunscreen out of habit but not everywhere and as completely as I would have if I’d known I’d be sitting in the sun all day.

Today I’m burned and achy. I swam for a bit to try to un-crunch my back (which worked, yeah!) but many things hurt, still. I just keep going to the faucet and drinking water. Miraculous, clean, readily available water.