Calm before the Storm

Late October 2012 Hurricane Sandy devastated my home state of New Jersey and much of the North East.  Weeks later many of us are still recovering as things slowly begin to return to normal.  My family and I were fortunate to be spared any severe damage but were still forced to deal with our own share of hardships.   

 

The weekend before the storm my wife and I had planned on an overnight camping trip to Stokes State Forest.  Saturday would be a relatively windless and dry day with overcast skies.  But late in the night the forecast called for high winds and rains that would only continue on.  Obviously camping was no longer the plan.  But, this lead to good fortune as my wife suggested we go climbing together.  Climbing with my wife is a rare privilege.  Early into our exposure to climbing, before her pregnancy and the birth of our son, my wife and I were dedicated gym rats.  In fact, my wife was actually a very strong climber before the priorities of motherhood took over.   

 

This would be the third time in nearly a year (fifth time in total, not counting two ice climbs) my wife joined me to climb outside.  We decided on Ricks Rocks, a 30-50 foot cliff band near the Delaware Water Gap, popular with the Boy Scouts (my partner Ashish ran their climbing program here back in 2011).  I put my wife on the Boy Scouts “test piece” known as One Bowl Gulley, a 5.0 climb that is mostly 4^th class with a few very safe but technical climbing moves.  For my wife the difficulty was the heights, not the climbing.  She would climb and be lowered off in 10 foot intervals, but always ending higher than where she left off.  For my turns, I could actually start a few feet to the right on a variation of the route called One Bowl Ceiling, 5.8.  There’s a bulge crux along with some slab sections that made for a good climbing workout.  Later, I set up a top-rope on Jason’s Crack, 5.7 but the route as well as the entire wall was very wet and muddy making it an unpleasantly filthy grovel and after I topped out I told her not even to bother.  She told me she had already made up her mind after listening to all my grunting and watching me scoop mud out of the crack.   

Looking down One Bowl Gulley

 

Looking up One Bowl Gulley



 

After lunch we decided to call it a day.  By then we could feel random drops of rain and the wind had picked up.  Despite only a few hours of climbing, I had a wonderful time with my wife and was happy to see she enjoyed her time there (although she’s not quite lukewarm to climbing with me regularly).  As we descended the trail I asked her about making salvaging the distance we drove by taking a short hike at The Gap.  But as she thought this over a snake slithered out on the trail in front of us and began to hiss loudly and I knew right there wasn’t even a chance.      

 



My Favorite Climbing Partner

The Snake that ended the day