Utah: Climbing Along the Colorado River

Tuesday after dinner we made our way back out Highway 128 to a climbing spot along the Colorado River. In Tennessee it's rare that we head out for an evening climb, but given how hot it gets in this desert environment, the evening hours were our best shot to get the guys up on the wall.

Nate had scoped out the Moab climbing options months ago and settled on this set of climbs across from a place called Take Out Beach, where paddlers often get off the river. The descriptions he read mentioned a bit of a rock scramble getting up to the landing for the routes, but what we found was considerably more challenging than what he was expecting. It's probably easy for experienced climbers, but as we got up to the nook we soon discovered we'd have to climb up a couple of sketchy spots. It was clear whoever wrote those descriptions weren't expecting kids or a lay participant who only does this stuff to support her kids & husband.

After some spirited back and forth about how we were gonna get up -- and eventually back down -- we worked it out that Nate would belay us up as a fall precaution. Once up on the ledge we had a to walk a bit to get to the climb location. At one point E yelled back to me, "Mama, do not look down! You do not want to see this." I appreciated his heads up and did not look down as I mentally latched myself to the rock wall.

We finally made it to what we thought was Minions, a kid-friendly and Nate started leading the climb and clipping in as he went up 80'. We were on the ledge, but there was enough space to spread out a bit and a couple of flat spots for the boys to sit.

As Nate started reaching spots where things began to get tricky, I discovered a figure 8 knot in the rope that was going to create trouble with Nate's descent. This was added stress on to the effort to get to this spot, the small amount of space we had to safely sit, my limited climbing knowledge and the plunge to our doom if someone walked back too far. (Realistically no one was going to plunge to their doom, but it sure felt like it.) Eventually Nate made it to the top of the climb (yay!) and descended a bit before he needed to clip into the wall and E and I worked on the knot and moved it farther down the rope so Nate could safely descend.

With Nate back on the ground, it was Everett's turn to take on the climb, and unsurprisingly he scurried up that wall like it's the most natural thing on the earth to do. He agreed with Nate that it was an incredible view from that vantage point.

While E was climbing, I got to hang with Holden who had seemingly created an entire universe with a smattering of rocks that he found. His sound effects of "ker cha ker cha" "pssssh pfffffff" "pew pew pew" kept me nicely entertained.

After Everett was down from his climb, Nate looked up on his climbing app and realized they had done a much, MUCH more difficult climb than originally planned. Instead of Minions, they did a climb called Men in Tights.

After the trials of the outing, Nate apologized again for how tricky things had been and happily agreed to get me a bottle of wine on the way home as penance. But that part didn't even go smoothly as we realized wine is only available at liquor stores in Utah and the ones in Moab closed at 6p. So instead, we had a backyard dessert party with a mostly-unfrozen key lime pie.

All's well that ends well, but I will not mind if we don't have a repeat of that scenario any time soon.Leer más