Tuesday, March 1, 2011

one tyrolean traverse, fire dancing, a face-size hamburger and a puppy dog

First of all, apologies to all of you who have been patiently awaiting our postings.  For the last 2 weeks of our stay at the Potrero, we treated ourselves to a house with some beds and consistent hot water.  Unfortunately, this came at the expense of losing out on reliable internet and subsequently put a stop to active blogging...so here is a collection of photos to document some of our more recent adventures in MX.

We took a drive into the desert one sunny morning with our friends Jack and Dan to Culo de Gato to climb the Crescent Moon Buttress.  It is a beautiful 8 pitch climb in a very beautiful landscape, as you can see below....
  

Below is a profile view of the route. You can see the namesake "crescent moon" feature, which is at the top of the 3rd pitch.  As you continue along the ridge you see the deep "v" notch, over which we set up a super sweet tyrolean traverse.


In this photo, Nyssa is rappelling down into the aforementioned "v" notch.

 

And now here she is climbing back out...


Jack and I remained on the initial side of the notch in order to orchestrate the tyrolean set up from both sides...you can see we definitely had our thinking caps on for this operation...

After much careful planning, we knew things were safe and took the ride, which was definitely exhilarating and exciting! Below, Rich is enjoying the ride...


Here is Jack heading across the notch towards Dan and Nyssa...


And the ever photogenic Dan enjoying the exposure... 


And after all that fun, we still reached the summit of the buttress.


 Our friend Quest, who is an avid poi enthusiast, told us about a photo contest that he was interested in entering, which required a photo of poi being done in an obscure or extreme location.  With our rope skills honed, we decided to take a crack at some night time photoshooting on the spires to enable his victory.  



I set myself up on the spire opposite of Quest (which is the far, illuminated spire in the picture above) and captured the image on the left. 
Dan was ready and waiting with his camera to capture the fire dancing from below, which is depicted on the right half of the entry photo. 
 Quest combined these photos for his submission to create the above image.  We would encourage all of you to vote at 

In order to celebrate their successes, Potrero climbers will flock to the kitchen of a lovely mexican woman to indulge in the infamous face-sized hamburger. After placing your order, you spend your waiting time on her front porch, enjoying the finest lounging Hidalgo has to offer...


And then the burger arrives...and holy crap, it actually is the size of a face...Here we see John and Jamie enjoying their hard-earned feast.  Note the size of the beer bottle in relation to the size of the burger...


And finally, a puppy.  This is Chewy, who was adopted by Kris from Skagway, AK.  He purchased Chewy from a Mexican who was selling grilled corn and puppies outside of the canyon gate one sunday afternoon.  There is a very active program for puppy adoption in and around Hidalgo, and thankfully it enables climbers to provide a much higher quality of life to some of the stray dogs in Mexico...this one just so happens to be the cutest puppy ever!


We have now crossed back into the US and are beginning the next leg of our journey.  This also means that we should have little to no problem providing you all with new postings.  There is still plenty left for us to show you all from Mexico, and soon we will have updated posts from Indian Creek, Moab, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City and finally Driggs...
until next time...

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