MOAB train-up

MOAB (Rock climbing w/ James Hu; Skydive Moab; UTV (Slickrock))

Back to the theme of Verticality.  I returned to Moab, Utah because I loved it the first time I visited.  It is a Mecca for off-roading/rock crawling because it has thousands of miles of trails; likewise, everywhere you look you could climb (although there are only several handfuls of sport climbing walls where there are anchors screwed into the rock for top rope climbs); there are just as many trails for mountain biking; and there is the Colorado River where you can raft and paddle board.

The things I chose to do I’ll brief in some detail.  The first was rock climbing.  I did a three-day course with Moab Canyon Tours—private, one-on-one instruction with James Hu—GREAT guy!  James brought me out to Take Out Beach (it’s where they take out rafts from where tours go down the river) for the first day of climbing.  We covered top rope and lead belaying; 2-to-4-point anchor building; sport anchor cleaning; single and double strand extended ATC w/ prussic back up rappelling techniques; Munter mule overhand (MMO), Prussic Munter Mule overhand (PMMO) belays and rope rescue applications; progress capture with GriGri, munter, mictrotrax; belay take over, belay escape, load transfers. 

A deluge of rope stuff.

Mostly, we climbed.  I am still fairly new, but I think we did a 5.9 climb on Ice Cream Parlor.  We did a crack climb—and I’ll admit it—I got stuck at a point about 2/3ds of the way up.  I stopped and James just said, ‘OK.  Just lean back.  I got you on belay.  Lean back and just look at what is available.’  I did, he pointed out a few places to put my hands and wedge my shoe into the crack.  Problem solved; I finished the climb and cleaned all the hardware on my way down.  

Another day we worked solely on anchors and mechanical advantage rigging. I drilled all these and how to use the Munter for rope rescue safety work.  Mostly, we just drilled a few techniques, but I got a lot of reps in.  We did this one afternoon because the sun had moved around and was directly on the face we had selected and was too hot.  We pulled all our gear to a small canyon trailhead where there was a massive cottonwood tree for shade and something to tie on to.  Away from ‘managed’ top-rope drilled anchors, a lot of times a climber has to create an anchor point with trees or boulders that are available. 

For more Verticality, the next thing I did was go get some jumps in at Skydive Moab.  The DZ was known as a ‘tandem factory’—meaning their big cash cow was folks that just roll in to do one jump on a tandem rig so they can say they skydive.  So, our jumps were done real early to accommodate the tandem volume (used the same instructors/jumpmasters and filled the plane/loads) as well as winds pick up as the heat rose around noon.  So, we might get two jumps in before noon, then you might have to wait for 4 hours to get on a manifest. 

I did this for a little over a week and then I got cocky and hurt myself on a bad landing in the wind.  I massively tore my left hamstring—my leg from my back of my knee up to my buttock was entirely bruised—totally dark purple, almost black.  I wasn’t going to jump anytime soon.  I could barely walk, never mind jump or more climbing.  Well before it got too dark, I got my FPV drone out and flew a bit down the Colorado River canyon, but it took me a while to find an area with 5G cell phone coverage for the DJI app to function.  

I could, however, still sit and drive a UTV.  So that is what I did.  I actually ended up going the same trail off of Kane Creek Road where James had set up the rope rigging courses at the Moonflower rec area.  I drove around and took a lot of pics, but decided the UTV was a little loud (I didn’t bring hearing protection).  I left Moab about a week early due to the injury.