The Notch is AMAZING!

The Shiloh's Edge crew got our first taste of Smugglers' Notch bouldering this weekend, with a trip up from Thursday night to Sunday morning. We began our climbing on Friday morning with some amazingly cool temps and incredible excitement at the boulders which where littering the notch.
As you drive up, you are literally swerving around unbelievable climbing boulders on a tiny 1.5 lane street. As you park the car, you can barely get your seatbelt off before you bolt over to the nearest incredible line that is staring you in the face. The rock quality is unbelievable, the angles superb and the climbing so varied.
JP, Izzy, Evan, Morgan and I got on tons of problems of all different grades. There are just too many to list. Evan, in typical Evan-style, got psyched on one very hard problem and spent much of his energy focusing on it. The Impossible Problem was a V7, but a critical hold broke three weeks ago, making it more like V9. Evan quickly sent that, but then set his eyes on a sit start into it. It has gone once or twice since the broken hold incident, and Evan really wanted to send it this V11/12 gem. He made some great progress, linking into the Impossible Problem, but had to throw in the towel late Saturday night as his fingers were bleeding from the sharp crimps.
Here is a video of Evan's best attempt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMz0q9Se2Ek

July closed out with a great weekend up at Rumney for some sport climbing. It had been quite a while since I tied into the sharp end, but three days of throwing myself at tough routes really recharged my affection for roped climbing.
JP, Charlie and I made the journey up to NH for the final weekend of the month. We were excited to run into Murph, Jut, Michael and Sandra up there and get some of the spray down and the psych from the Rumney experts.
The weekend didn't produce any super-hard sends, but it did get the blood flowing and both JP and I are excited to do some more sport climbing here this fall.

Last weekend, I was back to pebble wrestling. On Friday, Ben and I ran up to Snowy Mtn to polish off a few things. The Cure is a short V8 that I had tried a few times before. The topout had always stifled me but this day was quite different. After just a few attempts, both Ben and I topped it out the first time our hands hit the lip. .....Really don't know why it was so hard before.
I then worked on finishing the V7 Never Been to Hueco. Several jumps to the topout produced the same disappointing result, however, with just a slight shift in the right hand crimp, I was able to snag the jump move and topout casually.
On Saturday, JP, Tyler and I visited the Hideaway and Happy Valley in Western Mass. It was great to see these new areas and sample some of the amazingly gneiss rock. We had a ton of fun working on problems of all grades, however, nothing big went down this trip. At the end of the day we ventured over to Happy Valley and were BLOWN AWAY by the beautiful gently overhanging walls. We threw ourselves on Sleeping Giant and after numerous attempts at jumping to the slot, we were forced to trek back to the car without a send among us.
We will surely be back for this route (if nothing else). It is one of the most fun V5s in the Northeast. Beautiful and varied holds, tall and committing, with a safe landing. Can't be beat.