(Photo from kungfuclimber!) Jennifer and I drove up to Keene on Saturday night; I picked her up at Penn Station directly from the bus that dropped her off after her interview down in Philly. My one-hit-wonders playlist lasted us the entire drive up, which took about 4.5 hours including dinner stops and whatnot.

I'd spent all day Saturday at the vet (another big bill for bloodwork for Stella), borrowing climbing boots for Jennifer (I had to drive about an hour back out of my way after waiting for an hour where I was supposed to meet my friend who was lending them to me, and dealing with stupid Manhattan traffic going down to Philip's to borrow his ice screws (I've only 5 of my own...) I love driving and all, but when we finally rolled in around 11:30pm I was pretty ready to just go to sleep. I slept on the floor because I forgot to bring a pad for Stella and I let her use mine. She tried to steal the sleeping bag, too, but that wasn't going to get over.

The plan was to get out relatively early to Chapel Pond and do Chouinard's, and then depending on what time we finished, go find something else to do. We got up around 7, and after mucking about making breakfast and stopping at Stewart's for dog food (forgot Stella's), we didn't get to the parking lot at the pond until some time after 8. As we got to the base, there was one party of 3 just starting up, so it didn't seem like a bad idea to wait.... the incident with the slow fellows on Sisters Left over New Years should have taught me that the answer to "how long can it possibly take" is "ridiculously long", but I never claimed to be a fast learner.

Turns out it was the leader's second lead ever, so she was predictably slow. She was on doubles, and she brought up the seconds separately. One seemed pretty new so he took even longer than the leader did, and then the third was fine and fast. I don't carry a watch with me when I climb because waiting like this inevitably depresses me.

I headed up after they got to the first belay (in the trees, right?) only to find that she'd built a little screw anchor in a wall about 15 feet below the trees. Because of where they were situated, I couldn't climb past, or around them. Eventually, after about 15 minutes of standing around, I ended up making an anchor next to them (3 screws AND a tree!), but again, because of where they were I couldn't really bring up my seconds while these guys were still there. Probably another half hour or so later the second in the group ahead of us started up, so I felt okay letting my party (we picked up some random guy that morning who was pretty desperate for partners after having spent the previous day soloing - we're both too charitable; we let him join us) start to climb.

Jennifer'd never climbed ice before, but she did fine; the ice was so wet and soft and stepped out (can something so rampy really be "stepped out"?) that she didn't really have to swing very much. Once again, we had to wait around at the belay for the next party to finish the second pitch (by this time, Mike R. and his group had already climbed dogleg and the first pitch of Chouinard's right - though to be fair we probaly didn't start climbing until they were onto the second pitch of the left side climb). This pitch took me marginally longer as I went straight up instead of dodging around all the vertical bits but it also went just fine and I don't feel that I was particularly slow. Only one little "oh god" moment as I was topping out and the entire top out began to crack and dinnerplate off...

The second party managed to get their ropes stuck trying to pull after their rappel, so after I got to the rap station on the right side at the top of the little wall, I agreed to head over to the left side to unstick their ropes. It was pretty evident that stuck ropes would be a difficult problem to avoid (big rope eating crack in the rock) so I wanted to rap from the lower station; this meant that after my party came up I had to do some downclimbing/rapping back over which was a PITA. I rapped first, followed by Jennifer - I'd set her up with an extended rap backed up with a prussik at her waist; she's rapped this way a dozen times before when we're been rock climbing and it's been fine. However, the other guy that we picked up took it upon himself to tell her after I'd left that it was wrong, and make her clip her belay device (still attached to the sling) to her belay loop (where the prussik was also atatched). I wish she'd have been more assertive in telling him that she had rapped this setup many times before. Painful. The prussik kept getting sucked into the device and her rap took ages. The guy was just like oh, it was right? I've never seen that... By the time we got down, packed up everything, had a bite to eat and got back to the car, it was... 4 pm. Ridiculous. A good day, but ridiculous.

It was also snowing. We stopped by the bivy to grab our stuff, and by the time we got back to the northway about an hour later (stuck behind a car going about 20 all the way there), it'd probably snowed a good inch and a half. The snow didn't really let up too much until we got down around Albany, by which point it was mostly rain. The roads were crap, the visibility was crap, and I was really craving Burger King, which also pissed me off. Finally caved and stopped in New Paltz for BK, but I got a salad with grilled chicken (do you know how much crap they inject into those chicken breasts???) so I don't feel toooooo bad about it.

The weekend was way too short. One day in the Adirondacks is just not enough.