If we had had a 4x4, we would have parked the truck at the parking lot, and hiked down the Maze Overlook trail. As it was, we parked our bikes, dumped some of our biking gear, and hiked down the same trail.

I was amazed at the trail. Back on the east coast, this would not have been a hiking trail, it actually required some simple climbing technique! Cool! It's only a mile long or so, but it convinced me that I have to find a job out west. Life out there is just more fun.

We'd actually forgotten about that mile when we packed our gear. Instead of bring Mark's comfy expedition pack, we brought a disgusting army duffle sack to hold the climbing gear. Oof! As always on our trips, I carried the big heavy load. (It'd happen to you, too, if you weighed 220 lbs. and were 6'7" high.) I figure it's why Mark takes me on these trips. Ah, well. It's only 1 mile, right? (Those of you who have read ahead know why I'm laughing as I write that.)

By evening, we were comfortably settled into our new home. We wouldn't have to move our gear for a while, now. At least, not until we'd come close to running out of food, and then it would be easy! (Little did we know...) We stayed quite a few nights at Base Camp, so I'll bore you with some photos of me trying to wake Mark up in the morning, and the site of our estate:

The next four or five days were pretty comfortable. We hung out, hiked around a bit, and tried to climb. Unfortunately, neither of us was really prepared for the quality of sandstone down there. It's pretty shitty, particularly at the Maze Overlook side of the canyon. We didn't have much experience with sandstone climbs--in fact, I had almost none. Mark didn't have a whole lot, either. Here's a shot of Mark bouldering on some better than average sandstone. Look for the big chunk of falling rock in the photo.

It's not that we didn't try, though. We did a lot of bouldering:

Heck, one day, after a bad snowstorm (more on the weather later), we tried climbing a decent looking crack. Okay, it was in the shade, and that made it pretty unlikely to go, but we didn't find a whole lot in the way of long cracks in vaguely decent looking rock. Here I am freezing my hands and feet off on the crack:

Well, I obviously didn't get very far--my hands and feet got pretty numb. I suppose aid would have been the answer; after all, we had both of our racks and some of our friends rack, too. However, at that point I was too cold to climb, and Mark was too scared by the quantity of rock I'd scraped off getting as far as I had. (I'd had a bit of fun sticking bigger than necessary cams into the crack.)

So, what about the weather? You've noticed a bit of snow on the ground, I'm sure. Yeah, the second day at our base camp, it snowed a bit. It wasn't too bad, but it had us slightly worried. After all, we were almost 2000' lower in elevation than the ranger station. The rangers had warned us that if it snowed too much, it might be impossible to drive out to the highway. However, it mostly melted the next day, so we decided to stay and have some more fun.

On our third or forth day there, the weather again didn't look too great, so we hiked over to Chimney Rock on the other side of the Maze. (You might check out the map.) The route we took involved walking along the top of one of the ridges. Well, unfortunately, there was still some snow from the night before--quite a bit more at the top of the ridge than down on the Maze floor. Here's a photo from a game that we'd get good at called "Toss the Mark". With snow on the ground, some of the friction climbing became pretty much impossible, so I just gave Mark a good shove and sent him up the climb. Then he'd drop a rope, and I'd haul myself up.

We got pretty close to Chimney Rock that time. Here's as close as we got:

At that point, it looked as though there was a storm coming in from the south east, so we bugged out. The next night we learned something important: Running shoes are great for backcountry biking, good for hiking, not too bad for climbing, but just horrible in snow. They got wet, of course, and then froze at night, since we didn't really want them in our sleeping bags. It's hard getting a frozen running shoe on in the morning!

The next day was toasty warm and sunny, though. (That's when we tried climbing in the shade. OK, so in the sun, it was warm.) Most of the day, we just hung out and bouldered. Near the end of the day, I tried a butt start that didn't work too well. When I was about a foot off the ground, the rock crashed down on top of me, and I ended up bashing my left ankle pretty badly. This was injury #1, but it wasn't too bad. I could still use the ankle normally, it just hurt a lot. Mark got a good shot of the accident:

The next day we took a different route to the southern end of the Maze. This time, we followed the bottom of a canyon instead of the top of a ridge. The trail was supposedly marked with cairns, but it only had a few. We actually found the coyote trails to be more reliable than the cairn markings. Those coyotes know where they're going!

Toward the end, though, we finally got off trail. So, we had to play Toss the Mark a few times to get to the top. Well, actually, we didn't quite make it. Occationally, there was a small waterfall which needed to be scaled. During a really easy boulder problem, (I'll guess 5.3 or so) my patella got dislocated! Wow, that hurts! Mark got a really lousy photo of it. Photoshop managed to turn the dark blob into a blue blob, though. I'll show you both versions:

That was the last time I bent my right knee for a while. (Well, it wasn't too bad until it dislocated again about 10 minutes later, but Mark didn't take a photo of that one.)

That, combined with some more snow, made the rest of the trip pretty exciting!