Mt. Yonah

This past weekend, my friend Jason and I went up to Mt.Yonah (about an hour and a half Northeast of Atlanta) to test our skillz on real rock. For those who might not know him, he's an old friend from highschool who started training with me this summer at the rock gym. We left on Friday afternoon right after I finished class. The drive up was sooooo long, it should have taken no more than 7.5hrs, but ended up taking about 9.5hrs because we were stopped for 2hrs in legendary Atlanta traffic, at 9:00pm??? Anyways, when we arrived in Cleveland (the closest town to Mt.Yonah) around 1:00am, we found a relatively unsketchy parking lot to spend the night in at a 24hr supermarket. I would have had a great night's sleep, but some random guy was pressure washing the sidewalk in front of the store from 1 to 4am, so it sounded like a machine gun going off in the distance for 3hrs straight. Jason lost his cool a couple times and flailed around uncontrollably in his sleeping bag screaming...it was pretty funny to watch. This was his first time sleeping in a van. Obviously, sleeping in a van has its drawbacks occasionally, i.e. crazed friends and loud background noise. When the sidewalks started glowing with an immaculate brilliance, the pressure washer stopped, and we finally got some sleep.

Mmmm, goober and bagels!

Saturday morning started out ruff. Jason woke me up around 9:ish and all I wanted to do was go back to sleep; besides, this was my 2 days off from school to rest and recover, and by-golly I was gonna get a little R and R if Jason went psycho on me again or not!...Yeah, I ended up getting out of my sleeping bag about 5 minutes after Jason started trying to wake me up. I woke up a little pissed at first, but I knew we came to climb, not to sleep in an over-sized refrigerator of a van, so I arose from my slumber.



Alas, we were up, we were minutes away from a great climbing destination, we were stoked! All I could think about was hanging off a 300ft cliff and looking out at the mountains thatbegin the Appalachian trail just across the valley. Jason said it felt surreal that we were really about to go climb real rock; it hadn't kicked in yet that he was actually in the mountains.



We hiked up the trail for about 30 minutes to reach the base of the first major cliff face, and in no time we were climbing. I belayed Jason on his first outdoor route. After he left the ground, he was stoked and spooked at the same time. I think the experience of climbing outdoors for the first time, with the possibility of taking a real fall, was almost TOO real for him to fully accept. After he climbed his first route, I went up to the top and showed him how to do his first rappel (descending the rope to the ground). It's not easy to lower yourself down backwards into a yawning abyss, but he did it anyways. As for myself, I climbed a dozen routes or so and rappelled them all. Thats a lot of climbing for one day! It was an honor to teach my friend "the ropes" (haha) of climbing from scratch this summer, and then to climb with him on his first real climbing trip. I suppose it's a proud parent type of feeling. Nothing to get all teary eyed over though. Over all, it was a great trip, my premise to every trip is to have fun, and to keep the adventure high, and I think I did.