We are at a hotel in western Ohio. Yes, tantalizing close to home, but it’s late enough that pushing on would be silly. We meant to camp on the way back, but rain in Kansas, and thunderstorms in Ohio, have kept us in hotels. Hey, we roughed it for two weeks, so we can afford a couple of nights of comfort. The drive home has seemed long, really long, mostly due to the fact that we started in Grand Junction, CO, rather than our usual jumping off point, Denver. The extra five hours will keep us away from home for an additional night, though we should arrive early enough tomorrow that it won’t be too big of a deal (plus, the cat would keep us up all night anyway).

A smattering of random thoughts and observations from the trip:

* Reliance folding water jugs are terrible. Two of ours had holes out of the box, and another was bitten by some woodland creature.
* Our sun shower worked really well–until another woodland creature chewed big holes in it. A strong wind overnight knocked it out of the tree (at least that’s what I’m telling myself), and it was riddled with holes the following morning.
* According to the guidebook, there are areas at Maple Canyon besides the Right Fork. We only sampled the Campground crags part of two days, and spend half a day wandering about the middle bit of the canyon. The crags at Right Fork were just too good (and convenient to our campsite).
* I am glad to be out of the dust at Maple, and the rain overnight gave the van a much-needed (free) wash.
* I miss the smell of the sub-alpine pines baking the afternoon sun.
* It was troubling, at least a little bit, seeing bolt sleeves protruding from broken rock whilst ‘dogging up Sprout in the Pipedream cave. I told myself those were placed on lead for bolting the route, and removed. Yeah, that’s the ticket. They most certainly didn’t break (or, worse, the rock around them didn’t break) during a real lead fall.
* Kansas is still pretty flat.
* Popcorn (5.12b) was probably my favorite route of the trip, and only partially because I onsighted it. Sooooo long and sooooo much fun.
* I am not looking forward to hitting the fingerboard again. After a month off of it, I expect to be very weak. Very, very weak.

Posted on 16 June 2012