We arrived at Smith Rock in the middle of the night, only being able to guess at where the cliffs were. We couldn't see anything. After scouting around for a campground, we found a place at the Bivouac campground about 8 miles from the park entrance, pitched our tent, hunkered down and got ready for an awesome day of climbing to come.
There were giant, quarter sized, stink bug type beetles all over the campground, but no mosquitoes so it turned out nice.
Smith Rock!
Russ playing around on the base of To Bolt or Not To Be: 5.14a, the first 5.14 climbed in America on record. Note the lack of...anything to haul yourself up with.
We did several climbs on Cinnamon slab and got nice and toasted in the sun, had a quick shady lunch and headed over to the nearby gorge to find a crack to climb. We ran into a large group of French people who were just starting the climb (the only other people in the gorge, climbing the only climb we were interested in, the odds.)
It ended up being a horrible sketchy bust, so after that little fiasco, we washed our hands and feet in the river and decided to head out to the Oregon coast that night instead of the next day.
We made lunch in the car and we located a free campground just outside of Coos bay on our phones, set the GPS and headed out through Mount Hood National Forest and down some really narrow, windy roads that got a little scary after dark.
Seeing as how the day of climbing went mostly without a hitch, we should have known we were in for some sort of epic to make up for it.
oh yea, cliffhanger.
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