On the top:


On the inside

OK - a picture is worth a 1000 words, BUT we Do need the story.

Well, here is some of the story:
Horace Greeley famously said, "Go West Young Rogue" and so I did, first to meet my son in Tucson.
We drove down to the El Picante Biosphere Reserve in Mexico with seven botanists and ecologists, most from the University of Arizona,
some from as far away as Shanghai and Denmark. We camped both in the desert and on a beach to study the amazingly robust Spring Bloom in the desert.
With all this rain it was literally a carpet of flowers.


After that I flew up to San Fran, was met at the airport by Oak and we headed up to Occidental and a number of climbs in Redwoods and Douglas Firs.
Friday evening we shopped for food, made and ate dinner and talked equipment and climbing technique till late.

Saturday morning we hauled out all our gear and went through several practice climbs using different methods of SRT and then packed up and hiked up the valley.
We climbed a redwood (first-time for Oak, too) that sported five top reiterations, but the remnants of two are so old and riddled they'll soon be gone,

leaving "Triceratops", as we named it.
A fun climb, but not too much roam-around room in the crown. Then we climbed a nice Douglas Fir.

Sunday morning we refined our gear and techniques and practiced an SRT rescue
(Oak was quite talkative for an unconscious climber but that is likely due to the fact that I kept talking to him and he's too polite not to answer, conscious or not).
Then we went up Fusion Giant (the tree Oak took David, Joe, and Bill up), which was great fun. We stood on the very top and grabbed a picture of ourselves against the sky.
Later we went to the Armstrong Grove and stood 'under' a giant in a goose pen tree. Those are the two pics above.

Monday we first climbed a Douglas Fir that had a Blue Cheese smell about it. The multitude of red ants, which once crushed smelled like blue cheese, alerted one another that two humans had breached their forward lines by ascending right around their perimeter and we were met in the top of the tree by a strong force of the 'cheese-smell-ant defenders' who succeeded in driving us out of their tree.
Oak wanted to name it "Pain in the Ants",but we realized looking at the tree that it already had experienced a difficult life and that name might be a little too negative.
Oak then came up with a super name: "Ants in our Pants" and the name stunk, errr, I mean stuck!
After the Douglas Fir we headed over to another old master Redwood with a whole lot of dead in it, but we only climbed up to a wide horizontal branch where we hung out for a while.
Sam hung one of his self-designed, self-manufactured hammocks to try it out.


After a good time we rappelled down so I could pack and after a nice Indian dinner Oak dropped me off at the airport shuttle to catch the 11:59pm red-eye home to the East Coast.
I had a 40 minute layover in Atlanta but that was hardly enough time to get outside and scramble up a tree.
I am back in Delaware where the tallest tree in the state is not as tall as the Poison Oak that is growing up the side of the Parson Jones Redwood


that 'vine' is the poison oak, about 200 ft tall!

Almost all of my gear has been through the washing machine now, due to the Sudden Oak Death nemesis (Phytophthora ramorum).
When I soaked my Petzl helmet in a bucket o' sudsy soap and scrubbed it I found out the straps were really grey, not black!
The water came out dark, very dark indeed... maybe I'll get a dedicated rec helmet and leave the work helmet on the tree truck...

I can't wait to get back out there and find some more interesting trees to climb.
Thanks Oak for a great experience and all your generosity; a true 'Rogue' in the best sense of the title

Thanks for sharing guys. Douglas Firs and Redwoods sound just too awsome to resist. Oak, how about posting a few "how To's" about your home grown Hammock? Is it a similar design or variation of the Hunabku Hammock? It's always a joy to share your adventures.
Wiley Coyote

It was indeed an excellent time, and Pat a most excellent guest.

Pat is an excellent and highly experienced DRT climber, but had some great opportunities to try out some different SRT techniques. It was really fun to see him try out a variety of methods then dial them in a bit over the weekend.

While Pat's narrative was mostly correct he left out a few things:

1) He voluntarily took on the challenge to reduce his gear load on our Monday climbs. We pulled everything out of our packs and started to parse stuff down to the essentials (plus a few luxuries) for a 100 ft trunk tied SRT entry, followed by in-canopy DRT. Plus, it left me room for my hammock.

2) For some reason, since late 2009 the public has had a perception of Rogues mistreating doors (in particular the door of a certain bathroom located in southern Florida).

In order to shift this public perception and turn over a new leaf in the relationship between Rogues and doors we "adjusted" the refrigerator door in the guest house where Pat stayed.


Terrible Fung Shui.


Hard at work.


New and improved!



The lightweight approach - shelve some of that cool gear.

Hopefully this will allow door-rogue relationships to reach new heights, and encourage other climbing locales to open their doors for future rogue-related climb gatherings.

And for the record, we are hanging upside down in the first photo.

Okay, first off I'm calling shenanigans on the upside down picture. Wouldn't your lanyards be hanging up to your faces?

You can't pull a fast one on me!!!

I'm really bummed I couldn't be up there to join you guys. Such a short drive away, but I was rappelling with about 80 kids on saturday.

We keep meaning to fix our frig doors ever since we moved into the new place. Maybe you can come down and do ours, too?

love
nick

Nick,
If you need help "fixing" your refrigerator door, I can help. I have some prior experience with doors. I figure one of Sid's most excellant 12 oz throw bags at about 80 PSI should do the trick real good. When we're done, you'll be able to see just what you have in the frig without ever having to open the door. AND, as an added bonus feature, you can solve the age old mystery: Does the light stay on when you close the frig door? Yes indeed. I'm starting to see some real career opportunities here.
Wiley Coyote