That summer we also made rock climbing history, well we may have at
least. I would love to have been able to run up the canyon anytime
that I wanted to climb but there were two bottle necks there. Neck
the first was a little case of time and distance for travel and set
up I was looking at a minimum of thirty minutes to get started let
alone finished. The second neck was that sport climbing required a
willing accomplice and not every one had the same schedule as I. So
my idea was to put eye-bolts into our massive weeping willow tree in
our front yard and climb up the bark. That didn't work too well
because the bark was a little fragile for the forces involved in this
type of tree climbing. So my brother and I started making climbing
holds out of wood and rocks that we had drilled a hole through the
center of. The wood worked okay but got really slick after just a
little wear and natural rocks were a bit brittle so many of them
snapped in half around its new middle hole. We were given a few
proper rock climbing holds from friends and them by the process of
natural selection and replenishment ended up with three routes that
we could climb about 20' without having to drive up the canyon.
There were two that went mostly strait up that were pretty boring and
one that curved back along a long graceful branch that was pitched
back at at forty-five degree angle. It was hard and cool looking and
we could climb it in the night with some lights we brought out for
the purpose. Most importantly we could show off our skill at climbing
to anyone who visited our house without having to drag them up the
canyon to spectate. I thought it was a brilliant idea and I thought
that I would get some praise and respect from fellow climbers but the
most interest I got was a lukewarm, 'That's cool bro.' It was cool
and we had a lot of fun on that over the years until I got to fat and
too weak to do it and then the tree got diseased and it was
eventually cut into firewood with the twenty year-old rock climbing
holds still bolted to the limbs.
