On our way up North through California towards Lake Tahoe I had decided that it would be the perfect opportunity to hit up a few Wineries since this is something we can't do at home. I had been researching all day while we were driving and found some that looked intriguing. We pulled off into the town that we'd have to drive through towards them and about 30 seconds of pulling off the interstate the van DIED! AHGHG!? The engine stopped, power steering was a gonner and we were left stranded in Safeways parking lot. We lifted the hood and began to inspect. What were we looking for? Good question, for both of us it was like trying to read japanese and failing miserably. Coming to our rescue was 3 lovely homeless men who had some previos car knowledge. Sam and these guys spent about half hour discussing and trying to nail down the problem as I was on the phone with AAA working on getting a tow to the nearest mechanic. As soon as I had all squared away and the tow truck was on the way Sam came running up to tell me to cancel the tow because the van was in working condition. The van has 2 gas tanks and apparently something with either the fuel filter or fuel pump in the gas tank we were using had malfunctioned. We switched over to the second tank and were back on the road again! The day had began to get late and the wineries were soon closing so unfortunately we skipped on the tastings and continued towards our climbing destination.
We ended up stopping about 25 miles from Lake Tahoe and climbed at a few areas the first being Phantom Spires. These contain multi-pitch routes with "knob tying" as protection. Seems less than stellar but turns out that maybe they are on to something by tying slings around rock knobs to protect you from falling to your death. I was feeling exceptionally brave and decided it was time for me to take on a few lead climbs of my own. I felt awfully proud when I finished the second and final pitch to the top of a cool spire! We also found a crazy amount of booty gear on the climbs. We walked away with a new nut, two quick draws, a sling, and a wire gate caribiner...not a bad days work!!
Just a few miles up the road is the super popular climbing area, Lovers Leap. We scoured the internet for some moderate and classic routes to climb. Found a few that looked intriguing (and some that I could practice my lead climbing on!). This area can be crawling with hundreds of other climbers so we opted for a rock face that gets less traffic than the usual East wall. We found a few routes that looked fun and switched off leading pitches. After we exhausted our options in this area we wandered over to the wall where all the popular routes are. We timed it just right as it was late enough that most people had called it a day and we jumped on something called the " Bears Reach". This was a cool route that followed a series of flakes up 3 pitches to the top of the buttress.
On the last day at Lovers Leap we wanted to jump on one of the classic routes in the area called Corrugation Corner. We didn't necassarily get an early start which may have been our first mistake. We wandered our way up to the base around 11 to find 2 other parites on the route with a guided group waiting to get started at the bottom. We patienly waited our turn and slowly made our way up the route. It was a fantastic climb on great rock and one of the best 5.7 multi pitch routes we've been on so far. What should have taken us about 1.5 hours to finish took us somewhere around 4 hours due to being behind slow parties. This was the last climb we did before heading up north to Mount Shasta!
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