Joe's Valley

So this past weekend I borrowed Jamie's Prius to drive up to Joe's Valley. I must say it is a damn good car. I averaged 47 mpg going there and 56 mpg coming back. I only spent about $55 dollars on gas for the weekend. In my truck it easily would have been two or three times that amount. I met my good friend Shannon up there from SLC. I got there on Friday night and wanted to go climb on the full Resident Evil. So I hiked around New Joes in the dark trying to find it but afraid of getting lost. I didn't find it, so I'm definitely not going to try another night session there until I know that area a little better. We camped up the Right Fork at the Mansize area and Joe's know has port-a-pots there and at the Buoux area thanks to the SCC. In the morning we headed down to the Riverside area to warm up. I had forgot just how good the warm-ups there were. We climbed the Angler which is a quality boulder problem right by the river. Then we headed back down the road so I could jump on Worst Case Scenario. That rock climb is awesome. I was able to do all the moves in a few minutes. Worst Case Scenario has a pretty bad landing and a horrible fall zone that could leave you dropping about 15 feet into the road. It has a cool tufa feature in the beginning and then it busts right on some crimps to a jug. I gave it a few good tries and almost did it before the skin on my fingertips wore too thin. It seems that the Draw has left me without good fingertips. Then we headed up the road to the Buoux area to do a few climbs. We did a climb on the backside of the boulder with the highball Speed on it. From there we headed over to New Joes to some more climbing. I climbed on the full Resident Evil which is cooler than it looks. I was able to get into the start of the stand up a few times but it was afternoon and the sun made it hard to see some of the holds. We did a climb called Cool Joe? which was really cool. It wasn't very hard but it was definitely tall. It's really scary because about 15 feet up you have to grab onto a chossy jug and work you're feet up while hoping that it doesn't break. After that I did a climb on the back of the Resident Evil boulder which was called Big Boy. It's really ugly rock but it has good movement. Shannon climbed on this thing on the opposite side of the boulder which started in some underclings and climbed up slopers. He finished it up the following day. When we were finished in Area 51 we headed up the hill to Planet Of The Apes which is a full value boulder problem. It starts with a comfortable knee bar and moves up some compression moves with a slopey rail for the right hand and some crimps for the left hand. It finishes with a hard mantle. I gave this a few tries and got up to the topout once but couldn't figure out the mantle. I decided to call it a day as we had been climbing for over 9 hours at that point. We went back to camp and chilled out for the night with our trashed skin and fatigued muscles. On Sunday we woke up and got going a little faster. We went back to New Joes and warmed up near Pimpin Jeans, an awesome crimp problem. We did a climb opposite that which looked really cool, but was actually really lame. Then I went up the hill and finished up Planet Of The Apes. We headed back down to Area 51. I gave Resident Evil a few tries and got back to the same point. My fingers were so trashed and I was so tired at that point that I decided to call it a day after doing a cool warm down problem called Warm Me Up Scotty. I headed back to Flagstaff and I'm going to try to make it down to Groom Creek next weekend.