Summary

Description

Lisa and I left for WV around 6:20pm Friday evening. Neither of us were really excited about the trip becasue the forecast was for crappy weather: cold and rainy. (A forecast that was right on the money.) We decided to scrap the idea camping and get a hotel room. Turned out to be a great plan.

We made it up there a little before 10:30pm, checked in to the hotel and drove over the the campground to hang out with our rappelling group. As soon as I got there, I was in a better mood. It's a great group, and I felt at home. We hung out around the fire for a couple hours before heading back the hotel. I felt a little guilty about staying in a hotel since the sky was perfectly clear.

We were up early Saturday morning to get ready and head back over to the campground for breakfast of egg and sausage muffs. When we got up, we realized how good an idea the hotel room was since it was raining. Our friends tell us the rain started around 4am. Lisa was a bit stressed about getting over there by 8am. I knew that with the rain everyone and everything would be moving slowly. Folks were cooking and eating when we got there, and we joined them, but it was another hour or so before everyone was up.

With the rain, the plan changed from going out to Ram's Head to rappel to staying at Passages and rigging ropes on the 60' climbing tower. That way, when the weather got bad -- well, worse than it already was -- we didn't have a long hike back to the cars. It was also an easier area to rig a couple of tarps at the base to keep some of the rain off.

So we spent about 6 hours in the cold and rain ascending, rappelling, and practicing change-overs. I went up and came back down twice. Did pretty well both times. Spent about an hour up on top of the tower waiting for a free rope to rappel back down the first time since everything was going a bit slow. When I finally did get on rope, I did a good job and dealt with the dangling pack, the jumar, and the weighted rope pretty well.

I also got a chance to practice doing a couple of change-overs, going from ascending to rappelling while on rope. I had spent a fair amount of time thinking about it, but there's nothing like actually trying to work through it while hanging on a rope. At least I was only 10-20' off the ground and not hundreds or thousands of feet up.

When we finally called it a day, we all headed over to Benji's bar area for a team meeting to discuss the upcoming expedition. It was good, and I was happy to be inside out of the rain, but I was still bundled up and stayed cold. We finally finished up and headed to dinner at the usual Mexican place. (About 30-60 minutes later than Lisa's caloric needs dictated.)

Getting to head back to the hotel and take a hot shower after dinner was oh-so-much nicer than going back to a cold, wet tent. Yeah, it felt like cheating, but it's cheating that I fully approve of. Once we were cleaned up and dry, we decided not to head over to the campground even with the lure of a campfire and camaraderie. We had had our fill of rain during the day.

Sunday, we didn't set an alarm but woke up at a reasonable hour, packed up, got a small continental breakfast at the hotel, and got on the road. All to the tune of more rain. As we got near home, there was a little bit of blue sky, but the rain returned later in the evening, including a little thunderstorm action.

Ended up being a good trip, and I'm glad we went. I'm still bummed that we didn't get any climbing in, but the trip to WV ended up being worth it. I'm especially glad we decided to cheat and left the tent at home.