climbing with chicas

So yesterday was my last official girls climbing day in the magical land of Rocky Mountain National Park with all my lady friends. This has been something that I have been participating in for almost three years now: climbing one day during the week with all girls, or mostly girls.  It's nice to have a guy around to help spot us on scary stuff I guess :) and I'm pretty sure they like to pretend they have boobs too so it just works out for all of us.

So on this one special weekday, usually Tuesdays, a group of lassies all hike up to chaos canyon and climb, eat cookies, chat about stuff we like and things we hate, make up gang names for ourselves, and have fun, it's nothing less than radical.

When the sun starts to go down we usually finish up the day at a friends house with some cheese, bbq, and vino of course! Best day everrrrr.

This has been something that has really helped me excel in climbing.. I'm pretty much at the head of the inch worm... if you don't know, you don't want to trust me.

When I first started climbing in 2004 it was mainly because my boyfriend is a bad ass rock climber (www.phillipschaal.blogspot.com) and made it look so easy and so fun. Well I had a pretty tough time trying to make it seem easy and fun, its super hard and takes a lot of dedication and tenacity to be an "average" climber. I didn't really know any girls that climbed so I climbed with Phil and his friends that could fly up V10's while brushing their teeth..

So after booking my first climbing trip to Europe and not having a clue about what bouldering really was and making myself lactose intolerant from eating nothing but unprocessed cheese for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  I became discouraged, intimated and thought I should just stick to shopping, and eating Lactaid, but than... after a few more climbing trips Phil and I decided to move to ColoRADo.

I was scared.. everyone in Colorado is a climber and everyone is damn good at it... keep in mind I didn't know a soul and could barely pull my ass up a V1..  But what I didn't expect was to become friends with girls that were bad ass climbers that were super nice and basically inspired me to try harder. So that's why Tuesday are awesome for me and I'm sad that the season of Tuesday climbing, chicas, cheese, and wine has come to end.




But there's always Wednesdays!!

I still have a bit more time to try to few things that I'd like to finish up.. yippy, dippy, yee haw!

A big thanks to Melissa Strong for the pictures.. xo