Flyboys

So I’m catching up on posts. Last year, Liz and I had been talking about climbing Flyboys for a while, and we finally had a weekend of good weather, and compatible schedules! The caveat? it was in mid-October, so it was wonderfully clear, but cold, and the days were getting short!

The days leading up to it, we found another duo to climb with, so we could have cars at both the start and finish of the climb. We drove up to Mazama on Friday night, met them, and camped at the finishing point of the climb.

The next morning, we hopped into one car, and drove to town to get breakfast at the general store, and started with the climb!

Liz and I swung leads, and taking photos while doing this is pretttty tough. I’ll need to figure out a system, but here’s Liz at the 5th pitch’s belay station.

When we finished the 6th pitch, we noticed that the other party was pretty far behind, so we decided took a break for lunch. We had been climbing each pitch in ~30-minutes so we were ahead of schedule.

So about 1.5-hours passed before the other party showed up. They decided to bail, and Liz and I decided to keep going. They took my keys, so they could drive my car back to the campsite, to take care of those logistics, which was nice. Given our pace, we felt that we had just enough time to finish the climb, before the sunset.

We got going again, and the other party got some shots of us on the 7th and 8th pitches, which turned out to be a slog. We weren’t warmed up (at least I wasn’t), and the rock was cold enough to numb my fingers… so these two pitches took us about 1.5-hours? We were slightly concerned about our timetable, but we got our rhythm back once we were back in the sunlight!

Also, Liz was okay with climbing more of the 5.9 pitches, to keep us on track, cuz she’s strong AF 💪💪💪

Anyways, we got back on our pace of ~30-min per pitch, and we simuled one of the pitches, for efficiency.

Here’s Liz on pitch 17! We literally made it to pitch 18 as the sun set behind Methow Valley

Then, Liz crushed the final pitch, and the light disappeared literally the moment she set the anchor. I was nearly at my limit, but she offered some words of encouragement which got me going again. Everything just worked out perfectly, which was incredibly satisfying. From there, it was a 40-ish minute hike back to the campsite, where we met up with the other party to share a beer. We got dinner at Methow Valley Ciderhouse, and found a campsite to crash at for the night.