On Thursday night I wanted to hike Angels Rest in the gorge and went up with Karen and Matt. It was uber windy and once we got to the top we had to walk on fours and crawl from rock to rock. We figured the gusts were near 45mph (with nothing to guide us besides being pushed over.) After some Cheezits and hot cocoa we headed back down.

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I recently bought a new camera case called the Alpinist case for schleping my camera when climbing. As I'm in no shape to climb outside yet, I thought I would go up the grueling hike to Angels Rest to work off 2 Cheez-it crackers and try the case. It's designed to be used with one hand for climbing and such and after a bit I got it down and it's pretty slick. So it should do on my 5.2 climbs this summer.

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For our ultra exciting New Years we went over to Matt's and played poker until 12:01 when we all bailed and went home to sleep.

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Christmas was over at my parents again. Simone, Mary and Trey came up to eat all the cinammon rolls and pork loin. Simone liked her new cape after I wore it and showed her how cool capes really are.

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After 2 weeks of being stuck at home I walked down to work to pick up Christmas packages. There was still a lot of snow and I used my shoes with screws on the bottom which worked out pretty nicely.

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Mt. Tabor finally got enough snow for Matt, Keevin and I to make a West face summit attempt. It took us all day and we barely eeked up some of the upper sections, but we finally summited after a gallant race up shirtless by Keevin and Matt. We got to practice techniques learned by the Mazamas and invent our own as well.

Photos

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We finally got some snow in Portland that shut the city down for 2 weeks.

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Sara and I had grand plans of going up into the mountains to go hotspringing and camping. The cold front that said it was coming with 7 degree weather talked us out of it. Instead we slept in and went to Dish for breakfast and then headed up North to get in a good hike. This time the weather talked to Sara's shoes and said they shouldn't hang out. So instead of hiking we walked over a bridge to look at the river and headed back to town to visit REI and buy some shoes for Sara.

Sara had talked about this mythical mountain bike park under the bridges of Seattle. I thought it sounded like the Troll that lives under bridges. This, like The Troll was true. We will be making trips over there to get ready for, well, get ready for talking about mountain biking.

We celebrated our conquest of nature that night by having dinner at a Japanese restaurant that cooked their food on stones. They were quite friendly and even did the "Irashayimase" when people came in. It was quiet good. The beer helped out as well.

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Today we went to BFE to go shooting guns and chew terbaccy. I skipped on the tobacco but shot a few guns, I even got some of the elusive pudding pops. Us:1 / Terrorists:0

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We went into the Gorge to hike up Munra Point. It was a perfect day and the trail was fairly dry. This didn't stop me from falling on my ass on the way down though. We saw salmon in the river (or sturgeon if you ask Matt.) The top of the hike is the coolest location in the Gorge that I've been on, but you can see for yourself below.

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