DryStoneGarden

Over Memorial Day weekend, Anita and I got in a couple of days of climbing at Lover’s Leap on Highway 50 in the Sierras. It’s one of my favorite places in California.

The rock is easier to climb than it looks because it has a ton of horizontal dikes — veins of quartz and feldspar that erode more slowly than the rest of the rock, leaving lots of positive edges to hold onto and stand on. There were patches of snow at the base of some of the climbs from the big storm last week.

Lover’s Leap is the site of one of the most famous rock climbing videos, a segment of Dan Osman free soloing 400 feet in 4 minutes. Climbing videos can be boring even for climbers, but this one is fun even if you’ve seen it before. Using a rope and climbing with a concern for our mortality, Anita and I took over two hours when we did this climb, about thirty times as slow.