The Blogs and the Bees

I had been in Tucson almost a full year before I got mixed up with bees or blogging. Most of a year is a good run by anyone's standards when it comes to avoiding these two things and particularly so when it comes to climbers. Climbers seem to be born with the blogging instinct-- call it spray, call it 'beta' (make little quotation marks with your fingers when you say 'beta') or just sign your name fifteen times in a row on the Long's Peak summit register --anyway you slice it one of the great joys of climbing is swapping bullshit and thumping chests with other climbers. And that's the idea behind the Team Tuesday Climbing blog. We're here to crush on Tuesdays-- be it on the Lemmon, Milagrosa, or Gate's Pass. And we're here to talk it up and spray it around and have some fun on the days when we don't get to get out and crush.

Bees are as much a part of the Arizona experience as swapping bullshit is part of the climbing experience. In Tucson there are some things you can only avoid for so long-- rattlesnakes, jumping cholla, and bees among other things -- and this is what it looks like when the bill finally comes due:










The vicious little bastards lurk somewhere around this fine, little arete near the base of It Cliff. They are belligerent, rabidly anti-climber, and they have no compunction against flying into your mouth to brutalize your soft-tissues. My advice: terminate with extreme prejudice.

All this, of course, only after I blew two redpoint attempts on 'Armed Robbery' (5.11) at Jailhouse Rock. Joe, who Sent at Jailhouse Rock, barely even got a honey-scented fly-by when the swarm descended on me leading me to conclude that the smell of angst drives honeybees to a murderous rage while confidence, contentment, and self-satisfaction act as a kind of cloaking device that hides you from the bees' view. Sorry bees. Next time I'll Send.



I'll close with a couple of shots of Joe making short work of Dragon's Back (5.9/5.10-)

Welcome to Team Tuesday Climbing


-C-