Jen wanted to ride bikes this weekend, I wanted to climb, and Jasmine just wanted to get the hell out of the house. So, in our spring tradition, we loaded the climbing gear and bikes into the truck and headed south. Temperatures are great right now, and we rode in the morning and climbed in the afternoon before going back to camp and chilling by the campfire under a star-filled sky. I love the desert.
On Sunday we headed down to Big Bend and hiked up the talus to climb Lighthouse Tower. I’ve been looking at this thing for a while but just never got around to it. The climbing is great. It’s thoughtful and cruxy with some run-outs, but never burly enough to do anything but really keep your attention. Unlike most towers, there are no anchors on the top. So, after you get to the small plateau at the top of pitch four, you basically do a highball boulder problem, stand on top, look over the other side toward Big Bend, and then reverse it while your belayer tells you where to put your feet. I snapped a couple photos and reversed the moves pretty quickly because I was a bit nervous and wanted to get it out of the way, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be. If I would have known that in advance, I would have spent more time up there.
