Wild, Wonderful

Welcome to West Virginia.It's wild and wonderful! Like the WV license plates say, so the climbs exhibit. Take, for instance, this classic at Butcher's Branch, Flight of the Gumbie, 5.9:
Or, how about swimming at Whippoorwill? And why should we whip poor Will? Hm...
But Whippoorwill has better than just nice, warm, summer water. How about more DWS (Deep Water Soloing)?
But yeah, the water's nice!
If that looks a little easy, it might be. For the last climb of the day, already pumped from rope-climbing, I hopped on something harder; the following might be a 5.12a called Waver, I was told:

And when you're done climbing and swimming and being wet, the sun dries you up,
just in time to go to Pies & Pints for a tremendously large dinner. Alisa orders a Spinach & Garlic 1/2Lg. pizza and eats it. I order a Classic Pie 1/2Lg. pizza and a Classic Hero sandwich. And eat it all! Mm, Mm!
That night we are surrounded by lightning and thunder, thunder and lightning. No fuzzy puppies, no sun, no moon. A tent illuminated from the outside every 2.2 seconds such that Alisa and I could have put on a strobe-style puppet show for each other if we so desired. With that much rain, we awoke to a humid campground.
Luckily, Pirate's Cove, another great DWS location in Summersville, was very sunny by noonish and indeed offered some great climbing and swimming that Brian Stuenkel would love to climb. And others, too, of course! (See: Dad!, Kevin!, Nicky!, Jon!, SeanManaka007!)Heck, I already miss it there! So nice! There aren't pictures or video, but there was a climb at Pirates Cove that I nearly got to the bolted anchors on before I fell. I must've been about 40 feet out of the water when my arms made their final transition from stick of butter to melted butter. That means I fall. And scream! That's what happens when you make a move off of two fingers then one finger after climbing what already felt like 25 feet of 5.12. Anyhow: Great fun! If anyone checks out this route, which is just a 2 minute swim from where I stand in the picture, you'll enjoy it: I cleared out tons of spiders for you!

And there you have our 2-night, 1 long-, 1 short-day stay at the New River Gorge in West Virginia. Thanks to Roger (See Roger's Campground) for the coffee and hot water in the morning, and the 2-day lending of his personal guidebook covering all of the areas we climbed there! What a great guy and place!

-Your happy and at home Landescaper, N8