Saturday, 05-Apr-14

Since Saturday was slated to be a rainy cool day, Daniel found us a hike to check out in the area.  It’s strange, but we realized that while we’ve all been to the Gunks dozens of times, we’ve never done any normal hiking… well, this is a perfect time to fix that, right?

Hike #1 – The carriage road below the Trapps

More than anything, this was a quick recon mission, to see how the rock looked and to get a feel for where we wanted to climb the next day.  We’ve all been in this area a dozen times before, though we did push farther to the right than we normally do…

Hike #2 – Bonticou Crag hike

Sadly, this crag is not open for climbing.  Sad, because damn this would be good for climbing.  Huge split cracks heading up the sides, with lots of interesting roofs and ledges and trees all over it.

The approach we took was short – maybe 3 miles hiking.  Since we didn’t have heavy packs it went quite quickly, with Daniel, Erin and I taking our time and enjoying the scenery.  The scramble up to the summit was a bit more interesting though, with more than a few amazing views as we clawed our way up roughly 300ft of rock slide.  My takeaway?  Damn I want to climb this… or at least do some bouldering… hell, even camping in some of the small caves would be fun!

After hitting the summit and having a bit of lunch, we headed down the long way home – it was still early, and we really didn’t have any other plans for the evening.  We checked out Spring Farms on the way down, talked about the San Francisco housing market, and generally enjoyed the outdoors and the amazing views of the mountains.