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Ieva got invited out to Marmot’s offices for work, so I decided to meet her out there so that we could go to Yosemite. Of course, with getting the business going this year, I wouldn’t have much time, but we figured we could manage 10 days. Just enough time for a short wall and some good free climbing.

Basically, we had an awesome time. We did Skull Queen on Washington Column, had a great time, and had amazing luck with the weather. We got to see and meet lots of great old and new friends (one of my favorite parts about climbing in the valley, actually). We got to work on a new project and get new motivation for training when we get home. We fit in some super high-quality bouldering in Bishop, and I got to go see my sister in Fort Worth, TX on the way home.

That was about as good as we could have done with only 10 days! Here is the gallery of the best pictures and commentary from the trip.

Two weeks ago Ieva got an out-of-the-blue offer to go to Greenland for a week. Eric Post, a professor at Penn State, does research up there and needed someone to go along on this trip to, well, basically just carry heavy loads.

She left on Saturday, the day of Michael and Sharmishtha’s wedding. She was really bummed that she had to miss the ceremony itself (and the partying!), but she did get to hang out quite a bit for the rest of the day.

She doesn’t really know a whole lot more about the trip, since it was such short notice. She probably only talked with the members of the other group for about an hour total before leaving. In any case, we bought a new digital camera for the occasion, and I’m sure she’ll have lots to tell when she gets back. I got an email from her this morning that said that she’s tired, but doing great. She got to ride in the cockpit for a while, which is really nice considering that the flight is on a C-130 (military cargo plane), so the atmosphere everywhere else in the plane is less than stellar, so I’m told.

In any case, here are some interesting links that I found while I was trying to dig up any information beforehand that I could:

• Here’s a satellite photo of where she’s flying into. Note the runway in the center of the photo. Drag on the picture to see the edge of the Greenland ice cap, several screenfulls to the right. Zoom out gradually to see where this is in Greenland (or where Greenland is at all, for the geography-impaired). Very cool.
• Here’s a political map of where she’s flying into. The tiny town is also known as Kangerlussuaq.
• Here’s the home page for Eric Post, the professor who’s sending Ieva on this trip. Those same caribou antlers that are in the photo on his home page wound up in Ieva’s possession on the first day of buck season in State College. She got to carry them to App House from our apartment and tell passers-by that they were from the buck that she shot that day. Very impressive.
• Here are the best weather forecasts that I could find for Kangerlussuaq. Note that there’s no civil/nautical/astronomical twighlight listed, since she’s above the arctic circle. Neat.
• Here is someone’s weather station info in Kangerlussuaq (I just keep copying and pasting this name) for up-to-the-minute weather info.
• Here’s a picture of the town of Kangerlussuaq.
• Here’s a really cool picture of the edge of the ice cap.

I’ll let you know when I hear more from her, but I suspect that we won’t hear much until she gets back!

We got to go climbing from August to November this year. The big destinations were City of Rocks, ID; Tuolumne Meadows & Yosemite Valley, CA; and Joshua Tree, CA. Here are the highlights.