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The Construction of our new climbing gym is underway. I've been keeping a better account of it's progress on the Facebook page. The Edge - Halfmoon

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Native Americans were here.

Wandering through the property right now is like floating through a sea of pink flags. Fifty feet in any direction is another pink flag and a little pile of dirt.

Our Edge climbing gym manager, Adam Catalano, arrived at the site on Monday around lunchtime to catch up with the archaelogical survey crew. After wandering for 15-20 minutes, he finally found them, nearly finished with what seems like several days worth of work.

Tracy, the foreman on the project, revealed that the test pits had uncovered three chert flakes, evidence that Native Americans had spent some time here making cutting tools and hunting as animals came down to the creek for a drink.

What does this mean???? Well, fortunately, the site is in the corner of what will be our parking lot, so if we give that area a 25' buffer and leave it undisturbed, we can move along with clearing land and erecting the building.

"The Edge - Halfmoon" on Facebook

Wow. This is a huge project. You never really realize how large a building project is until you get into the thick of all the hoops and contracts of it all.
Right now we are on the CUSP of cracking that throttle wide open. This morning I dropped off a contract to the folks who will do the archaelogical testing. That will go down next week.

Once they clear that there is nothing of significence there, we can start cutting trees. Then it will be a huge rush to get in a foundation before the ground freezes, but I'm confident that it will happen. Once those first trees come down, it is going to just all go by in a blurr for me. I'm sure y'all will be "edgy" waiting for the opening, but I'll be rushing around like crazy.

I just put up a Facebook page for the gym (The Edge - Halfmoon) so you can "like" it and keep up to date on the progress.

Here's to hoping for clean dirt!

The Notch is AMAZING!

The Shiloh's Edge crew got our first taste of Smugglers' Notch bouldering this weekend, with a trip up from Thursday night to Sunday morning. We began our climbing on Friday morning with some amazingly cool temps and incredible excitement at the boulders which where littering the notch.
As you drive up, you are literally swerving around unbelievable climbing boulders on a tiny 1.5 lane street. As you park the car, you can barely get your seatbelt off before you bolt over to the nearest incredible line that is staring you in the face. The rock quality is unbelievable, the angles superb and the climbing so varied.
JP, Izzy, Evan, Morgan and I got on tons of problems of all different grades. There are just too many to list. Evan, in typical Evan-style, got psyched on one very hard problem and spent much of his energy focusing on it. The Impossible Problem was a V7, but a critical hold broke three weeks ago, making it more like V9. Evan quickly sent that, but then set his eyes on a sit start into it. It has gone once or twice since the broken hold incident, and Evan really wanted to send it this V11/12 gem. He made some great progress, linking into the Impossible Problem, but had to throw in the towel late Saturday night as his fingers were bleeding from the sharp crimps.
Here is a video of Evan's best attempt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMz0q9Se2Ek

July closed out with a great weekend up at Rumney for some sport climbing. It had been quite a while since I tied into the sharp end, but three days of throwing myself at tough routes really recharged my affection for roped climbing.
JP, Charlie and I made the journey up to NH for the final weekend of the month. We were excited to run into Murph, Jut, Michael and Sandra up there and get some of the spray down and the psych from the Rumney experts.
The weekend didn't produce any super-hard sends, but it did get the blood flowing and both JP and I are excited to do some more sport climbing here this fall.

Last weekend, I was back to pebble wrestling. On Friday, Ben and I ran up to Snowy Mtn to polish off a few things. The Cure is a short V8 that I had tried a few times before. The topout had always stifled me but this day was quite different. After just a few attempts, both Ben and I topped it out the first time our hands hit the lip. .....Really don't know why it was so hard before.
I then worked on finishing the V7 Never Been to Hueco. Several jumps to the topout produced the same disappointing result, however, with just a slight shift in the right hand crimp, I was able to snag the jump move and topout casually.
On Saturday, JP, Tyler and I visited the Hideaway and Happy Valley in Western Mass. It was great to see these new areas and sample some of the amazingly gneiss rock. We had a ton of fun working on problems of all grades, however, nothing big went down this trip. At the end of the day we ventured over to Happy Valley and were BLOWN AWAY by the beautiful gently overhanging walls. We threw ourselves on Sleeping Giant and after numerous attempts at jumping to the slot, we were forced to trek back to the car without a send among us.
We will surely be back for this route (if nothing else). It is one of the most fun V5s in the Northeast. Beautiful and varied holds, tall and committing, with a safe landing. Can't be beat.

The EDGE update

Deposits have been sent to both the building company and Rockwerx, the climbing surface company.

Clearance has been granted to start clearing trees and preparing the site.

We are on the move!

Projects don't come together overnight though. So be patient and pray for no more glitches.

When will it open? I can't say for sure, other than 'early 2011'

Weekend update by JP

Last week, we ventured up to The Stables in Saratoga for a quick Monday evening sesh. This is a long and interesting wall along the mountain bike trails up there. It has some decent lines, but many are super crimpy (so Ben loved them) and the topouts are the hardest part.
Although it is close to home, I'm not sure if it is worth many repeat visits.

Friday was a trip up north to MacKenzie with Aaron and JP and Saturday JP and I headed south to finish up projects at PKill. JP blogged about the weekend, so I'll just let him do the rest: www.weekendbouldering.blogspot.com

Happy Fourth. Careful with your digits.