Early Season Skaha Climbing

15 hours of driving and 1300 km for a day and a half of climbing? Seems a bit excessive, but Kyle, Liam, John, Jon, Andrew and Brett all were pretty excited to head out to Skaha to trade poor snow conditions and a cool overcast forecast for a warm sunny weekend of climbing! To maximize our weekend, we left Calgary at 1 pm and arrived at the Okanagan Falls Provincial Campground within seconds of the other car, perfect timing! It was wonderfully warm and we had some beers and a campfire before heading off to bed, stoked to get on rock the next morning. We all were up very early so had a leisurely breakfast before we met Liam (who was staying at his mom's place) and his mom at the parking lot. We spent the whole day at Claim It All Wall, which was about a 40 minute hike in from the north parking lot but it was worth it. We were the only group there for most of the day and were able to set up tonnes of ropes and take over the whole crag.

Brett working his way up Stubborn Streak (5.10b)

Thailand - Getting our Tan (and Climb) on in Tonsai

At the end of March, Kyle and I ventured overseas (our first trip abroad together) for two weeks of fun and exploration in Thailand. Neither of us had been to Asia before and we didn't have much time so it was a blur of sight seeing, activities and trying to squeeze in a bit of R&R. Although we wanted to do some climbing in Thailand, that wasn't totally the focus of the trip. It was really nice to spend some time being tourists for once, mixed in with a bit of recreation too. For this blog entry, I have focused mostly on the climbing, since covering the whole trip couldn't possibly do it justice. We met so many amazing people, checked out some fantastic places and only just scratched the surface of what Thailand has to offer. It would be really hard to put all of those experiences into words, but hopefully I can pass on some useful info for anyone interested in heading over to check it out for themselves.

Within hours of arrival, we had determined that Chang was our beer of choice