Not Having A Lot of Money is Fun Sometimes

If we had a ton of money, the four of us would have gone to Bacchus or the Gilded Otter to eat, drink beer, and hang out in noisy warmth all evening before going back to hotel rooms to fall asleep with the television on. I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be cooking mac and cheese in the dark by the overlook, passing the headlamp back and forth to see what we're eating or fetch more beer or look for another warm layer in the stinky climbers' disorder of the Subaru. We wouldn't be drinking ourselves warm with scotch, talking about chickens and Yosemite and grad school while a gorgeous sliver of a moon slides up the sky over Millbrook. We would have bought ourselves out of a familiar dilemma; the cold is finally too much for scotch or fleece or 500 fill-power down to manage, but it's too boring to admit defeat, drive to Russ and Amy's, and crawl into the tents we've pitched in their yard.

Constraint breeds creativity. We decide to hike shivering up to the boulders on the carriage road, sharing three headlamps and the flask of scotch. Doug and Michael work the Gill Egg, taking turns climbing in the headlamp's tunnel of light while two of us spot down below. The Uberfall is dark and cold and quiet and entirely ours while the Taurid meteor shower streaks the night sky. Michael, Doug, and I monkey on the boulders until we're sweating and removing layers, following each other on multiple traverses of the warm-up boulder. Scott takes photos and, as a reward for his patient effort, comes away with the shot I'm posting here. Later that night, after we're stuffed into sleeping bags in our tents pitched under the bright cloudy arc of the Milky Way, a pack of coyotes must have just cornered a rabbit in the field next to us. The dissonant, sinuous harmony of their banshee-dog chorus wafts over the field as we fall asleep.

This really isn't anything that I have a whole ton of experience with, but I'd imagine that having enough money to consistently purchase comfort on every climbing trip can be really expensive. There are worse (much worse) things than a sitting down to enjoy a grass-fed cheeseburger, some sweet potato fries and a pint of porter with a group of climbing friends in the guaranteed comfort of a brewpub. But it would have cost us each at least twenty five dollars, a midnight send of the Gill Egg, a really neat photo, a rare experience of solitude at the Uberfall, a Taurid light show, and a crazy avant-garde piece of coyote choral music as a lullaby.