Congrats to Marcelle & Chris

Marcelle & Chris were married yesterday. Great day, good party, and lots of good friends. Before the wedding they roamed around town into some good spots for photos. I'm not sure if this runs a foul on etiquette... but I brought my camera to the pro wedding photo shoot.

Lookin' good kids! A few more photos here.

Another Float

Last weekend Jill and I made our annual float to Grand Manan. Great place. I spent the weekend roaming around taking photos, watching marine life, and eating fine foods. Blackberries were in full season so I ended up picking a kilo while waiting for the ferry. Another kilo probably never made it into our buckets..

Blackberries. Tart.

We came to a couple of epiphanies:

1. We want to get back onto team veg. So as of Sept. 1st we're vegan again for a while.
2. We want waterfront property. Eventually. But not on the island... somewhere on the lower river. I'm now shopping.

Anyway, I think half the reason why we like fishing communities so much is that they seem to share our taste in colour. All vibrant; all the time. Although I found lots of nice flowers and nature over the weekend it was the man-made colour on the island that really stuck out:

A collection of the colours I found.

Anyway, I've talked about it before but this map points to the location of the best campsite I personally know of.

View Larger Map

Cover Story

A week ago I was interviewed by Here Magazine about climbing. Today it was published... along with a few of my pictures (one of which was the cover shot... nice). Yep... no credit... by that's my photo on the cover! No mention of it being of Moncton climber Franca Z either. Why are we both not rich and famous now?

The interview went o.k. and the article isn't as ridiculous as I expected given the odd questions I answered. But seriously... long-boarding is nowhere near as cool as skydiving or climbing. Come on.

It's funny. Notice the stock picture of the guy belaying in jeans, sneakers, and ice screws on his harness? WTF! Oh wait... that must be Hennigar since nobody else has a daisy chain of tied webbing. LOL.

A Stag for H-Bomb

Last weekend I threw a stag party for Chris Hennigar. A few years back we spent a day climbing at Main Face in NS just outside of Halifax. It's a pretty spot with a decent trad cliff growing right out of a big lake. I got wind that the cabin at the summit was open for rent and got the contact info from Climb Nova Scotia (now a card-carryin' member).

In typical style for Henni and I, we packed an obscene amount of stuff which had to be lugged in. He focused on necessary climbing gear... while I went heavy on bringing beer, liquor, and meat. The drive there was quick enough but we got there after dark, leaving us a bit insecure at the prospect that we were lugging hundreds of pounds of stuff up a steep ATV trail in the wrong direction. Anyway, we eventually ended up at the cabin a-ok.

The cabin at Main Face. Not pretty... but location is everything I guess.

(Funny side note: Mark, driving in a separate car behind us... got separated and lost in rural Nova Scotia. He decides the appropriate course of action is to call a stagette party full of ladies for help. Nice work Mark! Try again.)

The lines at Main Face can be really quality, but unfortunately, as we were warned, many of the 3-star classics are quite overgrown. Expect moss, lichen, and blueberries to be the norm. A few lines remain naturally clean and they are stellar. Oskar and Mr. Puff were exceptionally nice.

Henni cruises Oskar.

Fred proposed 'The Meatgrinder' as Henni's epic route for the weekend and it didn't disappoint. He got up it though and wasn't beat up too bad in the process. Way to go for awkward 5.9 offwidth!

We had a big feed Saturday night and after a few beer decided to do a midnight run of Popcorn, the classic 5.6 that goes strait out of the lake. This is a cool 45% dike that traverses about 15 m in a 25m pitch. Mark, Adam, Chris, and I jaunted up this with headlamps. Perfect finish to a long day with a belay view of the cosmos and owls hooting across the lake. We were back to camp by 1:00 a.m... in time to down a few Jagerbombs and shoot Ian's pimped out pellet rifles for a few hours! Drunk, we finally crashed around 3:30.

NB Day Weekend

Great NB Day long weekend.

7-Mile Lake

Went to Jenny's camp and spent a great day drinking, flag-raising, and swimming in the heat. Got on the boat with Jill and her parents for delicious surf n' turf the next night. Today, I finally started painting the house. Why does the colour never look the same as it does on the chips in the store?

Jill back on a boat with me... she swore this would

never happen again!

A fire to make Ryan proud!