El Chorro via Ithaca

Climbing Frontales, El Chorro limestone

Ancient Arab ruins, from the 9th century, cut from the rocks

 Massive piton on the long climb Amtrax,   The climb reminded us of Devil's Tower, when we ran out of water and finally getting back to the ground, surrounded by tourists with so many water bottles.  the lake has very large fish ...

  This is the famous Shockley's ceiling in the Shawangunks, 

 along with winter squash grown nearby. Then there are tapas. Why? Actually octopus tapas, the lady at the bar was nice to me and gave me some ice.  Maybe they were octopus, but who knows for sure, I was having none of it. If I ran a market or a little tapas bar, I would be nice to people, and give them advice about places to camp.    

 We stayed in a little village north of Alora, I don't know how I found it, one  bed but no breakfast, but we did find figs ... 

 Back in Trumansburg ... down the road from Ithaca, the old Masonic Temple

 Shawangunks

 Famous climb on the Frontales area, called Putifiero, all the climbs can  be famous for me 

the long view of the gorge 

a garden in Benaojan Spain and the fig tree ... and the pomegranate tree...Jakob stops every 10 feet or so to look at the plants, smell them, taste them and then tell the story about them. Today we gathered pomegranates, figs, dates, limes, and almonds. 

The cliff early in the morning, where everything ends up in the sun.  
It is sunny and hot and dry in the afternoon, so we walked over to El Caminito del Rey, the large walkway through the gorge that I climbed to last December, which has become a huge tourist place, since it was rebuilt, attracting  large buses of people. We could not do the walk because they only allow it from the other end, it was too hot to scale the dangerous looking fence.  We found that people made reservations months in advance!  

This was the day of breaking things, Jakob said it was because I was driving off the edge of the road, which was true, but I thought the car had troubles before I got hold of it, also the day I broke the washing machine, the handle of the door came off, how was I supposed to know you cannot open the front loading washer when it is running?  

The beautiful rock escarpment as the sun goes down, It was  beautiful and we wondering where to sleep since the car had completely broke down, coasting to this spot and refusing to go any further. We walked in the dark back to the Chorro train station, to meet the tow truck, which was supposed to be coming all the way from Malaga.  When the tow truck actually appeared,  the driver was very nice and friendly as he was glad to see us (not that many people are glad to see us here, not like the grandmother and grandfather in Ecuador), and I was very glad to see him, he was the most friendly person I ever met here.  And he brought another car along, which meant, sleep or no sleep we would  climb the big climb the  next day. The next morning at 6 or 7 I was sitting on the back porch  looking at Orion and the other stars, listening to the sounds of the mourning doves and watching the shadows of the palm trees on the wall. We drove to El Chorro, about 10 minutes away, found the road to the parking, but  there was already a car there. I said Jakob, they are on our climb. He said impossible, but it was true, the only people climbing anywhere that day, on our climb.  But it did not matter, it took us awhile to get there, I got so excited I just start heading up the mountain, and naturally overshot the climb, had to rappel back down, then go up the right way, then we started.We were already in the sun, but it was not too bad at first a little breezy, this was 5 pitches, not counting the scramble and the extra off route climb.   It got warmer and warmer the higher we went.      Jakob had collected some limes and made limead, I carried about 3 liters of water and limeade up the climb. It was really exciting climbing whole way up, great rock with unusual features. Wherever we climbed, the rock changed. . At the end of the second  pitch, just as I was getting to the anchors, I took a big circus fall, and had to do half of the pitch again, and banged my hip during my downward acrobatics, which I did not really notice until we were going back down and the rock was too hot to touch.