CCURDLE Coyne

After last weeks festivities gathering ticks in LCC Court and I decided we needed a bit more action saturday morning before the rain started. With Annie still out of commission with arm issues, we men headed up to try our luck on Boomerang and Coyne Crack, up near the Thumb. Boomerang is a 2 pitch 5.10.  Pitch 1 has fantastic right leaning finger jamming, great gear and a bomber 2 bolt anchor and pitch 2 has scary waterfall slab face and corner climbing protected by old pitons with ratty, soaking wet webbing attached intermixed with thought provoking pod gear with a slung bushel for a belay. Court got pitch 1, and I was lucky enough to get pitch 2. Who had the better lead?

Pitch one(the quality pitch) of Boomerang

Coyne Crack is a splitter finger crack that goes at 11d and worked me last year. I was excited to return and try to send it for a respectable 2nd attempt on it. All went well and despite desperate mantling after the first crux section, I managed to pull off the redpoint. To ruin my day, Court onsighted it shortly thereafter. Whatever. Congrats to the kid. Not to downplay his accomplishment, but I did spray him down with gear beta prior to his go. But I just say that to make myself feel better about getting shown up. Superb route. Hope to return and try our luck at another hard 11c, Spring and Fall, next week.

Looking down at the crux section of Coyne

Yosemite? Try LCC

We each lapped it again on TR after our respective sends.

After climbing I set out for a long run. With the high country still socked in with snow, and my creativity deteriorating on more possible linkups on the University bonneville section of trail, I turned my attention the draper canyon trail system. You may have heard of the WURL, or the wasatch ultimate ridge linkup. My run, inspired by that challenge, is known as the CCURDLE, or Corner Canyon Ultimate Rainy Day Linkup Extravaganza.. This run isn't especially well known among ultrarunners as I created it as I was driving to the trailhead yesterday. The acronym came to me as I observed the consistency of my chicken bacon artichoke pizza vomit after completing the run.

If you haven't run in Corner Canyon, or biked, the Draper trail crew down there did some legit work. All the trails are well maintained, well signed(even providing some life advice at times), are closed when muddy, and have updated maps and bike maintainance stations. The one problem they do have however is that the place is a maze. If its your first time, expect to get turned around.

The fat maps around the area state there are 17 different trail sections that can be traveled on. My goal in doing the CCURDLE was of course to run all of them. Now before you buck your head in disbelief, many of the trails are less than 1 mile long. Some however are 3-5 miles long, so it balances itself out. Linking them all together proved to be a challenge, which I failed at(due to rain, laziness, hunger, not knowing where that trail was, etc), but I managed to hit a considerable portion of them(like 12) in 3 hours plus the standard 6 mile Bonneville section over near there. Basically you just run up and down this bluff a bunch of times on as many different trails as you can, running into the same people over and over who are essentially doing the same thing.

The sign says many of the trails are red, meaning closed.......

But the signs hang mercifully down!! 

How many cliche LDS proposals have happened here?

A call to serve and protect

Dictating social queues

Advice for happy living and tick infestation

The trails I hit were: Bonneville, Clarks, Ann's, Rush, Corner Canyon Road, Ghost Falls, Aqueduct, Gasline, Canyon Hollow, Brocks, Potato Hill, and couple other connector trails. If you're interested in training for the WURL, look somewhere else. There is no off trail hiking, no summits attained, no ridges, minimal vert, and many grandma's on unicycles lapping you, but at least you can say you did the CCURDLE.