Yes, you read that title correctly.
This past weekend, Nick, two new friends Amanda and Kevin and I set forth on an epic journey to the North Shore of Long Island. Our minds were filled with whimsical stories of incredible granite boulders that litter the coastline of East Marion... but I had my suspicions. Surely, such a place couldn't exist in New York!
We arrived at the Wildwood State Park campsite late on Friday and were greated by 7001 degrees Celsius heat and a 500% humidity. Every ten minutes or so a group of drunken men with a lantern who's brightness rivaled the sun would shout "YEAAAH!". And just to make sure we didn't sleep, an angry Chinese woman banged on our tent at around 3 in the morning, yelling in Chinese. We awoke at 5 to the sound of ducks quacking.
But us boulderer's are resilient, and after some chocolate chip pancakes and coffee, we were on our way.
Before we knew it, we were walking down the many steps, a landscape of winding coastline and... no, it couldn't be! boulders? Our paces sped up as we passed boulders that seemed to grow bigger and bigger until in the distance we saw it, a house sized, orange, granite boulder placed 10 feet from the water.
We began goes on a very fun V4 that centers around one dynamic move to a jug. After taking it down, we tried the low-start into the V4 that goes at V7. We worked out some beta and after several goes I pieced it together and sent! Probably my fasted sending of a V7 to date.
There is a certain laid back quality to beach bouldering... dips in the ocean between goes... girls in bikinis strolling by... and despite the hot Summer sun, the rock stayed full of friction!
Nick began working on his project from his last visit, an interesting traverse which we could not decide the grade on. He pieced it together slowly, and eventually took it down! I got to play around with my 50 mm lens on this one, and I'm very happy with the results.
We played around on a few more climbs, our bud Kevin took down a technical V6, our other friend Pat played around on a ridiculously crimp tall man project (probably like V10) and we explored the beach and found some great new lines on the most beautiful boulder I have ever seen.
After a night touring the streets of beautiful Port Jefferson, and observing the stunning sunset, we returned to the campsite and, against all odds, slept well with a day of sun, surf and bouldering pulsing through our systems.
The next day, we climbed on a different boulder and put up three new lines at V2, V2 and Vsomethinghigherthan4. I got close on the V6 traverse, but greased off the top-out, twice. We spent the last few hours bullshitting and taking pictures.
It was quite the adventure.
-WB
