Ninja morning.

It was theoretically possible to scramble your way up the back side of this rock, but my preferred solution was to boulder up the front of it and rappel off the face whenever I needed to come back down.

This was aided by my much beloved but alas rather uncomfortable Black Diamond Apine Bod harness, a selection of lightweight ropes and hardware, and...

Don't tell me you go around trying to ninja it up without your sword.

I went on this trip with my primary rock climbing partner and we spent most of it doing our level best to get onto the very tippy top of every damn fool thing we passed by, regardless of whether it was intended to be ooked upon or not. Towards that end we didn't complete a whole heck of a lot of actual traditional hikes, per se, because we kept getting distracted. (I went looking through these photos again in order to find this one which I posted previously.)

Night one saw us rocking up to this placid but comparatively boring creekside site shortly before sundown. That's my buddy's extremely well traveled MSR single-Hubba there, a considerable portion of which (along with one of his sleeping bags) is now made out of Tenacious Tape after it got eaten by a bear in Alaska one time.

But all that that was before the morning light coming over the crest revealed this fuck-off massive rock edifice that was right up the hill behind our campsite which, of course, we immediately scaled. That's where the 'biner picture above was taken, as I recall.

The Red River Gorge area in Daniel Boone is home to all kinds of interesting rocks, as I have vouchsafed to you all previously.

I could go on posting pictures of them all day. I have hundreds of the things.

I learned a couple of important lessons on this trip, gear wise. The major one was that I will now famously not travel anywhere my packable down jacket.

That's because we started this trip in roasting near-summertime temperatures, 85 and 90 during the day in the full sunshine despite it being only the middle of April.

And then on the morning on day four we woke up to three inches of snow, and more accumulating by the minute. We had no winter gear whatsoever.

Needless to say, we took that as our cue to get out of there.