Triple Crown Weekend Recap - Stone Fort

As far as bouldering competitions go, the triple crown is the king of competitions in the Southeast. The other weekend Liz and I went up to Chattanooga to compete in the Stone Fort leg of the triple crown, and here's how that weekend went for me:

We got up to Chattanooga mid afternoon on friday and popped over to the boulders on Old Wauhatchie Pike (we only had about 2 ish hours) just to touch some real rocks again (oh, the struggles of Florida climbers- more on that another time).

After that we went to the Crash Pad for the BYOB party/fundraiser. The SCC hosted this amazing event to help pay off the acquisition loan for Denny Cove, an awesome sport climbing crag right outside of Chattanooga. There were tons of vendors, food, drinks, competitions, and raffles! We snagged shirts from our favourite Chattanooga brand Burlaep, grabbed some cool goodies from Cactus & Pine and even got a personalized climbing haiku from Steep South. The best part of that evening was running into a ton of friends from previous climbing trips/ competitions.

My personalized Haiku from Steep South

The competition was scheduled for Saturday, however a rainy forecast pushed it to Sunday. With this, we got an extra day to hang around Chattanooga (my favourtie city!) which included pancakes for breakfast, some thrifting, a nice walk during a break in the rain, and some good old gym climbing.

Fast forward to Sunday morning....

We arrived to Stone Fort nice and early (before finding out about the delayed start time, darn wet rocks) and got to wander around and check out some vendors, catch some freebies thrown into the crowd, and hang out with friends. Mind you, maybe throwing rolls of tape into a crowd isn't the worlds best idea, I almost died at least once.

Trying to figure out how to grab a damp sloper

As we got started we realized we needed to manage our expectations, many of the rocks were still damp, if not outright wet. So I set my goal of just completing 10 climbs that day and filling out my scoresheet (spoiler alert, I managed to get in 12). I spent most of the summer solely sport climbing so it was interesting to get back on some climbs at stone fort that i hadn't touched since February. All of my previously "impossible" climbs came very easily, despite the less than ideal conditions. I guess that means it's time to set some new goals.

However, the most notable thing of this day was not the climbing itself, but the friends. We started out the day just Liz and I with our friend Peter that we had met at a previous competition. Through out the day our group evolved and grew and we split into different groups and then came back together. I made some cool new friends, reconnected with some from earlier this year, and introduced different groups of friends to each other. We also got to celebrate a birthday that day!