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| Korey at the hanging belay. |
Sometimes it is hard to leave things along. A very skilled chemist by the name of Max Perutz knew this better than I do. He did something everyone told him was "nutty", he tried to solve the structures of myoglobin and hemoglobin (the proteins that bind to oxygen in your muscles and blood). He and John Kendrew persisted however, and after twenty years, they figured them out and together received the Nobel Prize. The thing is, the structures changes when they bind to oxygen. So Max Perutz said, "I want to know what the structure of hemoglobin is when it's not bound to oxygen". Everyone thought that was crazy, it took twenty years to put the hemoglobin puzzle together and not only did Max wanted to do it all over again, but do it in the absence of oxygen!? The cool thing is that he actually did it and solved the structure of deoxyhemoglobin (hemoglobin unbound to oxygen).
Last year we started up this route (The Fun Ramp!) late in the day and decided to bail (from the only fixed anchors on route I might add) since we didn't have headlamps and didn't feel like making things too wild. I mean hey, we try not to have anything epic happen on a climb that is less than epic. Korey and I went for round two and made it our first route of the day so we'd have sunlight to spare. We certainly didn't ever have to work as hard as Max Perutz did, but sometimes it is hard to walk away from a route.
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| Taking us up to the main feature of the route on round two. |
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| Korey about to walk our own sandy version of Half Dome's famous ledge. |
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| The FUN ramp! |
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| The feature is huge actually, we thought it would be a thin flake. |
