Road To Munson Not Good

Since it’s been so dry, with a province-wide fire ban, yesterday I thought I’d try to drive out to the Munson Lake boulders.  Being ultra cautious, based on last year’s experience, I stopped many times to test the road on foot prior to attempting sections by car.  Eventually, I made it, but even the return trip took at least twice as long (and three times the focus) as usual.  Here’s a detailed report:

Seven Mile Lake Road is firm and dry.  Some sections are riddled with brick-sized rocks, others pot holed, some deeply rutted, and there are a few eroded washouts.  Collectively these make for a rough, but uncomplicated drive.

Munson Lake Road is wet at the turn-off, but passable.  The rest of the road is dry, and rough.  Early season ATV traffic stalled in some of the uphill sections.  Their side-slipping tracks, and 3-point turns have left deep scars in the road surface.  Typically muddy sections are dry, but still deform under weight.  The bulk of the remainder is very soft and sandy.  There are fresh moose (and now human and tire) tracks as deep as 10cm in places.  Since the weather changed so quickly, what I think happened was as the frost came out and moisture evaporated, things dried in place, with lots of air space between the granules. Driving isn’t very good, and with the bit of rain forecasted later in the week, everything could turn to deep mud for quite a while.


Overall, I’m glad I made the trip.  A sandwich box, which I’d forgotten out there in December, was especially happy to see me.  (I didn’t have the heart to tell it I didn’t even realize it was missing.)

It was really nice to finally get some harder climbing in and tenderize the finger tips a bit while in the process of putting up 4 of the 10 or so new problems I ran out of time for in the fall.

Spongiform one of the new problems goes up the right, and a traverse (once clean) looks possible as well.

Oh, and my training outcomes... Generally, it feels like I’m climbing rather sloppily, which I’ll attribute to early season rust.  This should get polished off with a few more days on the erratics.  On a positive note, for all but the most balancy and technical problems I attempted, strength and stability gains more than made up for my (temporary) lack of grace.  The strength increases were very noticeable, along with how quickly and thoroughly I would recover between attempts.  With a bit of luck, I’ll soon be able to get on some of the harder projects and really put the training programme to the test.