Well another week has already disappeared, but we did take a fun and as always adventurous trip to Palisades State Park in South Dakota for a weekend of climbing and mountain biking.  We spent Saturday completing a ride of a trail that we attempted last fall only to wake up at 3am with our tent being flattened against us by 50mph wind and snow.  This time the weather was great and the trail was not bad.  Next in our ND naivety we left a completely empty and perfectly suitable campground behind and drove several hours south to the state park where we planned to climb.  Forgetting completely that outside of ND people like to camp outdoors Memorial Day weekend.  So after driving past several hundred campers in half a dozen camp grounds we found a small patch of unclaimed grass in an unknown South Dakota town where the sites were not really numbered or marked and we felt we could legally squat for the evening.  The next morning we left the partying high school kids behind and returned to the park where we found a freshly open camping space and lots of intriguing and fun cliffs to climb.  Here are a few pictures. 

Cliff Lined Creek Leading To Farm Land

Roo & Max Enjoying a Little Fishing & Hunting

Real Climbers Trails (Straight Up)

Tourist Trails (Plush)

My Favorite: Farming Is Never Far Away In The Dakotas

Ballancing Rock

Many Climbs Started Abive The Water

King & Queen

I ran accross an interesting artical on the Backcountry.com site earlier that shows design, testing, and manufacturing processes of black diamond carabiners.  Very interesting.  The article is at the following link.


http://www.backcountry.com/store/newsletter/a737/Creating-the-Carabiner.html?sssdmh=dm10.108985&cmp_id=EM_CON1034a&mv_pc=r202&ep_rid=2152198