After living in Southern California for over 3 years, my friend from college, Todd "Gunner" Gontarek flew out for a visit. He was only here for 4 days so we really had to pack it in.

I picked him up from the airport early on Friday afternoon. From there we went to my house to drop off his stuff and we hit the road. First stop was Wahoo's for some fish tacos. I think they lived up to the hype. Next we went down to Fashion Island to buy some cigars. We took our cigars down to the beach on Balboa and walked down to The Wedge to see some big waves. We left the beach and grabbed a few Guinnesses at Muldoon's in Newport. To finish off the night we swung by the Block at Orange. We played guitar at Mars for a little while. We ate at Left at Albuquerque and picked up some Krispy Kreme donuts on the way home where we drank some more Guinness.

The next morning we hopped in the car about 9:00 and headed to Josh. We stopped at Carl's Jr along the way to pick up some burgers.

Here is a picture of Gunner at the gate to Josh.

We headed to the Ryan campground first to do 2 of my favorite climbs in the park on the Headstone. They aren't terribly diffucult, I just like them and I don't know how to explain it to people. The first we did was Southwest Corner, a 5.6. It is a great climb because you really feel exposed. Next we did Cryptic, a 5.8 on the other end of the Headstone. Here are some pictures of Todd topping out on Cryptic.

We chatted with the people in the background of the first picture. There were 3 guys from Canada that had flown out to just climb at Josh. They seemed to be having fun. We also met Jake from Nomads and Ed. Hopefully we will be climbing with them in the future.

At the top, we recorded a special message for Shane who missed out. Click Here to see it.

We left Ryan and headed to Echo where we TRed R.M.L. This is a great 5.9. It is a good place to learn how to use your feet and forget about your hands. Here is a little video clip of us doing something stupid. We walked to the top of the Echo Cove rocks and basically jumped down to the top of R.M.L. In my mind, this was safer then leading it. Several people take a side walk up but it didn't look good to us that day.

The beginning of the climb took it out of me. When we got back to the car, I drank the last of our water (bad situation in the middle of the desert).

I was feeling pretty bad, but we pressed on. We headed to Gunsmoke which was just around the corner. I rested in the shade and regained myself. Todd gave Gunsmoke a whirl and then traversed the rock that makes up the Gunsmoke area. Now I felt pretty good and Todd was feeling borderline. We really only had one more thing on our hitlist, The Chasm. We figured we could handle this without to much of problem. At this point we had been out of water, or any other liquid for that matter, for some time. Atleast the sun was going down and it was cooling off. I had been looking for The Chasm for years. I overheard someone talking about it once and just knew it was in Real Hidden Valley. Jake knew all about it and pointed us in the right direction. For those of you wondering, it is near Saturday Night Live. If you look in the Vogel guide, the entrance is pointed out in the picture. Look for the picture of In The Pit on Gateway Rock. It is documented as "Secret Entrance To Crevice". The Chasm was awesome. Here is a picture of Todd.

We didn't get a ton of climbing pics, but we had a great time. We scrambled down the rocks to the car and got back to the main gate were we put our 25 cents in the wall and filled up on water. We drank about 3/4 of a gallon in 2 minutes. We grabbed some In-N-Out on the way back. We spent the rest of the night in the hot tub drinking Guinness (of course).

We finished Todd's visit with a total tourist stop, Universal Studio's. We went on some rides and got some pictures. T2-3D was really cool.

At that point Todd was dead tired.

So we turned in.