"If you fall," Todd warned me, "you're either going to have to prussic up or get lowered down to the bottom and do it again." Great.

"Maybe you should explain the move to me then," I said. After a little hemming and hawing he did, which helped only slightly. I now knew what the move was but it still didn't seem doable. (It's very doubtful I would ever have figured it out for myself.) I got into the starting position, just needed to bring my left foot up and go. But if I brought my left foot up I was most certainly going to fall off straight away. I dallied long enough that I wore myself out and had to climb back down to a better stance. A little deliberation decided me that if I fell off straight away I might still have a chance of getting back onto the rock without any severe consequences, so I went back up and took another shot at it, this time moving quickly to conserve my strength. The left foot was up, the position could be held. Shuffle, shuffle, move left foot, much better position. Shuffle, shuffle, good holds now, just pull around the corner and phew! I was there. No gold stars for figuring out the move, but at least I made it.

The second pitch of Inverted Layback (5.8) was my lead. It seemed overrated at 5.8 and I pulled through it quickly, arriving at the top to share a belay with someone who had come up Layback. We chatted about whether or not Lowe Balls hold falls while our respective seconds ended up in a logjam beneath us. Todd came through first and we walked off, declining the other pair's offer to share their rappel.

Now it was my turn to lead something. Todd suggested Broken Sling, a 5.8 in the area.  "That's one of the ones I told Steven I'd do with him," I said. Then I thought about it some more. "No, wait," I said, "that was Birdland. I can do Broken Sling." The crux is straight off the ground before you get in any gear, my least favorite sort of crux. I placed gear at the first possible opportunity - less than stellar gear from a less than stellar stance - and then moved up one more move to a much better stance with much better gear. This is what being scared does to me,  makes me place extra gear after the hard moves.

Todd, as usual, wanted me to do the two pitch route in one pitch if possible. I gave no guarantees. Rope drag is my nemesis and it was a wandering route. But when I got to the belay I didn't like it so I just clipped into the fixed anchor and kept moving. You downclimb from the anchor and then move up and right. And right and right and right. No gear. Ultimately I was 20 feet out from the anchor in the corner. It was the farthest I'd ever been involuntarily run out and the first time I was keenly conscious of the consequences of a fall this far off the ground.

"This would be an ugly place to fall," I thought and my left foot immediately slipped for no good reason at all. I hung on. One more move and there's gear. But after 10 minutes of tinkering I still couldn't get gear into the thin, shallow, flaring crack I was looking at. I even went so far as to try a Lowe ball. No good. One more move and there's gear, I thought again. I tested the holds for the next move - they ware fine. I could do this move. I looked down at Todd to explain the situation. There were two or three people standing with him and all eyes were riveted on me. I was certain I must have blown this in some way. I was either farther right than I should be or I'd missed gear. The book only called this PG and I'd been on multiple PG routes without even noticing. This route felt a little R.

The only sensible choice was to make the move, so I did. Gear went in. Everyone felt better. The spectators wandered away and I moved back left to the notch that was the last challenge on the route. I placed gear there and knew instantly that rope drag was going to be the death of me so I backcleaned the previous piece (exposing Todd to the same horrible pendulum I had faced) and finished the lead without any more dramatics. As I belayed Todd from the top I remembered what it was that Steven had said about Broken Sling. He'd said that it would be a good end-of-season goal for me. Oh, well. Season over, time to move onto the next season. I felt good about the lead although it still wasn't as hard as Double Crack. I guess I'll be comparing every lead to Double Crack until I do something harder.We made the walk-off again and Todd chose Crass (5.10) for his next lead. Steven and I had top-roped this route once after I'd led the first pitch of Le Plie and I hadn't been able to pull the opening roof even after repeated tries. I'd gotten a finger caught between the rope and the rock on one of my falls and removed a chunk of skin from it and had finally given up when the blood started soaking through the tape we put on it. Todd hung at this move for a bit. It's a strange move and one has to reconcile oneself to the fact that there really aren't any better holds up there. Once reconciled, Todd pulled through quickly and finished the route in style.

I was interested to see how I'd do on it. I've been working very particularly on my strength as it relates to roof moves because they're my biggest weakness. I felt stronger as I moved up to the crux but I still couldn't hang off the critical, not-at-all-positive hold in order to swing my feet around. Ultimately I was able to do the move with tension on the rope from Todd. It was helpful because I at least felt how the move should go. Todd decided to take a second run up and after a little encouragement I agreed to do the same. This time I managed the move on the second try without any tension. It turned out that I really could hang off that hold if I just believed that I could and I walked away from Crass feeling very upbeat but completely thrashed.

I guess Todd was feeling strong because he decided to lead Criss Cross Direct (5.10) next. He normally doesn't approach two unknown 5.10 routes in one day. Steven and I had also recently done this route (he led it), with me falling repeatedly on the opening moves and both of us falling at the crux. Criss Cross has a very strange crux. The easy way isn't obvious and the obvious way isn't easy. Once the easy way is discovered the crux becomes the opening moves and the whole route probably isn't 5.10 anymore. I refused to give Todd the beta on the crux but I warned him to clip the fixed pin low figuring that, so long as he did that, he wouldn't hurt himself. Todd pulled through the opening moves cleanly, clipped the pin low from the pumpy position as I'd asked, and then instantly did the crux the easy way so that he was standing above it in less than a minute.

He placed a piece as I talked to the party that had just come down from the route - they'd done the  route all the way to the top and I was curious as to whether there was anything up there for me to lead (turned out there was a 5.8 R pitch and a 5.9 PG pitch, so Todd and I decided not to bother). I looked up at Todd to see him placing a second piece from the same stance, curious because the next move isn't really hard. I started to tell him that he was through the crux already but then I remembered placing extra gear after the hard parts on Broken Sling and left him to it; I wasn't  going to tease him about his comfort level.

My eyes were drawn to the leader on my left - way off the ground with no gear in. "That route looks  hard," I thought to myself, "I wonder what it is." Todd continued up smoothly, still placing more gear than I've come to expect out of him on comfortable ground. The leader to our left was moving right. I could now see both him and Todd at the same time. "Wow! He's pretty run out," I thought  and then, like the faces becoming the vase, it clicked into focus. The leader to my left was on Broken Sling, the route I'd just led myself. I had a good laugh about it and was interested to see that this guy was just as far out from his gear as I'd been - guess I wasn't doing it wrong after all.

"How are you doing?" I asked Todd finally. He was very close to the anchors and not making any whimpering sounds but he was still placing so much gear that I was a little worried about him.

"It's pretty easy so far," he said. "How much further up is the crux?"

I laughed and told him that he'd blown through the crux a long time ago and he finished the lead quickly, lowering off from the anchor. I had to explain to him where the crux was and about the hard way vs. the easy way because it was all news to him. I figured I could probably do the route cleanly - once you have it wired it's maybe 5.9 - and I did. Todd thought I should lead it next but I thought that would just be a gimmick. I wasn't ready to lead 10s, even if I could do this one, so why bother?

The day was continuing to grow more beautiful. I was by now climbing in just a tank top (and pants for those of you with dirty minds) and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. We ran into some people who had heard a recent forecast - rain starting at 5:00 with rain and possible snow for Sunday (snow? yeah, right, it's April). We decided to call it a day and start the drive up to the Adirondacks. We wanted to get there in time to set up camp before the rain started. We left about 3:30, hoping we weren't making a huge mistake by counting on bad weather that wasn't coming.

We drove up to the Lake George area in continued good weather only to find that all the campgrounds were still closed for the season. The sun was starting to set and the sky was clouding over so we picked up some supplies (read: beer) at a small grocery store and found a spot on state land to set up camp, finishing as both darkness and rain fell.

A long night ensued. It got colder by the hour and we could hear the rain falling non-stop on the tent. Todd went out at some point during the night and came back to announce that we were now getting freezing rain. I got out the fleece bag liner I'd gotten for Christmas and Todd finally got into his sleeping bag instead of just lying on top of it and we went back to sleep. We woke up later to see some light coming through the tent and heard that the rain had tapered off to a drizzle. We lay there, half dozing, half talking, when suddenly there was a strange "whump" on the side of the tent. We were instantly alert. Who was out there and why were they touching our tent? I was just giving Todd a typical female "well, aren't you going to go out there and check on it?" look when he noticed that one bit of the tent was lighter than the rest. He pushed on the tent wall and we heard a clump of snow fall to the ground. We cleared all the snow off the tent. It was now much lighter inside and the sound of rain (um, snow) hitting the tent was louder. We went back to sleep.

We woke up again and repeated the procedure, finally deciding that it was time to get ourselves out of there. Luckily Todd's tent has a nice sized vestibule into which we had brought all of our belongings, so we packed everything up from inside the tent. I opened the outer door and was amazed to find more than 6 inches of snow outside. It looked like January, not April, and felt like it too. I dashed down to the car carrying my bag and left Todd to strike the tent while I cleaned snow off the car manually (Todd is one of those organized types who removes the snow-cleaning utensils from his car at the end of the season). I had just removed the last of it when Todd came dashing down the hillside with the rest of our stuff.

All thoughts of hiking out to Roger's Rock were gone. We had brought rain gear, but not snow gear. As it was, the 20 curvy, hilly miles to the highway were slow and frightening. Amazingly there was snow on the ground all the way back to New Paltz and I drove much of the way into Connecticut with fresh snow falling.

A strange weekend indeed. 70 degrees and climbing in shirt sleeves Saturday; 18 inches of snow in some parts of the northeast (most of it on our tent) on Sunday. But all around fun and I wouldn't have missed any of it.