I stepped out of the truck into the soft dirt and gravel of the frontage road. We parked perpendicular, and we were the first to put a car in P.
“There’s a lot more people here than I remember,” I said.
“Yeah, it get pretty packed these days,” said Joe.
“It used just to get packed on holidays.”
“Now, it’s packed just about every weekend.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“For the local coffee shops, yes.”
“For finding some peace, not so much.”
“Yeah, the Happy Boulders are not a place you’re gonna find yourself.”

As the sun lit up the eastern skyline in a cool blue, we walked up to the most popular boulder in the bunch, the Happy Boulder itself, and dropped our supplies. Not standard equipment for a day of bouldering, for sure, but we weren’t there to wrestle pebbles. Our pile of gear consisted of a short length of rope, seven bolt hangers, seven quickdraws, and a wad of nail-less hanging putty, the kind of stuff you might use to hang a Nevermind poster on a bare dorm room wall.

We giggled and then got down to business. I stuck some of the putty onto the back of one of the hangers and attached it to the boulder at head height. It stayed. I reached down, grabbed a quick draw, and clipped the carabiners to the bolt hanger. It too remained put.

Joe put on the next hanger just two feet higher than the first, and in minutes we had the entire fifteen feet of the Hulk (V6) turned into an over-bolted sport climb. Joe hung the rope and completed the ruse. We loaded our packs and scrambled up into the talus of the west rim to wait. Our wait wasn’t long.

A lone boulderer approached from the south sporting nothing but a pair of shoes and a sun-bleached chalk bag. Older and old school, the grizzled crag master looked at the apparent shit show that was the Hulk and said, “What the fuck.”

A great pressure built in my belly as the giggles wanted out. Tears rolled around my pinched eyes and more than a few drips of piss wet my Hanes. The boulderer stormed off further up the canyon muttering under his breath.

“We are gonna get our asses beat,” I said.