Outside has a best gear of the year feature, and I really love their sport climbing selections. The only problem is that all their links go to the product home pages and it’s really hard to locate the items on the site. For example, I can’t find the Nicros hangboard anywhere on the Nicros site. And it took me WAY longer than necessary to find the Edelrid Eddy Belay Device on the Liberty Mountain Climbing site. My biggest complaint, though, is that the Verve Hondo knickers are only made for men. I really need a good pair of climbing pants or capri pants that won’t get shredded on the rocks.

Check out the full list of best gear at Outside.

Our weekend plans got slightly derailed on Saturday when the landlord showed up to look at a couple of leaks, so we decided to use Saturday to do some housework, and then spend Sunday climbing, hiking or whatever.

One of our big issues with sticking to a schedule is that we pretty much can’t unless we have made plans with other friends. Left to our own devices, the day usually unfolds as such: I wake up early and get showered, tell Partner-in-Climb what time it is, he says to wake him in 15 minutes, then I get on the computer. 2 hours later, he finally gets out of bed and I am still on the computer. Then of course he wants to check email, online auctions, the news, the weather, etc. This week we were successful at actually getting everything packed and getting on the road by noon. Unfortunately, that was merely the road to the downtown Santa Monica, and not the PCH like we were supposed to be on. However, our “short” detour to Santa Monica did score us some great finds on bike gear, in addition to a new climbing rope, so I will not complain.

And we eventually did make it to Santa Barbara, but that is another story…