Did you know that dogs and bees can smell fear?

Jonathan Lipnicki said it. Of course, he also said, "Mom's coming, I have to go to bed." Bees, though. Your firearms are useless against them.

It'll come around, just keep reading, rube.

Kate and I headed up to the Gunks for a day of climbing at one of the most famous locales in North America. She and I were in the area anyway, at her parents' house in between some relaxation in the Adirondacks, the Jersey shore, and 30 hours in the car between the East Coast and the big CO. We decided to head up to New Paltz and grab the grips on some moderate classics, so I borrowed my buddy's tri-cam collection (specialized climbing protection with an appearance that Kate likened to a spaceship) and headed North on I 87. $30 in entrance fees later (Gad Zooks! Privatized parks pack a penny punch) and she and I were walking along the Carriage Road.
Our guidebook was a meager internet printout consisting of a general description of the area, and 4 routes (out of several hundred). Needless to say, we quickly became lost. The first people we met were oddly familiar, and indeed friends with Nuno via employment at Sport Rock in Alexandria, VA. Whatdya know? That hound gets around.
These two climbers had just come down from Mrs. B's Something-or-other, and had rave reviews. The route clocked in at 5.6, a manageable moderate, so Kate and I racked up our harnesses and headed skyward.
Mrs. B's took a weaving line for 3 short pitches up the wall, and despite being advised to run them together, I decided it was in our best interests to keep the distances between belays short to aide communication, as it had been months since Kate and I did a multi-pitch route together.
The first pitch was a short section of face climbing, and I took full advantage of my borrowed gear when the ladder of horizontal slots appeared and begged for C.A.M.P.'s hardware. From a tree on a ledge, I brought Kate up, and then headed up and right to the prescribed hanging belay. The going was smooth, and I decided to put a halt to the pitch at a very small ledge with an old rusting piton looking out with it's wide eye. With my bum left hanging out over 100 feet of air, with rope coming up and Kate tight on the end, I noticed a buzzing. Not the normal flies which had whined passed my ears and licked the salt from my neck. This was a more sinister, striped sort of evil. I swung on my tether and looked around a corner just in time to see a swarming nest with a few dozen wasp bodies, and quickly rocked back to the left. Back under the pin, I noticed another nest, this time Carpenter Bees just on the other side. Give up, you're surrounded!
Kate arrived seconds later, wondering at my frantic face. Was it happiness at our reunification? Sure, but I had a more pressing need at the moment. Get the hell outta there!
She (unhappily) tied herself to the wall with stingers singing, and told me to get a move on. She made it perfectly clear that the longer she stayed in situ, the deeper in the dog house I'd be(e). Climb quick, Monkey. Before I could get going, I felt the unforgettable ZAP on my elbow, and had a quick vision that my fate, like Macaulay Culkin in My Girl, would end with the stinger. I took off with a throbbing pain in my right arm.
After 15 feet of vertical progress, and one piece of haphazardly placed protection, I heard a voice...my lovely lady: "Ummm, yeah. I hate you."
Deciding to finish the shortest pitch in climbing's long history or risk a year's worth of dish duty, I wove together a few more cams and hung again, pulling rope as fast as I could so Kate could get going. She got up to me panting, having levitated the distance in under a minute, and fortunately avoided envenomation. Our final rope length to the top of the cliff was great climbing, but tainted by our collective shudder anytime a harmless 'skeeter brushed our ears.

We laughed it off at the top of the cliff, rappelled down to our bags, and had a celebratory gulp of limeade. Survivors, we made for another objective; a climb called High Exposure. There was far less animal interaction, and the excitement consisted of climbing from a precarious ledge, out a body length horizontal roof and swinging into the air, ass 1,000 feet above Upstate NY. I'll take that over Jonathan Lipnicki's fear mongering every time.

NOTE: Posted posthumously. Kate never said "I hate you." That was added for dramatic effect. She was indeed quite calm, but given that I misquoted her, I should make a correction.