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| Calico Hills, Tiger Stripe Wall |
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| Colin on the First Pullout Approach |
The first few days were a bit of a familiarisation exercise. The first and third days we went into the Calico Hills as it's mostly single pitch (and half of it is bolted for sport climbing). It's the first bit of rock you hit when you drive round the 13 mile loop road, and faces across to the canyons proper. The rock on the Calico Hills is in three diagonal bands - one that's pink and swirly, one that's deep red (the Chinle sandstone), and one that's beige (the Aztec sandstone). The rock here and in the caynon is covered by what they refer to as varnish - a hard, flat, cracked, black coating that provides you with amazing jugs and gear as the sandstone around it erodes leaving plentius jugs. Sometimes the edge of the varnish is very thin and it feels like it's going to snap, but generally it doesn't (although you sometimes have to be careful). Underneath, or where the varnish is lacking, the sandstone is a little softer but still has good friction, and is incredibly featured. You get bands with chicken heads, bands with deep purple dots, bands with red and beige stripes, etc.etc. Even on areas that look purely beige from a distance, there's still likey to be small varnished holds, and rippled sandstone slabs.
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| Mount Wilson |
On the second day we went for an epic popular link up - Johnny Vegas (4 pitches of 5.6) followed by Solar Slab (9? pitches of 5.7). Despite an early start there was still one party before us which was a little frustrating - they were quick on the climbing, but still gearing up when we arrived. Johnny Vegas was brilliant, some fantastic varnish features, nice climbing, and never hard. My fourth favourite route of the trip. Solar Slab is loooong! The first pitch was 185 feet, with the first 30m or so being unrotected 5.4 slab. It was quite straightfoward but required a lot of concentration, so when the gear arrived and there was a crux move, I was quite thrown and it took me a while to figure out the move. Second pitch was 165ft of wide bridging up a flake chimney, then I had the third. At least a bit of it, until I reached a stopper move and couldn't see gear above. We didn't have time to finish by then anyway, so retreted with multiple raps (abseils, but when in Rome...). I'm not sure if it was just due to not being used to the rock, or because it was a slab, but this route seemed a bit of a sandbag to me whereas everything else we did (except one route in Joshua Tree) was very amenable. It made me quite wary of the grades, something that made me wary for the rest of the trip and I kept panicking we wouldn't get off the routes by dark! We kept planning to come back for a rematch - Solar Slab Gully (parallel to Johnny Vegas but easier), Going Nuts 5.6 (which would have taken up to the base of my failed pitch), then the rest of Solar Slab, but it was never as high on our priority list as the rest of the amazing sounding routes!
we had more luck on the rest of the multi pitch, here's a summary of each:
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| French climber on Belulah's Book |
Cat In The Hat, 5 pitches of 5.6 up a tower called the Mescalito in the middle of a canyon entrance. This route had a great 3rd (mine) and 5th (Colin's) pitch up lovely varnished cracks. The top of the 5th pitch is scary as it changed from varnished jugs to smearing slab above gear - glad Colin got that one! The route also has a great big ledge on top of the 5th pitch (not the top of the Mescalito, but it's where most people finish) where we ate our lunch before going back down. The route's also greedy, it ate my no. 8 nut - jammed solid, every whack with a nut key just seemed to reshape the soft metal into a fatter shape which made it even more unlikely to come out.
Group Therapy. 7 pitches of 5.7. My third favourite as it had a couple of offwidth pitches (although tye mostly involve placing gear in the offwidths and climbing the face - still fun though). This was even more enjoyable by the fact that you actually top out and walk off, rather than rapping down. Quite a lot of the multi pitch routes are only climbed for a certain number of pitches, as they become friable or epic further up (with complicated summits and descents), so rap bolts are necessary to get back down. Group Therapy was trad the whole way, not a bolt in sight (Tunnel Vision was similar, sharing a walk off and having just one bolted belay).
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| Colin seconding first pitch of Johnny Vegas |
Birdland, 5 pitches of 5.7, looking towards the Mescalito. I really liked this (second favourite) was it was a bit different to the other routes we'd done, not just varnished face climbing. For example, my second pitch was varnish, but without edges to no judges - it required manteling and balancing and some strange three dimensional climbing. The top pitch (Colin's) gave us another photo tick (the (brilliant) guidebook has a good selection of photos of routes at amenable grades) and was a thin crack with just enough varnished holds. We met a nice friendly group of 6 Americans who were following us up this. I had a bright idea we could swing raps back down so save time as somebody could be setting up the next rap while somebody's pulling through the last one, but there was an initial delay of about an hour before the plan could be put into action! The belay ledges get smaller and smaller the more pitches you go, and the top one's not big enough to share, so everyone that went up the last pitch had to come back to the small ledge at the start of it, and unfortunately the last person down was the one that had the rope to set up the next rap! I actually made it to the ledge below them as I was the first to rap - we all thought the ropes (60m half ropes) would be long enough to rap two pitches on one - they weren't, I came to a stop 4m above the desired ledge! Luckily there were enough people there that there was a rope next to me in situ, so I didn't have to prusik back up with one prusik and a sling, phew. The rest of the raps went without too much excitement, although the two remaining Americans (we only shared with 4 of them) got their rope stuck (quite common due to all the features - we were lucky for the trip and only got one minor snag) and were still trying to free it when we walk out in the dusk.
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| Seasonal room in the Bellagio casino |
Dark Shadows, 3 pitches of 5.8 up the back of the Mescalito (actually 4 pitches, or more if you continue, but we didn't bother with those). This was a route Colin really wanted to do but I wasn't at all psyched by it. It was in an amazing location though since it rises out of the only wash (river bed) to have any water in it. You look down onto ponderosa pines, and decidious trees of bright green and yellow, starkly contrasting with the black and white rock. The first pitch is a run out slab, which I got scared on a bit too much, so downclimbed and gave ALL the leading over to Colin ;) We just did the first three pitches.
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| Crux on first pitch of Solar Slab |
Tunnel Vision. 6 pitches of 5.7+. My favourite route, and our last one, and my turn for the two crux pitches. The first of these was a short but bold hand traverse and a serious rope drag inducing short chimney where the rope just got wedged between chockstones and the side walls, despite me climbing down to free it once. The second crux pitch was an amazing crack, which it is possible to bridge across - or get stuck right in as I did! For a long portion the only gear if you do it my way is a walked up no. 6 (and no. 4.5 for a bit) camalot, which is kind of nice as you always have gear always above you - as long as you don't look down to see how long the run out would be if that one piece blows! The 5th pitch was the fun one - the tunnel. A huge parallel sided squeeze chimney through the cliff behind an enourmous (30m wide?) flake, followed by twin jamming cracks (one in a corner, one flared one up the face), followed by some romping up huge juggy pockets.
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| The Mescalito and Magic Mountain |
Each of these long days required a 5am start so that we could hit the loop road when it opened at 6am, so that we wouldn't have to queue for the route and could get down before dark. We overslept a couple of times, somehow happening to wake just in time to get to the route just before any other parties and get it done and get back to the car before getting ticketed as we kept forgetting to apply for a late exit pass (which enables you to stay in the car parks later than 5pm).
The pitches (and routes) are so long they require a different mindset. It's no good identifying the crux or the finish and just trying to get that over with, you kind of have to see it as a bit of a voyage. As an example, I led a connecting pitch on Birdland (well, I call it a connecting pitch as it's just face climbing without any defined single feature where you have to route find your way to a base of a crack) which was 120 feet long. The end of it looked miles away, so I just had to focus on the immediate couple of moves... you have to look ahead plenty as it's in the back of your mind that if you go the wrong way it might be very hard to escape, but there's no way of telling if you're getting it totally right so you just have to trust and keep going. I was just getting into the flow when Colin asked if I could see the anchor so I looked up and there it was, just a couple of metres in front of me, had no idea I was so close!
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| Colin seconding third pitch of Cat In The Hat |
We interspersed these long days with shorter, single pitch days (I soon realised Colin just doesn't *do* rest days!). Apart from the two days in the Calico Hills we also did one route in the Calico basin (round the back of the hills), one day on White Peak (or perhaps Windy Peak, I get them confused) where we didn't do Ragged Edges as intended as I had a finger tweak that I was trying not to aggravate, but did a couple of easier crack routes instead. Plus one day at a crag called the Rad Cliff in the main canyon which we'd gone to so we could 'rap from the dementor tree' (all the routes there are Harry Potter themed) was a bit of a disaster - the two star 5.7 (Chamber of Secrets) appeared to have fallen down, the 1 star 5.7 seemed impossible to get to the base of (it was hard enough just to get to the crag), so we settled for the no star 5.7 (The Basilisk Fang) which looked quite fun. Turned out to be very friable, two (varnished) footholds snapped on me, and another solid looking horizontal one cracked in two when I stood on it. I got quite freaked out by 1/3 way up when I couldn't find any more solid looking holds or gear, so decided to downclimb to the only decent gear since the start (a good nut and huge sling round a protrustion a few metres below) and retreat off those - losing only 2 maillons, a frayed no. 8 nut (no number 8 nuts left on the rack now!) and some cord.
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| Shoe Tree on route to Joshua Tree |
We also went to Joshua tree for a day. Top tip - if you go for a day, make sure you get directions for the quickest route. If you follow a sat nav, then with have a brief stop for breakfast (and to have emergency naps on the way home!) it takes you 5 hours each way, eek! We still have time for 4 great routes though, including one particularly good 5.8 jamming route which I sent Colin up as I wasn't feeling up to it but didn't want to miss out ;)
I was the sole driver on the trip to save $10 a day adding another one, which was only a problem on the Joshua Tree day. I only tried to kill us once, turning the wrong way into 4 lanes of (thankfully distant) oncoming traffic, luckily the roads out there are pretty wide so I had room to do a swift u-turn!
We met some very friendly Canadians at the Ragged Edges area who we kept bumping into. We saw them before starting up Birdland and the day went so well we decided they were a good omen! Saw them the next day before Dark Shadows although I didn't enjoy that route, although they'd been on the way back to the car as Tim wasn't well, so maybe we were just sharing their pain!
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| Joshua Tree |
So we didn't do Epinephrine (16 pitches of 5.9) that we'd wanted to be good enough to do (although we did have a look at it on the Rad Cliff day), and in fact I didn't lead anything over 5.7+, but we got a fair amount of really cool stuff done! I think our final tally was 34 routes and 49 pitches. We saw a lot of different places - for the first week and a bit we didn't repeat any canyons (there's about 10 canyons down the main bit of red rocks, they go west to east and the cliffs goes north to south). We did 3 multi pitches in the Pine Creek area and two in the Windy Peak (or was it White Peak?), but apart from that everywhere we went was new to us.
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| Black Velvet Canyon |
Of course I have plenty of excuses for not climbing harder ;) On top of struggling to keep up with never-endinginly-psyched-and-energetic-Colin, my tendons were feeling tweaky and the cold I was just starting to get over when I flew over came back with avengeance due to the dry and sandy Las Vegas air. My sinuses were blocked up and I was on the verge of going to a doctor's when it finally started to improve. The other disadvantage of the air was that I had to take my contact lenses out every night as I felt like my eye had been sandblasted if I tried to sleep in them like I'm allowed to. But it's a small price to pay for 15-25 degree temperatures (warmer than expected, the climate stats online say 5-15 for that time of year), plenty of sunshine, and only the briefest (three) patches of rain (one of which we managed to avoid by escaping to Joshua tree, another by going to an airshow, and the first was the day we flew in).
It wasn't all climbing, we experienced a bit of Vegas too (ventured outside the motel every third day perhaps, the rest of the time we just crashed with a good book unable to do much else). We went to two all you can eat buffets at the Paris casino, one breakfast ($15) and one dinner ($25), and looked round several of the big casinos. Some have particular attractions, like the world's largest TV screen (the Fremont Experience), a water slide through a tank of sharks (Golden Nugget), fountains set to music (the Bellagio), a highly decorated seasonal room (Bellagio again), a lion enclosure (MGM Grand, although the lions were out in their 12 acres of roaming land when we went there) etc. We succumbed and had a go on the slots on the last day (hard to avoid, every where has slot machines, even the airport and pharmacies!) in the Luxor (the big pyramid). I bet a grand total of 2 dollars and lost it all. I have a friend over in Vegas who we visited too, once to play pool and play on the Wii (I lost miserably), and once for a board game evening (I won, woo!), and went to the airshow with.
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| Barrel Cactus |
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| Colin on pitch 3 of Dark Shadows |
The food was a big highlight - there's so much exciting stuff to eat out there! Some of you will have seen my new facebook profile pic where I'm tucking into a ginormous ice cream. Then there's the foot and half foot long subs as standard lunch fare, turtle brownies (chocolate brownies topped with caramel and pecan nuts, indulgent), jalopeno bagels, lots of cookies, any numer of chocolate bars with peanut butter in, breakfast biscuits (like savoury scones), pink lemonade etc etc. Oh, and Colin's favourite - ginseng flavoured iced tea. We went to the cheese cake factory two days before coming home, and promptly went back the next night as it was so good - we thought it would be a little tacky but it's quite smart and the menu is extensive and immensely tasty. I've never seen so many bizarre flavours of cheesecake either! I've brought three boxes of jello back to eat raw - it's not like our rubbery cubes (which are great climbing snacks), but it's a paper back of sherbert type stuff, lovely to quaff in big mouthfulls!
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