Got into Keystone about 5PM and decided to head out quick to toprope solo the crag at Swan Mountain Road. Tossed on the backpack at the trailhead and peeled out. Got to the Traverse Wall in 4 minutes (far out) and top of the little cliff at 12 minutes (with a small delay as someone with a lot of cheap beer was camping in the middle of the trail and I did a little scouting to make sure I wasn't crashing someone's hot tent session before I went down the trail. At the top I saw that the bolted anchors were in fact all gone but one. I tested the one remaining and it spun. I found a pulled-out hole from an old anchor right next to it (looked at my beta photos on Mountainproject.com to see what they used to look like).
I didn't see any suitable trustworthy anchoring options on top (that didn't require like 30' of rope to tie into and drape over the edge - for the most part it's loose microwave-size blocks up there). I went down to the bottom to check out the existing stuff and found some interesting future-worthy trad leads, but ran out of time so headed back to the condo by going down to the main campground road (closed for logging).
Wonder if I should call this blog "Thinking about rope solo while hiking" instead?
lol
I wonder why someone pulled out the top anchors?
ReplyDeleteIf they are loose they should be pulled to keep someone from getting dead on them - but I didn't have any tools or I would have finished the job. I posted on Mountain Project that if anyone cares I'd see about putting new ones up. We'll see.
ReplyDelete