Red Rock - The Wild - 8-11-2011

Didn't get this up when I did it - a whole month has gone by. Alas ...

Took the boys up Rock Canyon to "The Wild" to meet Ryan for an evening of climbing. Loading a new harness into his new backpack, there was a glitch and Ryan ended up at the cliff with no harness. Since the boys had put a lot of effort into the hike in, I decided to Lead Solo the 5.6, so I set up a couple cams at the bottom and equalized them.

I started up, and tied off the first draw, partially to keep the anchors pointing upward. I had forgotten to put in a third piece to hold the anchor up, and had to hold them up as I climbed the first few feet, and have Ryan untangle me.

Below: note the Grigri at the junction of my legs. This isn't optimal, and it had some drag, and fed like crap later in the climb, but it's what I had with me in the pack at the time. Not sure if the Eddy would have been better or not. One of these days I'm going to opt for a Soloist or whatever it is now.

 Below I'm having trouble getting the Grigri to feed, so I'm going to go ahead and clip off on the bolt. I'm using a rappel rig that Dawn Glanc taught me in Ouray last winter. I like it pretty good, and have started leaving it rigged for just such an occasion.

As I came down I cleaned, and then set it as a toprope for the boys, and let them climb for a bit. When they were done I reset the cams, added a third anchor point above the locker the rope was tied to so it wouldn't droop while I climbed, then set up a Petzl Microcender and used that without a backup. I had read recently on the Petzl website how they want us to do it now (which is quite nice of them) but haven't gotten around to testing it yet, and didn't want to do anything new this time. My son took the pics above, and didn't take any of my toprope solo, but you've seen it all before.

I'm probably going to do some more routes in the next few weeks, so stay tuned for a test of the new Petzl system.

July 17, Swan Mountain Road Toprope

It's been a very long time since I have done any ropesolo, and I keep trying to get out in Utah to climb, but every time I plan it there's either thunderstorms or like Saturday morning, the crag looked like flies on poop, the climbers were that thick.

I got up early this morning and decided to try to get in a lap at the toprope cliff near the Swan Mountain Road Traverse Wall near Frisco, CO. This was actually one of my first toprope solo adventures a couple years back, when there used to be bolts, but they've either been chopped or in the case of the loose block at the top with bolts, the block is gone. There is a very strong local group of Highball Boulderers, and it's possible they're reclaiming it, though it's like a V-minus-4 and I didn't see any chalk today on any microflakes or microcrimpers to give me any clue they're doing a hidden V1 route on it. On the hike in I surprised a fox, about 50' away on the trail, but my camera was in my backpack, so I didn't capture it for you.

I was up here a few weeks ago with the kids, and discovered that it might be possible to run a very long rope down from two trees, as shown in the pic below.

I made two figure-8-on-bights with a loop between them (thanks Dawn Glanc for showing me that). I wiggled the knots around to equalize it, and guessed about how much stretch there would be once I weighted it for the rappel so it would sit over the edge. I managed to not have two extra lockers (used one on one of the trees), so I used a couple opposed biners with the one locker. Good enough. Anchor rope brown, climbing rope pink. Note knot in climbing rope.

This is post-climb. Note my Microcender. I've grown to like it. At the bottom I make a coil of rope and use a quickdraw to clip it into an overhand-on-a-bight just below the level that rappelling down would put me if I were doing laps. This weights the rope a bit and helps the Microcender feed better. A few feet up I did a sit test and it locked just fine.

And this is my smiling face after the climb. Did it a lot easier this time than last, from what I remember. Must be all those "impossible" 8's and 9's I've been working in Rock Canyon in Utah. Not enough time this morning to do laps, but it might be on the agenda this week. Talus below feet is bottom of route. There's another route about 10' to my left that I haven't done. That could be interesting too.