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.