Setting up my rappel after leading Weissner Slab
NOTES: Pretty rainy and chilly and windy and shitty. Jesse and I DID NOT do our reasearch on this crag at all and we got our bells rung by really scary leads and slippery rock. Lesson. Fucking. Learned.
CLIMBING SETUP: LEADING. We actually brought my rack for a change, but fuck if we weren’t unprepared for how tiny cams we needed and how many nuts we should have had. Carrying our 2s and 3s up the route was silly.
CLIMBING SETUP: TOP ROPE. Super long extensions necessary at this place. Even my static 120 may not be enough for some routes. Be prepared to really really extend.
CLOTHING: Stretch Jeans. Red all weathert with my running zip-up over. Kept the zip-up on the whole time except for climbing TC Pro shoes. Brought the wrong right foot shoe. Idiot.
QUICK CLIMB SUMMARY:
Weissner Slab - Trad - 5.3 - Easy climbing. Really hard protection.
Right Edge - 5.7 - Again, climbing super easy, but leading would be impossible R Rated.
Up the middle. - Not a real Route - Probably like a 5.4.
Vector - 5.8 - Fun climbing up to a crack that requried jamming. I can’t jam, so I bounced.
Weissner Slab - 5.3 - Lead
We intended to do Weissner Slab into Knight’s Move 5.4. The plan was for Jesse to lead the slab and I’d lead the 2nd pitch to the top. WRONG. WRONG! Jesse made it half way up the slab and had a choice. Go left where it looks a little harder but better protected, or go right where it looked easy but unprotected. I think I called out that the guidebook said to go right so he did. Ultimately he bailed from no protection whatsoever. His highest piece was a nut. So rather than lower off of that he downclimbed the whole thing.
Like a moron I said “let me give it a try.” I went up to the nut then ventured right like I told him only to find the same thing. ZERO protection. I seriously contemplated just going for it, the climbing looked easy enough. But it was a serious serious runout and the last piece was that nut. So I downclimbed back to the nut. I started to go up the left and saw one bomber nut placement about 8 feet higher up. This turned out to be the last piece and I ran it out about 12 feet or so to the top. Not recommended. It kind of scared the shit out of us so we both agreed not more trad leading today.
Right Edge - 5.7 TopRope
We already had the rope setup from our rappel off the slab so we just gave it a few burns on a different section of the slab. First up was the right edge. A really fun edge climb with zero protection. Glad we didn’t even attempt to lead this. Fun climbing and a really really slabby blank face at the top. Fun.
Up the middle - Not rated.
Not really a route but just something I wanted to try. Probably the easiest thing of the day but it got me back to that right-side area from the slab lead. I wanted to climb it on top rope to see how scary the moves would have been on lead. They were all super easy and I probably would have been fine, but still glad I didn’t lead it.
Vector =-5.8
Apparently one of the oldest 5.8s in the country (possibly the first). Really fun climbing up to a crack system that defintiely required some jamming skills (which I do not have). Pretty fun climb, but we were just no into it on this day.