Chris Hirsch and I drove up Saturday afternoon, to avoid driving the 3 and a half our trip twice in the same day. Jim Merli would meet us at the boulders on Sunday. What Chris and I walked into was enough to scare Jim & Nic into going over the top of the dome the weekend before, verses hacking through the woven, twisted entanglement of fall tree tops. Just finding the trail was made difficult by the thorough devastation of 80 percent of the trees in the forest. Either their tops were broken off, large limbs were snapped, some left hanging, or the occasional completely uprooted tree. Work was made hard with crash pads on our backs. So we eventually dropped our pads, cut through a ways, went back and picked them up, hiked to where we could go no further, set them down again and resumed work. What is normally a 25 minute hike, became a 2-something hour tour de force of sawing, hacking and pulling full sized trees off the path.....ALL the way to the boulders.
I drank almost all of my water for the day before making it there.
Chris had aspirations to work Exodus on the backside of the dome, but as is often the case, the ending was soaked. So instead he put his sights to doing Absolution, a tall problem with a few broken holds & big move at the end. Well, big for anyone of a normal size.
I was on top of the boulder, cutting down the remains of a tree that was broken and hanging off the top, when I heard a smack on the rock behind me. Then Chris' head popped up. "Hey! Did you just do it?" I asked, being completely surprised by his hand & face. "Nah" He said topping out.
Nic had put up a new variation of this problem last weekend, starting from the right arete. Chris put that one down quickly too.
"Hey, has anyone done just the arete?" He asked...."No, I don't think so. You should! That would really piss off Nic!" Chris cleaned the line as he climbed it, pulling out a large chunk of rock from a seam halfway up, brushing out pockets & blowing off holds as he went.
After a couple tries he topped it out, naming it Dic Oblowjoba, after someone very special.
After that Chris started looking at possible lines going up the backside of the large boulder leaning onto Absolution, where The Juggernaut exits. He points out two really nice edges to start on. We scope out a couple more holds, brush them up, and then climbed the very fun new line we're calling Puffer Cheeks, after that same special guy.
It was my first FA. Yeah! As far as I can tell...the holds were all dirty, but that's not saying that it may not have already been climbed. We just don't know that it was. So I'm calling FA! FAAAA!
After that I started talking pictures of all of the boulders, to get something visual up on Mountain Project. Coming soon....
I shot all of the main area and then hiked and clear the path to the right area, with the large slab. We were on Back Slapper when we heard leaves crunching. We had heard that before and we disappointed by a squirrel....but this time it was Jim! We were starting to think he wasn't coming! He showed us a new line he put up on a boulder just below his Turnstile project. I finished shooting the area and we headed back to the main.
Jim and I threw our pads down under the Amateur boulder; me working the arete called Sticky Icky, and Jim on his insane sit start to his insane problem Amateur. Jim has only been climbing about a month since his (almost) 2 year hiatus away from climbing, and the bastard is just as close to doing the line as he was before!
I was feeling surprisingly strong as well, considering I spent the morning sawing trees.
I got to the sloping lip of Sticky Icky with only a few tries, only to find the sun staring me straight in the face!
Chris was nice enough to go up on top of the boulder and hold a pad in front of it as I worked it.
I had always been told that the hard part of that problem is the heel hook at the start. This has never been a problem for me, so I naively thought it would be over quick. Not so quick. Even with Chris blocking the sun for me, the top out if really hard! With no good right foot and the rock under angling away quickly, I pushed and humped and rolled off the top several times until my wrists were raw. Top-out shmop-out! Next time I'll nail it for sure.
The rest of the day I shot pictures of Jim on his line, a very satisfying thing in itself.
But after his fingers couldn't take the tiny holds anymore he sat down under Sticky Icky, "I wanna climb something today!"
To my inner delight he flailed a bit. He's always walking up my projects, so it felt good to see him having trouble on one of them. Sorry Jim! Finally he asked for my beta and sent it, but not before hanging out and humping the top out a bit too. I'm glad it's not just me! That top IS hard, Jim said so!
