Thursday, March 13, 2008

3-13-08: Retrofit & others

Another two problems that were discovered, cleaned and climbed in short order are located on an unnamed boulder about 100 meters up from the Bridalveil Falls parking lot. Their discovery begs the question, "how many climbs have been found while searching for a good place to pee?" The first problem to go down sit starts in the obvious dihedral and climbs right with much awkwardness onto positive holds. Not to sound like sour grapes (since I was never able to escape out of the damn dihedral), but folks with a good arm span have a SERIOUS advantage here. In all fairness, tall folks in our group still used a tiny and rather heinously sharp crimp to gain the better holds out right, so it isn't all sunshine and roses being 5'10" and up on this problem. Paul named this line "Escape from Alcatraz" and Scott suggested a grade of v4, which besides hurting my ego, seems a bit sandbagged. Here's a video of Scott making it look at least v5.




The arete to the left is the problem that actually drew us to the boulder in the first place. The line is aesthetic and there are some obvious start holds. The one drawback is the tree directly to the left of the start, but by careful body placement, it doesn't get in the way too much nor pose a hazard in the fall. Here's a video of Paul on the attempt before his send. The move that he falls on appears to be the crux. The grade for "Retrofit" is in the ballpark of v7.



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