Red Rocks
Red Rock Canyon is located in Nevada, only a few miles from the Las Vegas strip. Last year I spent my spring break climbing there, and it was a great way to get to know a lot of people in the Dartmouth Mountaineering Club. This year, even though I have graduated, I decided to go on the trip again. It was a little different because may of the participants were freshmen, but I had a great time anyway. Red Rocks is a great place to go climbing, with beautiful sandstone cliffs that provide a variety of options for both trad and sport climbing.
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3/16
A nice day; my first time climbing for quite awhile.
Calico Basin, Cannibal Crag:
- A Man in Every Pot, 5.8+ TR
- Ma and Pa Kettle, 5.7 TR
- Caliban, 5.8+ TR
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3/17
More people had arrived by today; not an intense day of climbing, but fun.
Calico Hills First Pullout, Panty Wall
- The Last Panty, 5.7 TR
- Boxer Rebellion, 5.7 TR
- Sacred Undergarment Squeeze Job, 5.8 TR
- Brief Encounter, 5.8 TR
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At our campground
3/18
Today was not really what I expected or could have reasonably predicted. Last night, around the campfire Mike, a ’12 (sophomore), asked if anyone wanted to go do an easy trad climb the next morning. Because there are few trad leaders on the trip this year, I quickly snapped up the opportunity. That very day Mike and Vish, a ’10, had been out until after dark because they had had multiple problems with gear and ropes getting stuck on a trad climb. In the end they had left their ropes on the climb and it was Mike’s and my mission to retrieve them first, and then do a climb of our own.
We woke at 5 am, typical for a trad day, and were at the loop road on which the climbing crags are situated at 6 am. The road opens at six, and our timing could not have been more perfect; as we approached the gate a man came forward to open it for the day. We were the first on the loop road, and it was dark was we drove ¾ of the way around the 13-mile loop to Juniper Canyon, our destination for the day. Mertens, Julie, and Alice went too, to do a 5.8+ climb, Crimson Chrysalis. We parted ways a short distance along the approach hike, and Mike and I headed up to Geronimo to get the ropes that had been left behind. When we got to the bottom of the climb we found a pair of climbing shoes, too big a size for me and much too small for mike, but we decided to pick them up. The rope recovery mission took longer than we expected. Mike climbed the first pitch, looked at the ropes and moved them a bit to make them easier to pull down, then rapped down and we pulled the ropes, with some difficulty. By this time it was 9:30 a, which sounds pretty early but wasn’t considering we were hoping to do a 7-pitch climb and had to get back to the car by 6 p.m. We decided on Peanut Brittle one of the few climbs in our difficulty range in that canyon, which looked, form the guidebook, to not be too far away.
We started walking, but were thrown off by numerous feint tracks that meandered through shrubs and occasionally petered out. We jumped between these paths before sort of just plowing our way through bushes or up rocky washes. Time was ticking on, and we were definitely running out of time to do Peanut Brittle, but we decided to just keep going and see what time it was when we reached the base of the climb. When the sort-of trail that we had been following dead-ended in a cave, we made the call that we wouldn’t have time for 7 pitches and began reassessing our options. In our guidebook we saw a 2-pitch 5.6 trad climb that looked like it would suit our purposes well, but from where we were (near the back of the canyon) to the approach was a long, steep, slightly scary slab. The walking itself wasn’t very hard, but it was in full sun and our packs were heavy (we had a trad rack and three ropes between us, plus all our personal stuff). Also, some parts were quite exposed such that a trip or slip might realistically end in a long painful slide and then a deadly fall. We made it up this, depositing the spare rope and the shoes we had found along the way for collection on the way back down. Upon reaching the bottom of the short trad route we had identified, we ate lunch and then started preparing to climb.
As I unpacked my stuff, however, I had the sickening realization that I didn’t have my shoes. I remembered that I had been carrying them in my hands in a stuff sack because they wouldn’t fit in my pack, and had probably set them down while doing some scrambling. We thought of trying to use the ones we had found at the base of Geronimo, but they sat several hundred feet below us along the slab. We ate and then, with no other option readily available to us, we went back the way we had come. By this time it was maybe 1pm, obviously too late to try to do a whole, full-length climb, plus I was still missing my shoes. We decided to make our way back to Geronimo and look for my shoes along the way. Of course, we took a pretty stupid way in, so we didn’t exactly retrace our steps. We didn’t find my shoes, and when we got back to Geronimo I went for a brief excursion to look for the, to no avail.
It was a little after 2 and I tried on the shoes we had found at that very spot some hours ago. They fit – not well, but well enough. We decided to do Geronimo, at least as much as we had time for. It’s a four pitch climb, and we did the first two, mostly without incident. Geronimo is a rap-down, not a walk-off, so it was no problem to do half the climb. On the first rap I hurt both hands; my right index finger got a nasty rope burn, and the webbing between my left thumb and forefinger got caught in my belay device requiring a quick, skin-ripping tug to free it. On a day of only two pitches of climbing my hands got more destroyed than they had on the other days, with significantly more climbing. This is not to mention the three large cactus spines that became lodged in my fingertips when I accidentally steadied myself on the wrong plant.
We hiked back to the car, reaching it at about 6:15. The rangers who ticket cards along the loop road hadn’t come by yet, which was good, but the other trad climbing group, Mertens, Julie, and Alice, still weren’t back. Their climb should have been doable in the amount of time that had elapsed, but things can go wrong, such s a getting a rope or piece of gear stuck. I wouldn’t have been worried about them except that we had agreed to text each other from the tops of our respective climbs and I had heard nothing from their group despite sending them four or five messages over the course of the day. In addition, as Mike and I had walked back to the car, a few drops of rain had fallen and the wind had picked up. A storm appeared eminent, or at least potentially so. Mertens had the keys to the car, so we hitch-hiked easily back to the campground.
When we arrived the camp was in a bit of a frenzy. The wind had become even stronger, reminiscent of the sand storm I experienced last year at Red Rocks. People were dashing to and fro, putting loose items into the vans and weighing down the tents with rocks. Sand was everywhere, including our sleeping bags and our dinner, and as it got dark I couldn’t help but keep worrying about the climbers who were still on the mountain. Nancy was very concerned, I think, in her capacity both as trip coordinator and Mertens’s girlfriend. She insisted that we all focus on other things and that they would be alright. Because we had been in the car with them and had intended to communicate with them during the day, I think Mike and I felt more concerned than some others and probably unnecessarily, but between the weather, approaching darkness, and lack of communication I couldn’t help it. Eventually we got word that they were okay and were heading to get dinner in town. I went to bed, relieved that everything was okay but with a knot in my stomach over feeling nervous and continuing to talk about it after Nancy had tried to stifle that topic of conversation.
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Belaying
3/19
Calico Basin, Kraft Mountain, Conundrum Crags, Sunny and Steep
- Family Affair, 5.8 TR
- Family Circus, 5.9 TR
- Wayward Son, 5.9 TR
- Edward Silverhands, 5.10a TR (cheated)
The next morning Mike and I shared the story or our moderately unsuccessful day and heard about the other group, including the trad group we had been worried about. They had run into another party of climbers who didn’t have the requisite ropes to rappel down the route, so they had fall rapped together, greatly extending the whole process. Today I wanted to get in some climbing and relaxing. We went to Calico Basin, a crag off the loop road, to two crags behind Kraft Mountain.
The first, Conundrum Crag, had two 5.9s and a 5.8. We were in a group of seven people, which worked well to climb all three. I sent one of the 5.9s, which I haven’t done that many times. Granted, I was on top rope, but I was still pretty happy with myself. Once we had exhausted Conundrum Crag, we moved on to Sunny and Steep, where another group of Dartmouth folks had been climbing all morning. We watched other climbers work on really hard, impressive climbs (12as and cs), and some of the freshmen (who are really really good and some of them had climbed before coming to Dartmouth) made their way up a 12a as well! I climbed a 10a in the area, which was one of only a handful of 10s I’ve done to date. Overall, I felt it was a productive and pleasant day of climbing. Then, on the way back, we made a wrong turn and ended up walking for an hour and a half down a boulder-filled gully that was definitely not the route we were supposed to take.
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3/20
Haha today was a fun day, but not exactly much in the way of climbing. It was cool to climb with Vegas literally in the background, though, and route-finding instructions such as “start just above the graffiti ‘M’ on the left of the wall”. After spending some time at the crag, we decided to go for ice cream and ended up discovering a really great frozen yogurt place called u-swirl where you get to choose your flavors (and how much you want) and toppings, then pay per ounce (much better than Dartmouth Food Court’s froyo and cheaper).
Urban Crag, Limestone
- 5.7 TR
- 5.7 TR
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Beautiful rock
3/21
Calico Hills Second Pullout, Magic Bus, Gallery
- Electric Koolaid, 5.9+ send (TR)
- Neon Sunset, 5.8 flash
- Technicolor Sunrise, 5.8 send (TR)
- flailed on Gelatin Pooch, 5.10a (TR)
- flailed on Pump First Pay Later, 5.10b (TR)
Today was great, climbing-wise. I hopped in a van this morning with Julie, Nancy, Vish, Maya, and a few others who ended up climbing elsewhere. We headed to Magic Bus, a moderate wall on the second pullout of the loop road. In the parking lot we ran into a few groups of people from the Red Rocks Rendezvous, a festival of sorts for climbers that attracts some of the best climbers in the world and also a bunch of other people who crowd climbs and make independent folks like us a little impatient. The people we encountered were very nice, and not too numerous in the areas we were climbing.
We were the first party to arrive at Magic Bus, and put up a couple of really nice 5.8 routes. I led one of them, and completed what I think was my first 5.8 send on lead. I then top-roped the other 5.8, which was perhaps a little easier. We waited for awhile to get on another nearby route, a 5.9+, and in the meantime I led the same 5.8 again, and successfully sent it again, which was nice; it wasn’t a fluke. Eventually we got on the 5.9, and I sent it on top-rope, which pleased me greatly.
We moved on to the Gallery, a huge wall with numerous climbs that progress conveniently from easier to harder left to right across the wall. My climbing day went precipitously downhill at this point, consisting of flailing on a 10a and a 10b, making little progress on either. I felt pretty good about the day overall, though. After hanging around the Gallery for awhile we returned to the car. So far the day had gone on without a hitch, but upon checking her phone Nancy discovered a message that Tom, a freshmen who had been trad climbing with Mertens and Mike (the ’12 who I climbed with the other day), had torqued his knee pretty badly and was having a hard time walking. Fortunately he was able to walk back down, although with difficulty. We weren’t exactly sure what was happening, but were pretty certain that bringing a bunch of people to the area wouldn’t be particularly helpful, so we stopped by the grocery store to get ice for his knee and some other groceries for the group.
We returned to the camp and enjoyed a delicious dinner made by some of the freshmen, consisting of fish tacos with all the fixin’s (refried beans, avocado, lettuce, yay). Now there’s talk of the wine game, which I’m not really feeling like doing, but I might be convinced.
