After Zion, I made my way to one of my favorite climbing destinations anywhere: Red Rocks near Las Vegas. The climbing and scenery is great and the conditions are pretty splitter year round. Thanks to my new buddy Matt Clark I managed to crash and climb here for about two whole weeks before heading back to the bay via Bishop and Tahoe.
My trip to RR started out with a bit of sport climbing with Ale and Melissa. I was psyched to finally get out to the 'Sunny and Steep' crag which has one of the best concentrations of 5.11 to 12- sport climbing I've ever seen. The main wall here is super steep with big moves between killer jugs and finger buckets. After a sweaty warmup the conditions improved and I was very stoked to get a flash on Mr.Choad's Wild Ride (11b). Ale managed a last ditch red point of the namesake Sunny and Steep (12a) just as the sun was going down (I pretty much got spanked on the same climb). Nice work amigo!
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| Ale Crushes Mr. Choad's Wild Ride |
After this, I spent a few days cruising some moderate trad routes with Matt. Armatron, Dark Shadows, Straight Shooter were some of the standout routes. It was great to get a bunch of mileage under my belt and get a feel for placing gear in the soft sandstone.
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| Matt @ Brownstone wall with Nightcrawler above his head |
Matt and his girlfriend left for Portland the following day and at the last minute I found another partner Shameer on the mountainproject.com to do Nightcrawler (10c). I had been eying this beauty at the Brownstone wall when we did Armatron a few days prior and I knew it was a classic Red Rocks climb at the grade. Having just arranged our climb half an hour prior, I swooped Shameer from the Red Rock Casino a bit after 10AM. At this point it was all systems go; we needed to hustle to beat the 5pm sunset. We mashed out the big hike back to the Brownstone wall at a very solid pace and racked up at the bottom of the wall with a solid sweat going. The climb had 3 pitches of great climbing: one physical squeeze chimney followed by two pitches of techy jamming and stemming in the varnished corner. I believe my lead on the fourth pitch was my first red point of a 10c on gear to date, I was psyched! When we were done we rushed out in the dark to grab Cari-lynne from the airport!
Cari-Lynne and I started by doing a couple of sweet and fingery 5.10 sport climbs at the first pullout. I'll admit, they were a bit stiff to warm Cari up to RR climbing… sorry babe! The next couple of days we climbed @ whiskey peak in Velvet Canyon which became my favorite crag for the rest of the trip. Cari and I spent the next couple of days getting on classic 5.9's and 5.10's. It worked out great as I got to do some interesting and challenging climbing right and my wheelhouse grade wise. Meanwhile Cari got exposed to some new and different outdoor techniques (like jamming the cracks!).
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| Makin faces on a ledge |
After Cari left Matt and I did another awesome day of climbing out at whiskey peak. We got on Wholesome Fullback (10a) and then rapped into Our Father (10d). The latter was one of the most classic 5.10 pitches I've ever seen. It starts off with Indian Creek style hand jamming and moves into classic RR thin laybacking, Quite similar to parts of Nightcrawler but definitely a step up in difficulty.
I gave Our Father one very solid go on lead and pushed past the crux nearly to the top of the pitch, when an unexpected foot slip thwarted my red point. I took a nice exciting 10+ foot whip onto a very small (#0 master cam). Unscathed but filled with adrenaline I finished the pitch. This made for a fitting climax and finale to my time in Red Rocks.
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