Watching women climb

Someone, I forget who, once told me that if I wanted to improve my climbing, I should watch women climb. As opposed to the raw strength that a lot of men display in getting up the wall, women are masters of efficiency and grace. I have read of female climbers able to climb in the 12's, but unable to do a single pull-up.

This is one of the most beautiful climbing videos I've seen, both in terms of the climbing and the camera work. It's worth clicking the link and waiting the extra few minutes to watch it in HD.

Thanks to Brian at The Way is in Training for the link.

Dayventure: Climbing at Cosumnes

Our friend and climbing addict Kat is back in town for the holidays, and when she asked us if we'd like to spend the day after Thanksgiving going climbing on REAL rock with her, we jumped at the chance. We didn't read the fine print: Must wake up at 6am.

I don't know if it was all the bad food I ate or what (probably it was), but I had a bad night's sleep. My first nightmare in more years than I can remember. And getting up that early always sucks. But once we were all bundled into the car and hit a Starbucks, things looked better. Coming with us were Kat's friends Bryan and Erica, the narcoleptic. (She's not really narcoleptic. She just falls asleep a lot.)

Cosumnes River Gorge is a REALLY nice spot whose only real fault lies in its distance - about a 2 - 2.5 hour drive from home. But it's nice granite, with an easy 15-minute approach and bolts that are, on the scale of bolt accessibility, somewhere between ridiculously and very easy. A profusion of routes, too. All this led Kat to believe it would be very packed, but it really wasn't too bad. There were a few other folks, but not too many. The skies were clear by the time we got there, but there was a cold breeze blowing up the gorge, so we were often quite chilled.

We had enough gear between us to set up three routes, and we were the first ones there, so we went ahead and picked three. Our first was "Training Pants" (5.8), a nice large crack with some lie-backing that, unfortunately, Rebecca could not sort out the start for (Rebecca had a frustrating day, which I assume she'll detail later).

After that we did the first of the two "big-name" climbs of the area, "Unconquerable" (5.8). A tricky bit of crack leads to a man-sized chunk in the wall, presenting an awkward bit of roof to get around. After that, it's pure lieback to the top.

We traded ropes with a couple guys so we could do the other famous climb, "Dinkum's Crack" (5.9). I don't know how to crack climb, but I'm beginning to suck less at it. This climb had a super-easy beginning, and then narrowed to a tricky stretch of 10' or so with only a finger-width and frequently-shallow crack to work with. Apparently this is a good spot to practice trad leading, as the crack just eats up protection. I was not able to do the middle third gracefully, though the beginning and end went fine.

We sat down for lunch to watch a pair of climbers on the opposite wall of the gorge do the first pitch of what looked like about a three-pitch climb. The leader was using a combination of bolts and protection, and it was fascinating to watch him work. When he got to a comfortable ledge, he clipped himself in, pulled the rope tight, and belayed the follower up, who cleaned the protection as he went. I was bummed they didn't keep going, but we had an excellent vantage point to watch them work.

Finally, I climbed "Chamberlin's Chimney" (5.8), a fun combination of crack and chimney climbing that I think was ultimately my favorite. By now, however, the sun was going down, we were tired, cold and fairly well scraped up, so we trundled back to the car and then back home.

Cosumnes River - Climbing

Daniel made a really good post about this with pictures and all here, so I'll just stick to my own quick notes.

Climbing outside hits all kinds of massive anxiety buttons for me. So going on an outdoor climbing excursion is always kind of a mixed bag. Sometimes I do better at conquering the fear than others. Yesterday was not my best day.

My hips were in very poor shape from the previous day's trail run, and so the clambering and scrambling that always comes with an outdoor climbing excursion (that are already one of my prime anxiety buttons) was harder and more painful than it should have been. Even, on a relative scale, this was pretty easy scrambling.

I was pretty discouraged when I couldn't figure out how to start the 5.5 climb, and I did the 5.8 'unconquerable' but only about an inch at a time - I'd gain a couple inches, fall, gain a couple more inches, fall, rinse and repeat. It was stubbornness and Kat's patient, helpful belay, that got me to the top and not much else. (Daniel, who is reading over my shoulder, just informed me that the first climb was a 5.8 - not a 5.5 - so i guess that makes me feel somewhat better).

I tried unconquerable again towards the end of the day, and I managed to do the beginning a bit better than I had the first time, but I was very quickly reduced back to 'gain an inch' fall, and about 1/3 of the way up decided to call it a day.

It was a beautiful location, and while the sun was out, it was a beautiful day. The company was good, and it was very nice to spend a whole day away from the house and from work.

Camping in Mammoth

Big eventful weekend. We left home at about 4:45 on Thursday, sat in traffic basically from 580/13 interchange all the way through Tracy. We finally got to I-5 at 6:30pm. Ick. However the rest of the drive was relatively traffic free, and I had Freakonomics on my IPod which turned out to be a great way to pass the time. We finally got to our campsite at about 11:30pm. Fortunately, Daniel's parents took our tent up with them (they went up a day before we did) and had already set it up for us, so all we had to do was put our sleeping bag in it and go to sleep.

Friday 8/1: Climbing @ Horseshoe Slabs



I will admit that I was somewhat apprehensive about our first unassisted outdoor climbing experience. But Daniel had read through the book of climbs for the area and found a place where the routes were relatively easy to access the tops of, and the climbs were mostly slab - which is what, so far, I have found I like best. Some, but not all of the routes had bolts. Other routes, you have to create an anchor from the trees and/or boulders at the top.

We chose a route that was listed as a 5.7, which did not have bolts. The original plan was for Daniel to go up and set the anchor and I would stay below (since scrambling around at the top makes me nervous) but since we had to create the anchor ourselves, and since the scramble to the top didn't look too bad, we both went up.

The rule for top-rope anchors is that they be EARNEST (Equalized, Angle, Redundant, Non-Extending, Solid, Timely)

• Equalized means it should put an equal amount of pressure on each arm of the anchor
• Angle means that the two widest arms of the anchor should not be greater than 120 degrees
• Redundant means that there should be a back-up for every part of the anchor so that if something fails, you don't die.
• Non-Extending means that if one of the two (or three) arms of the anchor were to fail, the position of rope shouldn't drop more than 5-6 inches. So that you don't put undue stress on the remaining pieces of the anchor or your rope (or the climber!)
• Solid means that the bolts or trees or rocks you build your anchor on should be solid - no dead trees, hollow rocks, rusty or spinning bolts, etc.
• Timely - done relatively quickly - this is the least important - but it helps to make a good acronym ;-)
  

There was a sturdy, live, tree right at the top of the route which was a given as an anchor option, but in order to meet the 'Redundant' requirement, we needed a second anchor option. Fortunately there was a large Solid boulder just at the base of the tree on the side opposite the wall face (ie: the tree was between the boulder and the edge).



It took us a long time, and several experiments with varying different types of gear, but we finally got an anchor we were both quite happy with - so we figure we ended up with an EARNES anchor ... everything but Timely ;-) that should get better with practice. Unfortunately we forgot to take a picture of the anchor once we were done. But here is the rock face we climbed with our rope on it:



Unfortunately - since it was only the two of us - we don't have any action shots of us climbing :-(

But we each did two climbs on this one rope - one pretty straightforward 5.7 up the right side along that crack that's visible in the picture above. It was fun, but there were no cruxes or any particularly hard spots. It was a nice way to start climbing ( and to make sure our anchor really was going to hold us!)

The second climb we did was to the left of the rope along the MUCH tinier little crack you can see just to the left of the rope - it wasn't listed in our climbing book, so we don't know the rating - but we're guessing 5.8 5.9 - at least for the part right at the beginning of the climb - where there were basically NO features on the wall - just these teeny tiny little finger holds, and some slight slight variations in the texture of the rock to use as foot holds. For me it was a bit of a scramble. The fun thing with slab climbing is that as long as you keep your butt out away from the wall, gravity does most of the work of keeping you on the wall, but as soon as I tried to lift my weight up at all in order to get to the next handhold, my feet would slip out from under me - but little by little, I inched my way up, and finally made it to a place with better hand-holds and foot holds. after that, the climb was again pretty straightforward.

Unfortunately, we'd gotten kind of a late start to the day, and since it had taken so long to set the anchor - those two climbs were all we had time for. But it was definitely fun, and I feel more confident re: our anchor setting abilities, so I will look forward to more outdoor climbing.

K - Bed time - I'll post Saturday's activities tomorrow.

MAS Anchor-building seminar, day 2

Day 2 started out much the same as day 1 - breakfast at the Headwaters Cafe (great coffee, good quiche, pretty crappy sandwiches - thankfully the second day we got our sandwiches from the deli in the general store instead, and they were great.) and then heading over to the MAS offices. Today we'd be climbing at Spicer Terraces, about a 20-30 minute drive south on Hwy 4. We parked at the dam on the Stanislaus river that is responsible for Spicer Reservoir and headed out across the dam on a warm, sunny day with hazy skies (smoke from the wildfires).

We would be climbing on the middle level. Brandon showed us the upper level (and we even climbed it later on), but we never saw the lower level. We also hiked past a climbing site called Dynamite Wall that required some leading to climb.

 

The first thing we did was revisit our lessons from Saturday - each of us building a quad, grabbing a rope and then heading up a climber's trail on the side to set up topropes on some different routes, and then Brandon came around and checked our work. He left ropes on three climbs for us to try - two on the middle terrace called Lightning Crack (5.7) and Venus Flytrap (5.9), and then an unnamed 5.8 on the upper level.

We each got to climb one route before moving on to the next lesson. Rebecca and I climbed Lightning Crack, which she found to be much more challenging than the slab on Saturday. She also scraped up the pad of her finger, which sort of put her out of the mood to climb further. I found the start to be a bit challenging, but the rest was straightforward.

Brandon then sat us down and went over the various forms of protection out there, and how to use them. We learned about nuts, hexes, cams and tri-cams. Then we headed out with a rack of gear to find some area and try to build a toprope anchor on it, using what we'd learned. I really liked playing with the gear, particularly the static stuff like nuts and hexes, but felt a bit nervous about cams - I don't really trust the moving parts, and placement seems quite voodoo. I wound up not even using any in my anchor, though Brandon reinforced my hex with a cam.

Once that was done, we got to climb some more. I climbed Venus Flytrap, so named because of it's curved shape and crack in the center that can lure unsuspecting victims in and trap them, when they should instead be stemming off a small curved ledge. The start was quite simple, but once you got to the stemming it grew quite challenging. Although I quite like stemming, this turned out to be harder than usual due to the negative incline on the right face (forcing you to use a LOT of lateral pressure to keep your foot there) and the ledge on the left diminishing to nothing just a bit too soon to grab the good holds hidden in the crack above. I tried a bit of lieback at the top but, looking at the pictures, did it quite poorly - I needed to get my feet up! Good climb.

Next was the 5.8 on the upper terrace - had a good mix of stuff. The crux was a crack halfway up with almost NOTHING on the face on either side. Brandon wanted me to use a handjam in the crack and smear up to the next handhold, but I could not figure out how to do a handjam without killing my hand. Eventually I sidestepped the problem by finding enough of a ledge up to the right that I could use to balance against with my left hand and feet in the crack - once again being very tall saved the day. No pictures of this one, sadly - forgot the camera down below.

And then we were done! After two days in the hot sun we were feeling pretty beat, and had a hideous drive through the smoke-drenched valley ahead of us, so we said our farewells and headed home to the comforts of a firm bed, shower, dinner and kitties.

MAS Anchor-building seminar, day 1

The drive up to Bear Valley on Friday was uneventful - took about 3.5 or maybe 4 hours, no real traffic except the obligatory slowdown by Tracy. Good weather. We checked into the Bear Valley Lodge and explored a little - not much TO explore, really - pretty much the entirety of "downtown" Bear Valley is in the warren of corridors in the lodge. Shabby general store. Chic cafe. Hotel restaurants. After relocating us because our toilet wouldn't flush (might as well get this out of the way: the Bear Valley Lodge pretty much sucks), we had dinner at the hotel restaurant, where I had the most unique "veggie burger" of my life - essentially a deep-fried patty of mashed potatoes in a bun. Yeah. The diet for this weekend is so shot.

Anyway, on to the real subject. The next morning we went across the street to the MAS offices where we met our instructor for the weekend, Brandon, as well as the other couple in the seminar, Rich and Jenny (also Bay Area residents who climb at Touchstone). We set off for abuot a 30-minute hike to Box Canyon, and then up on top of Box Canyon, where Brandon settled down to teach us some anchorin'. There was much scrambling and rock-hopping to get up on top of the canyon walls, which really pushed Rebecca's safety boundaries, but she was a trooper.

We went over anchoring on natural features (ie, trees, boulders etc), and Brandon showed us how to build a quad with a master point and secure it when bolts are unavailable. Then he had us go around and scope out potential anchor spots and even build anchors on them, which was very helpful. We then went over bolts and how to evaluate and use them, using a climb called "Pulp Friction" (which we unfortunately didn't get to climb) as our example. Then Brandon set up ropes on two long (60') slab climbs (a 5.7 and a 5.8), and we descended back down into the canyon to climb.

The climbs were a lot of fun - fairly straightforward, a bit challenging but not threatening, easy on the arms since they were so slabby, and good for practicing smear and edging technique on raw granite. It's definitely an adjustment to climb on real rock, where the routes aren't taped out and the "rules" are much more vaguely-defined. Brandon kept reminding us to get our hips out to increase the friction on the soles of our feet, while our instincts kept telling us to hug the wall (which just sends your feet flying). Rebecca and I climbed both routes without TOO much difficulty (I had an easier time of it since my height allowed me to cruise past the cruxes), and we were both struck with how little you need to actually climb on granite slab - tiny tiny little finger holds feel immensely satisfying, and your feet hardly need any excuse to stick to the rock. I think Rebecca found her new favorite type of climb.

We had dinner that night at the chi-chi cafe, which was really pricey but REALLY good, and polished off a full bottle of wine between us, which we hardly ever do anymore. It was a good day.