Thursday, August 5, 2010

TR: First Flatiron


Photo Courtesy of Google Images

The Flatirons are a pretty decent sized massif right outside of Boulder. Their known for easy technical long climbing, great views both east and west and are generally considered to be a classic ascent. Couple that with the fact that you generally see them every day whether you live in Denver or Golden and I've wanted to climb one of them for a while. So Tuesday morning when Andrew, Brian and I were sitting at Big Daddy's Bagels in Golden and Brian suggested we nix going to Eldo and we go climb the First, I was stoked.
We headed up to the trailhead and hiked up to the base of the climb. The classic route is rated 5.6 R and it's entirely because of the first two pitches, which Brian also mentioned that it's required to take the sharp end on one of those two pitches your first time doing it. Andrew rared up for the first pitch and led it off. The first pitch is actually pretty scary, it's almost all friction climbing and smears with very little pro and one eyebolt that you can clip in between the starting point and the first belay station. Andrew pretty much killed it on this pitch, leading off with a killer sense of humor, joking about a mono-undercling and humping the belay tree when he arrived at it. Climbing the pitch myself I was even more impressed with his calm of mind as I woulda been SCARED! (note to the reader: we used a pretty interesting system of climbing for this climb being that the two followers simul climbed on different ropes while being belayed from above by the leader using an ATC guide set up., it worked well for speed, sucked ASS for rope drag)

Andrew about at the belay on the First pitch
So being that it was my first time as well, it was time for me to take the second pitch. Up I went, placing in a little tiny red nut about 8 feet off the belay, and then running it out for about another 15 or 20 feet until I found a MAMACITA cam placement in a bomber crack! I was so happy to get that placement in, I'd started singing to myself lightly to keep myself from getting freaked about how high above the pro I was. 15 feet up, slung a piton and grooved on up to a ledge through some easy smears and big jams and setup a belay station. This was pretty fun! It took me a little bit to hunt out some appropriatly sized cracks that I could build an anchor on. Belaying the simul climbers up was brutal. Way more pumping out than any of the climbing had been.



A few pictures from around 2 pitches up
The next two pitches went pretty uneventfully with Brian, Andrew and I swapping leads on pretty easy climbing and terrain, I'd say one highlight was Andrew getting a booty call text message while we were two pitches up and then Brian and I simul climbing an easy pitch and talking about girls the entire way up. Fun day!
Now we got to my lead which was on the 5th pitch up, the weather had been getting darker and gloomier looking for most of the day and by this point we were starting to hear sounds of thunder getting closer. I almost bailed on leading this pitch in favor of a faster trad climber heading up so we could bail if necessary but I decide to take it after some encouragement from Brian. I'm so stoked I did, this pitch was super fun climbing varying from some long easy runouts, to some good crack jams and stemming problems, purely a joy to lead and anywhere there was a scary move, I was able to get a good piece of pro in. Couple this with the distant rumblings of thunder and being close to 1,000 feet off the deck and this was a truly interesting lead to have. The only down side was the thunder was SCARY and CLOSE and the pitch certainly meandered so that the rope drag was un real. I had to do a final traverse to the belay station after laying back a big flake and I shoved a piece in simply because I was worried that the rope drag would make me peel off 15 feet above my last piece of pro.
So we got to the belay and once the other two guys got up we had to make a decision to rap off the back side or finish the route. By this point the thunder was right over head and it was starting to rain, so after a small debate we decide to check out the rap station and bailed off the route. Brian scoped it out and after looking at it said it wasn't half as sketchy as he remembers and went off the back. I was pretty in favor of bailing as I'll admit the thunder was freakin' me out so I was pretty happy with this decision. Although, it does mean, I'm going to have to head back and climb the thing again and make the true summit sometime soon. Oh well, the climbing was fun enough that I'll gladly do it again even though we were probably 40 vertical feet from the top.
The rappel was a true freaker though, total free hanging at one point. Definetly a song creater! (I sing sometimes when I get scared enough)

Rap city on the backside of the first with lots of air underneath!

This day was awesome, I can't wait to get out with those guys again and go climb something big and tall like that. Even though we didn't finish it we were all pretty stoked with our progress and pleased with our decision to take the safer course of action of bailing. Although, when we were sitting at the sun and eyeballing the lack of rain up there it would have been sweet to high five on the true summit....next time.


Andrew lookin' pleased with our attempt

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Belated TR: Long's Peak


Cause of the events of the last week, I haven't had time or the energy to post up a write up of a little outing that I had up Long's Peak Keyhole route about two weeks ago, so now that I've gained some time and energy, enjoy!
So Long's Peak is the furthest north 14er and one that you can see from pretty much anywhere in Denver, Golden etc. And oddly enough, in my last 3 years of being here, I've never been up it. I'm assuming because most of my 14ers have been skiing oriented and the ski lines on Long's are burly and typically one of those things that you might not ski unless you had a particular goal in mind. So when Mike emailed me a few weeks ago asking if I'd be interested on a moonlit ascent of Long's, my first reaction was "Crap it's a friday, I'll miss out on work." My second reaction was "I'll make it happen somehow".
So that being said my dumb ass decided to go to work for 3 hours before heading up to Boulder to meet up with the gang to go up Long's. This was very very dumb. So essentially I warmed up for a 14 mile hike with 5,000 ft of vertical gain by riding a 150 lb tri-cycle around for three hours. I'll reference why I'm making a big deal about this later....
So we met up, got up to RMNP and started the booking it approach up the long trail to Long's Peak at around 1:30 pm. The first half passed pretty uneventfully other than our moonlit ascent was screwed by the huge cloud sitting over the peak. Mike had reccomended using a red headlamp to light the way as it would help with night vision. He was totally right about this but wrong about the fact that it totally screwed my balance point. The first half of the Long's trail is pretty smooth and easy but the second we hit the boulder field I was crashing left and right until I switched to a white lamp and suddenly I could see again.
Now reaching the boulderfield is usually a pretty long hike in. For some reason we did it in about 2 hours or so. About this point, between the light color issue and the fact that I'd worked that night I was getting pretty freakin' wrecked and starting to move really slowly and frankly started to feel pretty damn bad. We'd had an arrangement to regroup by the keyhole but by the time I got there everyone had taken off. (In the after discussion, I think this was the best for the group FYI)
Most people know that it takes me a lot to lose my temper or my cool in this matter, but between how wrecked I was feeling and then finding no one there I kinda lost it. In retrospect, I'd simply pushed myself a little too hard and my emotions were all sorts of jacked up at this point. I polished off the last of my coffee and because I was beginning to be able to see the trough with the sun coming up I decided to push on aways.



Some of the views as the sun began to lap up RMNP
So it should be mentioned Long's Peak standard route is really not a hike. It's a scramble through some pretty high consequence terrain. The ledges are huge, and the climbing never harder than Class 3 but if you fall, your going quite a ways. Add this in to the amount of people that this peak sees and I'm astounded that there aren't more accidents up there. The trough is really what I'd call the real beginning of the route too. Big exposure, easy scrambling, actually extremely fun too. Mentally, I calmed down and actually began to enjoy the route finding and climbing as I worked my way slowly higher. I managed to actually catch up to half of the group just below the narrows. Coupling this with teh beautiful light hitting the Ships Prow and Mt. Meeker (I think, must check a map on that one) it became a pretty special experience.
So this was not the end of teh unpleasantness on this trip, and I'm going to publicly apologize for being an asshole at high altitude to Mike at this point. Seriously dude, my bad. I was feeling super crappy and I'm sorry I bitched at you when I passed you in the narrows. Feel free to bitch at me at some high altitude vantage point at some time.

A few climbing shots

So when the trough ends, you come into this system of ledges called the narrows, once again super easy climbing, big exposure. Other than the above mentioned bitching at (sorry again dude) this was really fun! The exposure added a nice little sphincter clenching scariness to the otherwise easy ledgewalking that led up to the homestretch. I'm going to add, I looked up and saw tons and tons of 5th class lines all around it that I'm going to have to do some research into because the crack systems and granite looked killer. So at this point we were almost at the top when we presented with the final problem, a slabby cracky wall known as the homestretch.


Shots of the Trough and Allan climbing the Homestretch

Once again a little route finding presented nothing harder than 3rd class, although a fall would have been an absolutly massive catastrophe. At this point I'd realized that the best thing for me was to just continue up at my own slow pace and relax and enjoy the easy jams and scrambling. The beautiful thing about this peak is that it gives you a wonderful alpine climbing experience. With the harder rock and exposure, long hike in, the second you crest the summit you feel as though you've gained a peak of massive importance. When I crested the summit and looked over the diamond all I could see was clouds thousands of feet below me covering the front range and to my west the vast expanses of the Indian Peaks and Rocky Mountain National Park. It was a beautiful moment especially with it all bathed in golden morning light. We summited at 10 of 7 so it was about a 6 hour trip up.

Goofy lookin' summit shot, can you tell I'm sleep deprived?



So this brings me to the other problem with Long's. Crowds. We got an early start so on the way up and at the summit there weren't that many folks but I would NEVER EVER start any later than we did because on the way down there were HORDES coming up the trough. The other problem with this is a lot of the terrain in the trough is loose scree. If I ever do this again I will be wearing a rock climbing helmet because I was living in terror that someone was gonna knock a rock down and kill me the entire way down.
There should really be a better education about the terrain and weather on long's. I saw people going up in Chacos, cotton t-shirts, jeans, carrying a single 8 oz water bottle. Seriously if there was a storm or something they'd be in some severe trouble. Last soapbox moment, PEOPLE PICK UP YOUR FREAKIN' GARBAGE! There was so much trash all over the standard route. It was absolutly foul.
Other than that I had a great time, the descent was pretty uneventful (as all good descents should be) other than a quick stop at the Chasm Lake viewing point to snap shots of the Diamond (god I want to climb that) and a beautiful view of the peak, I pretty much popped in my Ipod and let passion pit ease my weary legs down the peak.
Lessons learned, seriously pay attention to how my body is feeling on stuff like this....and don't pedicab before hand :) I would really like to go do this route again at somepoint, in a more rested state though as I feel like I'll enjoy it way more