Saturday, 05-Oct-13

Climbing at Redrock in Glouchester

A simple adventure for a relaxed Sunday – my friend Gaku and I went to Redrocks, a climbing spot a bit outside of Gloucester.

Daniel and I had been here once before, after I’d heard some rumors of it being awesome from the NUHOC climbers.  The guide showed a few pretty interesting sport/trad routes, and so we met in the parking lot, racked up, and headed onto the trail that wound beside the highway and into the woods.

When we found the climbs… dang!  The rock here was almost identical to the rock in Joshua Tree – a type of very rough Granite that shoes just love to stick to.  But unlike Joshua Tree, Redrocks has been polished by countless New England winters… leaving the rock very interesting, but a bit more challenging to find grip on.

The climbs:

Pink Floyd Crag

• “Animals / Wish you were here” – 5.5 or 5.7? – We set up two small pitches to the far right of this wall – taking a few runs on some rather interesting layback-style vertical cracks.  Gaku and myself both worked a few different moves for a bit, just moving the anchors around.
• “Unnamed Bolted Face” – 5.10b – This is my bane, and my challenge.  The problem is that I can’t even figure out what move needs to be made… The first few are fun and simple, though quite committing, but by the second bolt you’re basically just stuck in a blank face, with some small cracks far away… staring…

Main Crag

• Zipper – 5.5 – this is the definition of a layback / crack climb.  Perfect and beautiful and fun, though a bit easy.  I’d love to lead it, but not convinced that gear would hold since the flake is so thin.
• ??? – 5.7? – this was a perfect crack / dihedral climb that I had led while climbing with Daniel… but had taken a strange / inefficient route up.  This gave me a chance to try it again, which led to a very fun and clean climb.  Not sure why I didn’t do it this way in the first place…