Sunday, 23-Mar-14

You’d think I would have learned by now, that when Daniel agrees to show up an hour earlier than he planned, that he’s actually going to arrive roughly half an hour late.

But in this case, it wasn’t at all a problem – see, the plan was to leave my house at 9:00 on Sunday morning, so that we could get Breakfast in Gloucester before climbing at Redrock.  But of the 12 people that I invited, only two replied… And one only replied to say she couldn’t come.  The other reply?  Saying that they couldn’t make it until 3:30 at the earliest… likely after we were going to be headed home.

So, Daniel and I got a slow start.  But it’s ok, because part of that slow start was… Breakfast!  I love breakfast, it’s basically the best part of the weekend for me.  We hit up Georges Coffee shop in Gloucester, the same one that we had hit when exploring Dogtown, and had an excellent-but-huge amount of pancakes and bacon and eggs.  The waitress even remembered us, and we chatted about trips to Europe, of all places.

Once we were fed though, we moved on toward the actual climbing.  Driving out, parking, and hiking in were exactly what one would expect them to be.  Yep.

The area though… the area was cold.  Wet.  Covered in snow.  A lot worse than we expected, to be honest, though all of the walls were some semblance of dry.  The problem was the the dry walls were at the far ends of the spectrum – either super easy, or super hard.  the 5.11b slab route was dry… but yeah.  That’s not happening.

Before unpacking and starting up, we did a quick bit of exploring too; nothing too much, but enough to give us an idea of some other climbing spots, as well as at least two new routes that we’ll definitely try when we come back.

So what did we hit?

• Climb #1 – Trad route, a small hand-crack on the far right on the main wall.  My first trad lead of the season, so that was kind of nice.  It was pretty straight forward, but it’s always good to have a quick and easy climb to remind me that I do know what I’m doing.
• Climb #2 – This was a combination of two routes, an easy layback flake, and the insane 5.11b slab.  We took the flake up about halfway, then traversed right to another crack system.  Daniel was able to get most of the traverse, but the cold took me down before I was able to finish it up myself.

The rest of the night was spent teaching Daniel how to drive a standard-transmission car (a bad decision… my poor transmission!) and getting dinner at John Harvard.  An excellent day!