Sunday, October 23, 2011

Red Rock NV - 10/08/2011 - 10/10/2011

One of the benefits of being employed by the federal government is that you get all kinds of random holidays off that most people outside of elementary school don't even remember exist. October 10th is one of those holidays (Columbus Day), and since I am a government employee we decided to head to Vegas to do some climbing at Red Rocks.

Luckily for us, Amy's brother and his wife (Michael and Kim) were planning on going to Vegas that weekend to visit some friends, so we decided to split the cost of a condo for the weekend so that we wouldn't have to camp with the kidos.

We drove out to Vegas on Friday night and after staying up late catching up with Michael and Kim we went to bed hoping for a good nights sleep so that we would be well rested for climbing the next day.

Well, the good nights sleep thing didn't happen since Danny decided that 4:00 AM was when he wanted to wake up and wouldn't even think of going back to bed. Since we were feeling tired we just kind of lounged around until about 10:00 AM and finally decided to go do some climbing. Since we weren't feeling all that perky we decided to climb at the Jagged Edges area since it has several single pitch easy trad climbs and also has a fairly short approach.

We had a fun hike out to the crag as Danny insisted on climbing up every little rock on the approach and wouldn't let us help him at all (it was hilarious). When we got to the crag we started by climbing "Go Ahead and Jump", an easy 5.5 face climb that follows a crack for protection ending in a very easy chimney.

_DSC3958

_DSC3969

After that we climbed "OK, OK, OK" which is a much better route in my opinion. It's a 5.6 crack that actually has a couple of crack moves on it instead of just pure face climbing, and it's a little bit longer as well. I lead the route, belayed Amy up, and we moved on to the main Jagged Edges face.

_DSC3979

_DSC3982

Since we had the kids and only one rope we decided to just do the first pitch of Jagged Edges to the bolted belay station about 60 feet up. I lead the route (which consists of face climbing with the crack for pro for the first 50 feet and ends with about 10 feet of very slick varnished 5.8 hand crack guarding the anchors) cleanly then Amy TR'd it cleanly as well.

_DSC3996

_DSC3999

_DSC4009

_DSC4014

After Jagged Edges (since we already had the TR set up) we decided to TR the first pitch of "Plan F", a .10a finger crack that shares the first pitch anchors with Jagged Edges. We both TR'd it cleanly and it actually felt nice to get a little bit of a workout after the super easy routes that we had done earlier.

_DSC4020

_DSC4024

After the four routes we decided to call it a day and met up with Michael and Kim for dinner.

Sunday we just went to church and hung out with Michael and Kim but planned on a full day of climbing on Monday.

Sunday night we all got some good sleep so we decided to do some harder sport climbing on Monday. We headed to the Black Corridor which has a bunch of .10s and .11s and is shaded all day long. We started by climbing "The Cell", one of the three 5.9 warmups in the corridor. It gave us no trouble so we were about to move onto some of the mid .10s when the kids went crazy. They both started crying and throwing tantrums and since there were a bunch of other climbers we decided to leave the area.

We thought about heading to a less crowded area, but the kids were obviously tired and didn't want to be outside anymore, so we ended up just calling it a day and they both napped for the entire drive home.

No comments:

Post a Comment