Around the Kern -- Saturday -- F.A.s?

On Saturday Ben and I fooled around half the day running up and down boulders on the side of the road by the Kern. It was fun, but it was getting hot and we weren't getting any climbing done. On our way to find a shady spot for lunch I spotted a couple of cracks in a small buttress below the road, a few miles before Johnsondale. Here's the map of the spot. There's a pullout on the left of the road, and the buttress is down the cliff towards the creek from there.


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We had some lunch, grabbed our gear and headed down. The approach was a sandy, chossy, bushy mess, and full of trash. Apparently people drive up to the pullout above and trundle all sorts of stuff down towards the creek. We saw rusty metal, tires, lots of broken glass. To be honest, I was a little concerned about the possibility of someone trundling a fridge or something right at us!

We got to the cracks, and my suspicion was confirmed: they were definitely climb-worthy. Here's a picture.



The rock was reasonably good, but it was absolutely covered in lichen. In addition, there were chockstones in the cracks, and a lot of loose rock lying around. There were absolutely no signs that a human had climbed these cracks, or indeed ever stood where we were. No chalk on the rock, no evidence of cleaning, no trails, no nothing.

We decided it would be too risky to try to climb these on lead, since the lichen made it unlikely cams would hold, and in any case the quality of the rock was a complete unknown. So we went to the top of the little buttress to set a toprope on the right-hand crack first. We chose the most enormous of several boulders up top and wrapped it with a 30-foot long webbing I always carry. While up there we trundled those rocks that posed a danger while on toprope. We also decided the belayer would have to be well off to the side of the climber, just in case, for both cracks.

Ben was kind enough to give me the first and easier ascent of the crack on the right. I trundled the first chockstone I came upon because it was obviously loose, and left the second one where it was, completely avoiding it. The climb was fun, with a couple off-width sections, one of which could be avoided by doing a mantle. The lichen, on the other hand, was insane! Smearing was, of course, impossible. Jamming was questionable. My eyes were full of ground-up lichen. Man! Suffering! I enjoyed my dirty, groveling first ascent, and Ben jumped on it. He huffed and puffed and went into the off-width rather than mantel. If indeed I have naming rights, I'd like to call the climb "at last, I made you gasp".

We then decided to shift the rope slightly left and try the face between the cracks before proceeding even further left to the harder crack. I didn't think it would be possible at all, because all the lichen made friction nonexistent, but Ben managed to squeeze a few impressive moves out of it. He then made for a right hand jug, and the jug proceeded to come completely off. Ben avoided getting hit, and the rock embedded itself in the dirt at the base of the climb. Realizing there was another small loose piece, Ben lowered off and we called that route off-limits.



When we went up to shift the anchors for the harder crack, we realized this anchor was going to be considerably trickier than the one for "at last...". For one thing, we needed to trundle a lot of rocks. But also, the only reliable boulder we could wrap was enormous, so we needed to use one of our climbing ropes. Then there was a sharp edge that the anchor rope would have to go over, and, of course, we didn't want to sacrifice a good long rope for one damn crack FA. I suggested redirecting the strong point a little to the side of the sharp section with some well-placed cams, but Ben took it further and devised an anchor at the very top of the crack with three cams. We rigged a way to lower him so he could build that, and then went below to climb.

This second crack was just as dirty as the previous, but also a lot harder. The start was from a little cave with two chockstones, one razor-sharp, up to the crack proper. Here's Ben doing it.



Then I did it, huffing and puffing and cursing, but, miraculously, not falling. Ben decided to call it "seven fingered sloth", in honor of the tape gloves he borrowed from me, which had come unstuck in an interesting seven finger pattern.

After that we messed about for a while looking for other things to climb, I lowered Ben to retrieve the anchor for "sloth", and we headed back up to the car. It's impossible to be sure, but I think we may have been the first people to climb there.