Red Rocks: day 2 (better)

Ragged Edges
Originally uploaded by slampoud

On Saturday I woke up feeling slightly better, probably not because of the antibiotics proper, since I'd only taken one dose by then, but rather because I knew that issue had been handled and now it was up to me to climb, somehow.

We returned to the Ragged Edges wall, and made it to the route of the same name before anyone else showed up, so we set up and Ben was already making his way up the first pitch when other climbers started arriving. I warned everyone we were going to take our time on this one, since it was our first climb of the day, but even so, Ben was looking really tentative. He made it to the top of the first pitch, and I followed, but he wasn't feeling it for the second, and by then the ground was crawling with 5 or 6 other people, so we moved away. We moved left to an easy crack called "Diplomatic Immunity", and then to another yet further left called something like zigzag crack.

We took a good long break during lunch, and I have to admit, I think I caught a tiny nap, too, and then moved across to the other side of the canyon to do "Spidercrack". This climb is typical of this area, but I've never seen anything like it anywhere else. It's not really a crack proper, but rather a broken up face with lots of opportunities to place stoppers. While Ben was leading Spidercrack I got to shoot the shit with a real local down at the base, and to relay some beta. This was especially cool, because I do love meeting the locals, the people who actually put up the routes and climb them year after year and have all these stories to tell. After that we called it a night relatively early, since I was still feeling pretty crappy.