Sunday, April 5, 2009

Red Rocks: day 4 (party time)

We'd been planning all along to do one long multi-pitch climb at least. Since Tuesday was going to involve a lot of driving, and hence an early departure from Red Rocks, but by Monday the drugs should have kicked in, we chose Monday as our epic day. We'd mentioned this plan to the local we'd met a couple days before, Sean, and he'd suggested that instead of doing one of the mobbed routes, e.g. Cat in the Hat, we should try Birdland. So when we left the campground on Monday morning, bright and early, but not too early and definitely not too bright, we were headed for Birdland. When we spotted it from the trail, around 9am, there were already two parties on it. Two parties ahead of us qualified, in our mind, as mobbed, so we figured, how much worse could Cat in the Hat be? We continued round the corner of Mescalito to Cat in the Hat, and found one party ahead of us and one forlorn climber, whose partner had gone back to the car (a 45 minute hike away) to get her shoes. So we jumped on it. Depending on how you count, Can in the Hat could have anywhere from 4 to 6 pitches. We did one pitch, a scramble, two more pitches, a traverselet, and a final technical pitch. I call that 4, even thought we re-racked for the traverselet. I didn't especially like the 1st or 2nd pitches, but I loved the 3rd (typical broken varnished face climbing of the area, like Spidercrack), and thought the 4th was OK. We caught up with the party ahead of us at the base of the 4th pitch, and while we were waiting I got to go down a crevice just below us and retrieve three booty nuts (two BD 6s and a 2 micro-stopper ridiculous thingy). The view from the top was absolutely beautiful. We met a Canadian who gave us big wall tips and suggestions for routes to do in Yosemite. Turns out his grandpa was born hours away from where mine was born. Small world. He pegged me as Greek after taking one long look at me. "You look just like my cousin." I was flabbergasted. We rapped down and had to wait a bunch in places, because by that point there were maybe 8 parties on the rock, heading both up and down... All in all, though, the day was a tremendous success: we did the climb, we were fast, we negotiated the social aspects just fine. If anything, it wasn't much of an epic, but given that I was sick, I'm somewhat grateful for that.

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