Monday, October 5, 2009

Past Weeekend...

Went to Jackson again this weekend, and I can gladly say that the climbing season has officially arrived! Temps in the upper 60's and low 70's all weekend made the rock nice and sticky and it was great to meet a ton of new psyched strong climbers.

On Saturday I hopped on one of my long term goals, Space Cowboy 5.12b. All I can say is that .12b is considerably harder than .12a. It still blows my mind thinking about the difference. I started out rapping in and hanging the quickdraws. First go, I managed a mediocre 8 falls/takes, but fired the crux sequence first try. Second go, I knocked it down to 5 takes/falls. Third go, I was happy to get it down to 3, one of which could have been avoided if I stuck a longer quickdraw on. So I'm sitting at two takes basically. I think I could definitely one hang the thing, and then a send would only be a short matter of time after that. Maybe in a month...

Sunday, I got out early, warmed up, and ran right over to Cro-Magnon Warrior, a .12b also. Setting the draws I think I eeked out just 8 takes/falls, and got nearly no beta for the whole climb. What makes the beta so hard is that Cro-Magnon climbs a vertical water drainage seam and has some super burly power/layback moves that will stretch the biceps to their limit. At the same time you're just pasting your feet onto nothing to keep the pressure on your hands, and yourself from falling. I was feeling it quite strongly after the first go, but sucked it up and went again and sloppily fell and hung 4 times.

I'll take the small amount of progress though, and I'm super psyched for these two routes. Fall break here at the school starts next Saturday and I'm going to have an entire week off! Tons of time to get some projects sent hopefully!

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