Red Rocks (April 7-8, 2007)
This past weekend Roanne and I (actually it was mostly me) decided to head to Red Rocks for some climbing. I haven't done any climbing of note since last October (over 5 months ago, crazy!) since last summer I was climbing with an elbow injury that finally forced me to take a bunch of time off. It is feeling pretty good again now, so I decided to ease back into the swing of things with some moderate trad routes, and Red Rocks seemed like just the place to do it. We left Salt Lake around 6:00 pm on Friday since Roanne got hung up with work, and rolled into the Red Rocks campground around 12:30 am. Unfortunately it was full, so we parked in a pullout on the side of the road and got settled in the back of the truck:
We set our alarm for 6:30 to get an early start on the climb. Unfortunately we took a while to fall asleep (Roanne was getting sick with a cold and I was too excited about the climbing the next day), and some drunk rednecks from Wyoming rolled in around 4:00 and were really loud, so we didn't end up sleeping much. Nevertheless, we got up at the planned time and headed for the Scenic Loop road. We parked at the Pine Creek Canyon pullout and started loading up for the hike in:
It was a nice hike in, since you could see the formation we were going to climb the entire time. We planned on doing Crimson Chrysalis, a 9 pitch 5.8+ on the Cloud Tower in Juniper Canyon. Here is the formation as seen from the parking lot, with our route shown in red:
The hike is started out pretty flat, and then steepened as it ascended the large ramp shown in the photo above. Here is Roanne enjoying the flat part, and the putting her back into it on the steep part:
We arrived at the climb and only saw one party on it, which was good news, but then we came over the top and saw three parties waiting at the bottom to get started. So that was a bummer, but they wer all parties of two, so we hoped we would just have to wait at the start and then could go up without having to wait. Roanne took a knap, and I talked to some of the climbers waiting to start. The alarm bells started to sound when one guy in the party directly in front of us told us that it would be his 4th time attempting the climb (after 3 previous unsuccessful attempts). Here is a shot of some of the first parties starting up:
After about an hour of waiting we were finally able to start up the climb. It follows the wide crack in the photo above for the first few pitches and is quite steep, but not too hard as the rock is heavily featured. There were a fair number of bolts on the face, and much of the time you ended up using face holds instead of the crack. It turned out that the party in front of us was very slow, one guy (who led all the pitches) was fast, but his partner was really struggling, so we spent a lot of time waiting. To add to the delays, they managed to get their rope tangled on each pitch since they weren't swinging leads and didn't bother to restack the rope or switch ends. After about 3 pitches with a lot of waiting at each belay we asked them if we could pass, they were really nice about it and said it was fine, I think it helped that I had been talking to them a bunch before the climb, and they also seemed like genuinely nice people. So that was good, now we were off and running. The climbing was super fun, here is Roanne on around pitch 4 or so, after the wide crack has ended:
Here is Roanne one pitch up, you can see Dave (one of the guys who let us pass) in the background:
And here is one much further up, when the rock changed from being mostly white to being mostly red. You can see this delineation clearly in the first photo of the formation from the parking lot.
Here is another one taken from the top of the last pitch, you can see that we have gained some serious vertical!
By the summit we were both tired and sore, my forearms were cramping up on the last pitch so I was ready to be done. Climbing a 9 pitch route probably isn't the best reintroduction to climbing after a 5 month hiatus, but it sure was fun! We scrambled to the top of the tower, here are some photos of us on the summit, in the one of me you can see Las Vegas in the background:
It was really windy during the last pitch, and we were worried that our ropes would get hung up on the rappel down, since there were so many chicken heads and cracks, but luckily we made it down without incident just as the sun was setting. It became totally dark on the walk out, and since Dave and Todd had been behind us, we looked back periodically to see if we could see them. We saw a head lamp on the wall, and it seemed to be moving down, so we assumed they would be okay. We got the car around 8:15 or so, and luckily we didn't have a ticket (the loop road closes at 8:00). We had planned on going out for Chinese food and a huge slice of chocolate cake, but it was a little late so we just went to Baja Fresh and had burritos. We had met a really nice couple from Calgary at the base of the climb, and they had offered to let us share their campsite, so we got a good sleep in the campground that night. The next morning dawned bright and sunny again and we were both quite sore, so we decided to go do a shorter one, a 4 pitch 5.8 called Dark Shadows. We took a few unintentional detours on the hike in but eventually found it, and miraculously there was no one on it. An older guy and girl arrived just after us, and they looked fast and asked us to go ahead since they had done it many times before, so we let them go ahead. In talking to them, it turned out the woman was Joanne Urioste, who did first ascents on many of the trad routes in Red Rocks back in the late 70s and early 80s (including Crimson Chrysalis, the climb we had done the day before!). So it was pretty neat to talk to her about what it was like to do the first ascents on some of these routes. The climb was super fun, it started at a wall with a stream at the base so it was really picturesque, the first pitches were pretty straightforward, then the last two pitches were the money pitches, climbing this incredibly varnished sandstone with huge jugs. Here is a shot of Roanne climbing up the third pitch:
Look how happy she is! Here is another photo of her rappeling down, with the route outlined in red (the foreshortening makes it hard to get a good idea of where it goes):
Upon pulling the ropes they ended up in the river, so it was a good thing that it was our last day of climbing. We hiked back out and started the long drive back to SLC, with the obligatory stop at DQ for a celebratory blizzard. It was an awesome trip, and hopefully I will be back soon to tick some more of the long moderate routes as I work my way back to full recovery and big sends.