Practice Gear
This weekend, the weather was good enough to make a trip up to Boulder to meet Ben for some world class trad climbing. Just south of the flatirons in Boulder is Eldorado Canyon, home to the mecca off climbing. My visit was brief, but I’m sure I’ll be back again soon after experiencing some great rock.
The goal of the day wasn’t to tick off some climbs, but rather to practice protection (pro) placements and trad leading technique. All this training would let us to not die when we go for the bigger and badder-ass climbs in the canyon. We setup shop on the whale’s tail, which is made of some awesome foundation sandstone. The climbs we focused on were on the shady side (7AM-Noon) and the wind whipped through the canyon. My feet started to freeze a good bit on the chilled rock.
The belay spot started on a ledge about 20 ft off the ground. The first climb we worked on was the West Crack. It is an obviously crack the ran up the west side of the whale’s tail rock. The rock was great for putting in pro, so every few feet we place some type of equipment (this is called sewing up a route). It ran the gamut from cams to nuts to slings to hexs. Needless to say we were very over prepared for the climb, but this is how we’ll learn to not kill ourselves on bigger climbs. After Ben made it to the top, I followed up and cleaned out the pro that he placed. We repelled down and switch roles, I went up first and Ben cleaned up after. During the climb, we noticed that someone before us jammed a tiny cam in the crack and it wasn’t ever going to come out.
We then went to a climb to the right called the “west dihedral”, it was rated a bit tougher climb. Ben led this one and I cleaned up after. We scrambled to the top and scouted the Wind Wall rock, which would be next on the list. I eyed up the rock and spotted a nice moderate multi-pitch trad climb to the summit.
