All Cats, All Day
In-between the cold snaps and polar vortexes, time was scheduled to go explore some of the lessly traveled walls at Rumbling Bald. Luckily and to my surprise, Jason had a cabin about 30 mins away from the Bald which he offered to let us stay the night at.
Arriving at the parking lot temperatures were cold, and many people were slinging out there boulder pads. We were part of the 1%, who were racking up ropes again. I had a general idea of where the Cat Wall was located on the cliff line, but never knew the location of the approach trail (also we missed it the last time we tried to find it). So we wandered up through the boulder fields and mountain laurel, we skirted below the Hickory Nut Wall and walked around the side of the gulley. Eventually, after some exploration we dropped down into the correct gulley, and saw the crag.
As par for the course, I ended up climbing on the north facing rocks in the hard of winter. I saw was looked like a nice 5.6 slab call “FreshStep”, to get started on, but it had some bite. Using friction and mossy ledges, I made my way up 100ft with 2 bolts and 2 cams. Then I saw that the bolt anchors which were through a nice icy waterslide, so I went right instead. This involved a dyno slab move to wet and slimy off width crack. It still make me shudder. The webbing was gone, so I added some webbing and a quicklink to descend. Bob then went to lead it too, and ended up taking a big whipper near the webbing tree. A root ball blew out below the tree and he ended up tumbling down the slab. The root ball end up hitting me as well.
Matt and Jason picked a far better routes called “Cat’s Meow” and “French Feline”. These were nice climbs on a buttress beside the slab. Matt used some useful tree beta, and Jason was able to send a New Top rope variation to Tail of the cat. “French Feline” happened to be the best climb at the cliff to myself. It starts with a cool roof, which you have to traverse out into an offwidth section. Here you can get some double knee bars and place gear. After that you have a great #3 and #4 crack the whole way to the anchors.
Bob also lead up “Nine Lives” which had its own interesting start, but the most memorable part was moving into a huge Off width Detached Flake. While climbing it, I kept wondering, “How is this thing still attached”. Matt and Jason climbed next to us on “Octopussy”, which seemed a bit sketchy. Matt has secret prussic beta for this on.
On the way down, we follow the “correct” path and drainage down. We stop and saw a huge boulder, which I need to come back and climb, just because it looked awesome. When we got done, we packed up and headed to Jason’s cabin for Matt’s Burger Smorgasbord (turkey and beef), discussion on the finer point between cheeses, and some intense games of Spades. If you play with Matt beware. He is a liar and a cheat, and if he gets the 2 of clubs punch him.
