Worrying our wives at Red Rock Canyon

[dima]

This past weekend, I joined wesweswes in doing his favorite thing: multi-pitch trad climbing. We went to Red Rock Canyon, just outside Las Vegas. I dabble in bouldering at the gym, and have done various unwise things in our local mountains, but I'm not really a climber. Wesweswes is a crusher, however, so he led everything, and took me along for the ride. Thanks, wesweswes!

It has now been a few days, I have been able to unclench, and can write this report. Wesweswes will fill in more of the bits about the routes. Since I was in crisis mode the entire time, none of the photos are mine.

Alright. We arrived Thu afternoon, and had a half day to do a thing. It was warm, so we picked a shaded route: Our Father. I don't even remember this one anymore. It was 5.10c/d, which was alarming. There were cracks.



One section was too much for my poor crack technique, so I laybacked it. Worked ok, but as expected, it burned me out, and I needed to take a few breaks to finish.

We rappelled from the top, and hiked out around sunset. Wesweswes crushed the hard climbing, but stepped on an unstable rock on the walk back, and hurt his leg. We planned to do something with a long walk-off on the next day, but pushed that back a day to let him recover.

On Fri morning we went to check out the Wholesome Fullback. 5.10b; reasonable. It was still hot, however, and this was in the sun, and people were already on this route, so we went next door to the Beta Blocker Corner. Obscure and 5.10d. But shaded!

We approached by climbing... something. At some point there was a very alarming, exposed traverse



The rappel station was on a small ledge between two such exposed traverses, so we left our pack there. After the traverse is a really cool narrow canyon with water in it. The walls are smooth, and you avoid getting wet sorta by "chimney-ing" sideways. We both made it. Eventually you climb up over a roof and up a corner



I think there was even more going on; wesweswes, fill in the details! We got to the top, rappelled down to the water feature, and had to figure out a canyoneer anchor to get down. Keeping the rope out of the water was impossible, so it got a bit wet. Then to get out, we had to climb the traverse back to our packs. Nobody fell, and everyone survived. This route was great! This took all day, and we felt real tired, but decided to take on one more challenge to finish the day: try to beat the house at the local all-you-can-eat sushi place. We did well

The next day, wesweswes's leg was feeling better, and this would be a good day to do a more chill climbing route, with a long hike down from the top. The morning was full of promise



We headed to the Celtic Cracks. 5.10a/b; great. The approach would be several pitches of something easy. We talked about simul-climbing it, but when we got there, it seemed easy. This would be a long day, so we just soloed it, in the interest of time. There were some cool big cracks



Then it got a bit alarming





It stayed alarming, and we finally roped up for the last little bit of the approach. Got to the bottom of the actual route. Finally!



We climbed up the first few pitches, to realize that this wasn't Celtic Cracks. We were instead ascending the appropriately-named Worried Wives' Club. Long, obscure and 5.10+! The crux looks like this:



That crack narrows to almost nothing, and you can't finger-jam it anymore. Somehow wesweswes led it without falling! It took me several tries, bit by bit. Above that is lots of cool chimneys. There was an impossible-looking roof that could be chimneyed
around (I'm not sure if this photo is it)



This route clearly sees very little traffic: lots of brush and dirt on the holds. This was all taking a very long time, and daylight became a concern. Towards the end, we started running out of rope, and simul-climbed the reasonable sections. Eventually it became clear that nobody takes this route to the tippy-top, but since we planned to hike down, that's what we did. Wesweswes led a very alarming-looking last pitch, and we were on top!



We had 20-30min of daylight left, and were very relieved to no longer be on 5th-class terrain. There was a problem, however: since we didn't climb the intended route, we took longer, and were further away from the descent route. And at this point I found out that the descent route isn't something that anybody regularly does, and we only had a not-very-clear trip report about it. We looked at the maps, and hiked over to Indecision Peak, where the trip report people went





Here was a ridge that apparently doesn't go very far, set in a mazy sea of cliffs



The topo wasn't nearly high-res enough to distinguish all the various dry-falls and cliffs and buttresses. It was now dark, and I thought we should walk the easier terrain to the other side of the mountains to some mapped trails and out to relative civilization to hitch a ride. Wesweswes was determined to decipher the trip report, however. We dropped down a very brushy gully, descended for a bit, and eventually started seeing cairns.



The cairns would come and go, but usually you couldn't go the wrong way for too long since the route would immedially cliff out. After 3.5 hours of poking around and backtracking and traversing we finally somehow emerged back to the road. At the car was a jug of water, and it never tasted so good!

We were out for 14 hours, and felt completely destroyed. It was late, but the desert road back to the campsite was full of police for some reason. Apparently this was happening. We returned to camp, ravenously cooked some food and drank some beer, and went to bed. What an adventure!

[Matthew]

Knowing you and knowing your immense fear of rope climbing just a year ago, I am beyond impressed by these routes and grade! Your level of endurance for all this stuff for back to back days is pretty badass!!!!!

What was it like doing that ropeless approach? Was it easier or harder than bypassing a San Gabriel chossy waterfall in big 5 shoes?

[wesweswes]

Correction: on day two we had intended to do Frigid air buttress (not wholesome fullback), but detoured to beta blocker corner to avoid the sun. Indeed, to reach the climb it requires a pitch or two up burlesque, then a couple traverse pitches to gain the top of a 200 ft waterfall. We could have rappelled down directly from this point but didn't bring a second rope, so we had to traverse back to gain a rappel station set up for single rope rappels. Beta blocker corner is already an obscure route, which is why the it seems it only had one bolt instead of two at various rappel stations. That's a problem since you generally want redundancy when rappelling, so I sacrificed a couple pieces of webbing to fashion backups from various chockstones etc. The climb itself though is an undercover banger. The first pitch involved chimney traversing immediately above a creek, then off width chimney up a 40 ft chockstones. After this, a short walk gets to the steep wall, where we were presented with the 10+ mixed face/crack slightly overhung crux. That was followed by some fun chimney and stemming to the top. I did the final pitch up on rock that was less than reassuring to an anchor with one bolt and no obvious backups, so down lead it back to the P5 rappel station, where dima joined me and we rapped down. Exciting day, and made it back to the car by nightfall -ish, then over to sushi. Yum.

Feeling accomplished, and my ankle more recovered, we opted for a bigger day. I really wanted to give dima the full experience of climb up something big and walk off it, and we decided on Celtic cracks on the labyrinth wall since it got shade most of the day. This requires a mile or two basically flat hike to the base up first creek canyon to reach climbable rock, at the first creek slabs. They're pretty low angle and mellow and we saw that others had used this 5.5 called rising moons as an approach to the labyrinth wall about 800 ft vertically up, so we did that, including some 4th class, easy 5th scrambling. It was pretty mellow so we did it unroped until the very end. Then we got to the labyrinth wall and started out as anticipated, but by mistake I took the wrong dihedral up, going too far right. I realized something was wrong a couple pitches higher, thinking that the climbing was quite a bit harder than anticipated. Instead of a fun roof, it was a lie back up a thinning finger crack that at the crux only allowed finger tips, with a mostly blank face to oppose off of. I used the force and made it through, realizing we were off route, and given the nature of the rappel stations being set up for double rope rappels, and us having only one rope, we were committed to getting to the top so as to access the walk off. Luckily at this point the climbing difficulty eased, and we followed a chimney system up several pitches, including sections of various sized cracks and lots of bushes. It seems very few people climb this route, but it's actually super good. Anyway, we got to the top of the climb and I soon realized we couldn't access the main ridge from there since we were on a sub ridge with a big gulley in the way. Did some more scramblimg and simuling and eventually gained the main ridge, unroped, and did the easy walk over to indecision peak. At that point looking east we did not see a way down, but instead various steep cliffs and drop offs. Looked improbable to find a walkable way down, and we found ourselves debating various strategies to self extract, now that it was dark. I thought it was worth checking out this highly vegetated gulley, and sure enough, some how soon we ran into carins which we followed all the way down. Overall it was a bit over 2000ft of 4th/5th class climbing, and 2800ft walk off descent. Big day, and I am quite impressed with dima given he's only ever done one other multipitch day before, at Tahquitz, like a year ago. Big ups to our undercover crusher. It was 14 hours car to car. We got back to camp at midnight, had some food and a beer, and quickly hit the sack.

What a trip.

[mikeywally]

great pics, great write up.

congrats on the memories made.