Made it out to Black Mountain on Saturday for some bouldering & exploring of new terrain. We started off with a hike up to OK Corral since the gate is closed and warmed up there. I managed to quickly repeat Dark Horse (vid soon) and then we moved down the hill to Morphic Resonance. I was psyched to give this problem a good first attempt but the crux was harder than I anticipated. I gave it about four more attempts, each time arriving at the same spot and not being able to static the last long move. Morphic is one of the sharpest climbs at black so we had to move on in order to avoid splitting a tip.
Next we arrived at Lobotomy, Ian’s new classic on Loh’s roof. It is a stellar line that starts with some fun roof moves, then moves into some crazy arete climbing with small pinches, and finishes with a delicate and scary slab traverse to top out! It is full value and took some work to figure out. I didn’t have much energy left after working it out so I wasn’t very close to sending it that day. I think it will go and I’m psyched to return to give it some solid fresh attempts.
After Loh’s we headed downhill a little further to a big bloc that team BMB had just cleaned up. Alan and Ian had given it a few attempts before I managed to pull off the flash FA of this cool line. Unfortunely I am not fearless so I didn’t even try to top out this 40 ft (?) boulder! As much as I hate not topping out, it actually works well enough to climb through the initial 10-15 feet of v6/7 climbing and then traverse out right and step off onto another boulder. I’m dubbing this line Great Dane. Alan later made an attempt at climbing to the top, with a brush in hand, cleaning as he went. But he decided to downclimb when it got thinner and he tired of cleaning.
Lots of excitement at Black Mountain right now with plenty of FA’s to be done and a solid crew coming out to partake in the festivities.