Black Mountain Hot

We went up to Black Mountain yesterday for a fun session with Aron, Ian, and a smurf.  We managed to persevere over the heat, rattlesnakes, and ticks.  We started the day warming up at the corral and then proceeded downhill to Loh’s roof to work on lobotomy and a few other climbs.  Lobotomy still feels hard but I’m feeling better on the crux moves now and I think it’ll go in better conditions.  The “Visionary” proceeded to clean a dozen or so lines and climb several of them.  Mostly cool slab lines.  We also worked on this really cool looking line on the side of the Great Dane boulder.   It’s a tall overhanging face with enough holds to be climbed.  The first move is a long one off of two small crimps to a small sidepull.  At first I wasn’t sure if it could go but after some work we got more comfortable with the move.  After sticking it the first time, I started to adjust my feet when the hold ripped off the wall!  Then when I chalked up to try out the with what’s left of the hold, I found the rock I ripped off in my chalkbag.  The good news was that the ‘new’ hold was bigger than the old, but unfortunately the rock was still crumbling when we grabbed it.  So maybe with some more work this one will clean up, but at least I got a souvenir out of it.

After this we went uphill to another newly cleaned boulder that Ian was psyched to get on.  The line follows a short steep section with positive crimps and rounds out to better holds and finishes with a spicy slab topout.  I wasn’t psyched at first but it usually doesn’t take long for me to decide to boot up and give a try.  On my first attempt of the day I managed to pull through the steep section to gain a decent sidepull but I fell trying to setup for the last move.  So I cleaned up some feet I could use and then pulled through all the moves for the FA!  The line is better than I was expecting and is probably in the V9 range but I’m not sure.  This new problem is now called The Smurf, in honor of a smurf and also because the overhanging section is short and some of the moves are bunchy.  The visionary and the smurf were close on this line so hopefully we’ll have some second opinions and maybe a video shortly.

And after a full day of hard bouldering, we walked back up to the cars to learn that Dom turns into a wizard after dark. He waltzed up OK Arete at dusk. Quite impressive.