Freedom Peak

Any adventure that involves getting up before four am is bound to be epic. And this one was. 
This morning's trip began when Michael knocked on my door at 4am. We had planned on bagging some peaks up above rock canyon. Because of the recent snow on the mountain tops, I had rented an ice ax from BYU's Outdoors Unlimited. Neither one of us has a car, so we rode our bikes. The ride up to Rock Canyon is long and steep. Despite temperatures in the low thirties, I was sweating by the time we made it to the parking lot. From there, we locked our bikes and started hiking up the canyon. After about three miles, we found ourselves in the Rock Canyon campground, which was completely abandoned. We had a little trouble trying to find our trail on the other side of the campground. While searching in the dark, we saw headlights in the trees about three or four hundred yards away. We bushwacked our way up the mountainside to where the lights had been, and found ourselves on a dirt road we hadn't know about. We were finally able to find our trail, and we continued upward and onward. Pretty soon it started snowing. Just a few small flakes at first, then a bit more, until it was coming down hard all around us. Thick clouds rolled in, obscuring our view of the mountains. We lost the trail, but the route was obvious. With a shallow layer of snow on the loose rock hillside, the going was tough. The ground got so steep that climbing further would have been nearly impossible without an ice ax.
Micheal had an interview to be to at 1pm, which meant we had to have him home by noon-ish. Unfortunately, this meant turning around only half an hour or so from the summit. But mountaineering isn't really about summits anyways. All in all, it was a good 6 miles or so each way, with more than 5000 ft of elevation gain.
The descent was fairly straightforward, and we were able to get back to our bikes and ride home just a few minutes after noon. I slept through the BYU football game without any shame.

Trilogy Butress

In one of my previous posts ("My First Multi-Pitch") I told you about the adventure Jeff and I had on our attempt to climb Trilogy Buttress, a four pitch tower in Rock Canyon. If you read that post, you'll remember that, not only did we fail to make it up the thing, we actually got stuck, and had to spend considerable time figuring out how to get down. Last week, after talking to the guy who made the route, I decided to give it another try. My partner for the climb was Micheal Davidson, a guy I recently met in my new ward here at BYU. After examining pictures and reading descriptions of the Buttress, we decided to take a different route for the 

first pitch. It was rated only 5.6 (really, really easy), but our info showed that although it was a full rope's length (60 meters) long, there were only four bolts on the whole thing. If you do the math, that's one bolt every fifty feet or so. When I asked the guy whole put the bolts in about it, he said that you could definitely bring some trad gear (cam's, nuts, chock, etc), but the rope drag would be awful. 

Nonetheless, 50 ft between bolts is too much for me, so w

e did bring some trad gear, and the rope drag was indeed horrendous. 

Micheal led the first and third pitches, and I led the second and fourth. When we got to where Jeff and I had gotten stuck, we found that we had been literally ten feet from the anchors we had looked for but never found. This time, we found them without trouble, and were able to continue upward and onward without any problems. The climbing was lots of fun, the view was spectacular, and the exposure was dizzying. The last pitch was only a 5.8, but let 

me assure you that 5.8 climbing on top rope, 20ft above the ground is one thing, and 5.8 climbing on lead, 10 ft above your last bolt with 500ft of air below you is 

an entirely 

different thing altogether. Fortunately, I was able to keep my head together, and both Micheal and I made it to the top without any problems. In

stead of rappelling, we were able to hike down the back side and make it to the car just after 

dark. 

But the story doesn't end there. Three days later, I was on Trilogy Buttress again, this time with Jeff Belnap and Jason Webb. We got started just before dark, and made sure to bring headlamps. 

Partly because it was getting dark, but mostly because they are wimps, both Jason and Jeff decided that they weren't going to lead climb at all. Of course, they didn't decide this until we were already at the top of the first pitch. So I got to lead all four pitches (Okay, so maybe leading a new route, in the dark, hundreds of feet off the ground would be a bit scary). In the dark, I didn't get the same 

sense of height that I did in the day-my attention was primarily confined to the small bubble of light from my headlamp.

The highlight of the climb came on the fourth pitch. A few feet above the first bolt, the handhold I was using broke loose, and I suddenly found myself falling through the air. When the rope jerked me to a stop I was a good ten or twelve feet lower than where I had started. When I regained my composure I was able to finish the climb without any more falls. The view from the top was just as amazing at night as it was in the daylight. 

Check this out

stillfree.com

Watch the top left of the four videos first.

Round Two

Yesterday I went back to American Fork Canyon to work on Reaching For Razors, the 5.11d I mentioned in my previous post. I had been feeling a little sick, and I didn't have any expectations of climbing the thing. After warming up on a couple of easier routes, I jumped on RFR. My first attempt was less than whole hearted. I was feeling weak, cold, and clammy. I fell at the the crux of the route, three bolts up. When I fell, my right foot got tangled up in the rope, and I was jerked upside down before coming to an abrupt stop. I didn't care, I just felt like crap and wanted down. On my second try, I stuck the move, and was able to clip the next bolt. Now I had forgotten I was sick. I had to rest at the bolt, but I got up the route again, and with much less trouble than last week. I'm sure I'll be able to send it free and clean soon. I'll keep you posted. 

On the way back from AF Canyon, I got a call from my new friend Mike. I met Mike just a couple of weeks ago, and just thi

s Sunday we found out we both climb. He's more into alpine climbing, mountaineering, and trad, which is what I really want to get into as well. He was calling to see if I wanted to do a night trad climb up in Rock Canyon. I have wanted to learn to trad climb for a long, long time.

 So I said that of course I did. Half an hour later we were driving to Rock Canyon. We headed up to the very popular and often climbed Red Slab. I led the first pitch, a bolted 5.7 that I had climbed many times before. Pitch 1.5 wasn't really a pitch at all, just a scramble up 75 vertical feet or so that we did unbelayed. The second pitch was our real goal-a 35-40 metercrack up the

 face of Ed and Terry Wall, also rated 5.7. Before Mike got started climbing, 

I got to fool around a bit placing cams in the crack and testing their strength. I belayed Mike while he climbed and placed his gear. He got a little over halfway up the route before the crack widened out to the point that he just didn't have gear that would fit. Rather than risking a big fall, he decided to back off. I lowered him to the ground, pulled the rope down, and hiked around the backside of the crag to the top. I set an anchor on the bolts on the top of the route, lowered one end of the rope to Mike, and belayed him as he climbed the crack up to me. Then we switched spots, he lowered me to the ground, and I did the same climb. I should mention that it had gotten dark before we got 

the the bottom of the second pitch, and we were doing all this climbing in the dark, with only our headlamps to light the way. After I climbed, we took a few minutes to admire the view with our lights off. On one side of us was the cliff, the mouth of the canyon, and the glowing lights of the city. On the other side were the sillouettes of the mountain and the darker, starry sky.

We rappelled down into the darkness, downclimbed to the top of the first pitch, and rappelled again. Then we packed up, hiked down to the cars, and got home around 10:00 pm. This morning my mild cold was far, far, worst, and I still feel aweful writing this now. Maybe climbing for eight hours straight while I'm sick isn't the best idea I've ever had. 

Yesterday I climbed the hardest route I've ever done-a 5.11d. I didn't do it without falling, but I led the whole thing. Just thought I'd brag about that.

Zion and Behunin Canyon

Last weekend I got to go with some friends down to Zion National Park. We drove down Friday afternoon, and got back late Saturday night (actually, it was Sunday morning). Friday evening, after the four hour drive to get to our campsite, we ventured into the park to hike Angel's Landing. I had done the same hike back in March, with the whole thing under a few feet of snow. This time there was no snow, and the hike was just as spectacular. We got to the top half an hour or so after sunset. We didn't stay long because it was getting so dark. In fact the descent back to the valley floor was rather treacherous-we had only one flashlight between the five of us. It was very hard to see, and any real slip would have resulted in a fast, airy trip to the bottom, some 1488ft straight down.
We spent the night at a FREE campsite just outside the park. We met three other carloads of people I didn't know, but who soon became my friends, and the night was a blast.
Saturday morning, the whole group started up the trail to Angel's Landing. Four of us split off onto the West Rim Trail, and continued on for another hour and a half or so to the top of Behunin Canyon. We spent the day navigating the 2000 vertical feet between the top of the canyon and the valley floor. The descent included 9 rappels, including several over one hundred feet (the tallest was 165ft), sketchy downclimbs, a short swim, lots of scrambling, and, in my case, a dip in a pool of the most foul, putrid, disgustingly stale water imaginable. In other words, everything you could want from a canyon.

My First Multi-Pitch Climb

About a week and a half ago, before all this business with school and homework started, my good friend Jeff and I decided we were going to attempt a multi-pitch climb in Rock Canyon, located a whole five minutes from my apartment in Provo, Utah. I had never attempted any kind of multi-pitch route. Jeff had been on a couple, and had never lead climbed on one before. Needless to say, we were pushing ourselves a bit. We decided on a three pitch route on a tower called the Trilogy Butress. We got some pretty good info on the route from an excellent website-mountainproject.com, as well as a dude at the local mountaineering shop.
Knowing that the heat was going to be our biggest challenge, we got an early start-11:30am. In other words, we ended up climbing in the sun during the hottest hours of the day.
I led the first pitch, an easy 5.6, to a ledge about 70 feet up the wall. I belayed Jeff up to my position, and he continued up the wall past me onto the second pitch, a 5.7. As he climbed up, the route took him around a corner and out of my sight. After a few minute, he shouted down that he could not find the anchors, only a single bolt with a rappell ring on it. What was worse, he couldn't see a single bolt anywhere on the rock above him. At his discretion, we decided to call it quits. I tried to lower him back to my level, but we found that with the rope running around a corner, there was simply too much friction. I could not lower Jeff at all. Still clipped in safely at my anchors, I untied from my end of the rope and let Jeff pull the whole thing up to him so he could rig a better rappell, which he did. With both of us at the bottom of the second pitch (remember, we're still seventy feet in the air), it was time to pull the rope. But friction had plans of its own. Try as we might, there was just no pulling the rope. It just would not budge. So we were stuck. We could not go up (no bolts), and we could not go down (the rope was stuck!). For an hour and a half we tried everything we could to get that dang rope unstuck. Finally, I ended up "reverse rappelling" the rope. That is, pushing off the rock with my feet while pulling myself up on the rope, then pulling the slack out through my belay device. So I ascended up the rope, eight inches at a time. I was able to free the rope and anchor it in a better spot (the next bolt down). I rappelled back to Jeff, and we pulled the rope without a problem. We were then able to rappell down to the ground. We hiked back to the car safe, sunburnt, and satisfied. It was a first rate adventure if I ever had one.