New Routes in the Cave!

As I mentioned in the previous post, I had invited the climbing gang over on Saturday to set new routes in my basement cave. The response was almost overwhelming, as 7 of my friends showed up! It was a little hectic, as you can see by the time-lapse video below that my friend John Schrag put together, taking a shot every 30 seconds over a period of about 3 hours.

(time-lapse video by John Schrag)

We took turns staying out of each other's way, and everyone got to put up a route or two. We wound up with about a dozen routes in all, including (in no particular order):

• Lean to the Left: all side pulls
• Handmatchers Tale
• Light up my Smile: uses all the lightbulb holds (So Ill's Electrophobia set) and ends on the happy face hold
• Hands use only roof holds
• Wooden holds + green-taped footholds
• The Low Route: good handholds, all mounted on the bottom half of the wall (works the abs!)
• The Undercling Route: all underclings, all the time!
• Matt's Route: Up the left overhang starting with a sit start at the Cra (the first half of the crack hold pair), and up the arete with several crimpy holds, then a big stem across to the right overhang without using any feet on the end wall, and back down that arete to a controlled finish back on your butt. Elegant!
• Peter's Route: Green pockets and sandstone slopers

We didn't really finish setting a proper route on the roof, so we'll need to come back to that. But we had a lot of fun, put up some nice routes, and it will take a while for them to get stale (at which point we just do it all over again!). The official event photographer (John Grieman) took a lot of shots, and when he gets those up on Flickr I'll add a link to those, and perhaps post a few of the best here as well.