BETA PHOTO: The Miner's Delight sector showing existing routes...
Description
Strike It Rich is a very fun 2 pitch route that starts by climbing Miners Delight for 3/4 of its first pitch and then branching off, up and left to the first belay. Both pitches are generously bolted, nicely exposed and pretty steep.
Pitch 1: 5.11b, 18 bolts, 120'. Climb P1 of Miners Delight for about 80', over a small roof, and then find the line of bolts heading up and left to a semi-hanging belay (100' rap to the ground). Climbing the last 40', from the roof to the belay, is interesting and positively fun. It's not terribly technical--it mostly involves working through the side effects of a pretty good pump.
Pitch 2: 5.12a, 12 bolts, 85'. Follow the corners straight up the steep wall to a nice face-climbing crux near the end. There's an .11a section pulling into/out of a dihedral at about 50', finishing at a good rest. The crux is about 15' higher and may not seem too bad if you rest long enough. The anchor is just over the steep stuff on a slab. You can lower off (a bit of rope drag), or rap, or top out and walk off the ramp system.
Strike It Rich is equal in quality to Miners, and though it's probably a little more exposed, it seems lots less intimidating. Richard deserves 99.99% of the credit for this route. He found it, cleaned it, bolted it, and incurred all the expense and work(!) to get it in. I was just lucky enough to climb it and snag the redpoint. Another excellent addition to Ra.
The perils of climbing into one's 50's get compounded when one climbs with a truly great athelete. I thought Strike It Rich would be a very good climb - with a fingery and tricky crux. P1 climbs through most of Miners P1 which sets the stage for a good forearm burn. The traverse that links SIR to Miners adds problems of route finding, on a steep wall, that come in after the pump has already started. And this net you 120 feet of climbing. Mark on-sighted it. At mid 5.11 I figured that was cool, but not surprising. P2 starts easy and ratchets up the tricky and inobvious sequences. The crux comes after 75 feet of this and it is tricky, fingery, inobvious, and your feet go all the way to hell, just when you need them most. I had run it on jugs, got the clipping stances down, cleaned some key invisible holds, ran each sequence while bolting it, and figured I was pretty much set to rock and roll (BMOC!). I led it, bobbled my own sequences, and Mark promptly flashed it. Am I supposed to do something about this? Break his fingers? Not in this life. Back to the gym seems like a good option, but it reminds me of the Nike ad: "Somewhere, someone is training when you are not. When you come up against them, you will loose."
Ra
RSS Feed
