By Dave Goodell Aug 17, 2011 rating: 5.7
| Ditto Gary's comments. The route description seems wrong, but the photo looks right to me. There's another photo of First Crack listed incorrectly as Second Crack here. I thought this was a really fun trad lead. The upper two thirds of the climb takes stoppers really well, so you don't need a big rack to lead this one. There are only three downsides that I see to the route. One is that there is a lot of small loose rock and dirt to knock down on your belayer if you're not careful. Another is that, like most all routes here, it's rather short. The last is that you can't realistically get any protection in until your feet are maybe 10 feet off the ground. There's a good spot for a mid-size cam (#.75 C4 maybe?) lower, but you'd have to extend the piece enough to get the rope around the bulge higher up that it wouldn't offer any real protection against decking. Instead just climb carefully until you can get a #3 C4 in above a block trapped in the crack maybe 15 feet off the ground. Just remind yourself that the holds are all pretty good and the climbing is easy. If you really want to fuss more, you could probably put that smaller cam in not extended, clip it, put the #3 in higher, then down climb and back-clean the smaller cam to avoid the rope drag. There are 3 bolts at the top for anchoring. |