The best things in life require a little work, like getting born. If you've found yourself drooling over the flawless 5.10 dihedral pictured on the cover of Shull's Southeastern Rock, it's time to put in a little grunt work and escape the Womb. A mandatory stop on the southeastern climber's Yosemite training circuit.
P1: A 5.9 hand crack angles up and right to the route's namesake pod in a left-facing corner after 165'. Belay from bolts. Or break it up and belay from a ledge after 65 feet.
P2: Crux. To gain the corner, you must squirm to the top of the pod and convert from squeeze-chimney technique to laybacking the left-facing corner above. Fortunately, most of the conversion takes place while toproping from excellent gear. Kicking your belayer in the head at least once is de rigeur; twice, and you're buying the beer. Once established in the corner, stem and layback your way to glory for 50 feet or so and belay on a ledge from gear.
P3: Brows to the trees, 5.7.
Location
The Womb dihedral is distinct as the right margin of the slabby left end of the North Face. Look for a right-facing, vegetated flake about 40 feet up, which in turn will take you to the right-angling hand crack that ends at the Womb.
DESCENT: Walk off to climber's left, or shwack over to the R and use the Safari Jive raps.
This is a great route & probably the hardest free route on the Glass & probably the state when it was freed in the early '70s. I don't mean to take credit away from the first free ascentionests listed here and I am not one to normally quibble on route ascents, but when things are being historically recorded it seems right to get them as accurate as possible. I will also state that this occured over 30 years ago so my timeline memory may not be the most accurate.
For the record. This was freed very close to the same time by 2 different parties. Those parties were Diff Ritchie, Tim McMillan & myself. And Jeep Gaskin & Joe Meyers. I believe our free ascent was @ 1974/75 at the latest. Communication of what was happening on routes back then was only word of mouth as there were very few climbers active in the state. At the time none of us had met Jeep or Joe. There were also very few climbers in the state, that we knew of, that could come close to climbing at that level at that period of time. Jeep later told me that he & Joe Myers had freed this route and I told him about our free ascent as well and that I believed it may have predated his & Joes ascent. Checking the Kelly & Shull/Lambert guide books I can see that the FFA is credited to Jeep & Joe in both books in 1977. If done in 77, as listed in the guide books, then their ascent was most likely not the historical FFA.
I will say that both ascents were very close to the same time period. Between the 2 separate free ascents I don't know that either party is really sure who actually did the first free on this one. I do remember a little discussion with Jeep on this back in the day. Perhaps historical credit could probably go to all in both parties. Or at least Diff Ritchie & Jeep Gaskin as they both lead the crux pitch, not knowing it had been freed. Regardless of who actually got the FFA on this route it was a great lead & FFA by two very talented, visionary, and bad ass climbers for that era!
Looking Glass Rock
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