This is a frustrating 5.8, and that is because the first 8 feet are balancy 5.10! An excellent route to sandbag beginner climbers on, which I found out on my first day of climbing as I never really got off the ground.
This is the bolt line closest to Hornets Nest on Critical View. Stand up on a large blocky foothold, which is much harder and more delicate than it looks. A few more thin moves get you to the second bolt, and then cruiser 5.8 to the top.
This route use to be definately 5.8. But through the course of erosion and the missing stone the start has gotten harder. The ground use to be at least 18 inches higher aqt the base of the rock. I use to be able to walk up to the route and step right up on the big knob. Now I have to make some interesting moves to get on it. Then there was a cheater stone at it's base for awhile which is now gone too.
I get a kick out of just walking by this route. Every time I'm in the South Seas and I pass Critical View I'm amused by how people remedy their frustration of the start of the route. As Bob said, the large nob at the bottom keeps getting higher and higher from erosion, and people get more and more creative in how they get up to that nob. Once I saw smaller rocks with sticks on top piled up at the base, another time there was this small boulder there that only could've been lifted by two people, and just recently I found a log braced between the nob and ground for frustrated climbers to walk up. Admittedly, when I first started climbing about nine years ago, Tom Bodensteiner and myself used to take a running start at the route, quickdraw in hand, and hop up on that nob to clip the first bolt. I'm glad to say I've since solved the "problem" of the boulder start, but Critical View is still one of my own personal classics.
RSS Feed
