El Matador 

I have never done El Matador, but I have heard that after enduring that stemming pitch, it is hard to sleep on your side for a week!

While unrelenting for sure, this route is very easy to protect. Continual movement is the key, and good crack holds will help along the way. I climbed this route with someone under 5'5", he climbed the crack the whole way, and only used the stem for rests! No 5.10 climber should shy away. One of a kind.

I'm 5'6 with relatively short legs and was able to stem/chimney whenever I wanted. Awesome route but oh, the pain. The pain!

I got the same pump in my calves I usually get in my forearms after leading this pitch. I think I placed about twenty pieces of gear, because the bottlenecks in the left crack were too good to pass up, and because, at any minute, I could have succumed to the pain.

The Tower's most famous pitch.

Pitch 3 is a short and fun romp after the determination and focus required for p2. Pitch 4 looked fun, too, but we got rained off. Guess I have to do it again....

Summited the tower on the route. Did the 10a variation of P4 over the right side of the roof (it was fun and felt hard for the grade). On P4, one can skip the first anchor and go about 150ft total to the next anchor. It's then another 70/80 ft to a set of anchor (look left) at the summit.

I'm 5'6 and can stem anywhere on P2, but moving off of pure stem would be quite difficult for the first 30 ft).

500 keyhole stopper placements...you can't carry enough draws for all of them, but it doesn't really matter.

The second pitch is fantastic and is one of the most memorable I have climbed. El Mat is a must do for any 5.11 climber. It takes good pro, so dont be scared to take a shot at this classic.

I cannot agree that no move is harder than 5.9. I have climbed plenty of cracks at plenty of places and some of the crack moves on the bottom half of the climb are in the 10b or 10c range although there are easier moves in between them. I cannot judge the difficulty of the upper half of the climb because I am not used to chimney stemming, but I can say that is it going to feel plenty harder than 5.9 for those of you who are not used to it.

Gear Beta for second pitch:

The climb does like medium to small pro. I took triples from 0.5 Camalot to #1 Camalot, and doubles from 0.3 inches to 0.4 inches (blue and green aliens) and I placed most of that (I place every 10 to 12 feet) and I did not have to worry too much about having to ration certain sizes on the way up. I took two sets of nuts and I placed five or so of them. Definitely do not need any Stoppers smaller than a 5. The last 30 feet or so of the second pitch do favor smaller gear in the 0.5 inch to 0.3 inch sizes, so save some tiny cams for that section.

I took two #2 Camalots and I was only able to place one of them. I do not think you could place two on the route, so do not take 2 of those. I read somewhere that it would save time to rack nuts on individual biners. I tried this strategy and I found that it burned extra time because I was not used to it and I had to fumble around to find which nut was on which biner. That is probably a better strategy for redpointing the route. If you are looking to onsite the route, I think that sticking with your normal process is the better strategy.

Rappel Beta:

We rapped from the top of the second pitch with two 60M ropes. This dumped us off on a 4th class ramp, which I did not really like. If you are not comfortable downclimbing a little 4th class, I would rap to the anchors at the top of pitch 1 and then rap to the ground.