Fatal Flaw

Start sitting with hands on a pair of large jugs at 2.5 feet, down and right of an obvious arrow blaze. Using the thin undercling seam and blocky foot rail, traverse right into the large sloper rail feature. Follow this rightwards through increasingly hard moves to a tricky sequence to get stood up on the slab. From here a series of tricky and hard slab moves lead to some poor slopers at the lip. Use these and some very small feet to make a hard, tenuous and precarious mantle at about 15 feet above the deck (a fall from here would be exciting).

A very aesthetic line on great rock that climbs wonderfully with close to twenty hand moves, depending on your sequence. It’s almost perfect except for one fatal flaw— it’s contrived at several points along the way. It’s possible to move into ‘Endo’ at multiple points in the beginning. It’s also possible to mantle left onto the rail just past the halfway point, which eliminates a number of hard slab moves as well as the final mantle. (This version is called ‘Fatal Flaw Left’.) Were it not for being contrived, this would be one of the best lines in NH in my opinion. Ultimately, I think the line is fairly obvious and ends up climbing pretty naturally, so it doesn’t feel as contrived as it is, but your enjoyment of this line and your opinion on its quality will probably depend on the extent to which contrivances and ‘rules’ take away from the climbing experience.

This route starts on the same holds as Endoscopy. The huge, swooping sloper feature is easily identifiable even when the chalk has been washed clean by rain.

Many pads, spotter