Sunday morning was gloomy as predicted but we did get up and head out. The closer we got to the Gunks, the nicer it got and by the time we were there the sky was pretty blue and it was warm and I was wishing I’d worn the shorts after all.<\/p>\n
I’d sworn I was leading Laurel and Ken’s Crack no matter what, that I’m going to keep leading them until they don’t scare me. Thanks to the forecast, the Gunks were pretty empty and we got right on Laurel. Todd wanted to walk down further and do Ken’s Crack first, figuring that it’s free less often, but Ken’s Crack was scarier so I insisted on starting with Laurel.<\/p>\n
It went pretty well. I only hesitated briefly before making the move, then I somehow made the move such that I didn’t get all the way to the top of the ledge with my right hand and ended up in this finger long instead where I had to do a lot of jiggling before finally getting that ledge. Then I placed a piece, which I didn’t do last time, because it’s too far to go otherwise. From there, it was smooth sailing.<\/p>\n
I grabbed our rope as soon as it was down and ran over to Ken’s Crack and it was indeed free. That went pretty well too. I way over-protected but I didn’t fall, didn’t hang, and didn’t even whine really. In fact, it felt easier than it often does when I’m following it for some reason. I think putting all that gear in forced me to keep finding stances, which there are really a lot of if you look.<\/p>\n
Then Todd led Pink Laurel and Classic which evened us up at two apiece. I had also promised myself that I would lead an equal number of pitches to him so I said let’s go over to Eyesore and maybe I’ll do Trapped Like a Rat. I hadn’t promised myself to do anymore than those two hard 7s for the day but I went ahead and picked Trapped Like a Rat over Eyesore. Well, it was hard, harder than either of those other two, but I did make it through. I was pretty close to hanging at the roof when I pumped myself out by trying to clip two pieces that were too close together, making it hard to pull the rope up. I finally got the high piece clipped by z-clipping and then fixing the lower piece. By then I had almost nothing left but thanks to do laps in the gym I was able to finish it.<\/p>\n
Then Todd led P38 and fell again (and so did I). I was feeling pretty done but he wanted to keep climbing so we walked back to the Uberfall and Horseman was open and I said I’d lead that but then he said he didn’t feel like climbing anymore so we left afterall, which was fine with me. We’d done 6 pitches, all classics, and I’d led three hard 7s. It was a great outing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sunday morning was gloomy as predicted but we did get up and head out. The closer we got to the Gunks, the nicer it got and by the time we were there the sky was pretty blue and it was warm and I was wishing I’d worn the shorts after all. I’d sworn I was… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gunks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}