{"id":76,"date":"2000-10-14T20:31:00","date_gmt":"2000-10-14T20:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing2\/?p=76"},"modified":"2000-10-14T20:31:00","modified_gmt":"2000-10-14T20:31:00","slug":"women-leaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/2000\/10\/women-leaders.html","title":{"rendered":"Women leaders"},"content":{"rendered":"

We climbed in a group of 7 on Saturday, which worked out better than you might think. We landed in the Broken Sling area. I’ve pretty thoroughly led the routes in my range in that area, including both pitches of Broken Sling (5.8+) in one long pitch during the apex of my leading career.<\/p>\n

The route has a “bouldery start” which means that you’re past the crux before you get any gear in. From there the difficulty eases up considerably. During this recent period of lead head woes I have stated more than once that you couldn’t get me to lead that route again. Much of that had to do with the second pitch, though, which features a long runout traverse, not hard but the fall would be serious. So on Saturday I stood at the bottom of Broken Sling, considering the possibility of leading the first pitch, bouldery start and all, and decided to try it.<\/p>\n

I sketched through the opening moves, needing a little more encouragement (and a spot) than I had the first time around, but I did resist the urge to place gear immediately upon its becoming possible. I remembered that the gear, and the stance, were better if I stood up first and had the faith in myself that I needed to do it.<\/p>\n

Since I had led the route before and was actually feeling pretty strong and calm, I decided to try the direct variation which goes through the first roof instead of around it to the left. This variation is described as “no harder than 5.8”. The gear was good, so I started up, remembering that I could downclimb if I didn’t like what I found, but I had no problem pulling through it. I’ve learned better than to think that my lead head problems are solved because of one success, but I felt good about re-leading this route which was undoubtedly one of the most challenging I ever led.<\/p>\n

Everyone led something or other and there were plenty of ropes to choose from throughout the day. Although the parking lots were congested, the Nears were strangely quiet and we didn’t seem to be in anyone’s way. We had a bad moment when we realized that Todd’s rack was missing. After a half hour of searching it was eventually discovered farther down the cliff. Apparently another climber had moved it, mistakenly believing it belonged to a friend of his. Thanks to everyone who helped look for it and especially to those people who graciously opened their packs for us.<\/p>\n

Todd put a rope up on the first pitch of Inverted Layback (5.9). There’s no fixed anchor at the top of the first pitch, so we knew that eventually two people would have to go up and finish the route to the top. I had led the second pitch (5.8) before (again during my “leading is easy” days). No one else was jumping at the opportunity, so it fell to me to be the leader who would finish the route.<\/p>\n

I was followed by a guy from our party who has 20 years of climbing experience. At the first belay he said “I’ve never followed a woman before.” I thought this was odd. I knew he had a regular woman partner and that he has followed (i.e. cleaned gear for) her before, so I questioned Todd about it later. Todd’s take was that he was referring to a multi-pitch situation. Even so, I was surprised he’d never swung leads with such a regular partner, or followed her up a multi-pitch route at her leading level. <\/p>\n

Eventually I decided he meant that he’d never had a woman leader<\/i> before, meaning that he’d never arrived at a belay to have a woman start barking orders at him – “Sit there. Clip into that. Hold this.” This was interesting considering a recent discussion on rec.climbing (see All Women CLimbers of SF Bay Area UNITE!!! if you’re feeling masochistic). But it wasn’t a problem. I led and he followed and we both arrived at the top safe and sound. Now he’s followed a woman and he’s none the worse for it.<\/p>\n

\"Todd<\/div>\n

Another highlight of the day was taking a second stab at Criss (5.11) which I think I’m really close to getting clean if I can just remember the exact sequence I need to use. The lowlight for the day was the traffic from the cliff to New Paltz. Fear of traffic, combined with soreness, general malaise, and the Cowboys\/Giants game, kept me and Todd at home on Sunday. The Cowboys lost, BTW. Guess we should have gone climbing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We climbed in a group of 7 on Saturday, which worked out better than you might think. We landed in the Broken Sling area. I’ve pretty thoroughly led the routes in my range in that area, including both pitches of Broken Sling (5.8+) in one long pitch during the apex of my leading career. The… 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-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gunks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","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=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/climbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}