Siuirana Climbing

At the moment I'm cranky because no one is driving to Mile End tomorrow, so I probably won't be able to go, but this post is about...

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Today when we got up it was finally clear, and the rain had stopped, although there were intermittent clouds. Nick and I ate breakfast relatively quickly and headed back to Grau dels Masets. We were disappointed to see that a climb we had identified two days ago as looking good, but hadn't yet done, was absolutely dripping. It was a 6b that shared anchors with a 7 (easy 5.12 range) that we wanted to toprope -- but both were sopping, so that was a no go.

We warmed up on some other stuff at the eastern part of Grau dels Masets, and did a pretty tricky 6b (one of the ones that Nick didn't quite onsight despite being pretty close, and then I flashed by using his beta and prehung draws -- strop strop). Then we heaed over to the western part of the crag to do some of the longer, more exposed stuff. The hand-drawn topo in the guidebook was confusing at first when we thought we found the world's softest 6b (turned out to be 5+), but then we figured it out and did a whole bunch of 6s there, almost all lead, pretty much all in the 5.10 range.

We ate lunch at one point while we waited for a route to free up. Both us and another party wanted to both do two routes that shared the same set of anchors. We wanted to lead one and TR the other; the other party wanted to lead both. So we were stepping on each other's heads and crossing ropes and all that stuff. So at one point they were doing something while we ate lunch and watched it get progressively cloudier.

However, it hadn't totally started raining or anything, so once we got the chance we attempted to TR the 6c+ that came down from the anchors we had already clipped. We knew that the start was going to be hard based on the other party, but Nick and I simply never figured it out, and the other party was gone by this point. Eventually we both pulled past it and both cleanly TRd the rest of the climb, which was in the 6c/6c+ range. The bouldery start to me felt way harder, since neither Nick nor I could find any way of doing it that was even close. I would have lead the rest if I had figured out a way to do the start, since the rest was totally my style. I kind of suspected that something had broken at the start at some point, though.

There were a few drops of rain after that, but it eventually passed and became sunny again, and Nick and I did a few more easy 6s before heading back to the campground. That night, we ate dinner at the campsite restaurant again (we were pretty much out of food, and there were also a few more sporadic rain showers at this point) and headed to bed early again. This was our most productive sport climbing day of the trip, and was generally really pretty good -- it was too bad we didn't have more days like this! We didn't take any pictures this day, though.