miss akay

Climbing in the Gunks

Wow! Now that was a great day of climbing. Friday morning, I met Annie Wislowski for the very first time at 6am and we hit the road for the three hour trip to New Paltz, New York. We were at the Shawagunks, popularly called "The Gunks". We were climbing in a section called the "Trapps".

This is some of the greatest climbing I've done, by far! There were many factors that made this such an excellent trip... the weather was perfect, the climbs were fun, challenging, and at the right level for me. The rock was a great texture (not too rough for my little hands) but not slick like some other types of rock.

Annie was leading and I was cleaning. That means she climbed up the face of the wall first, placing gear/protection or "pro" into crevices served as anchors for both of us to rely on as safety. I climbed second and as I went up the face, I collected the gear out of the cracks and clipped them to my harness. I'm impressed with the Annie's climbing skills. She's a much stronger climber than I am. There were parts where I wasn't sure I could hang on, no less imagine her role where she's climbing without an anchor above to catch her. There is no anchor until she places one. Then she climbs past it, so if she falls, it is a distance that is more than twice where the last piece of protection is placed. It can be scary to take a fall on lead, because the distance is far, it's on rock, and those pieces of pro had better hold! I have never done any traditional lead climbing, yet. I've done what's called sport climbing, which is wear there are bolts already in the rock and you clip your rope them as you reach them. This is much simpler than trying to find a spot to jam a nut or cam, in order to make an anchor to clip into. As soon as I get back into the grove of things, I'm hoping to do a bit of leading. First, I have to get my strength up a little bit.

The climbs we did were rated 5.5 "The Horseman" and 5.6- "Frog's Head". The first one was a great warm-up and the second one was a little bit more challenging. Both of them, very do-able. I bought my year pass, so it's safe to say that I'm coming back!

posted by miss akay @ 5:21 PM