Scratching the Surface on New Year's Day

I've mentioned my local crag quite a bit.  A quick refresher is that it's 20 minutes from my house, has a ten minute approach, and is made up to an upper and lower cliff.  The upper cliff is where I do the majority of my climbing.  The upper cliff is roughly 30 feet tall with at least a dozen routes, most harder than 5.9.  The climbing is physical and pumpy.  The face is overhanging and the holds are mostly rounded without a lot of sharp positive features or incuts.  The lower cliff is crumbly, dirty, wet, and mossy.  It's a little taller and a lot longer than the upper cliff.  But unless it's bone dry and in the dead cold of the year, the rock is just way too gnarly to climb.  Even with a good cleaning, it would still be challenging since it always seems to be wet or seeping water.  And besides a handful of splitter cracks that are clogged with debris, most of the rock is featureless.  While there are established routes, none of my partners or any of the very, very few people I've encountered climbing there (access is sensitive, and we mostly climb there when the leaves are thick enough to hide us from view) have expressed any real interest in cleaning up the lower cliff.  However, I've been saying all along that the lower cliff has potential for ice.  Last year, I got to climb Plush, WI3, and did notice several thin lines forming inside of the many splitter cracks throughout the cliff.  This year, I decided I would make an effort to explore other routes, with or without ice, but regardless I'd be wearing crampons and using axes as this cliff is suited to mixed climbing.  The cliff is undoubtedly virgin to mixed climbing and is hardly ever "rock" climbed.  There's not a mark on the rock, be it gouges or chalk.  I felt comfortable that I was one of, if not the first to climb the large flow of Plush last year.  And I'm pretty sure this year I was the first to put tools and crampons into two other mixed routes.

New Years Eve I took a ride up to check conditions and saw that Plush was just a handful of dagger icicles, but a few of the splitter lines (I want to say there's 5 or 6) had ice forming in and around them.  I asked Andrew if he'd be willing to join me early New Year's Day for a few hours and he was game.  The next morning, he showed up looking a little weary and tired from the night's celebratory activities.  He said he probably wouldn't climb much, as he's also brand new to dry-tooling and mixed climbing, but he'd be ok with belaying for an hour or two.

The first line I tried felt like 5.7 climbing, so it was probably an M2 or M3 in "mixed" ratings.  I followed a vertical crack with a 2-3 inch thick smear of ice which ran up until a horizontal crack about 5 feet from the top.  The ice was thin and there was just barely enough purchase for my tools and crampons.  To the left of the crack was a thicker flow of ice, a little over 10 feet tall.  This variation was a lot steeper than the original line, but worth climbing since the ice was good.

View of the route. Notice the ice to the left of the rope for the variation. After the horizontal crack, it's all dry rock.

Taking a quick rest before topping out.

About 30 feet to the right of this line was another splitter.  This crack was a lot wider and the wall was slightly overhanging.  As you can see in the picture below, there's a lot less ice on this route.  Not shown, at the bottom, there was a staircase of thick ice that made for a fun scramble.  But what you see here is the business of the climb.  There were very few options for tool or crampon sticks in the ice, so it was purely dry-tooling as well as turf-shots into the partially frozen moss and mud within the crack.  The climbing on this route felt more like 5.9-5.10, so it might have been an M5.  I had to get very creative on this one, using back-steps and drop-knees to get any sort of footing outside of the crack on very smooth rock with limited features.  Unfortunately, after a few tries I wasn't able to top out.  I did manage to figure out how to execute the crux (back-step and drop knee) but my forearms were in dire need of a rest and I had to lower off the route.  Not wanting to keep Andrew out, I decided to wrap it up and save the finish for next time.     

Almost...