rolla

thanks Kyle and fgw, Mystery solved. Let my experience be a warning to future climbers of this route. Based on my experience and reading what you both had to say... I recommend bringing some extra webbing in case existing webbing is trashed and avoiding at all costs veering too far to the right (when looking up) into the trashy gully where you would also be rapping off of trash and praying to your god that the dead tree will not fail killing you and/or your partner. p.s. i don't think the 10b was 10b. j-tree 9 at best. the 8 above was similar to the 8 on outer space but w/o the friendly chicken heads available to folks not comfortable with a splitter crack.

Hmmm. We must have ventured too far right (from the perspective of looking at the rock from the base). This was our experience: rap 1. Off the back down to the gully that is right of the climb if facing the base. I think we rapped only 1/2 rope length. rap 2. After nearly pulling a boulder onto myself, having said boulder smash into one of our ropes (fortunately not destroyed) and scrambling maybe 20~30 feet down and 60~70 feet further right (if facing base), we found a decent sized tree with slings and rapped off of that. we left an additional sling and two biners. rap 3. this one sucked. after some more sketchy downclimbing we ended up rapping off of a 4-inch diameter dead tree with old slings attached and backed up by a loose boulder. rap 4. full double rope rap off a 3-inch diameter horizontal tree with some more old slings. So I guess in retrospect, the things that bothered me about the descent were: we weren't sure if we were on-route and so had uncertainty until the end, we had to rap off of less than bomb-proof anchors, and we were deep in a boulder strewn gully where everything wanted to come down. I would appreciate any more detail you might have on how you got down and where we could have gone wrong.

Kyle, would you describe how you got down? I just did this climb on Monday (8/22/05). I highly recommend the way up. I thought I would die on the way down (rapping off of dead and too small trees strewn with dirty old slings) and (accidentally pulling truck wheel sized boulders down to where i was standing).

late notice: Jan 31~Feb 2.