Trip Report: Red Rock, NV

I know this is supposed to be a knitting blog, but sometimes the knitting just isn't as exciting as other life events... bear with me though, I'm nearing a couple of FOs and will be posting them soon!

I took a mini climbing trip to Red Rock last weekend and had a blast. RR has got be one of my most favorite places to climb. It's huge, the possibilities are endless, and it offer tons of long, moderate trad climbs.


Day 1: The epic. After going around in circles about what to climb, we settled on a 4-pitch climb called Johnny Vegas which takes you to a large ledge from which you have the option of either descending or continuing up another 7-9 pitches to the top of the formation. We really wanted to get to the top, but thought we thought we'd play it by ear...

I led the 1st pitch, which was easy and tons of fun. When my bf got to the belay ledge he said he had gotten sick at the bottom and wasn't feeling great, but didn't want to give up on the climb. So the dubious honor of leading the remaining pitches fell to me. Nowhere to go but up, I led through the climb, enjoying every move and challenge. It couldn't have been more fun and satisfying. While I felt horrible for my dear bf, I loved the experience.


At the ledge, we ate a little something and he started feeling a little better. What should we do? Continue on up! From the ledge we climbed Solar Slab wandering many pitches up a huge sandstone wall, full of awesome cracks and interesting plate-y face climbing. Because walking off the top would have been an adventure of several hours, we decided to stop short of the top and rappel the route. After a couple of hours and 8+ rappels, we were safely back on terra firma, although we did the walk back out of the canyon by headlamp. 'Twas a spectacular day!


Day 2: after getting up at the crack of dawn the previous day, we slept in 'til 8 am and slowly packed up and grabbed coffee and breakfast. On the agenda for the day: a 2 pitch climb called Physical Graffiti. The first pitch was a little funky, but the second pitch was a full rope length of awesome hand crack.


After physical graffiti, we thought it might be nice to squeeze in a few more casual single pitch sport routes. So off we went to a place called the panty wall (ick). For some reason, the steeper nature of the sport climbing unnerved me a bit and I found what should have been easy straightforward climbing to be... um... challenging. We led a couple of routes (in shaky form) and called it a day.


Although I ticked a few things off of my to-do list, it's still quite long and I can't wait to get back there!!


Back with knitting soon!

posted by rockbridge @ 9:50 AM 2 Comments