Day 8

There is a huge wealth of climbs in Indian Creek and I’d realised that it was important to play to my strengths. I’m better suited to endurance climbs than steep test pieces. I also prefer the splitter style cracks to the corner cracks. My mind kept coming back to Generic Crack that we had done on the first day. I’d got it clean despite it’s length and my newness to Indian Creek climbing. Also, I was the only person in our group who could either do it, or liked it. The bottom part of the crack was flared and I think that this phased some people. To me it wasn’t a problem as I had spent a large amount of last year working on a flared crack project in Haukkakallio . On lead I felt the same as I did on Supercrack, I didn’t plan the gear well and brought too few #2 camalots and too many larger ones. This meant that I had to run things out a little further above the pieces I did have, but even then I felt in control in a similar way to Supercrack. I felt good and confident again but exhausted, particularly by the unrelentless heat of the desert. I then climbed Binou’s Crack 5.9. This was a bit different from where my strengths are but I felt fine the whole way. It involved a bit of laybacking, and the top part of the climb was protected entirely by Aliens. Aliens are small cams, and with their counterparts from other manufacturers they have revolutionised the climbing of thin cracks, providing protection where previously none was available. Small camming devices are not as good as the larger ones and whilst people do fall on them even on soft sandstone I don’t trust them in the manner that I trust the larger pieces. Despite this I stayed calm and in control. At this stage dark clouds provided some relief from the sun but the wind picked up and rain looked imminent. Despite just having done two routes, we decided to call it a day. Calling it a day wasn't a bad idea, the weather turned windy and blew dust into the tents, I don't know whether it counts as a dust storm, but the combination of dust and wind was enough to convince a Northern European not to climb.

A random punter on Generic crack. Actually, I told the belayer the URL of this site and offered to email photos if they got in contact. So if you want them, you can have them.