Last Day in the Creek

The day started wet. Frustratingly, it didn't seem so wet to abandon hope of climbing but it was too wet to actually climb. We decided to look at some of the less popular crags and were set to spend the day, in Tom's words, "like the Foreign Legion - carrying around heavy packs without actually doing anything". To get to the unpopular buttresses isn't easy. The paths are poorly defined and the terrain quite challenging. We first went to the Sabatical wall. I was overwhelmed because I had only really heard about a couple of Buttresses and suddenly there was 30 or more Indian Creeks all in a row. As I saw these close to it became apparant that for a lot of them the rock quality was quite poor and that there were considerably fewer possible lines and even fewer that I'd actually like to do. That being said there were some absolute gems there. Sabatical Wall was unsurprisingly wet, we didn't want to wait for it to dry so we went to Critic's Choice. This is home to "Belly full of Bad Berries" which is a hard wide crack that is well known after featuring in the film Return2Sender.

Belly full of Bad Berries follows the crazily steep arch shown in the picture. It starts off fingers and finished off width. In the film they make improbable moves. They seemed to spend as much time upsidedown pulling on their feet as the right way up. It was great to see but I know I'll never try it.

Getting to the base of the route was really hard. It was interesting because we had to cross strange improbable formations of sand, loose rock and mud. I've shown some images below. The approach was eerie and seemed otherworldly. It was also moderately scary as stable was one word that I would be reluctant to associate with the terrain.

I didn't go very close to this. I have no idea how it has survived or if it will be there tomorrow.

We had to detour around formations like this. How can you possibly ascend them. Apart from destroying something beautiful I think on a practical note it would be virtually impossibe.

We actually climbed one route (Bunny Slope). It was 5.9+ and after a sandy start followed a perfect handcrack up a slab. The route was over 50m and after the first 7m was all yellow camolots. Luckily we had a small arsenal. It was a joy to climb after the wider stuff on Blue Gramma. Nevertheless, I was struggling to keep up with the pace and decided that it was time for a change of scenery. Las Vegas was calling and I was hearing its call.