A Day of High Exposure

Ten D Sandbag - Thanks, Guys

We walked further down the track. I left to relieve myself, and when I came back, Mike and Eric had found some climbs. They sent me up first. I should have been suspicious.

"How hard?" I asked.

"Nine plus," they told me in chorus.

"Oh, I can do that then, I suppose."

And the beginning wasn't that hard. A mantle up onto a block stymied me for a while, but then I was on it. That's when it got hard.

"Can I use the edge?" I asked. No, I couldn't. I tried, and retreated, tried and retreated, tried again, and fell. Finally I said "Screw this," and then, "How hard is this again?" I asked.

There was a silence from below.

I hung on the rope and twisted to look down.

"How hard?"

They looked at each other. "Well, we didn't want to tell you. We thought you wouldn't try it if we told you."

"How HARD!"

"Uh... 10d. We thought you'd be really psyched when you on-sighted it."

"Yeah, right." It was common knowledge how long and how hard I had been trying to on-sight ten. And here they had thrown me on an almost-eleven. A woman climbing past on a neighboring route gave me a sympathetic look. "So they're your friends, eh?"

"Right."

I applied myself to the edge for a couple of moves until the slick surface of the slab relented, and then I swarmed up the rest of the climb in minutes. Eric moved quickly to the crux, explored a bit, and then padded through it like at cat. Mike tried it next, and though he fell a little more than I, with some advice on slab climbing from Eric, he actually made the crux correctly. I was inspired to go back and do it also. And with smearing in hand, a technique I used relatively rarely, it wasn't as hard as it had seemed.

Again, in Connecticut, a 5.10 b-c would take four or five days at a minimum, spread across weeks worth of work and visualization. I couldn't even climb 5.10d in Connecticut. I had to think the routes here were underrated, not even counting how much easier it was clipping bolts, compared with actually leading.

Eric shows us the right way to handle a 5.10d sport slab.