threat level? Colombia…

We´ve been here now in Colombia for 1 week, Bogota specifically. Yes, there is a threat level, but it seems more about where you choose to go than just being here. Jon’s family is from Colombia (his mother’s side), and that’s who we’ve been staying with. This trip is equally about seeing Colombia as it about going climbing, and since we aren’t prepared to rope climb (are we ever??), we bouldered one day at a sport crag called Suesca.

Our contacts prior to arriving didn’t pan out (in all truth, Mateo Cardenas, the LT11 main man, has been overwhelmed with work), so we went to a local bouldering gym called Roca Solida. This ended up working well as we were graciously assisted by the owner, Andreas Davila. Not only did he personally take us to Sutatausa (Suta for short), he’s allowed us to climb in his gym! It’s not big, but it has a decent steep area that our local gym, Rockreation Orange County, doesn’t have. It’s been nice to make up problems. After 3 weeks in Hueco on mainly roof or steep lines courtesy Rob Guinn’s guiding through Wagon Wheel, we’re content to keep up the practice!

Jon and I doing some product demoing for Andreas at his gym, Roca Solida.

…on the road

As of now, we won’t be doing any more development for awhile. We’re in Hueco till the end of January, and I can only post on hueco for the time being. Once we return to socal, I’ll collect past images of josh and continue to post on what was done in the past. This I’ll do while we go to Colombia, then Europe and the Middle East. When we return, if all goes well, we’ll head up to Squamish for a couple of months! Basically, what this means is I’ll post on what we are doing currently (away from josh) and catching up finally on all past things we’ve done in josh that we have records for.

Wish everyone the best climbing, health and happiness for 2012. We certainly will try our best!

yet another Koge cousin… the traverse

As I mentioned in the previous post, the Koge Traverse a direct contender for a quality traverse with Relic. Robert gives Relic 4 stars. Hmmm. This line is at least a star better. I think Relic is 2-3 stars; I’d give KT 4 stars. The finish is first rate, the whole line is more unique on top quality stone, and the landing is flat. It’s longer too, but that’s from memory. Jon and I also think Relic is v8, and I was guessing The Koge traverse is about as hard.

the traverse starts on a big ledge at the far right side of the face. He's about to start the first crux sequence.

velvet elvis and another new line

Either in a video, or in person, we’ve heard Velvet Elvis is now v9 or 10. The start hold did break, and now it’s a thinner slanting crimp, but it’s much closer to the crack. When Jon, Rob Guinn, and I did it a bit ago, the move to the crack, matching then going to the first flat crimp below the upper vertical crack, was the crux. Also, the original start we did was matching on the original hold, before it broke off. We plan to repeat it and see what the difference is. When we do that, I’ll post our observations.

Just a stone’s throw from VE, north up into the boulder field, is a hanging arete I’ve eyed for years. A month or so ago we walked through there again, and revisited its potential. It’s short, but very clean on superb stone. The problem starts at the base of the turn in the horizontal arete.

as seen from the road. this is a cropped image and the only one we have besides video. the arete appears as a shadow line just to the right of Jon in the blue shirt. At the shallow notch near the top is where the line turns back onto the slab out of sight.

Roadside on GTR

After visiting the Equinox area previously, and with Jon away for the recent holiday, we lost motivation to hike back out and ended up wandering around the boulders on the east side just north of the Peanut. And north of the Peanut is the Shark Fin area (actually the Shark Fin is just north of a formation we don’t know the name to, if it has one) which is opposite an obvious turnout on the right past a previous turnout for Equinox/Slashface, also on the right. I’d wandered through these boulders before and even eyed the very same faces and cracks, but this time they just seemed worth trying. The crack, which is in a video below, is obvious from the road. Maybe it’s been done, maybe not, but I knocked off a fair bit of dark gray surface rock that left lighter patches (an indicator it may not have been climbed). Also, the climbing surface within the crack is very good save a few spots low that had a bit of grain (again, odd to be there for such good rock had it been climbed before). The feet are not good, mostly smearing, and a mid height boulder is it’s only drawback that interferes with a move or two midway. Most likely it would be climbed from the boulder where Jill is crouched. On my first go, I dabbed on a pad on top of the boulder, and my second go dabbed on a 1″ pad at the lip of the boulder. My third go was close, but I avoided the “detritus.”

seen during the day, the line would be quite good without that boulder, and a bit heady. as it is, it's a good line. Roadside traverse, v2?.

Equinox crag and its local potential…

Around the formation of the stellar crack Equinox, there’s much potential. Some of it has clearly been done, but much has not, or seems to have not, been touched. The small satellite formation north of the famous crack has some development on it, and an obvious squarish block sitting just next to but south of it, has a few chalked lines up that impressive boulder. The boulders that reside around the northeast corner on the main formation have also most likely been done. I’ll list all that we climbed even if they’ve already been climbed. The ones we thought were FA’s I’ll also mention.

On the north end of the main formation resides a small boulder with a distinct vertical crack on the south side (actually, from memory of an older visit, that crack goes all the way through but is short on the north end). These we talked about here. Around the eastern corner (NE corner of the formation) from this crack boulder are a nice cluster of boulders that I’ll call the Nox boulders.

Our previous visit here we did only 3 lines, all of which may have been done before. This time we added 4 more lines, all of which we think are FA’s. First up is what we had called the Shield boulder: a plate of harder and finer stone not unlike the face of Alexandria, but MUCH smaller and shorter! There’s a left and right line called the Left Shield and the Right Shield that we posted about in the last blog before the summer break here. The slab may not have been done though. It’s quite thin.

The obvious shield on the Shield boulder. The arete, called the Sword Arete, in the background on the left was also done this time around as a low start.

how to make chalkbag zippers work better.

We’ve returned to josh on a regular basis as of this last Friday, the 18th. It’s been a long summer, so to speak, as the weather only recently cooled down. We didn’t take advantage of the start of the cold weather, but we did get in one day prior to friday.

We left off blogging at the end of last season without posting about the lines at the Sanctuary boulder. It’s a bit of hike, but mostly flat. It’s out in the far east at the Virgin Isles/Islands. We will also be adding video more often, but this post is about zippers: something I came up with that works well for chalked and poorly running zippers.

After heavy use, the zippers seem to get really clogged with chalk, and they no longer move smoothly. I decided on a fix that probably would have been better had I performed it on the bag new. I didn’t. So to fix that what I did was use a can of compressed air and blew out as much chalk as I could in the zipper. I noticed that I needed a fair amount of spraying to clean them out, and in doing so, I found the can to get really cold and ultimately lost its pressure. Having little to no experience with these compressed air cans, I can’t say what that means, other than they seemed to suck when it came to doing a lot of spraying.

In the end, I just switched to using a second can (they came in a two pack) to finish the job. After that, I sprayed a wax-based lubricant used for bike chains and made sure it covered all of the zipper, inside and out. The brand I used was really watery and so easy to overspray.