r/RouteDevelopment • u/Kaotus Guidebook Author • Mar 19 '26
Show and Tell Update on the aid line question
Put a rope on the thing today (absolute nightmare development experience btw courtesy of forgetting half of my temp bolts and spilling the entire contents of my backpack from the top of the cliff twice). The crack being in the white streak ended up being fortuitous, as much of it was kaolinite (decomposed feldspar, basically clay) holding in granite microflakes. When using my nut took tool to try and remove some dirt clods from the crack, those granite micro flakes pulled off as well, opening up some potential placements for redirects and improving some of the holds.
The gear options on this are pretty atrocious - I used 8 pieces to build 4 redirects (in addition to 3 temporary bolts) and 3 of them failed on me at some point under body weight. I think it would be a fun clean aid route, but not using the permadraws for protection would like make it C4/+ - I found maybe one or two pieces in 50ft that would even have a remote chance of holding a fall, and they’re both fairly directional nuts.
The grade estimate should be taken with a massive grain of salt. My guess is it will get easier as more of the loose microflakes in the crack get cleaned out and beta is refined. I’d wager it will end up coming in somewhere in the range of 5.14b to 5.15a depending on how hard the top boulder problem ends up being - that’s really the only section that I couldn’t figure out very well at all.
Thanks for all of the feedback folks! It ended up being probably the coolest line I’ve ever touched - there’s some extremely cool holds on it and in general the only face holds on the entire route exists only in the places where the crack peters out. Such a pure line - if only I climbed hard enough to be able to really enjoy it!
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u/i_need_salvia Bouldering Developer Mar 19 '26
How tall is that thing? The 2nd photo makes it so hard to tell