disjoint thoughts

After getting rained out at Red Rocks, Erin and I decided to get at least one day of climbing in. We picked a Superstition multipitch route that neither of us had done: Rink-Kudo.

So for people who don’t like to read, here’s how this blog post ends: don’t do this route.

The approach isn’t too bad, it’s pretty hard to get lost and the hike isn’t too hard.

Pitch 1 is decent. The crux is down low where you need to traverse between two cracks. I’m not very flexible and found myself crying out in pain as I tried to do a stem move. Other than that it was a good pitch. Not much lose rock. Good pro. Fun movements.

Pitch 2 is adventurous, at least if you climb it the way I did. I started up a crack that had at least 2 big bushes growing out of it. I guess I should have scoped out the pitch a little better before heading up. The rock was good, climbing was ok, pro was good. There’s a little tunnel at the end of the pitch that’s really kind of a disappointment. It’s more of a hole you step through.

Pitch 3 is where the shit starts to hit the fan. You start off by traversing left to reach the base of a chimney. You can place the shitty pro at the bottom of the chimney in mud cracks and lose flakes, but why bother. Once you’re tired of fiddling with pro, you fire up into the unknown of the chimney above. That unknown chimney is crappy. This chimney makes Ancient Art seem like granite. Lose, SHARP, rock is everywhere. Luckily your belayer is mostly out of harms way since the start of the pitch is a traverse, otherwise I’d rate this pitch an X for your second. The pro is ok, you just have to find it.

Pitch 4 is only for suckers who didn’t have enough of this route on pitch 3. If there were fixed anchors at the top of pitch 3, I would have considered bailing. This pitch is pretty much face climbing. It would be great if the rock wasn’t deceivingly crappy and the pro almost non-existent and equally crappy. In the 180 feet of climbing on this pitch, there were maybe two pieces of pro that I thought would would have held a fall. I had several hold break off on me, making the climbing extremely insecure. I was unable to trust my pro, and unable to trust the holds that I was climbing on. This was the worst pitch of climbing I’ve done. To add insult to injury, the summit has only one spinning bolt. You can back it up for your second with a suspect #3 tricam placement and a #1 bd nut.

The decent isn’t bad, but bring some extra webbing as you’ll probably need to replace some old shit… I don’t think this route sees many ascents.

I can’t recommend this climb to anyone. If you do it, just be careful and be ready for some insecure climbing. As for me, I’ve had my share of Superstition choss for awhile.