![]() ![]() “By the top, I felt pretty worked, which is normal from jugging as fast as you can,” Colley adds. ![]() A final wandering pitch of 5.6 took them to the top. Here, though easier, the terrain remains heads up – sporty hooks are followed by shallow cams out of a roof and finally lower angle terrain where Adams hooked features on the face. Two and a half pitches from the top Aurora links back into Tangerine Trip. I want it to hold body weight,” he says of the aluminum and copper blobs (copperheads) as thick as headphone wire mashed into the rock.Īdams describes the cruxes as “sustained hooking and heading and some beaking.” As for speed climbing pitch after pitch of hard aid, “It’s a battle doing such a steep route and putting it all together.” “If it’s over air and you’re going fast, I’ll grab a fixed head and give it a tiny test. ![]() Here his focus zeroed in on his one goal: Get to the top as fast as possible. Gone are the cramps in his shoulders and the anxiety of relying on fixed copperheads that could blow out of the rock unexpectedly. “Then, after 45 minutes of going for it, you start smiling and enjoy doing it,” Adams says. Pitch after pitch he repeated the cycle - clip a fixed head, pound in a beak, put in a shaky cam. “It feels overwhelming at first,” he says of how it felt knowing he had to take the team from midway up the wall to the summit. Next, he overcame wide cracks followed by hard hooking, expanding rock and more stretches of copperheads. Here he made a mantle off a hook, followed by clipping thin heads on the golden rock. Photo: ColleyĪdams took over at the top of pitch 6, which leads to The American Zone. Adams taking the lead midway up the route. Once through the Bat Cave, Colley entered the radically steep, thin aid climbing and expanding flakes that Aurora is known for. “I had a 3 Camalot in and it looked bomber, then it skated like 3 inches when I got on it,” he says. In addition to the pitch-dark, claustrophobic terrain, Colley also encountered slime and rock with a thin veneer of calcite that was so slick it spit out cams. Here Colley squeezed into a dark, wet crack where, he says, “it feels like your body is being crushed in the mountain.”Īt one-point birds flew out of the cracks and hit the team. This is where the route follows an ominous outward flaring roof feature rated A2+, 5.8, and described as “No Fun” in SuperTopo: Big Walls (3). Here “it’s pretty loose and kinda gross,” Colley says. Colley led the first half of the route and Adams led the top half.Īfter three pitches of mostly clean aid climbing on Tangerine Trip, Colley cut left out onto Aurora, where he entered a deep, dark feature called the Bat Cave. Due to the technically difficult aid on Aurora - endless stretches of copperhead seams, hard hooking sections, and periods of flared cam placements - the route remains a test piece.Ĭolley has done 15 El Cap ascents by 10 different routes and Adams has done 49 ascents via 30 different routes. Surrounding routes include the demanding aid lines Scorched Earth, Native Son, Atlantic Ocean Wall, and Iron Hawk. Their climb marks the first time the two have done a big wall in Yosemite together.Īurora is one of a cluster of routes that carve their way up the massively steep orange headwall on El Cap’s southeast face. This was Colley’s first El Cap speed record. Earlier this month he set the record for the Muir Wall. Their ascent marks Adam’s tenth El Cap speed record. On October 14, Yosemite climbing ranger Brandon Adams and Yosemite campground ranger Lance Colley pulled out all their aid-climbing tricks to halve the record, bringing it down to 13 hours. ![]() It’s only seen one previous in-a-day ascent, which was more than 20 years ago. When it was established in 1981, the route was a contender for one of the hardest routes on the Big Stone. Midway across the southeast face of El Cap, where the orange stone is sliced by knife blade-width cracks and where flakes hang precariously from the wall Aurora stands proud. ![]()
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