Laurel Knob - Water Groovin' All Daywoodzy | 03 November, 2007 01:33 Laurel Knob is such a spectacular set of granite!!! This weekend AM and I got on Canyon's of Laurel. Man yeah... We left ATL at around 8pm. These late starts I've been taking recently are really started to get to me. Thank goodness, however, that Laurel Knob is only 2.5 hours away from ATL at the right speed and in the right way. The wrong way will put you on US64 for waaay too long. That street is menacing at night :). Anyway, we got there around 11pm; roll out of the car onto the ground at Panthertown and sleep. I slept on a posh *two*, count it two, inflatable matresses. Why? Because I could and I was car camping, so whatever :). We got up bright and early at 6am. Ate some simple breakfast, failed to warm our hands and then started the long hike into Laurel. Damn it was cold, and the trail was surprisingly wet which of course made me worry about the face of Laurel. The last time I came to climb at LK all the water grooves were occupied by little water dropplets. Finally arriving at the descent trail that is going to hugely erode eventually, I have to pause and think about how annoying it is going to be to have to climb back up that mess. Anyway down I go. At the bottom, we find this HUGE roomly developer created trail that just make me feel sad and ugh it sucked. Why did some developer come and make this huge, car path basically, trail right at the face. Any why can't I park closer to the damn mountain if there is such EASY access. Bullshit. Whatever, I'm happy to be able to climb there I guess. No, actually I am SUPER happy to be able to climb there... We started up at the route we were about to do... shit it looked hard. It looked really hard. Oh oh, nevermind that was another route we were looking at. Damn Stegg, your a badass. Ok now that we've found the actual route we are going the climb, Canyons of Laurel, it looks much more manageable. AM and I deicide I will lead the first two pitches, he will take 3 & 4 pitches, and we will swap out the 5/6/7/(and the tried 7.5) pitches. I start running up the 40' solo to the first bolt, after having done a completely unnecessary 5.9 slab move off the deck. I clip Mr. Bolt and am suddenly aware of how awesome the friction is today. "I can climb anything made of granite today!", I remember thinking. Little did I know, I would have to. The rest of that pitch happens rather uneventfully. I mean what else can you expect but some run outs on 5.7 terrain on granite slab. Didn't get into the real water groovin' yet though. Man pitch 2, really made things interesting. The topo is kinda misleading for this guy. What you should do is follow Stegg's alternate route straight up the water groove. But I was being all stubborn and wanted to do it the FA way. So I set off. The topo says to follow one "crack" up a little, then shoot straight up, then traverse back to the water groove. Right... I ran up one crack... decided it was too far right, came back, did some sketchy 5.10 slab move over a lip onto unprotected face (the gear below was pretty damn good so I wasn't too worried, except for my ankles... I was far below) that led me into another crack. I followed this crack until I was about equal in height to the anchors. I then saw a chance to go directly to the left, directly to the anchors. The chance I saw was really this sketchy 15' traverse with no hand holds, but on oh 55/60 degree granite. So I commit to that shit. That was scary, but the friction was feeling amazing. After a really sketchy move at the end of the traverse back into the water groove, I clip into the anchors, look down at the straight up and get annoyed at how easy the straight up version would have been... and also noticed that I happened to clip NO bolts on this pitch. Even though the FA had put a few in (2 i think?) Heh, so ah, I managed to do it differently. So yeah whatever I did; I am now going to call the "Plank Variation" since that last section was like walking a plank. Heh. Its clever, shut-up. Pitch 3, I didn't realize this was going to be the best pitch on the damn route, but AM got to lead this spectacular pitch that was the most well protected hard climbing in NC I've ever done. There were literally 14 or 15 bolts on this thing, and some were clearly spaced to allow aidy'ish moves if you needed to. I would not have believed that slab climbing on 85/90
degree granite was possible, but in a water groove ANYTHING is
possible. Holy crap, Some of the smears and things I stepped on in this
spectacular water groove just blow my mind. I was thinking about it
afterwards, and I just can't explain how some of those moves worked.
Just 150' of amazing 11b water groovin! Damn it was awesome. It made it
even more spicy that I was trailing the rap rope and had the water
attached to my harness. The first few moves are intimidating,
overhanging stemming, not super hard... but talk about exposed, and it
was all of 11b, I guess. Man it was sweet. Just thinking about those
moves right now just doesn't make sense. You will know the meaning of
the double sloper gaston by the end of that pitch. But damn is it fun.
Since its so well protected, its just all fun too, there isn't really
any fear of falling, because if you do, in the business section you
just fall like 10 feet max. But damn, what a pitch. The next pitch is pretty badass as well. But you don't feel like some kind of super human... the granite here is more like 75/80 degrees and the water groove has more positive sides to smear counter pressure on. But still good and fun. The rest of the route is worth-while, but nothing really compares to those first 4 pitches. The rest of the pitches are just a bunch of 5.6 groovin, with a few interesting boulder problems interspersed. All in all, this was one of the best routes in NC that I've done. And certainly by favorite at Laurel to date.
|
MenuSearchCalendar
Recently...
Categories
Syndicate |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Trackbacks (0)