Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if Smith wasn’t one of my favorite places, if it wasn’t one of the most friendly, most beautiful climbing areas I’ve been to. If I hadn’t arrived with a list of routes to try and new areas to explore. If this wasn’t supposed to be fun. Everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves. And why should they not?

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if he wasn’t my boyfriend. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if this hadn’t been happening almost every trip for a year or more. Maybe it’s supposed to be enough that he’s willing to climb with me at all. But I’m selfish. Sometimes I want him to want to be there too. I’m lazy. Sometimes I want to have fun because of who I’m with instead of in spite of. After a trip I want to talk about the amazing things we’re going to do on the next trip, or relive the amazing things we did on the last trip, instead of hearing about what I did wrong, why we should have never went.

Sunset Over Smith

• Dihedrals, Moonshine Dihedral, 5.9 trad (lead)
• Dihedrals, Heinous Cling start, 5.12a sport (lead attempt)
• Dihedrals, Wedding Day, 5.10b sport (lead)
• Spiderman Buttress, A Desperate Man, 5.9 trad (lead)
• Spiderman Buttress, Iguanas on Elm Street, 5.10c sport (lead w/falls)
• Christian Brothers, Testament Slab, Revelation 5.9 mixed (lead) listed as a sport climb but I placed 4 “optional” pieces before the first bolt
• Christian Brothers, Testament Slab, New Testament 5.10a trad (lead) unexpectedly good
• Christian Brothers, Testament Slab, Barbecue the Pope 5.10b sport (TR)
• Northern Point, Burn Baby Burn 5.10a trad (lead)
• Northern Point, Playing With Fire 5.7 trad (TR)
• Northern Point, If I Ran The Circus 5.10b trad (lead w/falls)
• Monkey Face West Face Variation/Panic Point 5.8 A0 (lead p2, p4) don’t do Panic Point. Do Monkey Off My Back — it’s very similar, not that much harder, and you don’t have to do the awkward unprotected walk/scramble around the boulder

It was already after dark when Joanna and I got to the “Bivouac Area” (aka really nice campsite with heated bathrooms and running water). The rest of the group came in even later. Supposedly there was some cursing involved when someone lost track of their tent partner in the dark then gave up and slept in the truck, but I was fast asleep under a cozy juniper tree and did not hear a thing. Surprisingly we all found each other at sunrise as planned, and pulled out all of our coffee making apparatus. You don’t know how much of a coffee addict you are until you and your friends have covered a picnic table with things related to making coffee.

There was only one party on Morning Glory, so Denny and I threw our rope under Zebra/Zion while the rest of the group started setting up on 5 Gallon Buckets and friends. The easiest way to start Zebra/Zion is to start near 5 Gallon Buckets and traverse diagonally through all three of the bucket climbs. A group was already on one of them, so we decided to try the next easiest start, Gumby. As a 10b, it was a pretty stiff start for the day, but it is well protected (especially stick clipping the first bolt) and has its share of buckety fun. I did the first pitch and stopped at the hanging belay, which meant that Denny got the next one, the actual 10a crux of Z/Z. Denny gave it a good try, but after a few falls on an extremely well-placed yellow nut we switched ends of the rope and I finished the pitch. He took the 3rd pitch containing the 5.8 runout slab traverse into the unknown, and I got the 4 star 5.9 flake to the top. The book claims it’s the best 5.9 at Smith and I wouldn’t argue with that. It reminded me of Diedre at Squamish, even finishing up a water groove (but since it is not Squamish the water groove was not full of water, moss, mud, pine needles, etc).

Denny's annotated picture of Zebra/Zion, click through to see the notes

While we were messing around up there it had actually gotten seriously warm at the base, so when we got down (the descent through Cocaine Gully is not as bad as the book makes it sound) there was some sitting in the shade while the group migrated further down the wall. Some favorites like Cinnamon Slab, the Rabbit 7s (Rabbit Stew, Lycopodophyta, and Bunny Face), and some pebble pinching sport routes were done. I didn’t really need to do those since I’d done most of them 2 weeks before, so I just sat around and belayed for a bit, put up Wedding Day, loitered and belayed a bit more, watched people on Heinous Cling and Darkness at Noon (it’s really interesting to see the difference between people leading 12 who are pushing their limits and people leading 12 as if it’s a walk in the park), looked for pumpkins…

Fixed Pumpkin

I was thinking of trying either Moonshine Dihedral or Karate Crack, but by the time Moonshine was free (I couldn’t figure out what exactly was going on on Karate, but I guessed that it would probably take a while), it was getting close to sunset and my rope was still up on Wedding Day so I wasn’t sure I’d have time to wait for my rope, lead Moonshine, and have someone else clean it before it got dark. The guys on Heinous Cling had the rope up and were also in loitering mode so they (probably mostly jokingly) offered us a TR. Kate didn’t want it but I thought I might as well give it a try, since ropes up on 12s don’t grow on rocks. Surprisingly it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be (ie. it wasn’t completely impossible). I got to the top, and only fell a few times. It would be a different experience on lead, though. The wall is vertical-to-slightly-overhanging enough to make the falls clean, but the bolts are a little far apart.

The Smith experience is more towards the civilized side of climbing trips, not that there’s anything wrong with that. We got the usual beautiful sunset walk out to the car, dinner at the Terrebonne Depot, more drinking and chocolate at the picnic area, and another night sleeping under the full moon and the juniper tree.

Moon over Smith Rocks

• Morning Glory, Gumby/Zebra/Zion, 5.10b trad, 4p (lead 1, 2, 4) see Denny’s photo description of the route
• Cinnamon Slab, Easy Reader 5.6 (TR) Rebecca is just getting in to leading (not that you can tell) so she lead this easy bolted route
• Dihedrals, Wedding Day 5.10b sport (lead) used the magic stick to protect the first few moves and take most of the excitement out of it, but it’s still a quality sustained route
• Dihedrals, Heinous Cling 5.12a (TR) project for next spring??

Since it was Halloween, a few of us had costumes. I had an improvised shiny cape, Rebecca brought a pterodactyl costume, and Kate had a monkey hat! We could hardly leave without at least checking if the traffic wasn’t too bad on Monkey Face…

The only other groups in the campground had apparently taken advantage of their extra daylight savings hour to get some more sleep, and were firing up their stoves as we were cleaning up. Things were looking good…

After an only slightly miserable hike up Misery Ridge, we popped over to the other side and saw nobody on the Monkey. Denny had generously volunteered to lead the A0 bolt ladder, so he and Rebecca started up the shorter Pioneer Route while the rest of us went around to the West Face Variation.

I led first with Liz following me with a pack full of water and bananas (just like we did on Banana Peel at the beginning of the summer), and Kate and Zak paired up behind us (Charles and Joanna had to stay with their dogs on single pitch stuff). We did the variation start, an arching traversing crack rated 5.8 on the right, since it looked cleaner and prettier than the blocky 5.7 ramp on the left. The first two pitches to Bohn Street were a lot of fun, varied climbing, enough protection, not too bad rope drag.

The last short pitch out of the monkey’s mouth has a Reputation. It’s only 5.7, but the book calls it “Panic Point” and claims it’s the most exposed 5.7 in America. The first bolt can be clipped while sitting down in the mouth and still anchored in, so I reached over and did that. When I peeked around the corner I could see a second bolt continuing the traverse. It seemed a little tricky for a 5.7 — a little longer, more traversing, and the bolts didn’t seem quite as close together as Denny had described it to me, but it was definitely within the realm of an old school 5.7. The only odd thing was that the rock was a little loose and dirty for a super popular moderate trade route. When I popped out on the top anchor, I started chatting with Rebecca and Denny (who I seemed to have woken up from a nap) while stacking rope to bring Liz up.

Me: Hey, you guys on the top? Where’s that scramble you were talking about?
Denny: Huh?
Me: I thought you said there’s a scramble around a boulder and up an arete to get to the top?
Denny: Huh? You didn’t stop at the boulder on the nose?
Me: Nose?

After seeing a second bolt to follow I didn’t even think to look up, but apparently the real 5.7 route goes straight up, so I did some sort of variation. Oops. Kate awarded me the monkey hat in honor (?) of making all three of them do the variation (which I later found out is actually named “Monkey Off My Back”, and the Select book declares that it “deserves more traffic”).

Kate enjoying a banana on top of Monkey Face (picture by Denny)

Partly because of the extra excitement on the last pitch and partly because we wanted to get back to Seattle at a reasonable hour (and partly because we had set the clocks back and so the sun was going to set at an unreasonably early hour), we weren’t going to do too much more climbing that afternoon, so there was plenty of time for monkey dancing and eating bananas on the broad monkey head summit. I thing we gave the hikers on Misery Ridge a pretty good show.

• Monkey Face, West Face Variation, 5.8 trad + A0 4p (lead 1, 2, 4) not only were we climbing on a rock that really looks like a monkey, every pitch is a lot of fun (especially the more exposed 5.8 variation on the last one).

More pictures: Denny (including the monkey dance video), Charles, and Liz.