Pulldown Menu (Revised 07May2011)

Pulldown Menu, 12+, Perfect Crimb Area, Red Wing, MN

I tried Pulldown Menu, a beautiful, clean, and powerful route, for two or three sessions some time between 2004 and 2006. You can see from the image above that the climbing is easy to the roof - then the awesome three meter boulder problem starts. You get established on thin pockets on the roof, throw to a crimp over the roof, bring right hand above to another crimp, smear on the left, move right hand up to a gaston, and reach to shallow pockets, where you can kind of get your body into a vertical position, and move your hands into the much better holds above (including a bomber finger lock undercling!)
In ~2005, I fell many times from above the roof, either trying to clip the bolt above, or stabbing into the decent pockets. The route has an arete/bulge below the roof, and the crux is smearing your feet above the roof, so every time I fell, I would get inverted enough to slam my butt into the bulge below. I took enough falls like this that I was walking kind of funny, and decided to work other routes for a while. Soon, I forgot about the route, and moved to Oregon.
Now that I'm back in Minnesota, it occurred to me that it is one of the better routes at Red Wing that I had never redpointed, and was suddenly excited about it. I played a Jedi mind trick on myself to forget what it had done to my gait. Today, I managed to do it clean, and on my first try of the day! The trick was cleaning it, ticking the key holds, and hanging a couple of draws at the crux in preparation for an attempt. I did this from the adjacent route, Perfect Crimb (which suddenly feels a lot more like 10a than 5.9 - Glassier feet? Stiff grade? Overconfidence?).
When I did the crux on Pulldown Menu, rather than trying to clip off of the crux pockets, I climbed above the bolt (risking a nastier fall, I suppose), and clipped off of a bomber finger lock. It was kind of funny to be clipping the last bolt from that high - I could barely reach it below me. I'm very pleased to have done it, and ecstatic that Red Wing still holds the potential for so much joy. I climbed the route much more smoothly, quickly, and with comfort and confidence than I did years ago. Somehow I never thought that experience would count for this much. I am pleased to still be improving.


Afterwards