Vice Squad Day 2

Arseny on Vice Squad
Arseny, Jose, and I went to Sand Wing on Saturday, and, after warming up on Jump Start, and The Itch (a fantastic 11d that I'd never done before!!), we went over to Vice Squad. The Perfect Crimb area was ridiculously busy. Maybe a dozen kids, parents everywhere, people leading the genuinely horrible trad routes to the right, and a group of recent Iowa college grads. There was someone on Perfect Crimb, which I used last time to hang the draws and clean the route, so I had to put in the draws, and brush the sand off as I lead it, but it was still fairly clean the first time up.
I started out strong, and Jose and Arseny were surprisingly excited about the route. With a pre-clipped first draw, and one failed attempt on the first move, I then made it to the last crux before getting lost on the footwork, and falling. I marked a couple of holds, and finished the route. This was heartening - to 2-piece it so early in the day. I was confident that I could do it.
Then I tried it a bunch more times, and kept screwing up something. Either the powerful move from the shallow pocket to the little right hand gaston, or, even if I stuck that, then the move from the gaston up to the sloping sidepull above. I have a cool video of all of that that I thought I might put on Facebook. By the end of all these attempts, I felt completely exhausted, and I almost just took down the draws and called it a day. But the guys wanted to keep working it, so I belayed and watched, and took pictures until I felt rested.
Jose did the crux move, and Arseny did all but one of the moves. He expressed great excitement over the technical nature. "I haven't had to think this much about a climb in a long time".



Jump Start


(A description of the video that didn't upload: There's another fifteen feet of climbing above, but it's hard to see it, so I chopped that portion off. The climbing after the two finger pocket on which I let out a laugh of triumph is not very hard - not more than 5.10. It is pretty sandy, but it was also quite enjoyable. You have to keep thinking after doing the series of cruxes.)
When I was going through the sequence, I often thought things like, "Grab little pocket, feel pain, slap right foot on sloping edge, powermove to painful gaston, etc". This route was somewhere between uncomfortable and painful to climb. As Arseny put it, "Any hold that isn't a slopey shit is just extremely painful". Or as Jose put it, the route is a "parade of shit holds". An odd thing happened after not doing it the first day - I started to actually enjoy it. Looking back, it may be one of the more technical hard 12s I've done. It also felt satisfyingly improbable. The holds are really small, and only possible for me because the thing is, for the most part, dead vertical.
Like I said in the other post, it's nice to do something that you don't like/isn't your style. Sometimes, this is the only way to improve in climbing - to work weaknesses. Crimpy, technical, painful vertical/slab problems are something I've avoided for most of my career, and I'm just not as good at that kind of climbing. Although it's not the hardest I've ever climbed, it's very satisfying to climb something in a style that is not my best.
After that, we decided to go to Work Ethic, a 12a in the Cyclops area, and warm down on that. The weather was perfect, the company was great, and I got to do two routes at Red Wing that I'd never done before. I'm calling it the Perfect Day At Red Wing.



Work Ethic

Arseny on Vice Squad