Rattlesnake and Enchainment

Ron and I climbed at Red Wing today and did some linking up of various routes. (Kind of a mini-enchainment. Mel calls this “Vertical Traversing” which is a good description of it.)  Here’s Ron after leading up “Goofed on Skunkweed,” traversing after two clips to a clip on “3 Fat Chicks,” then traversing farther to the anchors of “Vertical Vice.” Then he down climbed “Vertical,” climbed back up it and traversed back across to “Goofed” and then down climbed to the ground. We did that on some other climbs and it is F.U.N. It also looks very different climbing down routes we know so well from climbing up them.

Then Ron took me over to Rattlesnake Bluff about 5 miles south of Red Wing. We wanted to see what it looked like for climbing development. (Nora had already checked it out earlier this year and thought it had possibilities.) It’s a little tough to get to the

base because you have to follow some steep game trails. It looks like solid rock and is taller than Barn Bluff. We wanted to measure its height and I only had my 132 foot rope with me. But Ron was a sport, so he rappelled from the top. With the rope doubled for the rappel, the cliff was 66 feet high.That plus the 19 feet Ron fell when he went off the end of the rope, puts the height of the cliff at 85 feet. (Don’t worry about Ron, in a few months of treatment, he’ll be almost normal.)