'Gunks Climbing trip!

For those that know me, I love being up high as long as there's a decent assurance of safety. I've been rock climbing at the indoor wall here at Cornell quite a bit here lately, so I decided to take it to the next level and see what real multipitch outdoor climbing was like. The conclusion? Same as my conjecture: simply awesome fun!

Gunks rock and fall colors from the intermediate belay stations we set up on the High Exposure route.

To address the whole safety thing, I did it in the context of a class. Yes, a Cornell class, on my schedule right along with the algorithms course I'm taking this semester. Only this class had 5 students, three instructors, and spent 4 days out climbing on the east coast mecca for this type of climbing: the Shawnangunks Mountains, or just the 'Gunks for short. It's a three hour drive from Ithaca, in SE NY.

The Gunks! Taken from the Trapps, looking towards the Nears and (in the distance) Milbrook.

Gunks at Sunset

After a couple introductory classes and a bunch of time getting reasonably in shape on the indoor rock wall (IE, working those arm muscles that get used in climbing and pretty much nothing else), we headed out on Friday night. We were camping nearby, and got everything set up in the dark just fine the first night.

Fall colors. Not quite in full swing, but definitely getting there!

What follows are probably going to be some of the most memorable 4 days of my time here at Cornell. The weather was fantastically 70 degrees and bright blue skies (last week it was 40s and raining) and the trees are just getting into their fall color swing. From above, the deep green forests were punctuated by patches of bright yellow and spots of vivid red. but I'm getting ahead of myself.

More fall colors

The climbing we were doing was traditional, or "trad" climbing. (Wikipedia article) This means that the cliff is too high for a single rope to reach the top, and that there are not (many) fixed bolts in the cliff. While a complete description is out of scope, basically the lead climber (the instructors in this case) climbs up and places protection (nut, cams, and other climbing specific gear) in cracks of the rock. They are belayed from below by the second climber, but are in danger of falling to their last piece of protection they placed in the rock. Before running out of rope, the lead stop, builds an anchor out of several pieces of gear, then belays up the seconds, who clean all the gear as they follow behind. Then the whole process repeats as many times as necessary to reach the top.

Me partway up a route called "Strictly from Nowhere" (Thanks Mike for the pic!)

So that's basically what we did for 4 days. Except every new climb is new and exciting. And every minute on the cliff was a minute I was drinking in as complete fun. In the evenings, as darkness approached, we would top-rope shorter, much harder sections of cliff to work on skills and such.

Top-roping at the end of the day! This route's called "Colorful Crack", and has a super fun and not too hard overhang

A personal goal of mine on the trip was to learn how to safely do the lead climber's job, so I spent one full day working on that with one of the instructors. I had practiced and become familiar with the types of protection and anchor building on my own time in the weeks leading up to the class, so it was not a big step to accomplish this on a fairly easy climb. Definitely exciting, though! We also spent several hours working on knots, rope ascending, and other vertical rescue scenario skills, all of which was beyond the scope of the class but we wanted to learn anyway.

My favorite climb? Split between one called Madam G's and one called High Exposure. "High E" as its called is possibly the most famous trad climb in North America. I didn't get any good pictures of me on it (busy hanging on), but here's a random one from a climbing website.

Madam G's route (with random guy on it for scale). One of my favorite climbs this trip!

Ready to jump off the top of madam G's to rappel down 200 feet. Yes, its massively overhung, and yes, that's a solid, 40 foot tree growing there!

The rappel off Madam G's was by far the most fun. Over 100 feet of just rappeling through free air from the overhang. (Thanks Mike for photo!)

Overall, awesome weekend. (both the climbing and the natural beauty!) I was pretty confident on all the trad climbs we did (up to a 5.7 rating), and certainly never close to coming off the rock on those. With the top-roping stuff, I maxed out at ascending a 5.9, and got up a 5.10 with a little rope-hanging here and there. Fun stuff.

When can I go again?