Soloists on the First Flatiron.
What started out as a warmup lap up Freeway (again!), I wandered off the line, thinking maybe I’d go do the Dodge Block Route, instead. Instead of Dodge Block, I decided to just check out Free For All – a 5.6 route David and I did with gear, a few weeks ago. Everything again seem to look pretty casual looking, so I decided just to solo it. For the most part, it was!
The Second Flatiron doesn’t get too much traffic, outside of Freeway, so it’s always somewhat of a tiny adventure going off that line. It’s a fairly funky line to be honest, but I think the variety of the terrain is part of its appeal.
Once on top of Green, I capped off the scambly nature of the outing with a little contrived boulder problem onto the summit of Green – a sit-down-start, awkward-crack, whacky-mantle little something-something:
I had thought about doing a pretty long run today, but the soreness of merely jogging across the street to the bank before it closed was enough to make me think otherwise.
Sunday was Chrissy’s 30th – sigh: yes, I don’t go out with a lady in her 20’s anymore. Well, that’s OK. Our plans to go to Shelf Road to climb were sullied by the threat of snow, so we stayed in town, and just knocked out 30 pitches for her 30th, before getting dinner with family. I did significantly less than 30 pitches, as I was easing into climbing, after trying to not rehurt my fingers. Fingers felt good!
For whatever reason, I focused a lot of my climbing on really stepping up high, which seemed to significantly make things easier. I didn’t think it’s a good way to go about things, but a lot of the climbing at Shelf is super reachy, with poor feet, and sometimes the way to overcome a problem area is to wrench as hard as you can on small crimps, step up high, and get to a much better area.