I waited to post about the best for last. On Monday of last week, Tim and I climbed Moonlight Buttress (1200 feet, 5.12d) on the Northwest Face of Angel's Landing in Zion. Wes started around 9 am and each climbed the first four pitches (5.8, 5.10. 5.11c, 5.12b) cleanly and all free alternating leads starting with Tim. Each of the next five 5.12 pitches were climbed free but not cleanly redpointed. We topped out sometime after six more worked than either of us have ever been and hiked up to the top of Angel's Landing before going back to the car for a big meal and a lot of water.
Moonlight Buttress takes the center of the prominent buttress in this photo. Pitches 4 through 11 are all on one continuous crack size that does not vary any more than a couple cam sizes the whole time.
Its a bit hard to see but the person below the roof is me at the hanging belay situated at the base of Pitch 7 and Tim just getting to the next ledge at the end of that pitch.
5 comments:
dang
I'm going to to try Moonlight next weekend and would love some beta. What did you have for a rack? Which pitches did you find hard/tricky. How was the weather?
Good job sounds like you guys had a blast!
if i did it again i would take: one BD Camalot #1, one #.75, five 0.5s, five 0.4s, three 0.3s, a red C3, and four quickdraws, along with belay devices and slings/daisy chains for anchors. pitch 7 was the difficulty crux for me, but i am bad a chimneys. overall, the crux is just having enough juice to climb everything. individually, i think i could onsite every pitch on that climb but number 7, but when you climb them all back to back it is really hard. we also had the follower take a backpack and i would bring a small tag line next time (we only took one rope with the assumption we would not have to rap) to haul a bag between pitches because climbing 5.12 over and over with 15 extra pounds is hard. we brought three bagels and 2.5 liters of water too.
Awesome! Thanks. I assume you brought some nuts for the last pitches? I'll post up about our experience in a few weeks. http://dreaminvertical.wordpress.com/
- Luke
ah yes, we brought a number 4 through number 10 BD stoppers.
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