Spear Me the Details

Rich and I headed off for another big, adventure climb on Saturday.  This time to Rocky Mountain National Park.  While I have spent many days in RMNP, it has always been to go bouldering and this was a very, very different experience.  Our objective was Spear Me the Details (5.11d, 700 feet, 8 pitches).  We decided to make the 6 mile hike in Saturday night to the base so we could wake up early enough to avoid as much of whatever weather came our way the next day.  The hike in was very rainy for the first bit but the skies cleared and things started to dry off by the time we made it to our camp site.  We got up around 4:45 the next day and we were at the base, climbing a couple hours later.  The first couple pitches were very cold but soon the sun moved over Long's and started to warm the rock.  The rock was wildly featured, reminding me of Hueco Tanks meets Mt Evans (unfortunately the boulders never got very big in this glacier cirque).  I lead the two 5.11 pitches, cleanly leading one and taking once on the other.  It turned out we avoided all the weather and were back at the car by 8 pm.  We headed straight to Estes Park were we enjoyed a deliciously large meal.  Below are two photos stolen from Summit Post and Mountain Project respectively.  Spear Me the Details heads up just right of the prominent eye feature low on the formation directly towards the summit.