Summary

Description

Friday night
5:50pm left the house
a lot of traffic on the road
stopped at Panera Bread in Winston Salem
10:00pm got to parking lot
10:45pm tent setup and in bed
12:45am woke up to occasional thunder and very light drizzle; I got up and put fly on the tent

Saturday
7:00am alarm went off
7:15am at car
7:22am group of 3 drove up planning to climb The Daddy
7:30am on trail to Amphitheater
8:00am turned at stacked white rocks on the right
stopped to gear up and drop packs at big rock at trail intersection Lisa does not want to slog down the Gully of Doom ever again 9:10am started climbing The Daddy
should run P2 and P3 together - I only placed one piece on P3
could run P4 and P5 together but would rather not b/c of rope drag and P5 is hardest climbing
wild blueberry bush at top of P2. Lisa brought me two blueberries in her pocket
1:50pm topped out on The Daddy
had PBJ at top
rapped back down descent gully
2:30pm(?) started climbing The Mummy
5:15pm topped out on The Mummy
5:25pm started hike off from Mummy Buttress
5:50pm arrived at boulder where packs were stashed
6:10pm left boulder hiking out
6:25pm got to main trail
more blueberry bushes along trail so had a few more tasty tasty blueberries
7:10pm at parking lot
glop (rice-a-roni, beans, canned chicken) for dinner
only downside were the gnats and no-see-ums
9:45pm in bed

Saturday notes
very windy day - anywhere from nice breeze (mostly) to blow-you-off-the-rock wind
The Daddy was in shade the whole time. didn't hit sun 'til we topped out
group of 3 coming up behind us on The Daddy (same as from parking lot). they were only 2/3 done with P2 when we were topping out
The Mummy was in shade for first pitch until the belay. shady big ledge at top on P2 was very nice

Sunday
7:00am alarm went off; still tired and sore so turned it off
8:15am got up
dude asked in parking lot if we had a joint we'd sell him
9:15am left parking lot
9:30am base of route
10:00am Mike started first pitch
11:00am Mike topped out first pitch
used 11 of 12 slings - possibly bring more slings.
3 bolts on this pitch
I hung off each of the two bolts before the last crux because I was tired
11:30am Lisa topped out first pitch
11:40am Mike started 2nd pitch
12:25pm(?) Lisa topped out
rappelled to top of Peek-a-boo P1; pulling rope was ... interesting
1:25pm both back on the ground
2:50pm left parking lot
3:30pm finally had PBJ sandwich on 181
6:15pm stopped for small pre-dinner dinner at Panera Bread in Burlington
6:50pm home

[The following is Lisa's account of the trip from her livejournal entry ...]

friday night, mike and i headed out to linville gorge to spend the weekend getting high.

we managed to leave the house a little before 6pm, and despite stopping to pick up roadfood at a panera, made it up to the parking lot at table rock by 10pm. our target for saturday was the daddy, a fairly popular route in the gorge, so we spent some time upon arrival staging our gear (filling water bottles, packing packs, etc.) so we'd have everything ready to go and could get an early start. this was a fairly unusual concept for us - we usually spend a leisurely morning hour in the parking lot having breakfast and fondling our gear before managing to hit the trail - and boy, did it ever pay off.

saturday morning my watch went off at 7am; we rolled out of the tent in fairly short order and were dressed and back to the car by 7:15. the parking lot was sparsely populated, and it looked like we'd have the gorge to ourselves - a rarity on a beautiful june weekend! mike had made pro bars for tasty and speedy breakfasting, and we were just breaking them out when a car pulled up and disgorged 3 climbers... also headed for the daddy. we felt bad for them, since they had clearly hoped to get there early enough to snag it themselves... but we were so glad we had our shit together and were ready to get the hell out of dodge. (a party of 3 is inherently slow, climbing, because the leader has to bring up both the second and third - or bring up the second to belay him/her on up and then bring up the third - and there's a lot of rope management etc. being behind a group like that, especially on long multi-pitch, usually sucks ass.)

any inclination we might have had to dawdle vanished; after exchanging pleasantries with them, we hauled ass down the trail. the best we could do for them was to get right on it and not hold them up too much at the start... we covered the two-mile hike out to the amphitheatre in about 45 minutes, dropped our packs with spare water at the intersection of the rim trail, and then headed down the wet nasty scramble to the Ginormous Gully of Doom.

i really, really, really hate the slog down the wash at the center of the amphitheatre. it's a combination of bushwhacking through tangles of brush, slip-sliding down scree slopes, boulder-hopping, and huge downward steps through uneven rocky terrain, descending about 250 feet over a quarter mile. my quads, they hate me. they're plotting with my knees to take over from my brain, which clearly has gone insane. and then we get to climb five pitches to get back out. did i mention how very much i hate this approach?

however, despite the rebellion in my lower extremities, we hit the bottom of the daddy a little before nine on a gorgeous carolina-june morning. the sky was perfect blue, we had enough of a breeze that i was getting slight goosebumps in the shade at the bottom of the route, and mike was in fine form - skating up the first pitch so quickly that he was already building the anchor when the threesome showed up behind us. i chatted with them for a few minutes, giving them beta on the route and the hike out, and then headed up the most excellent rock in the carolinas.

the daddy is 5.6, five pitches, five hundred feet of adventure climbing at its best. we were in the shade the entire way up, and the view down the gorge was incredible.

there was a small wild blueberry bush growing on on the ledge at the top of the second pitch; most of the berries weren't ripe yet, but it did have a few tiny blue-black treasures hidden among its leaves. i discovered them after mike had started his lead, so after he was off belay and pulling up slack, i picked a couple and tucked them away in a protected corner of my pocket... and then surprised him with a tart, tiny treat when i got up to the top of the third pitch!

the temperature was in the mid-eighties but felt much cooler, because it was so windy - scudding-clouds, waving-trees, flapping-ropes level of windy. we had an absolutely perfect climb, and topped out just before 1pm. (as the party behind us was still bringing people up on the second pitch... did i mention how happy we were not to be behind them?) while dining in luxury (pbj from squeeze tubes on homemade whole wheat bread - the finest of climber cuisine) at the top of the buttress, we discussed our options. we'd accomplished our goal for the day, but it was too early - and much too lovely out - to just head back to camp...

so we opted to take a run up the mummy instead. :) three pitches - about 300 feet - of ridiculously easy climbing (a little bit of 5.5, but mostly 5.3ish) was just what we needed to cap off the day. the belay ledge at the top of the second pitch was in the shade, with an amazing view across the amphitheatre, and we hung out there for a while just enjoying the breeze and the view.

the hike out was pretty straightforward - from the mummy buttress, we followed an overgrown goat trail choked with pine and rhododendron upward and around the rim of the amphitheatre. (quite literally the rim - in some cases, the trail runs right along the edge of the several-hundred-foot drop!) the last time we did climbed the daddy, back in 2001 (!), we'd gotten a much later start and topped out just as the sun was setting, then missed the goat-trail in the dark, so we ended up expending several hours and a ton of energy just trying to get back to the main trail... in broad daylight, it was significantly easier - altho still requiring some route-finding in spots - and it only took us about a half-hour to get back to our packs. on the hike out, we noticed more wild blueberries along the trail - we'd overlooked them in our mad dash for the gorge that morning - and each bush yielded a few more perfect nibbles.

between picking berries, stopping for pictures, chatting with folks along the trail, and our general end-of-day wipedness, we were moving pretty slowly on the 2-mile hike back to camp; by the time we sighted the cars, it was definitely dinner time. sadly, we were on the menu - the breeze had died down, and swarms of gnats and no-see-ums descended upon us. (on previous trips, we've determined that i have two climbing superpowers: making it rain when i want to lead, and attracting bugs. the latter was in full force... dammit.) despite liberal applications of bug spray, we got pretty thoroughly munched.

dinner was the redneck gourmet classic, glop-in-a-pot: a combination of cheddar broccoli rice, great northern beans, and canned chicken. sounds disgusting, but it's surprisingly tasty at the end of a long day of climbing! at first we were hungry enough to ignore the bugs, but after consuming our pot-o'-glop and a couple of homebrews (including a beer fountain of the overcarbonated peevish primate - that one's going to be an open-at-home-in-the-sink-over-a-pitcher beer from now on), we fled for the sanctuary of our tent.

sunday morning my watch went off at 7am again... and we promptly turned it off, rolled over, and slept in until 8:15... at which point we discovered how ridiculously sore we were. ow, ow, ow. i really think the majority of my aches and pains were from the slog down the gully - my quads were killing me, and any downhill hiking - even the gentle trail from the tent down to the parking lot - was incredibly painful. fortunately, a little aleve and some stretching loosened me up, and we decided to work out the rest of the kinks on hidden crack (5.7).

the fifteen-minute hike out to table rock's east face was punctuated by various whining and moaning from the peanut gallery (i.e., me), but once we got out to the rock, it was all worthwhile. the first pitch is a long (150-foot) 5.7 tradfest - pretty spicy for mike to lead after a full day in the gorge. i had a great time seconding it - the crux was challenging enough to be interesting, but not too hard (on second!) and the rock was fascinating - horizontal plates that made for slopy hands and hidden feet. we finished the second pitch around noon, in the blinding sun and the full heat of the day, and opted to rappel down rather than try to push through the third and fourth pitches.

rappeling turned out to be a little more interesting than we expected... we tied our two ropes together and headed down to the rap rings on peek-a-boo, a route in the adjacent corner - and in the shade.. to get there, we had to curve around a big intermediary roof, which added lots of potential for a stuck rope. some creative belay extension off a nearby bolt got me far enough out to pull the ropes out of the corner, and we managed to get them down without hanging either the knot (the usual challenge) or the end (in a rope-eating flake under the roof). with that epic averted, the rappel to the ground was pretty routine, and we were hiking out by 2pm and pulling out of the parking lot around 3.

an uneventful drive back across NC got us home around 7:30... we'd snagged a bite to eat on the way, so were sufficiently un-starving to unpack the car, put away the gear, and shower before tackling dinner.

so: perfect weather - exceptionally so for the gorge, which tends towards afternoon thunderstorms in the summer. perfect rock - i really think this is the best climbing in NC. perfect timing - it was awesome to get on both the mummy and the daddy in one day. perfect planning - we did everything we'd wanted to do and then some. even with yesterday's incredible soreness - why, oh why, did we buy a three-story house? - and the twenty-some-odd bug bites i brought home - of which at least one is itching at any given moment as i type this - our weekend was made of weaponized awesome.

(about a decade ago, on our early trips to the gorge, we'd met another climbing couple who were doing the mummy and the daddy in one day... which sounded like great fun to us. and though we've combined other climbs in the amphitheatre - usually the mummy and the prow - we never quite managed it. it's taken us long enough - but now, we are that couple. we win.)