First 5.12's!

The day after the last rest day we woke up in the morning after a rainy night. In the morning we decided with our group of loners to go out to canyon lands for another hike of 11 miles! We couldn’t really climb because of the wet sandstone. It was an awesome group activity on a nice windy rest day. Check out my new tourist shirt, only 3 dollars in the thrift store!
The day after that a was pretty tired of the hike through Canyonlands and of the sun that had hit my face all day. We went to the optimator wall where I tried ‘The Optimator’ (5.13-). This thing is pretty hard and 40 meters long. I might try it later on this trip in the Creek.



Our second day on we went to the tenderloins wall where I tried again the route of the wall named ‘Tenderloins’ (5.12). I did it on my second go! It is an awesome straight line. The first part goes through a pretty overhanging part and is size BD .5, so okey fingers for me and then it goes up for about 25 meters of size BD .75.
Those are all finger locks for me, finger locking is a pretty hard size but I’m getting pretty good at it! I like it a lot. Every line I try I learn a new style. So this was my first 5.12 and yesterday I did my second! I’m pretty psyched! I did ‘Slice and dice’ a nice .75 size crack through an overhanging section. I did this one also on my second go. I’m ready for some harder climbs!
The grading system in trad-climbing is completely different. There is no lettering system behind the numbers. It goes just from 5.7 up to 5.13, between all that you have +’ses and –‘ses. It’s nice they divided the grades like that because every route is so hand size dependent.




I climbed all the harder and smaller cracks with the new Supermocc’s that five Ten gave me! They are so great for size BD #1 and smaller, the tip of those shoes really get stuck into the smallest cracks if you place them well and twist hard!






I’ll be in Indian Creek for maybe 10 more days. This place is so big and I’ve still so much to climb and new area’s to see. Crack climbing is really a new style of climbing that motivates me so much again! I’m also very psyched for Yosemite to do some Big Walls with Florian Castagne who is coming for one month to the States to travel with me. I’m looking forward, it only gets better!

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