Glacial Erratics

Signs of perfect weather, a (small) gap in the busy schedule, a buddy available (LiggettTheYounger) and my shiny new cams meant it was time for a quick trip to TheRed. Much poring over available route information pointed to GlobalVillage as the place to be for some easy trad and some easy to moderate sport routes, which was a good sampling of the overlap of what we both wanted to do.    (45A)

But I forgot that about half the routes of the eight or so picked are not in the printed guidebook and thus far there's no wireless at the crags.    (45B)

We had just Sunday available; drive down late Saturday, come back Sunday evening after pizza. We got underway earlier than expected; halted for two hours as Thunder Over Louisville let out; arrived very very late; woke up with the sun to meet someone who wasn't there; and stumbled around, washed out and vague from 3 or 4 hours of sleep, until the coffee kicked in.    (45C)

GlobalVillage is a lovely place. For some reason it is not as popular as some of the other locations. I've heard and read various theories to explain this: the approach is long and tiresome or the routes don't feature the overhanging pocketed crimp festivals that brings people to TheRed. I don't know about either of those: I found the approach long but not steep. The climbs were interesting, high quality rock and it was just plain nice in the area. Plenty of napping rocks.    (45D)

The far end of the cliff houses a nice waterfall amphitheater:    (47U)

+ ++ T    (45E)

Here's the view from the top of KentuckyPinstripe, looking sort of westish:    (45F)

+ ++ T    (45G)

KentuckyPinstripe, as we later discovered, is a 5.10a and not EureKa, the 5.6 we thought it was. We started there as a warmup and the moves at the start had me saying things like, "No way this is a 5.6" and "Maybe it's called Eureka because you find the magic 5.6 hold and suddenly it's easy."    (45H)

I onsighted it anyway and went on to OnSight everything else that day (we only did 5 routes, seeing as we didn't know where several of them were). I've since decided that's no good. I should be climbing much harder and falling more often.    (45I)

Here's the view from halfway up the same route:    (45J)

+ ++ T    (45K)

Climbing will make your ass disappear:    (45L)

+ ++ T    (45M)

More info on the crag and the climbs will show up soon in ClimbTheRed. The rest of the pictures from the trip can be viewed at TheRedCliggettThumb. To summarize: We had a good (but sleepy) time, nobody got hurt, we saw and did interesting and fun things. Nice beat, we danced to it.    (45N)