Various photos of a few of the routes we worked on day three, in the Upper Gorge. This area is “trad[itional]” climbing. In many areas, hangers are bolted into the rock for clipping in safety gear. In this area, you have to bring your own hardware which you temporarily insert into the nooks and crannies of the rock.
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It’s hard to convey the sheer scale of the rock faces in Red River Gorge. These photos are from the walk into the Middle Gorge. About 20 minutes of steep hiking, and suddenly these ~200 feet tall rock faces appear overhead through the trees.
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On our first day in Red River Gorge, we drove to a nearby “roadside crag”. After a brief walk in, we encountered this magnificent block covered in 10a+ routes.
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Once we had our top rope up, we spent the rest of our daylight here. Staright up, dihedral with a 5.8 finger jam crack. Paste your feet on the right and bury your hands… four attempts, but I couldn’t quite pull this one off.
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Straight up the middle of this. Blank and mossy until you get to this unique feature mid-face.
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Then we moved a bit left on that same wall. This was crazy hard to make the first move to get up onto the wall.
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This wall was just a few degrees from vertical. Standing on tiny features like edge of a nickel. The upper lip is about 200 feet, and roofed out at least forty feet. Route started with this sheer, wet, mossy wall with a fist-jam crack (insert entire hand, make fist so it can’t come out and the walk up the wall :) Spent all day climbing all over this wall, and then one other route.
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Rained all night and all morning… finally cleared up and now this terrible drive thru some lousy national forest or something… #whereAreTheRocks !
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If you ask me, this was a pretty sweet place to start climbing! Super easy warm up… before we moved onto some much harder stuff. I can just barely climb the “easy” climbs here. Lots of insane over-hanging stuff that is way beyond me.
I did about 6 climbs in the afternoon before I was totally “burnt”. A couple of them were a grade or more above my best climbs the last time Mike and I were on the rocks. Really happy about that; Means my general “get in shape” continues to yield broad (health, life, parkour, climbing) benefits without my having to hyper-focus on specific sports.
Still a member of the Vertical Club… YES!
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