Meteorite (5.8) click for larger photo

This is the account of some new slab route activity at Sugarloaf Mt in the Southern Adirondacks. This unpublished face (a classic exfoliated granite dome) is big, about 500' tall by 1000' wide. I wish I could get a picture of it, but under the best conditions you still only see little pieces of it from the dirt road at its base. As near as I can tell, the rock lies on state land. Most of the land along the road at its base, however, is posted by a hunting club. There are two reasons why this isn't a problem: there's a small place to park on the one spot where the state land meets the road (2.3 miles from the end of the pavement). This adds a few minutes to the approach, but it still isn't bad. Secondly, the hunting club is out of business, and a former member told me that they never really had any problem with rock climbers anyway, and encouraged me to have fun on the slab.

Accompanying me were my regular Gunks partners Bill and Brad, and also Eldeva, a New Paltz native who'd just discovered her inner climber. Eldeva has climbed less than ten times, and had never friction climbed before. Not only did she have the guts to join a road trip with three men she didn't know, but her boundless enthusiasm and natural talent amazed us throughout the day.

My two previous visits over the past year, with various partners, resulted in "Meteorite", a two pitch 5.8 on the left side of the face. The route is named for a circular feature on the first pitch that looks like a small impact crater. From the top of the second pitch of Meteorite, some bushy traversing to the left would be necessary to bypass the end of a huge arch/overlap, above which I expected some mellow slabs leading to the trees. That was the goal of this third visit.

Ah, but how different things looked from the base of the slab! Above our previous high point I could now see that the slab rose ominously in a large, and as nearly as I could tell, featureless swell of rock. Upon seeing that, my ambition shrank considerably.

Fortunately I had a back-up agenda. 200' further to the left of Meteorite is a stunningly smooth, planar slab. Lying at a reasonable 50-55 degrees (eyeball estimate, don't hold me to it), the granite is flat and featureless by Adirondack standards. Based on my positive experience coaxing gear placements out of virtually every mini-corner and flake on Meteorite, I told myself, "OK, every feature has a crack; this is do-able", and racked up.

The start of It Ain't Over

I got stumped almost immediately by some slick rock about 6 feet off the ground. In retrospect I had missed the easiest place to start, and it didn't help that my climbing shoes had managed to find something wet under all those dry leaves. A few shaky moves to the right (above what later turned out to be the best start) and I gained the right end of a funky little band of weathered rock that led nearly all the way left to the first corner. The tiny erosion pockets in this band were too small for handholds, but provided enough irregularity to use as footholds for the traverse. A tenuous step up after this, now about 20-25 feet above the sloping, leaf-covered ground, and I was safe at the first stance. The crack here was great and I threw in three pieces. More 5.8 smearing led to the second corner, which unfortunately provided only a thin flared groove. The two pieces I placed in this were more psychological than real, but they enabled me to reach the next feature, a nice ledge that curved up to the left into a solid flake. From the top of the flake I was able to make a no-hands traverse right to an island of stout birch trees.

Eldeva "trusting her feet" on It Ain't Over

I lowered off and declared that I'd buy a beer for anyone who could follow the delicate opening cleanly. I'd regret that, of course. It's funny how leading above a long runout can make things feel more difficult than they really are. Once their rubber was dried off at the start, everyone seemed to follow the pitch without too much fuss. Eldeva had clearly absorbed the barrage of advice we gave her in the car on the ride up: "Trust your feet"; "Keep your hips out"; "Move aggressively from one foot to the other".

The angle of the rock eased somewhat above the birch tree belay, and I set my sights on the next little island of trees a ropelength away. A few moves across blank rock led to some corners and before I knew it I was halfway to the next destination. I was closing on it quickly because it wasn't as far away as I first thought. Which also meant that the tree that I'd thought would be the belay anchor was nowhere near as big as I'd thought. In fact it was probably only an inch and a half thick. Seeing that, and eyeballing the blank rock both below and above the anemic little bush, I decided to traverse left into the welcome shade of some larger trees. Now it's common to find that traversing on friction smears is harder than moving straight up, and this 50 foot traverse was no exception. But every dicey step was preceded and followed by gear, so everyone was happy and before long we were eating our snacks in the shade.

Once again I spied a tree up ahead and set out to reach it. This time it was a large evergreen tree. Above the tree the rock became much more vegetated and broken, so it looked like the logical end to this particular route. That was fine; we probably wouldn't have time to go any further.

This pitch was a serious route-finding challenge. After the first 20 feet, it seemed that every plan I had ran into a dead end. The black humps going left stopped well short of the corner; the water streak going straight up was well pocketed but too smooth; the crack in the arch was too small for fingertips, and so on. Naturally, the pitch ended up zig-zagging wildly for 140 feet, and yes, I ultimately paid for it in crippling rope drag. Quite frankly, by the middle of this pitch my lead-head was starting to wither. At one point I tested a delicate step-up repeatedly but just couldn't commit to it. So I moved left a few feet and drove a Lost Arrow up under a small overhang. Now, don't get all preachy about how pins are the Devil's own hardware and lead to the destruction of the rock. This route will never see that kind of traffic. The pin had a profound and immediate effect on my confidence and I motored through the tenuous stand-up move.

Unfortunately the warm glow of the chrome moly protection didn't extend very far, and by the time I had cleaned the dirt out from behind the next flake, I was starting to quiver inside again. The flake was hollow enough that I didn't dare put a camming unit behind it for fear of blowing it off. What's the ratio, outwards force = 5x the downwards force? The parallel crack really didn't want to accept any passive gear either, but in the end I got a couple nuts to stay.

The third pitch of It Ain't Over til It's Over (5.9)

At this point I'm only 15 or 20 feet below the tree, but the next bit of rock is the steepest we've seen yet. I debated the options (and weighed the consequences of the wrong one!) for a long time until I traversed several feet left and found the key divots that hopefully would get me up to the final ledge/corner below the tree. This is when the rope drag nearly defeated me. The cruxiest (hmm, is that even a word?) move was a high step with the right foot, and the rope over my thigh prevented me from getting my foot totally up on the hold. It was maybe halfway on, and just as I tried to work it further onto the hold, my lower foot started to slide off its hold. I knew then that I was going to fall. I just hoped the sliding, pendulum swing under that creaky flake wouldn't be too bad. After pushing myself to get that far, the frustration and failure I felt was crushing.

To me, falling is a lot like puking - it's the anticipation, the knowing that's it's coming, that is the worst part. By that analogy, at this point I was on my knees in front of the toilet.

But I wasn't going to fall off without a fight, so I hopped that bottom foot back on and re-stabbed that upper foot at its hold. This time it made it onto the little sloper. Knowing that I was going to fall soon if I stayed there any longer, I held my breath and stepped quickly up onto that foot.

It held. I got my hands on the positive edge of the ledge that arched up to the tree.

And so I was able to reach the belay, and complete what we called "It Ain't Over til It's Over". In true ADK tradition for conservative understatement, I'll call it 5.9. But just between you and me...it's harder than that.