jons dreaming: Ice Climbing... On Rock!?!

Last Sunday, I went with the UNM Mountaineering Club to Big Block, in the Monzano Mountains; while there, I learned this is the place that locals go to practice dry tooling.

Two days later I came back to try my luck...
We arrived at the crag rather late, arriving around noon and headed immediatly to the High Wall, west of the Main Wall. The routes looked like fun and I was eager to climb so I threw on my harness and shoes as fast as I could and jumped on the wall, route 2. As soon as I jumped on the route, I remembered that I had no idea what the hell I was doing and all of my excitement turned to panic. I remember thinking that the whole dry tooling thing was a little sketchy; who goes rock climbing with ice tools? It be like a cat trying to climb a pane of glass (this might be a bad analogy but it works for me). Awkward at first, with a little trouble trusting my holds, it got a little easier as I advanced up the wall; learning how to move, which holds to use and where to place my tools on different holds to keep my tools from slipping off the wall. I guess I wasn't too bad at this, my first time ever dry tooling, and I never fell on that first route.

Me tiptoeing up Route 2 (D 4 /5) of the High Wall at Big Block. Photo by Kenny Dunn

I can't find anything online with any ratings for any of the routes but I believe it is a 5.8 or 5.9/M4 or M5. Kenny led the route after me and did a good job, probably better than me but you won't hear me say that.

The High Wall; routes are numbered from left to right.

The second route I tried to climb is the farthest route to the west, almost to the dihedral; this route is not shown on the photo. The start of this route was a little tricky and by my third of fourth move there was only one ledge that I had to match on; this ledge was tiny. When I tried to pull myself up on this ledge and up to the next hold, it gave out and I dropped a couple of fairly large size rocks down; removing the entire hole. I tried once more but couldn't find another hold and had to abandon the route.

Kenny led the third route which is the far east route on the same wall, route 1; he did a good job leading this route but the top of the route was really crappy with a lot of scrambling. When I followed, I skipped the crappy upper section of the route. I fell a number of times on this route, though the route was easier than the first one.