Street Car Named Desire
It was a great bouldering day. Well, mostly. I had attempted a few boulder problems inside Joshua Tree National Park, and had done “ok” on a few of them.
I worked a V5 boulder problem out near “Strawberry Contraceptives” for quite a bit of the morning, had succeeded at pulling the hard moves, made it to the top, and then just as I was stepping up to grab a top hold on the climb (a much easier ending to the problem), I broke a piece of a foot hold off and tumbled to the ground. The meat of the problem involved a few sequencey hard layback moves, repositioning feet, and more layback moves to a big foot ledge. Once this ledge was obtained, the problem essentially was over. If it weren’t for the crumbly rock quality, the problem was sent. After dusting myself off, I did the moves again, made it to the same point, stepped onto the other side of the same hold (it had appeared better) only to have the “better side” break off as well, sending me to the ground again. Disgusted, I had walked away from the problem, saving it for another day.
Our group walked over to Gunsmoke, a classic V3 near the Barker Dam area. After playing around on Gunsmoke for a while, I decided to give Streetcar named Desire (V6/7) a go. It had been a long time since I had taken a look at this boulder problem, but as a climber who loves dihedrals, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to give it another look. Alex and I worked on the problem for quite a while, and after about 20 minutes, I managed to get off the ground. After another 20 minutes, I was making progress about half way up the dihedral, and after another 20 minutes, I was getting close to sending the problem! Here’s a video of my last attempt at the problem:
January 27, 2015. Posted by: nelsonday