Hey folks! My climbing partner Hung and I made a little two day Pinns trip we just got back from and I thought I'd drop you a trip report. I'm the planner as far as routes and such, not him, so I had some intentions, but nothing hyper-specific going in. Here's how it went down.
This was a somewhat last-minute trip as far as planning is concerned. It started about ten days ago when I realized I had Sunday-Tuesday (16th-18th) off from work. Just happened to be scheduled that way. I messaged my buddy to see if he was down, and he was. All the campsites in the park were booked for the days we wanted, except a couple group sites, which were far too pricy for just the pair of us, so I looked for other options. I found a HipCamp at Bar SZ Ranch about ten minutes down the road from the park, and it wasn't too bad. It turned out to be a great experience.
We drove down Sunday evening after doing a bunch of packing and housework ahead of time. The drive went fine, but we did leave later than intended, meaning we put up the tent in the dark after struggling a bit to find the campsite on the ranch. They need more/better signs. Tent up, we went to sleep and woke up the next morning around 7am. Having been to Pinnacles before, we were determined to get into the park early.
After changing clothes and such, we got to the park around 8am to find that the park isn't busy at all at 8am on a Monday morning. I've been here during the week before, but must not have noticed. We got to park in the little front lot at Bear Gulch even. After doing some breakfast and hygene in the parking lot and packing some snacks and such, we decided to head for the Monolith. Most of what's on the Monolith has been too hard for me to try and climb in the past, or swarmed with folks on a weekend, but not today. We took the Bear Gulch trail through the caves, got there no problem and there were no climbers to be seen. Hung has climbed here in the long past pre-COVID days, and suggested that I could lead the Direct Route (5.7) to get to the top and set up anchors for top ropes. With a stick clip, it seemed doable. I took it slowly, took a couple of times, and got to the top no problem. But this felt like the most sandbagged 5.7 I'd ever climbed. I chalked it up to 50s grading, lowered off, and belayed for Hung. He moved the quad over to the next set of anchors for POD, which I did really want to give a try, having been emboldened by sending 11a clean in Red Rocks recently.
It's at this point that, planning on working through the routes moving left to POD that I was able to figure out that we'd climbed the Terranean portion of Subterranean Tango instead of the Direct Route. This made a lot of sense based on a couple of questions I'd had, but here we were, apparently warming up on roughly 10a outdoors. (Side question, does everyone just stickclip the 1st/3rd bolt on this one when working the lower portion now? Man those first two rusty bolt hangers look sketchy!) Okay. With that sorted, we moved over to Hawaiian Noises (5.10d). It's listed as PG13 online, and I can see why. The second bolt is halfway up the face! It looks like if you blew that second bolt you'd definitely be in groundfall territory, so thankfully we were toproping. Hawaiian Noises went about as well as the Tango had on lead. I hung a couple times figuring out how best to pull on certain chockstones, wowed some tourists, and got the top. Hung followed, made a comment or two about how glad he was to not be leading it, and that was that. Two routes down.
At this point, we slid over to POD. I've had an eye toward this route for at least a year now, but it's been far harder than anything I'd been able to send at the park until now. I was grateful to not be trying to flash it on lead, but at least the bolts and hangers looked good and were more reasonably spaced than Hawaiian Noises. Well, let me tell you that the onsight attempt was not a thing of beauty. I spent so much time trying to figure out which of the massively chalked up cobbles were actually good, and from what angles, that I don't think I climbed more than two bolts clean without taking. I spent a good bit of time clipped into a bolt with my personal anchor as more tourists marveled at how cool we were. I did all the moves, and got to the top, but I'd describe the effort as "strenuous". Hung went next. He had a memory of getting a lot farther on this one than expected the five or so years ago he'd climbed here last, and made shorter work of it than I did. Still not clean, but he looked much better. It should be said that POD fits his general style better than mine. But hey, that's how you improve, right?
We lunched, napped for a couple in the sun, and I suited up for a second go, as this was the route I'd really come for more than anything. Could I do it more cleanly? Hung provided some coaching, suggesting generally higher feet (always a good idea), and finding more layback-y, hip in positions. It helped. The climbing from bolts 1 to 4 didn't go super cleanly still, but it was better. Bolt 4 to the anchor I managed without a problem. All of a sudden, this felt doable. We were tired and didn't want to have another go that day, but you can bet I'll be back. Pinnacles isn't that far from home, and mother nature resets a lot less often than in my gym. We hiked the rest of the way to the reservoir and lounged around a bit, talked about options for the next day, and enjoyed ourselves for a bit before heading back via the Moses Spring Trail and scouting a little under Discovery Wall. We made a camp dinner, and built a fire in the communal pit at the ranch with the wood we'd bought at the Camp Store, and had a generally good night.
Day 2 we woke up a little later, as we'd seen how empty the lot was the previous morning. We packed up the tent and belongings pretty quickly, and rolled in around 9:15. It was busier, but were still able to snag a spot in that small lot at the front of Bear Gulch. We'd talked about possibly driving around to the West Side and hitting up Whitetail Rock, as Mission Impossible and Get Smart look really appealing, but I'd spied all the well regarded easy things that have been put upon Crud and Mud since Brad's book was published, and, down for a more adventurous if less physically difficult day of climbing, advocated for that. We hiked through the caves again, out to the reservoir, and all the way out to the end. The trail was surprisingly good, if obviously less used than the ones we'd been familiar with in Bear Gulch. Heading uphill after getting to the end of the reservoir, I thought we were initially heading to The Frog, but figured out as we made it to the ridgetop which formation was which. My endurance for uphill hiking has gotten a lot better since I started climbing, but I'm still just not very good at it. It took a while to do those 200 yards of switchbacks though the brush. After arriving, I did some route finding and located Solotero Pina Especial based on the beta from Brad's book. Doing route finding based entirely on text is a lot harder than it is with pictures. With that route identified, I was able to figure out that the newer bolts on the arete at the base of the gully between the north and middle summits was Bathing Beauty (5.9), and that moving up the gully were Mud Bath (5.
, Pay Dirt (5.7), and Squeaky Clean Mud (5.6).
We decided to start with Squeaky Clean and work our way down the gully. We took just the stuff we'd need, and hauled it all the way up there. Not the simplest thing to do. I lead and sent the route, finding just the two bolts with hangers and nothing else at the top. I lowered off a couple of draws, and Hung went up after me. He also sent, but I had missed the info about descending by rapping off Bathing Beauty. Hung wasn't super pleased with the setup up top, but went in direct, slowly passed the rope through the hangers, and rapped off, cleaning as he went. When he got to the ground it was *very* hard to pull the rope through and back down. That done, we decided to move on down to Pay Dirt. With spotty coverage, I'd lost the page from this forum I'd had pulled up with descriptions of the routes (and the key descent beta). I told him he could lead this time, and I'd deal with the annoying rap. He did, just fine, and I went after, no problem. I did the same thing at the top, pulling a bunch of rope, setting up a rap (I can do this now, cleanly, without issue!), and getting back down. Since the first one had been so annoying, I'd pulled all the rope up the route minus what was needed to reach the ground figuring we'd save a lot of hard pulling the second time. Except this time, even with both of us leaning hard on it, the rope wouldn't budge. Welp.
This is the first time I've had a stuck rope. I've not been climbing outdoors all that long, in the grand scheme of things. We looked around for a minute or two, thought about some options, and decided our best bet (short of soloing the gully on the other side, which Hung, being a notoriously conservative climber, didn't want to do if we didn't have to), was to prussik back up the rope, descend to the Bathing Beauty anchor that we'd seen by now, and lower or rappel off that. I offered to do the hard work. I've never used a Prussik as an ascender before. I know how it works, and understand the theory, so it was time to try hard. We set up two to have a backup, and I sudo-aided my way back up the route I'd just climbed. It was easier and more successful than I'd expected. In direct again, I pulled the rope up, unthreaded the anchor we were in, and then carefully worked my way the 8-ish feet down to Bathing Beauty. In direct there, I coiled half the rope, and chucked it off the side for Hung to pick up, threaded the other end through the chains, and tied in to lower. And that was that. Back on the ground, with all our stuff, we sat and had lunch. All in all not that hard, just kind of complicated. Definitely the weirdest "mess" I've gotten into outside as of yet.
So here's the question for JC & KC (feel free to speculate, everyone). I know y'all know what you're doing as far as bolting and such, so why set these up like this? They're not great as top ropes. Even with a really extended anchor, the rope rag is going to be a lot higher than average. I don't figure material cost is it, or you wouldn't be bolting a crag that far out. We spent all afternoon trying to think what the intention was, and all we could come up with was that the expectation is to lead, belay a follower from above, then descend to the rap station and rap off. Even like this though, you just have to hoof it back up the gully to do the next route, etc. What are we missing? I'd *love* to know. Additionally, are there any reason these aren't on Mountain Project? I try to track everything so I can look back and see what I did. I'd put them up if there's no objection.
After lunch, we took on Bathing Beauty (we skipped Mud Bath after all the faffing around). It was definitely a touch stouter than everything else, but the crux was probably in the first two bolts and the rest was fine. All in all, high quality routes for a relatively sparsely visited crag, with mostly pretty solid rock in a park not always well known for it. Definitely mossier and lichen-ier than the more well travelled stuff, but very climbable and the views from a different part of the park were beautiful. We could have stayed longer, but had the hour hike out of the park plus two hours at least back to the East Bay, so we called it there, packed up, and hiked back out. We took Moses Spring again, this time without the Discovery Wall detour. I've never seen the park so green. The water in the cave was higher than I've seen it before too, and there were wildflowers everywhere. I can link to photos if anyone's interested.
