Summer Time, and the Living’s Easy

Well we finally got up to Independence Pass on Saturday for the first time this season. We decided to check out a crag called Phat City in the Lincoln Creek area, it’s a newer cliff with a good range of routes from 5.8 to 5.11, and the book recommended many of the lines. Hiking up through the woods it looked like we might have been the first people to walk up this trail this year, with a couple of lingering snow patches we had to walk over. A quick 20 minute jaunt brought us to the base, and the views were fantastic, as they often are on the Pass. The climbing turned out to be a mixed bag, some of the routes were lame, some were really good, regardless of whether they were recommended in the guidebook or not.

The one thing we all agreed was lame, however, was the state of several of the anchors up there. Now I know firsthand that putting up routes is expensive, but if the route is worth doing, it’s worth having good hardware on it. This is completely unacceptable:

The skinny chain is attached directly to the bolts, with no hangers to clip. It’s also hard to get a biner through the chain links, and there is just one skinny link for lowering. And this was on one of the better routes up there. This is just lazy, go back and spend the extra $7 to put some hangers on there, buy some real chain and big quick links.

Despite the shoddy hardware, we had a blast, though I wouldn’t recommend the crag. It’s got a lot of choss, and there are way better cliffs up there. Now we know, and it’s always fun to check out a new spot.