Wednesday, September 28^th

It's almost 5pm when we drive into the car park at Sleeping Giant, which is pretty late and we should have guessed what was going to happen to us if we decided to stick to the plan anyway. The plan? Well, we wanted to do two routes in an afternoon. Repeat an old one, rap back down and maybe lead a new one before walking out from the top. But we had a late start and … well … this is what happened.

Like I said, it's almost five when we park the car. We load up on harnesses, ropes and gear and head up the white trail one more time. We quickly decide to do a slight variation on "Rain dance" … should be easier now it's not raining (see the trip report). So we scramble up the scree slope and get directly under the chute that we traversed across to last time from about 8 meters to the left. We scramble a little more and we're on a big fat ledge a couple of meters to the right of it.

I kill a lot of time trying to get a perfect belay anchor in place and trying to sort the ropes. This is a result of just having completed a self-rescue lesson in New Hampshire on the previous weekend. Leon's going to lead the whole climb, so he's busy checking out his rack and asking for the occasional pro from mine, a couple of morons yell something unintelligible at us from the main trail below. It's amazing how your average slack-jawed troglodyte behaves when he's in the outdoors and spots something slightly out of the ordinary. The knuckle-draggers pushed off soon enough and we were left in peace.

Miles away somewhere over North Haven I could see a hot-air balloon hanging in the sky. It's a beautiful afternoon, no clouds and no breeze.

Leon took off going up and left around a fairly difficult arete, spending lots of time making sure his protection was good. Around the corner he was out of sight and, for quite a while, not going anywhere. He had a hell of a time trying to set a directional anchor that wouldn't pop (he was now going to go straight up the chute) as he dragged on the rope in a different direction. I was anchored in pretty securely so I couldn't swing around much to see how he was doing, but I occasionally spotted a flash of white shirt as he moved around and up the chute. He got to that cliff tree that gave us some problems last time and after getting around it, declared that it was the crux. Up on top he set a triply anchored belay station (in pretty much exactly the same place I put it first time) and belayed me from there.

My climb was ok, it was fun to go second this time around and see it from another perspective. It seemed slightly harder, possibly because I'm a little more carefree when I'm not leading and not really concentrating on which are the best hand/foot placements. In any case I tried passing the tree out on the arete and that took one or two mildly strenuous moves.

Got to the top and saw that the remaining light was rapidly fading away. I really wanted a lead today so I was all for rapping back down "Rain Dance" and climbing up another, easy-looking, route. Leon gives me a funny look and then shrugs, well ok … we'll see. I ask if the anchor may be improved a bit, and with Leon's blessing, I place a fourth piece on the anchor. I had trailed up a second rope on my climb, so we tie the ends together and thread them through doubled and opposed carabiners on the anchor. Toss the ropes, tie in and we're ready to go … using the same rappel setup that Alain Comeau taught us (for the second time) on the weekend.

I go first and it's a little constricted in the chute, have to go past the crux tree … which did it's best to claw at us everytime we passed it. At the bottom I get off and yell up to Leon that he can come down. Both at the bottom I look at the rapidly darkening sky and decide that there is still time for a fast climb up and to the right around the big prow above us. Flake out the ropes, clip in, Leon gives me his headlamp and I'm away. Halfway up I have to turn the lamp on, by the time I get to the top it's full dark. It was a very easy series of big ledges, with only a few meters of real climbing between each. This climb I hereby dub "Nightcrawler" and it's probably rated at 5.4. The thing didn't take me very long, perhaps 10 or 15 minutes, but once I got to the top I wanted to sling a little tree for an anchor … but my slings were horribly knotted. Leon topped out, emerging from complete darkness and muttering something about a "crazy owstralien". When reached me under the stars he probably saw, by the headlamp's shine, my big black sling anchoring me to the tree and all three of the shorter yellow slings still snarled around it. Ugly but it was safe safe.

We butterflied up the ropes, cleaned up the belay and Leon went over to the top of "Rain Dance" to collect the anchor we had left there from the rappel. Leon leads the way down following uncertain trails for quite a while before we reach the main one. Still nice weather, a bit cool perhaps, but with beautiful stars in the sky and the quiet woods of the Sleeping Giant all around us it was a good night. We get back to the car at 8pm. Hey, two climbs in less than two and a half hours … not too shabby!