Rock climbing at Echo Cliffs
From inside at UCLA, our weekly activity, to outdoors at Echo Cliffs, practicing lead climbing.
After an hour spent bushwhacking through bushes and trees on a non-existent trail (brilliant move. we're idiots!!), we arrived at the Grotto area of Echo Cliffs and attempted a 5.7, two 5.8's, and two 5.9's. We had success with the 5.7 as a nice warm-up, but the hour-long detour must have worn us out because we should have flown up the 5.8's and 5.9's... and we didn't.
Still, getting used to lead climbing was good practice, and we did make it up one of the 5.9's (Miss Pacman). Both 5.8's looked doable as well, but one of them, we were probably continuing to be morons and couldn't figure it out (Gameboy). The other (Little Giant) had the bolts in a weird place-- more than three feet away from the route itself, which just didn't feel safe. Further checking revealed that we were doing the correct thing, but we didn't know that at the time.
The 2nd 5.9 though (Junior)... that just looked hard. We'll look at it again next time...
We took the proper trail back and had a much easier time. 30 minutes, I think it was, not 90 minutes...
And yes, we had a random Ferrari sighting on the drive home.
