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Book of Saturday's on Notch Peak, 7/7/05:
We managed to pull of the 27th ascent of Book of Saturday's on Notch peak in a 23 hour push
doorstep-to-doorstep. We had a team of 4 (2 rope teams)....I had the Great Dr. Bryan Bornholdt tied in
with me and Bob and Glen (local friends) were the second rope team. The route has all the elements of
quality adventure (remote, little known, big approach, big wall free-climb) and with a crux of 11a is by no
means trivial. I was pretty psyched for this as it sounded similar to the routes I was on in the dolomites,
which I absolutely loved!!! With 12 pitches of mostly bolted limestone climbing, beefy anchors, and the
ability to rap the route I thought this would be great fun! Unfortunately the route is so loose that the
objective hazard of just being on the north face of Notch peak lowers the "fun factor" a bit!....we had stuff
raining down on us all day and definitely error ed in judgement in being up there at all, let alone with
multiple parties. Fortunately, we were able to keep everybody safe, complete the route, and walk away
unscathed.....however I'm relatively confident that any good karma I had is now used up!!!! I still say
kudo's to the FA team for putting up this route as they put a ton of work into this, but it really is only a matter
of time before somebody get's hurt on this one.
Below is the beta on the route from summitpost....when they mention that it's "loose and dangerous"
they aren't kidding! Having climbed a fair amount in the Black and the Fishers (me being not too
bright!), I figured "how bad can it be?" and can honestly say I was impressed with how loose this was!!
http://www.summitpost.org/show/mountain_link.pl/mountain_id/1827
Additionally heres the link to the article Bob's paper did on our ascent.
Cheers and if you go up on this, please wear a helmet!
Brent
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