Sunday, July 26, 2009

Super Psyched

My best friend keeps complaining to me that I sound like a "surfer" all the time when I tell her how "stoked" or "psyched" I am about climbing. In this case, Proper English will have to yield to unbridled youthful exuberance. I went up to Cathedral yesterday with Neal. I had heard various moanings and groanings from others about how wet and unpleasant it was going to be, but a 20% probability of precipitation is not to be passed up in this rainy season that is passing as July. In truth, things were wet, drying out halfheartedly, and most importantly, climbable. I led Still in Saigon (5.8) which I had done a few years ago with Kevin Mahoney, but remembered nothing about. It was my hardest trad lead so far, but I felt good about it. There were definitely a few dicey slab moves on it, but my time working the 5.11 slab on Gunboat Diplomacy and my many self-taught slab lessons at Metrorock have paid off, because I feel reasonably good on slab these days. Then we ventured over to Recompense (5.7), and while the upper pitches were wet, the first pitch was fine, and Neal led that. I think that was his first time with double ropes, and it was an educational experience for him. He got a bit off route, but with the help of the doubles and a lot of extended slings, he managed to salvage the off-route choss-pile into an overall route. In other words, he made it work with what he had, which I think is a really important skill.

We ran into the redoubtable Bayard Russell at that point, and they ran up the first two pitches of the Prow, so I went over to investigate. As it turns out, there's an easy variation and a standard 5.10a variation, so I chose to do the 5.10a version. It's a slabby thing with a few cam placements and a few bolts, so it felt very reasonable. I felt a little scared going over the crux, but my head is really in a much better place these days, and I just went for it and did fine. I took a look at the rest of the route, and it looked awesome.

[Advertisement. I want to go back and aid the route so I work parts of it. Eventually, I want to free it. Who wants to learn how to do some simple aid climbing and jugging? Let me know if you're interested! The route is A1 or A2 with a lot of fixed protection and goes free at 5.11d. You don't need to be able to climb harder than, say, 5.9, but you do need to be good with gear, very patient, and even more psyched.]

Neal finished off by doing some sort of very wet, scary crack at the North End. I didn't catch the name of it, but there were some exciting shenanigans required to clean the damn route. Today was brutally wet. It rained a lot. I tried to convince Dunbar, Jimmy, Alon, and Jim to climb at Sundown with Neal and I, but we were passed over. They did show us a cool little campsite though. Instead, we climbed with various North Conway Cool People like Freddie Wilkinson and Janet Bergman, who are to us as, say, a five course meal is to one of those oily rags which passes for burgers at Burger King. We got on Eyeless. Neal did quite well, while I flailed about ineffectually. Everything felt really greasy.

Driving home, we passed the exciting exit number of 26 on I-93 and I thought we'd go and check out Flesh for Lulu again, as the sun was poking its head from out of the clouds in an encouraging, but desultory fashion. Neal got on, and made good progress, but seemed to find it harder than Eyeless (12b), even though it's apparently graded easier (12a/b). But whatever--who cares? We had a great time. I got one good burn in. At the crux, you get this core-wrenching left hand gaston crimp (which is somewhat sharp and gave me a blood blister last week), hike your feet up, and dynamically (if you're me) or statically (if you're good, or maybe just tall) go up to this jug. Everybody uses this really high right foot that looks like someone's bottom lip, but I discovered today that the dyno was way easier if I used a foot that was closer in. Or maybe I was just feeling stoked. Who knows? I made a full on dyno and stuck it first try, which I felt great about. I shook out and traversed up to the final boulder problem, and blew one of the final moves before the last bolt is clipped. So that was, by far, my best burn on a 12 so far, so I'm really excited about that. I think it will actually go soon, just as soon as I get a little more endurance. I did feel slightly scared doing the last boulder problem, since I was so pumped, and as I deadpointed to this good three-finger sloper/jug thing, I felt my concentration wander slightly, and I missed it. I think this shows how important mental conditioning is. I probably haven't improved physically that much since last week, but I rehearsed the crux sequence in my head a million times this week, and when I went to do it, it felt great. The last boulder problem, however, I didn't really think that much about, and as a result, when I got up there, it was weird and I had to think, which was bad, because I was already super pumped. And being super psyched and unafraid really helped--I find I can never climb effectively if I'm worried my belayer is going to unexpectedly dirt me...

Well. I'm back to the lab. My complicated substrate synthesis is being delayed at present not just by all the climbing, but also by a lack of material. I'm spending a lot of time bringing up material and making reagents. I just made the beta-acylphosphonate reagent for installing E alpha, beta-unsaturated 2-oxazolidinones via Horner-Wadsworth-Emmons reactions, and it was brutal. First, you take the sodium amide resulting from the reaction between 2-oxazolidinone and sodium hydride, and acylate it with bromacetyl bromide. That works pretty well, and much better, I've found, than going with n-butyllithium. Then you treat it in an Arbusov reaction with trimethyl phosphite. Unfortunately, this generates a load of highly toxic bromomethane gas, which also has the effect of creating the undesired side product of methyl dimethyl phosphonate. This has to be distilled off, and the resulting nasty red-orange oil crystallized into the desired phosphonate, a nice white crystal. Well, while the NMR spectrum looked fine, it just refused to crystallize, so I was forced to run some flash chromatography in methanol/dichloromethane, which is definitely one of my least favorite solvent systems. I put my nice yellow solution on the rotovap, and went to the bathroom, and when I came back, I found that someone (probably me) had accidentally brushed up against the rotovap, and it was now at an undesirably toasty 70 celsius. Oooops. And now I had a red-orange oil again. But luckily for me, the whole thing started to crash out very slowly over the next few hours. So I'm stoked about that, too. Next up is allyl diazoacetate, which I've never been able to make very well, and may try to figure out. Something about the deacylation of the intermediate beta-keto, alpha-diazo allyl ester never seems to go according to plan.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Flesh For Lulu

Projected Flesh for Lulu (5.12a/b) at Rumney all day today. I was so psyched (and desperate) to get on it, I just showed up and projected it with random people. I had one good burn on TR where I almost got to the top and fell doing one of the last hard moves. Leading was harder though...I think the clipping is really pumping me out. Rachel showed up and TRed it really cleanly which was pretty impressive. She matched the crux hold, probably using her tiny little fingers, something I was completely unable to do. I did crimp the crux hold really hard. So hard, in fact, I have a huge blood blister there now. But I'm still super, super psyched. I was really stuck in the 11s there for a while, but now I feel like a bunch of easier 12s are within my reach! I just need a little more endurance!

[editorial note: I added some "quick reaction buttons:" yay! or nay! ?]

Friday, July 10, 2009

Trolls, Mordor, and Flesh

It finally happened this weekend. No, not the apocalypse. The weather finally got nice in New Hampshire (sort of). Sure, it rained now and then, but for the most part, the sun was out, and so I put away my design draft for an ark, and clipped my daises to my harness. See, climbing is a cool sport *because* it's so "extreme" (read: unpopular). If I were into something lame like, oh, golf, I probably couldn't even hire Tiger Woods with a million dollars to glance in my direction, let alone coach me. Fortunately, in something as esotetic (read: stupid) as aid climbing, I can hire Mark Synnott, a bona fide big wall man. So, he took some time out of his busy adventure-related scheming and parenting schedule to teach me about aid climbing. You know, you flip through the aid climbing chapter in Freedom of the Hills, and scoff. Yes, you are ascending using gear, and a lot of gear at that. Yes, it's very complicated. But no, it doesn't appear to be any fun whatsoever. You didn't become a climber to become a bloody rigger, did you? Well, I decided to do it anyways because I had heard it teaches you a lot about placing good gear, seeing as you test every single piece, and unexpectedly found it to be really fun, as well. And that's what climbing is about, right? Yeah. I mean, try to explain even "pure" forms of climbing to people. Uh, yeah, I dip my hands in a pouch containing the ground up remains of ancient sea creatures and climb to the top of the scariest rock I can find. And if I manage to do it without a rope, risking my life completely needlessly, well, I'm extra badass, so can I have my unbridled adulation now? In this, at least, the existentialists have the right idea.

Nut? Ice tool? Pin? So many choices!

Friday, we went to Trollville. We were at Cathedral yesterday, and we explained this fact to a passerby, and he asked "Trollville? Never heard of it." How typical. An added bonus of it being completely deserted most of the time, particularly the summer, is no one gives a fuck if you pound pins, bolt, or drytool away. So this was the perfect place for me to learn how to pound in pins. I mock-lead this A4 seam on the diciest placements, with multiple pieces ripping out on tests, and trying to stack pins and nuts to make things work. I fell about halfway up, which I thought was pretty good. That thing is pretty hard. I fell because I had to get a very marginal micro BD stopper, which was fine when weighted from below, but terrible when I got a bit higher on it. I think if I were going to do it again, I would "free climb" the very blank section in the middle using ice axes. Yes, you can drytool in the summer with rock shoes, and yes, it's totally absurd, but I had a lot of fun doing it anyways:

Absurd drytooling in summer. M7?

I had tried the route before in the winter, and thought it was hard, but it went pretty well this time. I would have sent it, but I got my tool stuck in a slot. Oh well. It's not really a mixed route though, because it never gets any ice on it. However, topping it out was quite tough without any frozen turf at the top. It was totally cool though: leashless trickery, hand jams, heel hooks, torquing sidepulls... I also aided this climb, and it was much more straightforward.

Leading the Mordor Wall. A2, I think.

Well, yesterday I got my first aid lead in at the Mordor Wall on Cathedral Ledge. This thing is no trifle. The first move is off a somewhat dicey looking talon placement:


And you can't see in the pictures, but the next move is to thread a little rivet with the wire of a nut, and slide the nut up to make a "bolt." And then there were a lot of microcam and micronut placements. I think I used almost my entire rack. At one point, I was running out of pieces and had to place a BD C3 (#000) cam and a BD micro stopper (#2) next to each other and equalize them. Those are tiny pieces, to be sure, but I bounce tested them very aggressively and was impressed to see that they held fine. It also took forever...four hours to lead it and then a surprising two hours to jug it. Every time I did something slow, like fifi in too much, Mark would say "Ah, but what would Chris Mac do here?!" and I'd try to ignore him, only to discover an hour later that he was totally right. And jugging a traverse is not trivial. If you thought cleaning a traversing sport climb was hard, wait till you try to do this. Mark told me he's seen people on big walls stymied for hours trying to do stuff like that.

Hey, Mark? Why wasn't this in the brochure? Nobody said
this was going to be awful!

Well, I'm pretty pleased with what happened. I didn't whip, and I only had one piece blow out on a test. I did almost poke myself in the eye when I whipped out a nut, but fortunately, I was wearing safety glasses. I've decided that nut tools, despite their name, are virtually useless for taking out nuts. You can get out most nuts just by yanking up on them. Why didn't anyone tell me this before?! I learned a ton about placing gear and jugging properly, and feel ready to tackle harder aid objectives. I think it will make me feel more confident trad climbing, too.


Well, I polished off the weekend by going to Rumney and having a go at Flesh for Lulu. It actually went pretty well, and I linked a lot of it together. I think I can definitely send it this season. It's 5.12a/b, but nothing feels harder than V3 or V4. It's just very technical and pumpy. It's really my style--slightly overhanging, balancy moves on crimps. Jeremy and Chelsea had a great time on it too:


I also went to Mark's slideshow about his excursion to Borneo with various contemporary climbing luminaries including Alex Honnold, Jimmy Chin, and Conrad Anker. I won't ruin it for you, because I'm rooting for him to come back in the fall and give a slideshow to the HMC, but there was a lot of gossip about these guys. In no uncertain terms, it was made clear to me that: Mark is crazy and bases all of his sponsored adventures on books which document doomed expeditions where dumb people venture somewhere they have no business being and end up having to practically eat each other before being rescued; Alex Honnold is ridiculously good and has almost no fear, to the point where he makes fun of Mark for being "Mr. Safety;" Jimmy Chin is incredibly charming, to the point where he can solve problems with local officials by whipping out his iPhone and showing them cool videos ("Ah, here I am skiing down Everest. What have you got to say about that?" Incidentally, one dude walked out of the room before the slideshow started, as soon as he found out that Mark wasn't going to talk about climbing Everest. He mumbled something about not wanting to see the "Not Everest guy." What a tool.); and Conrad Anker is both a bloodhound when it comes to routefinding and also totally tough ("You guys want to go down because there's a little typhoon? You're such wimps!"). Well, I'm going to end the post there, with that incredibly long sentence. It was a great weekend.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Positive Thinking?

I wish this were about the route of the same name in the Daks, but it is actually about this:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1909019,00.html

People are always telling me to think more positively, and it seems like that might actually be counterproductive. Well, to be fair, I think psychotherapy, and for that matter, psychology and psychiatry, while sometimes undeniably helpful, are somewhat pseudoscientific. Along with the bias I have that says social science studies like this often have some sort of agenda, I do take the whole thing with a grain of salt. But nonetheless, I think it's common sense that striving for realistic pronouncements, and general honesty with yourself, is often helpful. Of course, if you're on lead, and you need to lie to yourself to make it work, then by all means. But once you're on the ground, don't tell yourself you're a 5.12 climber when you don't have any arms!

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Rumney Reportlet

Neal, Hannah, Claire, Jeremy, Chelsea, Philippe, Jonathan, Patrick, a variety of hangers-on, and I pounced on the brief respite from the continuing monsoon-like deluge to get some sport climbing in at Rumney. It was good to get back into projecting mode. Neal and I worked on Orangahang (12a/b), and I think we both made good progress on it. I still don't think I have all the footwork down quite right, but it's good enough that I think I can send it with a bit more endurance. I put Claire on Tropicana (11a), her first 11 outside, and she did great, contrary to pre-mumblings to the contrary. A lot of stuff was really drippy so we didn't do much else. I wanted to get on Flesh for Lulu (12a/b), but there was some camp of precocious teens on it so we went and ate delicious Subway sandwiches instead. I'll try to project that next week. It seems like more my style. Mark Synnott and I are headed out to do some aid climbing this weekend, assuming the clowns at the body shop ever decide to fix my car. Maybe I'll get to lead my first aid climb!