Climbing at Old Baldy

Hanging out at Old Baldy.

I climbed at Old Baldy with my friends Caron and Aaron on Sunday. It was the first time we've climbed at Old Baldy this year and the first time we've been able to put our Old Baldy climbing permit to use. We were hoping to run into a park ranger so that we could whip out our permit and show it off, but no dice.

Descending Direct Pressure (5.9) after a successful clean climb. Although it appears one of my foot is on the wall, I am actually hanging under an overhang.

The hike from the park parking to the crags was quite scenic. Old Baldy is situated along the Niagara escarpment and so the view at the top of the escarpment is fantastic.

I was pretending to lose my balance, but instead it looks like I've gone insane.

The climbs we tried were okay except for Direct Pressure. When we got close to the climb, we ran into two climbers that were just leaving. They had thought about climbing it, but abandoned it because they didn't feel confident.

When I got to the base of the climb, I realized why. For Direct Pressure, where we belayed is actually 3 meters off the ground at the edge of the drop. To reach the first bolt, the climber needs to traverse over the drop. If the climber fails to reach the first bolt and falls (or the bolt fails), the climber would fall 3 meters onto jagged rocks and pull the belayer down along with them.

We looked closely at the climb and decided we could do it. It was very nerve racking but we all focused and managed to clear the first bolt on our attempt.

However, the climb posed another problem. Although the face of the climb is mostly vertical, the base actually angles outs. So if you fall far enough, you could land hard on your feet.

That's what ended up happening to Aaron. He was attempting a harder route that started the same way as Direct Pressure. When he reached the crux of the climb, he tried a few moves but was unable to clip into the bolt. He yelled 'take!' for me to reel in the slack, let go of the wall, fell around 3m and landed on one of his heels hard.

Aaron's nasty bruised up heel.

Fortunately, he didn't break anything and only ended up with a bruised up heel. We talked about the incident afterwards and we both agreed we followed standard controlled lead falling procedure. It's just the climb really sucks.

(Photos by Aaron)