Marshall & Mollie

Brian Burgess made the long drive up to Vegas to try to repeat the funsies that we had a couple months ago climbing Sour Mash. We felt like we wanted to find something with similar difficulty, but with a little more elevation gain, so we headed towards Oak Creek Canyon, home of some of the bigger Redrocks faces. Black Orpheus is 1,500ft of roped climbing, with another 600ft of 4th and 5th class scrambling up slab at the base. The guide books usually list it at 12 pitches. A worthy outing for a short, cold December day.

We were first in line at the gate at 6:00am, hiking up the trailhead at 6:20am, and at the base of the slab at 7:20am. At 8:10am we roped up and began the fun. We split the climb into two big blocks, and I was up first. Two big pitches of super fun 5.7-5.9 dehedral, followed by one 300ft pitch of simul-climbing 5.0-5.6ish stuff.

This was both of our intro to simul-climbing. Its going to take some working to get the bugs out, but man its fast. What would have taken us at least a couple of hours ended up only being about 50 minutes or so. Amazing. Takes a good lead head for both people though, as its absolutely a no fall situation.

Good times. The big simul pitch was the end of my block, and Brian took the lead for the serious stuff. We were just approaching the giant right facing corner that you can see from the big route photo. By this time, we were both having a blast, making good time, and loving the huge exposure.

The top two pitches had some of the cleanest crack climbing I have ever seen. Awesome. Well worth the thousand foot approach! The crux of the climb was at the beginning of our 6th pitch, with a pumpy move off of two finger lock-ish crack holds. They felt brutally hard to me. I seem to be doing fine on climbs where the cruxy stuff is technique based, but when it the tough stuff is pure pumping, I suffer. More running I guess!

We finished up some exciting 5.6 slab climbing, and topped out at about 1:30pm. For sure the fastest I’ve ever covered 2,100ft! Burgess smokes up stuff, its awesome! The top of the climb has a sweet horn with some good exposure that was begging for a little Bull Ridin’ fun.

The decent was 2 big rappels, and a whole lot of slab downclimbing. I made the mistake of leaving my approach shoes on the ground below, so I suffered rather miserably for 3 hours of smashing my toes into my climbing shoes. Ouch! We hit our packs at 4:30, and were back at the car just after 5:00pm. Good times!

Thanks again for coming out Brian!