The Climbing Club

on saturday portland rock gym hosted an ice festival and dry tooling competition to raise money for index and hyalite canyon. it included a raffle, a silent auction, and a slide show about mixed climbing in the cordillera blanca. very impressive. also, they had a keg of awesome beer.

the routes were set by seattle's own roger strong. and they were pretty hard. bryan schmitz (cc - powderhound) took the top honors.

finals route was really stout

prelim route took a really sweet undercling


and the new bd fusion tools are totally sweet, i liked them better than nomics.

Cool. Somehow it looks very strange to see people wielding ice tools, but wearing rock shoes!

...and using chalk while wielding said tools!

Were they top-roping in the finals?

yes, everything is tr. i don't know what the former rating was. the holds included a number of slick holds with either tiny ledges or pick holes, a few iceholdz, and on the prelim route - two styrofoam panels. very sticky, but very hard to pry the tools out of.

just to give you an idea - the winner got about 1/3, maybe as high as a bit under 1/2 of the way up the finals route before blowing off.

Looks sweet. Nice new profile pic too V!

Looks like a good time. Is that you in the second picture? If so, are those the new fusions you are using?

yep. i tried nomics in the prelims, and demoed the fusions in the finals.

just FYI - in case this stuff interested anyone - my friend eric just put up a few dry tooling routes up on the outside wall of s.g. if you feel like practicing, the lead is really straightforward.