New Crag Circa Aldama

On a tip from a friend, Mike and I went out exploring yesterday to see if we could find this crag off the highway near the town of Aldama. We'd been told about the two-hundred foot splitter cracks just a half hour from the city and with only a five minute walk-up. We almost turned around before we found it because it was really more like 45 minutes out, and it was a 15 minute walk up to the nearest end of the cliff-band. But once we were there, it was great. There's nothing like a little adventure climbing to get you rejuvinated. Click on the images below to see a large version of each one.


Here, Mike is ready to begin the onsight, FA (as far as we know). The first placement is well off ground level, relative to the ranch down below so the whole thing felt pretty exposed. The pic on the right is of us at the top of the climb.




Another summit victory photo. This cliff-band faces east so we were climbing in the shade all afternoon. But once on the top, we were back in the sun. The pic on the right is of Mike checking out other lines to the right of the line we climbed. You can see our line, the wide dihedral crack, off to the left. The hardest part, mentally of the whole climb, was topping out the pillar and then stepping back onto the face for the last fifteen feet. Talk about feeling exposed! Up til then we'd had the dihedral to work with on two sides, sometimes even cramming ourselves into the chimney for a bit. Then we got to the top of the pillar and we were back onto a normal face climb with 180 degrees of exposure.


On the top we found ourselves in an untouched 'forest' of ocotillo and cactus. It was really cool to see the land the way it would be without the imprint of humanity on it. Definitely a landscape that was unfamiliar to me, but I was glad I was wearing sneakers and not my tevas.