RAINBOW WALL - PART 2
(Click HERE for Part 1)

The night wasn't all that great. The weather was in our favor, but the damn flies and mosquitoes never stopped pestering me right up to dawn. I got most of my sleep in one hour snippets. Breakfast consisted of a RiceKrispie(tm) treat and a PowerBar(tm) I softened by keeping in my shorts all night long. MMMMmmmm....good!

We were headed up the ropes by 7:30am. I hauled the bag up the first two pitches and Tim jugged on by me to pitch 3 belay and  hauled the bag to pitch 3 while Bill and I sat below watching and making humorous/abusive commentary on his curious humping/thrashing attempts to haul the pig. Bill followed him and then hauled the bag to pitch 4 so Tim could get leading on pitch 5. The start of the pitch has some free climbing on it. Tim went as far as he could get, laughing at the "5.7" rating, before resorting to aiders. He was heading for a blocky looking roof that would obviously be exited to the right. The aid was again tricky, and it took Tim a while to figure out a slab section moving up to a bolt on the pitch. After a few false-starts, he got some handholds to help him with the high step in his aiders and snagged the bolt. You could nearly hear the "pucker-meter" go down when he was finally clipped in. From this point, Tim made steady progress up the last few feet to the roof and then out it's right side along a crack beneath it. Just above the right side of the roof, he reached the anchor. The lead cost him about two hours of work, but it seemed to be a pretty tricky piece of maneuvering in a few places.

Bill's turn...pitch 6. The corner above the roof swung up and leaned to the left. At A1, it was pretty straight forward, solid aid work for the most part. Bill yelled down that he'd found an intermediate belay station, then continued up the corner. Near the top, he moved out of his aiders and free climbed into a weird, awkward notch to gain the left end of Faith Ledge. Moving right, he anchored to a pair of bolts and kicked back to snooze on the comfortable belay. That figured. I've been hanging in my harness with my kidneys shoved into the back of my throat all morning and when we get a good ledge, it's my friggin' turn to lead!! Jugging to clean this pitch was mostly a pleasure. I picked up Bill's aider at the last piece before the notch and small tree and then tried to move up and onto the ledge above. The dangling aider caught on everything possible during this transition and was tremendously enjoyable. NOT!

Tim (above) and Bill (below) finishing off pitch two on day one.

We swapped over while Tim started jugging up to Faith Ledge. I'd pulled all the pieces from the pitch, figuring Tim could just take the straight-up haulbag path to the ledge. Evidently, it was a lot of effort to jug that steep wall. Ooops. Sorry, Tim. Bill put me on belay and I started up the ledges to the right. This section was kind of funky to me. I wandered quite a bit left and right going up to the base of a chimney. This went easily with some good stemming and I was on another good ledge system below a left-facing corner with a square ledge and two trees below it. The climbing in this corner looked really offwidth, but also looked like the only possibly climbable thing in the neighborhood. Not wanting to get us off track and figuring I was somewhere in the neighborhood of the right belay, I lashed into the two trees and started hauling the bag. Tim nursed the pig through the ledges. This haul was really fairly mellow, considering how ugly it looked on the way up. Maybe it wasn't so bad just because I weigh so much. A few nudges in the right place and the bag was through the bad stuff. After Tim arrived, I yelled down for Bill to come up so we could discuss where the route probably went. Bill, lounging around down on Faith Ledge flat on his back with his book simply yelled back "I have complete confidence in you and the Toolman!" While we were swapping the gear at the belay, Bill showed up and opinionated on the route ahead.

In the end, the wicked-looking offwidth above my little tree wasn't so wicked (5.8) and was the route, so Tim took the gear and wiggled up the slot and chimney above it to gain a ledge about 50 feet below Over the Rainbow Ledge (OTRL). He stopped there at a single bolt to belay and haul the bag up, deciding that it would be easier to get the bag up to the bolt than around the corner onto the face where the route finished to OTRL. Bill joined him and then ran the rope up to Over The Rainbow Ledge by traversing around the corner to the right and climbing the outside face (easy, but somewhat loose) to the ledge. Bill was hauling the bag when I arrived at the bolt. Tim had climbed around the corner pushing his jumars ahead of him and was at the ledge as well. While Bill wrestled the haulbag up over the lefthand lip of the ledge, Tim put me on belay and I climbed out onto the face and up to the ledge. I can't recall the exact time right now, but it seems like it was somwhere between 3pm and 4pm. We tied in and started setting up camp for the night.

Over The Rainbow Ledge is about the size of a rather wide sidewalk perched two-thirds of the way up the Rainbow Wall. The surface was flat and pretty good accomodations for the three of us for the night. We got comfy pretty fast. Tim cranked up the radio and Bill's whoops echoed off the walls. During the last couple of pitches to OTRL, the guys from California who had "reserved" the wall two weeks before finally showed up. We thought this was pretty late to be fixing rope, but they didn't make a move to do any climbing after arrival, only set up their bivy spot way off to the left of the bottom of the route (where we couldn't drop water bottles on them). One decision we made upon reaching OTRL was that we were going to follow the so-called "Swainbow Finish" to the top of the wall.

We were all ready to reach the top and some free climbing sounded pretty good to us at the time. Bill said it best, "I think we're all really free-climbers at heart." I had argued against this option when we originally made plans for the wall, but at this point, I couldn't think of a reason not to do the other finish. The three pitches of the Swainbow Finish move directly off the ledge to the summit of Rainbow Mountain. I fell to sleep with my first lead of the day looming over my head. That night on the ledge was the best night of sleep for me over the entire weekend. Once I got kind of situated and pulled my bivy bag up over my head to keep the buzzing bastards out of my ears, I slept until morning.

Alpenglow lights up the Brownstone Wall in Juniper Canyon