Blue Balls - 5.6

I started to the left of the two trees, one dead, near the bottom (useful landmarks) and went left following a slight overhang up an arete. I then stayed a bit left and came up into the v-notch roof/chimney. I think there are several options to get there, esp down low. There is a fair amount of lichen on the climb still, so it's not always obvious route finding. The climb is very casual and quite pleasant up until the roof area, where there is a distinct crux. It probably wouldn't have bothered me as much if the rock quality had been better. It's a neat area, climbing up an overhanging chimney with a lot of open air under your feet as you move up into it. It felt pretty insecure since there was a lot of loose rock and I didn't trust a lot of the more obvious holds. After overprotecting (one of these cams has got to be in good rock) I pulled right up through the V, which was pretty exciting. From there on up, the angle drops and it's mostly just a scramble for the top. I set up an anchor on some smallish trees near the base of a steep vegetated gully.

The rappel is around the backside of the feature, and it takes you down to the base of a large gully. It was maybe 100 feet? We had a 70m rope. A 60 might work if you aim further up the gully, but don't hold me to it. To get to the rap station, I went up the vegetated gully behind the belay and turned right. There were two options: down between two boulders was a slung chockstone and a couple biners (one locker) that seemed pretty good; might be time for newer slings though, and you'd need probably 10+ feet to do the job. A few feet further down was a second set of slings around a constriction, with a really sorry rusty quicklink and a biner. To make this work, one would need to leave some more biners or rebuild the whole mess. Oh, and there was a disgusting horror-film nest of earwigs under the slings.

Stemming through the roof on this route is awesome. Really fun moves with good gear available.

A nice route, seems to have a couple different variations on the 2nd half. Doesn't get much traffic, needs to get some more to clean it up a bit.