Technical climbing info
- Feature: Monkey Face
- Route: Pioneer Route
- Length: 5 pitches
- Grade: 5.7, C1*
*Route stats from the Rock Climbing Oregon’s Smith Rock State Park, 3rd Edition, by Allan Watts
Pretext
This blog has two flaws:
- I usually end up skipping writing about climbs that I don’t feel are “personally notable and total successes”. I attribute this to just not being totally excited about the experiences that miss the mark after the fact, which results in a lack of motivation to write. (I write these posts for fun, after all.) But for every success story, there were probably one or two less-successful stories.
- I almost totally gloss over the sheer volume of behind-the-scenes effort that goes into making these alpine adventures reasonable. Mostly because writing about the days living out of our Sprinter in Smith and Vantage during the off-seasons is just not very exciting to me, and probably wouldn’t be for anybody to read. But for every 1 hour in the alpine, there were probably 20 hours somehow preparing.
And this post isn’t really going to address either of those, other than just putting it out there that we do spend a lot of time in the crags. This just so happens to be one of the coolest climbs I have climbed in Smith! (I thought that would be the Marsupial Traverse, which turned out to be a bit of a choss pile.)
Labor Day Weekend
Labor Day weekend usually marks our last hoorah in the alpine for the year. It’s a nice long weekend, the weather is usually still nice, and the offices are still in “summer break mode”. And while 2 of those things were true this year, the weather was not forecasting to be good. Our treasured and coveted long weekend Eldorado Backcountry Zone permit was as useless as a keychain carabiner.
And while our social feeds filed with photos from Wyoming, for whatever reason, we didn’t have the foresight or the time to make a big trip. So, to the ever-sunny Smith Rock it was! But even Smith was not in perfect condition, as the footbridge was closed for construction.
And while our alpine plans were ruined, we had a few ideas in our mind for Smith. The Pioneer Route was high on the list. And while not super techy for a crag day, we were really intrigued by the concept of getting to the top of the notable Monkey Face. Not to mention the intrigue of climbing a big bolt ladder- something I had never done.
A wet and missed approach
The parking lot that morning was nearly empty, which was totally unexpected for Labor Day. I guess the barricaded foot bridge felt unwelcoming to most. We located our previous day’s river ford location and walked across- overall, not too bad.
We casually made our way down the River Trail, and over to the Mesa Verde Trail. I had never been that far, so it was pleasant to see a few new areas of the park. We made our first mistake by popping onto the Misery Ridge trail, which did eventually take us to where we needed to go, only to later discover we took a huge detour. We could have just walked a few steps further on the Mesa Verde trail to get to the obvious base of the route.
Spotting the bolt and permadraw that marked the beginning of the route, we racked and roped up. I scarfed down half of my massive burrito I picked up from Rigoberto’s Taco Shop the previous night. From here, I’ll break it down by pitches:
P0 – Cascade 4th Class
I like to differentiate between “4th class” and “Cascade 4th class”. Seemingly everywhere else in the world outside the PNW that I have been to, 4th class is distinctly easy terrain that I wouldn’t be concerned bringing my 6 year old sister up. But in the PNW, 4th class can mean anything between 4th class and 5.5. Seeing the permadraw made me assume this leaned closer to the 5.5, which seemed to be the case.
P1- 5.5 – Attack of the notch!
Looking up at the notch above, the climbing looked unexpectedly cool. We kind of assumed it would be trivial jaunt up to the bolt ladder, but stemming and squeezing through the notch, then moving onto an awesome exposed slab proved to be its own worthy pitch. I would have been a fan of having the line of bolts un-chopped, because only in Smith Rock would this pitch be considered 5.5. A brand new stuck severed rope was a good indicator why one does not descend this route.
P2 – A1 – Learn to aid!
This was the part of the climb that I was the most looking forward to, mostly because it was something I really had never done before. Most my aiding to date had been squarely in the “shameless cheating category”. And while I have done more than my fair share of shameless A0 cheating, going up a long bolt ladder with ladders was new to me. After a bunch of finagling, yanking, and swearing, I got the hang of it half way through and felt like I was kinda-crusing by the end of it.
Jess followed up with an alpine ladder (ie. a 120cm sling with knots) and an actual ascender. If we were doing it again, I think I would have just tossed down a static line to jug, rather than jugging the line to be cleaned. We had an extra line in our pack for the rappel anyways.
P3 – 5.7 – Panic point!
Stepping out of the Monkey’s mouth is definitely a cool experience. I was a little unnerved when I went to go check it out initially, but it turned out that somebody had put a bolt right above the mouth. Love it.
By this point, there were quite a few families on the Mesa Verde and Misery Ridge trails watching us. We were practically the only people climbing on that side of the park that day.
As I pulled out of the Monkey’s mouth, I head a kid yell out to his dad “THEY MUST BE SO STRONG!!!”. If only he knew that I was cranking on draws.
P4 – 5.4 – Dirty monkey!
The last section of the climb really took on a different nature of rock, mostly of the compressed mud variety. Somebody’s beer can was left in a cave that made the Money’s eye. (Please don’t litter.) In hindsight, maybe the Monkey Off My Back 5.9 variation would have been an all-around higher quality finish.
The rap!
We were absolutely stoked to have climbed this classic, and it was pretty special to have the whole Monkey Face to ourselves the whole time. There was still a small crowd of spectators as we rigged for rappel. After we double checked our rigs, I went over the nose of the monkey and into the 60 meters of dead space below me. Wow, this is cool.
I saw the rope gently blowing in the wind below me. My body gently spun around as I lowered down to our bags. This had to be one of the coolest things in my life, and it was totally unexpected.
In conclusion
This is a climb totally worth doing. We were originally concerned about the C1 pitch. Ultimately, it really wasn’t bad, and we got the hang of it. I wouldn’t want to be struggling with a huge line of people behind me though, so I was glad to have been there on an off-day and have the route to ourselves. We were happy to have proper equipment to aid (ladders, ascender). French-freeing would have been doable, but a real workout.
When planning for this climb the previous night, I really had the urge to try to descend the climb with a single 70m rope. In the end, we decided that hauling up the extra line would be a bit less of a pain in the butt than potentially getting our ropes stuck though. But ultimately, the double 60m rappel really puts the cherry on top of this climb.