Rappel down to the base of Waterfall cliff area climbs, Castle Rock 1st trad leads

As you know, this blog was initially created when I was in Amsterdam supposedly writing my thesis but I cooked and baked something new almost every day. The urge of documenting my food journey was urgent at the time.

As much as I still enjoy cooking and baking,  many other hobbies have taken over.

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[2015-08-31]

I got up at 6 as usual. I told myself to get back to sleep because it’s a Sunday and I have been sleep-deprived for at least the past month. I have climbed or gone backpacking almost every weekend, which means packing Thursday night, rushing to some campground Friday after work and getting back late Sunday.

Rolling in bed for a while, reading random posts on mountain project, I finally got up around 8. I made myself a healthy breakfast with green salad, sunny side up eggs and brie. I even had time to prepare a fresh batch of chocolate chip banana waffles. I love it when the apartment is filled with the smell of freshly baked goods.

D got here around brunch time, we decided to come back to Castle Rock this time for our first trad leads, considering this was where we started our outdoors rope climbing, it made sense to lead a trad route here. We started hiking down to the Waterfall cliff area and bumped into A who was looking for us since there was literally no cell reception there. The adventure started with us rap down to the base of the climbs. Funny how all the climbing videos only showed you the best part which is climbing but not the approach, sometimes the approach is an adventure of its own, not this one though, this only includes hopping off the fence, some simple anchoring and rappelling.

Leading to Death is a one pitch mixed climb, rated at 5.9 1st bolt and the rest follows a sandy crack up to a slight overhang finish.