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| partners | | The plan for the day was an unclimbed route up Newton Butte. Myself, Sean and several others over the years had spotted the massive, unmistakable dihedral tucked away near Newton’s southwest corner on prior trips, but for a variety of logical reasons I am sure, it had gone unclimbed. In a perfect world, I hoped the dihedral would go pretty moderate and that we could all get up and down in time for a quick trip out to Pattie Butte.
The descent down Shoshone Point was as fun and engaging as I had remembered it, but the packs felt considerably heavier than last time, as we carried down a double rack plus hardware and two 60m ropes. When we got to the base, I immediately thought it looked far harder than it did when I had given it a quick glance back in June of 2020. Nevertheless, Sean was undaunted and was rope up pretty quickly for the climb. The dihedral turned out to be a pretty long pitch at 160 feet, but Sean still made pretty good time of it, with only a few pauses and a little extra attention on some tricky spots. Chris then followed with some effort and the excitement of pulling down a couple of spooky basketball sized death blocks. That being said, by Canyon standards, the rock was pretty good and the rocks that came down were probably on par with what would come down on most first ascents. However, the climbing looked pretty hard and awkward to me and I did not have much stoke for following it to the top. I have not climbed much recently due to a nagging elbow and at the moment do not have much confidence in my climbing ability, so I sent up what the guys would need to get down and headed to Pattie Butte.
The trek over to Pattie was not overly difficult and just a tad tedious in spots. I made it worse by stubbornly traversing and hugging the edge of Newton's higher supai bands, thinking I could just drop off the "end" and stroll over to Pattie, but of course noting ever goes that easy in the Canyon and I found myself backtracking all the way back to the saddle, descending a few doable bands there, then traversing over to Pattie at the top of the redwall essentially. Pattie has a slightly thought provoking "crux" that you can't blow, but the rest was pretty standard. After a quick signing of the register, I headed back to the rendezvous and we began the taxing climb back up the Shoshone Point Route. It took Sean and Chris a little under two hours to climb out and a little over two hours for myself.
Another day well spent in the Canyon. |
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