Comments:

I can't believe it's been three years since I've been to Tahquitz! I was really hoping to do Whodunit, since that is my favorite route here, and it's been years since I've repeated that one. But there were two or three parties that beat us to it, so we decided to do the Long Climb. After all, it's been years since I've repeated this one as well. We used my 70-meter half ropes, so it was quite easy to link this together into four pitches instead of five or six, although I still think that the way Aaron and I did it the first time is the best. This time, I linked the entire 2nd and 3rd pitches together, for an excellent pitch that was a full 70 meters. However, this made the next pitch quite short and easy. Doing pitches 1 and 2 separately, by the book, then linking 3 and 4 and linking 5 and 6 makes this route four pitches that are doable with 60-meter ropes. Courtney handled this climb quite admirably. She didn't particularly enjoy the wonderful crack climbing on the first pitch, but she only took a little bit of tension once, when her foot got stuck really badly. On the remaining pitches, she called “take” a few times, but never actually hung or fell. The full 70-meter pitch totally wore her out, and apparently this made her quite happy! (Is that awesome, or what?)