Comments:

Freaking awesome crack! The old book gave this three stars, the new one only two. I've kept it at three, because in my humble opinion this route deserves four or five. The first thirty feet or so is probably the most perfect Indian-Creek-worthy splitter hand crack I've climbed at Joshua Tree. It slants to the left, and gets a bit thin at one point, making it hard enough to be called 5.9+ or 5.10a. After this, the route goes under a roof and up a really cool perfectly square corner... tricky, but fun. Sharon had difficulty with the hand crack, as I think it was the first true crack climb she had done, but she eventually made it up that. She got stuck again at the roof, but really got within about one move of pulling the roof. If she could have done that, she could have easily finished the route. Instead I rapped down to clean the last two nuts, then reascended my rope to clean the anchor.