It's funny the kind of attention you get if you take a beautiful, voluptuous
blonde to Joshua Tree for some climbing. I unfortunately attracted a little
attention myself while leading this, because I got a little confused with the
route, and the rope drag at the end was HEINOUS. But when Amanda started
following it, she had a whole peanut gallery watching, yelling advice, and
cheering her on. One guy even came over with a digital SLR on a tripod, and
started taking pictures of her, moving his rig around a few times to get the
best angle. Amanda had some difficulty with a few parts of the route, but
especially the crux: getting up, then out of, a short chimney. She fell once
in the chimney and scraped up her right leg pretty badly. I felt a
little guilty about that, since this was her first time ever climbing in Joshua
Tree, or climbing cracks for that matter. This was a pretty fun climb for me,
except for the rope drag at the end. The route traverses under a large roof,
and the rope drag was so bad that I got three blisters (and tore one of them
immediately) just from pulling up the rope, before I even put Amanda on belay.
I've been thinking about it since, and I can hardly think of anything I could
have done better to ameliorate the problem.