Lover’s Leap
Over Memorial Day weekend, Anita and I got in a couple of days of climbing at Lover’s Leap on Highway 50 in the Sierras. It’s one of my favorite places in California.
The rock is easier to climb than it looks because it has a ton of horizontal dikes — veins of quartz and feldspar that erode more slowly than the rest of the rock, leaving lots of positive edges to hold onto and stand on. There were patches of snow at the base of some of the climbs from the big storm last week.
Lover’s Leap is the site of one of the most famous rock climbing videos, a segment of Dan Osman free soloing 400 feet in 4 minutes. Climbing videos can be boring even for climbers, but this one is fun even if you’ve seen it before. Using a rope and climbing with a concern for our mortality, Anita and I took over two hours when we did this climb, about thirty times as slow.
Tags: climbing
This entry was posted on Friday, June 4th, 2010 at 7:56 am and is filed under miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 5th, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Your pictures remind me of trips that I took to the Sierras with my family as a child. Although, my mother did not let me climb them
PS. Thank you very much for your thoughtful comments.
June 7th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Wow, that speed climb was insane. I thought you were supposed to maintain 3 points of contact though. His leaps with both hands seemed a little insane. But it looks like he knows what he’s doing.
June 7th, 2010 at 6:10 pm
As for me… this climb is no less thrilling going 30 times as slow. But there aren’t any videos of my climb either.
June 7th, 2010 at 6:35 pm
Hey, I’m impressed that you guys did the pitch in two hours and came back alive to talk about it!
That Dan Osman video is totally unreal. I’m sure there was a lot of planning to pick the route before the actual sprint against gravity.