Rhamnusia, M8 WI6, 160m

March 31, 2006

On March 31st, Sean Isaac and I finished a new route up on the Stanley Headwall called Rhamnusia. This is another name for Nemesis the Greek god of Retribution, and the name of the ice climb to the right. It starts about 20 m to the left of it actually. We worked on this route over 4 days in March and completed it on Friday. Sean and I had already redpointed the first and second pitch's earlier but we decided to go and try and do it all in a day. Plus the last ice pitch needed to be climbed as well as the 4th bolted mixed pitch needed the redpoint.

On Friday we decided to mix it up a bit so I got to do the first pitch. We called this the Trad Pitch. It is 30m long and goes about M7, it has a few fixed pins and lots of good gear up a beautiful splitter crack. This pitch is alot of fun, with good hooks and torques, excellent gear and some good old school stemming. I whipped near the top on a bomber gold camelot after basically getting through the tough bottom part. I just got in the wrong postion and couldn't keep the torque on my tools, plus my feet were kinda bad. Anyhow, it's not runout and the gear is good so you can take a fall pretty much anywhere except near the start.

The next pitch is called the Stubby Pitch and it's about 30m and is around M5, WI5. Right off the belay there is some technical dry tooling past two bolts that gets you to a curtain of ice. This leads to a bolt just below a curtain of steep thin ice. There is about 15m of thin really steep ice that takes you to a bolted belay. I had done this pitch earlier when we were working the route and it's on of the best pitches of moderate climbing around. The ice is thick enough to take really good 13cm ice screws, and the fact that the ice doesn't have alot of features makes for some very intersting climbing, especially with monopoint crampons.

After this there is a traversing pitch through some snow and up a short chimney with ice in the back. There is a short roof, but a blue camelot protects it nicely, and the ice on the walls and in the back make for some fun moves. Some more thin easy ice leads you to a belay on the right. We called this the Tunnel Pitch, because the ice actually formed a tunnel to climb through when you enter the chimney.

Sean called the next pitch the Loose Pitch and early on it certainly lived up to it's name. The amount of cleaning required on this pitch was unbelievable. This pitch is all bolted but still has some exciting climbing because of the nature of the rock. When we first did this pitch, I got to spend about 3 hours belaying Sean while he drilled the pitch. It wouldn't have been too bad except that we had to climb the first two pitches of Nemesis to get to that point and I had just spent about an hour getting hammered with spindrift and snow in a very exposed belay. Add to the fact that we had a proto-type belay jacket we were testing that turned out to be not too watertproof and you have the makings of a pretty cold and damp belay. Anyhow, this pitch goes around M8 and it did clean up pretty good. It's certainly not the best pitch of mixed climbing you will ever do, but combined with the lower pitches and the ice pitch above it makes it worthwhile.

The last pitch of ice follows the dagger and goes straight up. I've climbed alot of ice, and I have to say I got really worked on this final pitch. It's steep, has some big mushrooms, fragile ice and some really funky hooking. Add to the mix that there is some water coming down, mono-point crampons and you have some exciting climbing. It's about 35m and it doesn't really let up until the last few meters.

Well there you have it. I blew the perfect day by falling on the first pitch, but oh well, at least we tried. This is a pretty cool climb with 4 of the 5 pitches being amazing. The first three pitches would stand alone well, and if you don't want to do the Loose Pitch, you could always traverse over and climb the last two pitches of Nemesis. Throw in some turns on the ski down and you have the makings of great day on the Stanley Headwall.