Looking down from the lead of P4 of
Northeast Face, Left of Warbonnet. Shirley (red helmet...just to distinguish her from the crowds of climbers below :) is belaying me ~160 feet below. This is a long, dirty and somewhat loose, bit runout, fairly steep and all around fairly scary pitch to lead. The route is rated 5.7 but this felt like a "stout 5.7". Perhaps this is due to above factors as well as uncertainty resulting from lack of topo or route beta (I was worried about running myself into a dead end terrain wtih no pro and no ability to downclimb). This is one of those pitches where I was really hoping for it to end......but it kept on giving for the full (60m) rope length. At this point I had no idea if I'm even on route (an old, "flexible" piton just higher up confirmed that I probably was on route...on some route). Plume and the starting notch are below (August 2, 2004).