Pinnacles

The hiatus ending weekend continued on Sunday with a climbing trip to the Pinnacles with Ben.
We left the Bay Area around 7 and parked the car at the trailhead at 8:45am. In the car we had decided to climb at the Monolith, in the area around the reservoir and on Discovery wall.

Our first goal was the Monolith. Ben started up the Direct route on the East Face. It's an easy route, where the interesting part are the first moves towards the first bolt, since one has to step off a boulder on to the wall and face immediate exposure...What didn't help was that the rock was still really cold, so that our hands started to hurt after a short while.

After that we swung leads on the Regular route on the Monolith. The temps had increased, so it was a very nice climb. After rapelling off we packed up our gear and hiked over to the reservoir, where I led the Central route on the First Sister. A fun, easy route to awesome views...Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera on this one, otherwise I would have gotten an amazing shot of Ben eating an apple while following up the climb :-)

We continues exploring the area by heading to Gertie's Pinnacle (Yes! The new guide book by Brad Young pays off!). There we did three routes...First Ben led the 10a, before I led the 5.7 and the 5.8. Those climbs gave me some confidence, and I hope that my 'lead head' gets better!

To end the day we headed over to the Discovery Wall, where Ben led Wet Kiss.

It was an awesome day, where we climbed seven new (for us) routes.