Sandy Hole 5.7, Angel Food Wall

Climbed on November 12, 2023. 

Fun Rating: Fun but Fucky.

I’ve titled this vision quest that I’m currently on the “Joe Herbst Appreciation Tour,” but for a long while now that’s been shortened in casual conversation with friends to the “Herbst Tour.” It’s a lot easier to abbreviate things when you’re saying something like “I think I need to take a break from the Herbst Tour for awhile,” or “Oh, this is a Herbst Tour climb? I’m out,” or “Yeah let’s climb, just not anything on the Herbst Tour,” and so on. While this is the side effect of an overly long name, the result of this is that I’m also considering Betsy Herbst’s FA’s as a part of the overall JHAT. Sandy Hole is one of her routes, put up with the Uriostes in 1977, right in the heart of the early RRC heyday. 

Megan shivering at the first pitch anchor.

Starting just left of Tunnel Vision, a trade route that Joe had put up with Grandstaff a few years earlier, and sharing a grade rating of 5.7 on Mountain Project nowadays, Sandy Hole begins with some easy climbing up broken terrain before you’re faced with a roof and squeeze chimney. I am somewhat notorious in my group of friends for wacky and inefficient beta, I’m unsure what my deal is but I find more often than not that I did it “wrong” when there is a wrong way to do it (having seen photos of Joe on Nadia’s Nine after my ascent, I realize that I was facing the incorrect way in the first pitch chimney, as an example.) I wanted to get that out in the open and clear, because I want to believe that I pulled the roof incorrectly. I just don’t think that squeeze chimney to chicken wing to fully cutting feet on slopers to a slab mantle is a very 5.7 sequence of moves, and as such I feel I must have done something wrong. Once I finished with that rather exciting bit of beta and could see what I was in for above, I scoffed and got on with it.

One of the coffin-spaces in the chimney pitch.

A good portion of the pitch was on some really dire varnish plates. Nothing broke on me while I was climbing, but I was avoiding putting my feet on anything that wasn’t a really solid looking smear. I was very pleased when this section finally ended and I could get back to the crack. It was probably about 20-30 feet before the entrance to the massive chimney and the anchor area that I was really missing my forgotten hand jammies that had been left in my pack when we had stashed them in the wash. I love a good jam, and I’m a fairly competent crack climber, so when I say that the back of my hands were bleeding, that should give you a decent idea of how sustained the crack climbing was and how long this pitch went on for. After almost the entire length of my 70m rope I was in the chimney.

It was quite a balmy day in the sun with a mild breeze, but with no light hitting any portion of the first two pitches I was shivering a little in my windbreaker. By the time my wife met me at the anchor with the words “so far I’d give this climb 0 stars” I was fully in sufferfest mode. After a moment of snuggling to warm up at the belay where we discussed that it would actually be more miserable to try to bail from here, I set off into the void for the second pitch.

Safely ensconced in the chimney-tomb.

If this isn’t your first time reading this blog, you’ll know I’m a man who loves a good squeeze. Offwidth, wide crack, and chimney are very much my bag and that type of climbing is where I have my most fun. The second pitch of this climb was a 4 star pitch for me. It was a series of extremely tight and claustrophobic squeezes, each ending in a coffin-sized space where you could rest (uncomfortably and contorted) before committing to the next unobvious and frightening squeeze sequence. Each of these was framed by ancient and massive piles of guano far enough away you weren’t afraid of accidentally getting it on you, but left you wondering where all the bats were. At its top, the chimney ends and you’re left with a mostly unprotectable traverse out a slabby hallway above the void of the pitch you’ve just climbed. It is incredibly unique, a little serious, and absolutely wild terrain and reminds me of the best parts of Community Pillar all combined into a single pitch. This was very much a type 2 pitch for my wife, who’s chest and butt are bigger than mine and contributed to a really frightening experience on follow. If you’re a curvier climber, or weigh more than around 180 lbs this will be a very challenging pitch. 

From there we climbed straight up the crack system and met up with the tunnel pitch of Tunnel Vision. This was my second time on the tunnel pitch and I was just as blown away by how wild and fun it was. The sidewalk at the top leading to the hand crack wall is still probably my favorite terrain in RRC, and makes me feel like a kid in a children’s museum. A couple hundred feet of mostly mindless but entertaining climbing led to the top of the route and the lovely but deceptively long Angel Food walkoff. My wife and I had taken some elopement photos in the park over by the Running Man wall the previous day, and my connection with this place had never felt stronger to me. We spent the walk talking about how wild that climb had been, and how hilarious the original 5.6 rating seemed to us now after having been on it. Betsy and the Uriostes didn’t fuck around, and once again we found out

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