I met Jon 2 years ago when he took a Level 1 Avalanche Course with me. Last winter he took the Level 2 course with me, and has become quite active with his local AMC Rock Climbing chapter in MA. He joined me for two days of climbing on Cathedral and Whitehorse with a focus on self-rescue, and multi-pitch efficiency.

Yesterday we started at “the classroom” on the top of Cathedral Ledge. There we reviewed building gear anchors and extending anchors out over an edge. We set-up a mock-rope rope system and covered belay escapes and leader rescue topics. After lunch we headed down and climbed Upper Refuse, Jon’s first Cathedral Ledge climb.

We only took a little over an hour to climb Upper Refuse so with some time left we made our way down to the North End and climbed Child’s Play and Kiddy Crack to work on our crack technique a bit. Jon took an extra lap on Kiddy Crack and we wrapped up around 4pm.

The following day we met at Whitehorse Ledge. A new route had been established just 10 day earlier and Jon was happy to check it out. We climbed the The Cormier-Magness Route’s first 4 pitches (660 feet), then rapped back to the ground for a quick lunch break.

The first three pitches of this route were highly enjoyable. While there are more pitches above the 4th pitch we did we wanted to get in another classic full length route so we wrapped from the top of pitch 4 and made our way over to Standard Route. We raced up that, and despite a small surprise on the 5.7 direct finish pitch, topped out in about 2 hours total.

An excellent 2 days of climbing and instruction, with a highly motivated partner… I’m definitely looking forward to our next adventure together Jon!