Time again for a good end-of-summer adventure: this time, instead of travelling horizontally, the desire was to travel vertically. Should be fun!

The vertical travel would be accomplished with the good sport of rock climbing. Recently, my girlfriend Mariia and I gotten fairly into this sport, specifically trad climbing. We purchased a double rack of Wild Country cams plus some small totems and microcams, for a grand total of 22 cams. I’m sure the old trad dads would say “this is 3x the number of cams I’ve ever owned in my whole life,” but whatever. Many dollars were spent, but so far it has been a lot of fun and worth the money I think. It is a unique way to experience the outdoors, has a great community, and the views from the climbs are incredible. So far, this summer Mariia and I together have climbed over 100 pitches of trad. Not bad! I guess the gear gets amortized over a lot of climbs. In any case, it is almost certainly cheaper than owning a boat, so that’s a plus.

For background, before this trip, I have probably climbed 30 pitches of trad at the 5.6-5.8 level. 5.8 is my limit on trad I think. I have a reasonable fear of heights and exposure that I am working to overcome, part of the allure of climbing for me I guess. I climbed Whitney Gilman earlier this summer (led every pitch, took two 5.8 variations, spicy), and it took me three days to emotionally recover from the experience, it was awesome. But, so far all of my trad experience had been under the watchful eye of someone who actually knew what they were doing. So, this trip would be a big step up. Mariia only recently completed her first lead at the classic Crow Hill, leading Boardwalk (5.5) and Sidewinder (5.7) — and by recently, I mean two days before the start of this trip. I think this qualifies as “learning on the job.”

The great Maine climbing experience began at 5PM on Tuesday September 1st. Mariia and I had been watching the weather updates come in nearly constantly, and we decided to kick off our adventure and pray the good weather held. Thursday would be rain but good weather was predicted for all other days. We and I drove about 4.5 hours to Clifton, Maine, where my family owns a small cabin. We stayed the night there.

We woke up on Wednesday, bright and early as usual at the Austin version of crack of dawn, 10am ish, extremely well rested. Our first climbing destination would be Chick Hill for the classic 3 pitch 5.5 My Time. I soloed this route last year, no rack no rope no problem, very scary but a great experience. Mariia was up for leading. Having only ever led two pitches before, it was time for a medium level multipitch. Time for some widening of the comfort zone.

Mariia successfully led every pitch, no problemo, avoiding at least four wasp nests with a cool head. Strong work! I got only one good photo: Mariia leading the third pitch. Sparse gear. There are a few totems right out of view of this image.

The mountain gets a lot less steep on this third pitch, but has basically no gear. I think the third pitch of this climb is really just a “head to the top on the easiest route” situation, no well defined route, no gear no problem. Nearing the end of the rope, Mariia opted to make a belay station in the forest alongside the route. I just walked/climbed right on past to make an impromptu fourth pitch to get to the actual top of the hill. Nice views! Acadia is visible in the center-left of this image.

One more event of note took place this day: some booty was recovered. Someone happened to leave no less than FOUR sport quickdraws hanging on the side of some 5.7. I got lowered from the first belay station and recovered this booty. Great success. Chick Hill, CLIMBED! Woohoo. And, we even left with more gear than we started with- truly a miracle.

Thursday was a rain day, we relaxed a bit before the next few days of climbing. It rained hard, so we wrote off climbing for Friday morning.

Friday morning we continued our adventure by driving up to Acadia, the main destination of this climbing adventure. Due to Thursday’s rain, we did some more horizontal exploration, checking out the Great Head cave at Steve’s suggestion. It was pretty cool. However, the desire to climb was insatiable, so we climbed the Beehive. Some crowd lines on the beehive trail were bypassed by simply rock climbing adjacent to the trail, a strategy suggested by our great friend Mark. We referred to this strategy as “Mark’s Madness.” Here is the beautiful view from the top of the Beehive.

On the descent we encountered a fun looking frog.

On the way out from the Beehive we passed by Otter Cliffs. I climbed here once last year and would agree with the description, “five star location with two star climbing. ” But hey, let’s give it a shot. We decided to go for top roping The Great Chimney. We got in a few laps on the chimney before it started to rain, so we unfortunately did not get to try any other routes at otter cliffs. We did however try the chimney at a few locations along the itself, at slightly different widths for a moderately different climbing experience.

We were lucky enough to stay with a friend in Southwest harbor Friday night, which was great. We enjoyed some hot showers and really, amazingly beautiful stars.

Saturday, SATURDAY – time for some real climbing. It was time to head to the where we had been dreaming of: the Precipice. We had heard many stories of great climbing at the Precipice, and were eager to give it a checkout.

We geared up and headed in. The approach was only a 10 or 20 minute walk, not bad. The crag was surprisingly not busy, only a few other groups at the crag. Our goal for the day was a classic three pitch 5.6 route, The Story of O. I gave the climb a go, leading it in two pitches by linking the second and third pitches. A great climb, great quality pink granite with some hand and fist jams, and cool stemming and laybacking. Here is a photo of me near the top of the second pitch, standing on a tiny ledge above the layback crux section.

After a quick rappell we were back on the ground. For round two, we decided to just do the same climb as before, to gain experience. Mariia led the first pitch, I led the second pitch (the crux), and Mariia led the third pitch. Here is a good pic halfway back down to the ground on rappell.

I did remember to turn around here to get a good sunset photo. The views from this crag were 10/10.

For Sunday climbing, we went back to the precipice crag. We found that all the classic routes were busy, so we decided to go for a “nice warmup” layback/offwidth situation, London Bridges (5.8). This was a grinding, scraping, disaster lead by me which involved a lot of resting on the gear. Needless to say, my offwidth technique needs some improvement. But, no cams pulled, and I got to the top and belayed Mariia up. She got up considerably faster (but also with lots of grinding, scraping, and grunting). Our next climb was the difficult neighboring climb directly to the left of London Bridges, Connecticut Cracks. This route is a series of discontinuous finger cracks, graded at 5.11a. This climb requires having small fingers, but is fairly low angle. We decided to top rope this climb from the same anchor with some gear for rope redirect at the top. I got up it with no rests, although I did find the touchy feet placements to be “unsettling.” I am not sure if I could lead this, but it was cool to at least have gotten up it with no rests. Mariia had a slightly harder time getting up, but got up eventually. Hooray!

However, soon after we got back to the mid-cliff ledge, it began to rain. It rained pretty heavily, making the slick granite very slippery. Given our lack of experience (and the fact that most climbs there required laybacking and thus good friction), we decided to head down, and after a quick rappel on a rando friend’s rope, we were on the ground. We decided to pack up and head out. Another guy bailing left a blue tricam on the wall, but we decided it was above our pay grade to go and get it, and we don’t even know how to use tricams anyways. Unfortunately, Mariia and I forgot to take literally any pictures at all of the climbing this day, which I will blame on the rain.

After we threw all the gear in the car the rain had subsided, and we still had an hour before sunset. We carefully raced up the precipice trail, although we found that the trail was mostly dry. I of course represented the MIT motor society.

Mariia nears the top of the trail.

We bagged the Champlain Mountain peak and decided we had time for one final adventure. To our surprise, we found a huge offwidth!! Check out this badass photo of Mariia free soloing the offwidth, hundreds of feet off the ground.

which we absolutely swear was not just a random horizontal feature..

We enjoyed a great view from the top of the precipice as the sun set, luckily we had headlamps for a dark descent.

Sunday night, we headed back to Clifton. We slept well.

Monday- the final day of our climbing adventure. We were tired from our three days of climbing and hiking before, but still had enough stoke to go for one more round of climbing before heading home to boring mostly horizonal life. For the destination, we decided to go for Eagle Bluff in Clifton Maine. This area promised a cool 5.8 chimney route – Witch Wonder. Scary Scary.

Here is the route. Hard to see here is the fact that the top right boulder is a tongue, which creates a mostly closed chimney/birth canal situation. We’ll see how it goes.

Mariia led the first pitch. The first pitch was supposedly bolted, but whoever bolted it was clearly a fan of huge runouts with ledge-fall potential. Mariia took a few small cams just in case which proved to be very useful. She got to an anchor and built a belay. Great success. From there I led up to a slightly higher anchor, a 20 ft micropitch. This led us to the base of the crack/offwidth feature.

By this time, on our fourth day of climbing, Mariia and I both were pretty exhausted, so we *almost* bailed from here. But, the feature looked pretty cool, so we decided to give it a shot. I led up, placing a shitload of gear to take occasional rests. Due to being tired and placing way too much gear, leading this pitch probably took over an hour. At some point during this hour, Mariia realized a wasp nest was conveniently placed at shin-level on her belay station. She gingerly moved on the belay ledge as far as possible from the vibrating ball of mating wasps. Apparently this just happens at the end of the summer.

I got to the birth canal and was birthed, more or less coming immediately face-to-face with yet another massive wasp nest. Yuck. But the experience of being birthed through the chimney was pretty cool. I gingerly led up past the birth canal on an easy lead past another wasp nest (in a great hold of course), arriving at the anchor exhausted, with insane rope drag, but with zero wasp stings and otherwise good spirits. I belayed Mariia up. Here she is, gingerly passing the second wasp nest.

Woohoo! Chick hill is visible in the background.

We rapped down and drove home. While the adventure was fun, it was definitely time to head home.

Thanks for reading!