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Mini TR: School Rock with a horde* of kids 13-Sep-2016 At 10:44:27 AM pmonks

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* yes that's the official collective noun

Chockstone has been a bit sad lately, so I thought I'd post a little ditty about wot I got up to last weekend. If you're after epics and/or big numbers, stop reading now - I'm too old and tired for that shlt.

Some friends of ours had access to a house in Truckee (north of Lake Tahoe) for the weekend, and invited 2 other families up for a genteel weekend of bike riding, swimming, drinking moderate amounts of overpriced wine, and all the usual stuff that old & enchildrened people are reduced to.

Knowing that one of the other dads (let's call him Paul, since that's his name) was (as in, used to be) a climber, I snuck my gear into the car and started quietly prepping the kids to lobby for a day's climbing. Initially I thought my cunning plan had failed, since Saturday turned into a day of bike riding with the kids, though we found a lovely new paved trail that heads east out of town down the Truckee River, and managed to cajole and bribe the horde into riding about 25km, which was pretty great.

Luckily that night the kids perked up and started saying they wanted to do some climbing, and I managed to persuade all 3 kids (my 2 plus Paul's) to lobby Paul to jump on a multipitch cruise on School Rock, up at Donner Pass. I was pretty happy with this, given that Paul's kid had never been on a multipitch before, and my two were still smarting from an epic we'd had 2 years before, which ended in us bailing off Lembert Dome in Tuolumne Meadows in a rather scary and very wet electrical storm. Paul was dubious that climbing in a gaggle of 5 was going to work, but somehow I managed to convince him it'd be fine, and a plan was hatched.

Here's a photo of School Rock - it's all about 2 pitches high (80m or so):

Our goal was the easiest route on the main rock - a 2-pitch 5.3 (~grade 6) called Kindergarten Slab on the left hand end of the main face - but having previously soloed halfway up some of the "harder" routes to the right, and knowing that pretty much the entire wall is climbable at an easy grade, I "accidentally" got a bit off route and ended up on the 5.5 (~grade 10) next door.

The first pitch was a full rope-length doddle that let Paul get comfortable with the double rope, multi-child setup I've used in the past, while also giving the kids a good chance to settle in. It deposited us just below the left hand end of the obvious overlap high up on the wall - you can see three people in about the same spot towards the left side of this photo:

I chose to keep pitch 2 short, since I knew the overlap would be the crux for the kids (not hard, but a bit reachy for the kids and quite exposed now that we were 50+m off the deck) - I belayed just below where the guy above the overlap in that photo is, on a lovely sunny ledge. Up until that point we'd simulclimbed all 4 "seconds" (Paul + the 3 kids), but for this pitch the kids basically came up in pairs (one rope at a time) - we'd spaced them about 5m apart on the ropes, and the crux was only about that long, so it worked out pretty well.

The last pitch was longer than I expected, but basically 3rd and 4th class stuff up and over the top of the dome, with great views down to Donner Lake and across to Mt Rose in the distance (great skiing over there!):

The kids romped up it, but then started bonking, so we quickly ate the picnic lunch we'd brought and cruised down the easy 20 minute descent back to the base.

All in all an ^AW_ES^{O^M_E} day out - while the easy grades and glacial pace barely whetted my appetite for "real" climbing, being able to cruise up bomber, sunny, featured granite with a bunch of (mostly) happy kids and a mate was just fantastic. And now that the kids are a bit familiar with the dome, I don't think it'll take much to get them on some of the slightly harder & longer routes further right again.