Belmont Brie

Trying routes that get no stars in the thorough new Busse and Burr Rushmore guide is a gamble. Rarely, such gambles pay off and you find something at least ok to pretty good (like the route Tenuous for me on Veiny recently) ... other times you experience something like this. First the good: The climbing on the top of Belmont Brie is really engaging. Steep sustained 5.9 crimping through rolling bulges with good rock quality and interesting holds. Otherwise, this thing has a lot of drawbacks. First of all, the guidebook 5.8 rating is a bit sandbagged. Taking everything into account, I would rate it 5.9+. The bottom has suspect rock quality and lots of slick lichen on it. The middle of the route is a total chossy mess. Protection on the route is unreliable, the bolting is bizarre, and the anchors are suspect. In its current condition, this route should probably be avoided.

If you do decide to give this thing a try...To start, cautiously ascend a shallow dihedral to the right with delicate footwork on lichen-slick rock to the first bolt. You will discover that most of the 8 bolts here are loose spinning buttonheads-- really unreliable in the case of a lead fall. Bolts 2 and 3 are also inexplicably way off line to the left (what the first ascentionists were thinking here, I'm not sure... Was the rock quality better in 1989? Were they trying to avoid extending a draw for some reason?). To clip or clean these bolts requires awkward destabilizing lunges out onto crumbling, featureless lichen-covered rock. The middle section is slightly steeper with less lichen and the bolt line back where it should be , but the rock quality deteriorates further. Holds flex, and the belayer will probably feel like an extra in the Mel Gibson movie THE PATRIOT as musket-ball shaped chunks of rocks will fall upon him/her with greater rapidity than your average Revolutionary War Hessian trooper could fire! Then the pretty darn good top, followed by the decayed "roll the dice" disaster that are the anchors. My partner (who backed up the anchor to lower me) and I both sent this thing cleanly, and he won the rappel lottery. BTW, This route's alternate name is Don't Leave Webbing On the Rock (so listed in the older Phinney guide), so there is some kind of story here that I, as an out of towner, don't know. But the whole thing was a really bad, bad idea on my part that could have ended up being not funny at all. Moral of the story -- be afraid of no star routes, be very afraid...

Not on Abominable Snowman proper but on an adjacent formation. Unpleasant downhill approach on a mat of rotted loose needles, through weeds and over trees downed by the October 2013 storm.

Such as they are...8 bolts. 2 bolt anchors with slings