Eclipse and Future Plans

Groom Creek is a late fall-early spring area, and on the last day of winter season (3/19) this year, I sent Eclipse, which marks this as my 8th V8, which in and out of itself is a neat little number, and my personal gift to Jamie after her passing. Eclipse feels pretty body-size dependent to me, so I'm glad I was able to find a way through it, with the help of Kim with some nifty microbeta, so here's the spraydown. 

In most cases, the crux for Eclipse is usually sticking the left-hand toss into a sloper edge from either what seems to be a condition-dependent half-pad crimp intermediate, or from the start jug. I was able to find a tiny smear foot and was able to trust it to make this move reasonable. The struggle for me was finding a good, reliable method for accurately releasing the right foot toehook that was used to free up the initial left heel-toe-cam. Thanks to Kim, a good marker for a reliable foothold was directly beneath my right kneecap. The final struggle was being able to stabilize on a right texture crimp, and then bringing your right up and generating off of it. I was finally able to do the move after realizing there was a tiny texture patch for my left foot. It wasn't as obvious to me as it was to probably others, but then again, I miss jugs and good feet like nobody's business (it's very predominant in sport climbing, or maybe I've been climbing on choss). 

 

The crux toss on Eclipse

In non-beta related text, I've always had a love-hate relationship with Groom. There's a lot of feature climbing here, and I've always liked more hold-based climbing. The granite here is also super hard on my wrists, and this place has dealt me some chronic wrist (TFCC-related) injuries ever since I started climbing here. Microbeta is king here. In my personal experience, you'll know very quickly if you climbed something poorly via the immediate pain going through your wrist. But also, if you do it well, the granite just lets you go right through. It's a demanding two-way street, and such is bouldering here. 

Oh well. At least I learned how to stand on feet that's facing the wrong way. My wrists are getting better. I can't wait to repeat this and get video. I spent too much time working this to only do this once. Weather is looking up. Joes is around the corner. Maybe some limestone sport climbing. Roofs for sure.