Clean Break is a spectacular 1500ft route on East side of Juno Tower, one of the peaks on Vasiliki Ridge just North of the Wine Spires. From the Liberty Bell Group Vasiliki ridge looks rather unimpressive but form the east the towering 1500ft wall is quite the opposite. I had climbed Clean Break 6 or 7 year previous and remember it being fantastic so, with a crew of Mountain Madness buddies we decided to hike in and do a "photo shoot" on it, climbing as two groups of two for better photos. I went up with Jason Broman on my rope, with Tino Villanueva and Dave "Alpine" Ahrens on the other. We hiked up Silver Star creek, which is more direct but I am not sure it is faster with a bunch more light bush whacking and a small swamp to contend with. We also left packs at the base and returned to them.
Tino leading the first amazing pitch. Sometimes routes can be hard to find the base of, this is not the case with Clean Break. The first pitch is a .75-2" splitter up white dead vertical clean granite, thus the name "Clean Break".
Tino getting his send on, rated 5.10b/c, no move might not be harder than 5.10b, but its pretty dang sustained but also awesome. Dave Ahrens stand below belaying.
Dave Ahrens leading the second pitch, steeper than it looks in this photo. Below is Jason Broman leading the 5th pitch. Clean break is a spectacular route, pretty sustained with 7 of its 15 pitches being 5.10. The route gets enough traffic that it is pretty clean. route finding is pretty straight forward and it took us 3.5 hours to approach, 4 hours on the route, 1 hour back to the base and 3 hours back to the car going up and down Silver Star Creek.
No comments:
Post a Comment