Ankle's Away

2nd climb of a rather stellar day that Steve and I had on the Lemmon. First we did Baradur on Rap rock which I thought was 12a and Steve called 11+Then we came down the mountain and in the late cool afternoon shade decided to do another climb on Chimney. I had looked at the first pitch often and decided it was as good a time as any to give it a shot and it went quite easily (at the time.) The fact that many of the local hard men had given this a shot without any luck certainly helped with the motivation. But the rope drag really sucked because you don't really want to runner out the gear much with the ground that close. What then looked like a pretty straight forward face for the second pitch, going over the overlaps out to the right of Copper Head #5 bulge and left of Jungle Gym and Perfect Peter, turned out to actually be one very testy lead. Crux move on lead was a throw the leg up and over the hands to a "bomber" slot for an ankle. At this point, your leg and waist are above the gear, you're doing 11+ style moves and if you pop off, you're ankle (or what's left of it) is going to be very unhappy. It's a very solid ankle jam. So solid in fact that if you pop off, it's going to pop your ankle in two. Steve pulled in off the "heel hook?!" for a high reach to very small face holds, managed to extract his ankle from the nasty ankle biting hole and finished up the pitch. Quite exciting and not exactly a lot of rope out.I thought it was going to have to take a bolt, nope... Another classic Steve lead. Once again, I was relegated to the second seat role. Here I had managed to lead the great undone roof, onsight, no falls, yada yada and Steve finds a way to make that look like child's play. I did manage to climb the second pitch on the TR without the ankle jam. Even on top rope, no way was I doing that move. I managed to get up the desperate face with a series of hard cranks, tiny holds and sketchy lunges.Enjoy, a truly classic test piece.

Just right of Copper Head #5 is a thin short corner that arches up right to roof. The roof is out left of Jungle Gym. Climb the thin corner, turn the roof, up the face a bit to a decent belay stance. Short pitch that was at the time considered one of the last great problems on Chimney (from a trad standpoint.) Turned out to be not so bad if you followed the corner up and right and got the good gear. 2nd pitch then turned into the real business (see above)

Standard trad rack, brass sack and strong ankle.