Up The Rocks

Home

"Doudouk" 5.10d

At the evening of July 24, we found a lovely camping area near the river in Garni gorge. July 25 was the day of Garni gorges basalt columns research .

Then we found some columns with a good cracks for the middle size protection gear, but those columns where not higher than 12-13 meters so we weren’t amazed by them. All the other columns where with micro cracks(up to 5mm wide), and some others had some wide cracks but were loose and would fall down after a hand touch.

Vadik cleaning the route Vadik cleaning the route

Vadik slackliningVadik slacklining

Few meters awayf rom “Doudouk” we found a perfect 35m crack. The lower 7-8m and the last 10m cracks were about +/-4mm wide but the middle part looked so good.
After a first attempt we found out that we should use about 8 pitons on the route and realizing that using 8 pitons for 35m pitch is not ethical we decided to leave the line for First Ascent to the climbers who can do the line without destroying it. For those cracks, small sizes of Camp walnuts also could work good.

So as Will Nazarian said before, Garni gorge’s basalt columns with their micro cracks will be very attractive to the hard wire climbers to make there First Ascents.
To have a some climbing we climbed “Doudouk” 5.10d, the route of the Joe Morgan which after was renamed by Will Nazarian who did the FFA of the route.

On July 27 we got back Yerevan, and that was the enclosing trip of “Arev” Armenian First Ascent Open Festival.