The Warrior 

Rob and Pat Dezonia established this route

And giving too little beta makes for a virtually useless page.

Approach description and time? Descent? Bolted anchors? Rap the route? One rope or two? Agree with the above, a sorely lacking description not worth much besides showing off the OPs pictures.

Climbed the route on 3.17.2008. Nothing short of an incredible route, this was my first experience in RR. I agree with Brad about wanting to preserve the adventure aspect, but I'll put up a little info for people to peruse.....

Approach was about 2-2.5 hours. Dicey scrambling was involved, as well as navigating some serious foliage. However, it's easy to see the climb at all times and stay on target. All in all, definately one of the LEAST pleasant approaches I've done.

P1: ~150ft, 5.9. Tons of chimneying. Run-out, but secure. A large red friend will be useful, if memory serves me. A 2 bolt belay resides outside the chimney, at the point where it pinches down to a stemming dihedral.

P2: ~120ft. Technical stemming (5.10a/b?) gives way to a hand crack in the right-facing corner. Take this (with a little more chimneying) all the way to the alcove base of the awesome, obvious fist/hand crack corner. Gear belay with TCUs.

P3: ~100ft (5.10c/d?). Pretty obvious: layback and jam the corner up to a 2 bolt anchor. A pretty physical pitch. You'll need a couple fist pieces and a couple hand pieces.

P4: ~170ft (5.10a). Laybacking up to and around a small roof brings you to easier climbing in a featured handcrack. Follow this up and either move inside the "cave" and climb through (watch rope drag), or stay on the outside for some challenging offwidth climbing. Lacking a large green friend, my partner opted for the cave. Beware the towering mounds of bird guano. Its gross while you're climbing in there, but funny as hell while you're drinking beer later. Pop out of the cave and do some easier offwidth moves to gain a small ledge. Gear belay, hand size.

P5: ~160ft (5.11a) The big lead. A bit of laybacking and jamming takes you to a difficult section where the jams disappear. Using small gear to protect insecure stemming on mostly featureless walls gets you through to a section of tips and tough fingers. Eventually make the transition out right onto the face. Heady climbing on small but decent holds brings you past 2 bolts to the roof. Great holds brings you over the lip to an amazingly exposed 2 bolt belay with a great view of your packs 700' straight down.

P6: ~150ft (5.8+). The climbing never gets very hard, but this pitch has sparse protection. The only bolts on the pitch were about 35ft up off the belay (and oddly were side by side...a separate belay?). Continue more or less straight up for a long and worrying excursion into a vast wonderland of questionable holds, and a thought-provoking lack of gear. Eventually you find a 2 bolt anchor.

P7: ~150ft. Easy climbing via the path of least resistance up and right, then back left, with occasional gear brings you to the top of the climb. A few hundred feet of scrambling, and you can gain the summit of the tower. To get down, rap the route using TWO ropes. Even though some belays were gear on the way up, you will be using some rap anchors on the way down that are on the face, away from the dihedral (hope this makes sense).

I hope, by posting up all this information, I'm not spoiling the adventure aspect of the route for anyone who wants to do it. I guarantee this route is a full-value experience. Enjoy.

I think the purpose of this website is information, thanks for posting it. those that desire the adventurous, information-free ascents won't be studying this page. BTW, insulting the first ascentionists of such a proud line is, in fact, out of line.

pat and rob share atleast 5-10 brain cells, and i dare you to tell them that in person!

pat probably wont pay any mind, but rob????? hehe good luck keeping your face intact!!!

any routes these guys put up,are going to be stout for rr.

Very fun and strenous route. The 5.11 is a 1 move wonder. Pitch 2 is 5.10b and R.
josh

We parked at the first Oak Creek parking area outside the loop road as shown by Handren (the one 0.5 mi from the loop road exit). I think it would be faster hiking-wise to use the Oak Creek pullout accessed from the loop road but there's the extra time to drive the loop. Here's an overview photo to demonstrate. From where we parked we found a good network of trails going up the right side of the pink cliffs to Ramen Pride. We made it to the base of the route in under 2 hours.

The route is burly, way harder for me than Cloud Tower, partly b/c the crack size on the 10+ pitch (I'm far better at finger cracks). The 11a pitch wasn't bad. Be prepared for lots of chimneys/groveling. We skipped the last 2 pitches after getting a slighly late start; we didn't want to do the raps in the dark.

There a different kinds of approaches for the classics of RR. There are long ones(Rainbow Wall), confusing or complicated ones(levitation), strenuous but straightforward ones(Cloud Tower), and then there are approaches where you arrive at the climb so exhausted from such heinous schwaking and mandatory 5th class groveling up chimneys and moss slabs it seems like a 5 pitch extension of the climb itself(Warrior).

Heads up there is a bolted rap anchor climbers left of the initial chimney up over and down the otherside of a big boulder that allows a rappel down the awful 4th class moss you came up on approach.

^^^^^^^

That's pretty funny! Perfect explanation for the approach, didn't want to sound like a baby, but I thought the exact same thing!

I used a 0.4 BD C4, a yellow master cam, and a blue master cam at the gear belay above pitch 2. Pitch 4 had a bolted belay to climber's right after the cave, not a gear anchor (required a couple traverse moves to get to the anchor).

The 5.8 top part of Pitch 5 (after you traverse right from the finger crack above the crux) is definitely R rated. A fall would result in serious injury. Definitely had a similar feeling to free soloing. It's not hard technically, it's just a mental exercise in doing one movement at a time, being sure footed, and not looking at how far run out you are.

Bring approximately 14-15 alpine draws, including a double length. Also, bring a set of nuts for the crux .11a pitch.

The approach included about an hour of hiking, a half hour of bush whacking and scrambling in a stream bed, followed by an hour of vertical scrambling with several sections of class 5. We used all of the rappel stations (we found 4) on the descent (we were tired) instead of down climbing. The slings on the rappel stations looked to be in decent shape.