The second pitch of this climb is one of the most classic pitches at Seneca! Amazingly, it was first done in 1951! P1: Climb the wide corner/flake sytem to reach a left trending ramp. The first 30 feet can be a bit runout unless you have very large gear. However, with modern camming units, there is gear that can be found in the flake if you search hard for it. Don't let people scare you off because of the tales of runout here. You will be well rewarded by doing the entire route. P2: Climb up from the large ledge to access an overhanging crack system. Follow this crack system to the top. The moves here are absolutely amazing for the grade and the gear is anywhere you want to put it. If you are visiting Seneca, do this route.
Location
Heading left on Broadway ledge from Castor and Pollux, locate the obvious left facing corner system after Conn's East Direct.
Protection
Some very large or very small gear is helpful for P1. The rest of the route takes pretty much any size gear that you have. There's Shuts on the summit that you can lower back to Broadway ledge in one shot with 2 ropes or you can hit an intermediate set of shuts along the way.
Good squeeze-chimney technique can help on pitch 1 (i.e. wear long pants), or stick to face and the occasional lieback moves. I agree that the gear is all there; still, I wouldn't recommend this 5.5 pitch to a beginning leader.
Set up an anchor at the top of pitch 1 where the giant flake begins running horizontally, more or less (at the start of the orange ramp that runs diagonally up and right). If you run into the cold shuts on Conn's East, you've traversed 20 feet too far along the top of the flake.
Pitch 2 is one of the most exhilarating 5.7 pitches at Seneca -- and that is saying something in a place renowned for amazing 5.7s.
RSS Feed
