We were fortunate that the park still was not too crowded. But we were unfortunate as the weather didn't really cooperate with our schedule. It was pretty hot out already. We headed over to the Cap Rock area to warm up on False Lieback 5.4.
Emily got to practice leading the route. She is getting really good at placing gear. All her placements were very solid and she doesn't whine about having to carry up and climb with a bunch of gear anymore. Although, since Christian has technically already gone up, he is able to give her an idea of what size pieces she will be needing.
Caitlyn still has not yet been able to master hand cracks. She has always preferred to do much harder slab climbing than to trust her hands and fists in much easier splitter cracks. There was one somewhat exposed spot she needed to climb out to to get into a hand crack but she got scared and froze up like she used to. We thought that she was growing out of that but since we have not had a lot of practice climbing as of late, she reverted back to being too scared to move. After she finally made it up, Christian had her do another lap on the climb so that she could see that it isn't as difficult as she made it seem.
She basically breezed up on her second time up and actually enjoyed herself somewhat. Emily made a second lap as well. Christian often does two or three laps on most of our routes. Once to lead it and then again to check Emily's gear placement and/or sometimes to go back up to clean up our anchor.
I usually go up once and then take pictures of the kids either on top or from below. I used to follow Christian to clean gear, but Emily often does that now.
By the time we finished that climb, we returned to the Lost Horse area to do some more climbs that we had our eye on last time but it had gotten way too hot. There were also already people on the big climb that we wanted to do. To be honest, the heat was way too much by then. We were not feeling too good. We ended up leaving the park to get a couple of frosty drinks to share. We felt a bit better after that but it is a long way back into the area we left, so we decided to just head to the nearest area to the opening of the park to finish climbing as Emily was not ready to call it a day. The closest easy climbs was in the Quail Springs Area on Trashcan rock. Emily did some more practice leads on B1 (5.1) and B2 (5.3). She has done them in the past already but it gave her some more practice.
She was supposed to choose both 5.3 routes but she must of got the lines mixed up.
Again, Emily's gear placements were all bomber. Unfortunately, her placement of one of her EVO Tricams was a little too much so. She basically got it stuck. Christian tried several times to loosen it but it only got stuck worse. In the end, we had to leave it. There was nothing else we could do and it was getting late. Emily has to earn a new piece now.
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