Impulse

This route is on the right side of the Blood Wall. Look for the crack and corner system that goes to the top of the wall. I would recommend this route to a person who enjoys adventurous 5.10 climbing over some runouts. Some of the rock is of amazing quality, some is not. With more traffic this route could become better.

p1. (5.9) Start at a large dead pine which will mark the correct corner system. I climbed in from the right to avoid the tree. Once into the corner system, stem your way up. The back of the corner will pinch down to nothing for some stretches, leaving few gear options. Go left at the end of the corner system, and up a short crack system. This will lead to a huge ledge that currently has a bunch of slings making a rappel station. I thought this pitch was light for 5.9, but with sparse gear.

p2. (10-) Once on the big ledge look for the crack system on the right side. Do not go up the corner on the left side of the ledge. Lead up through a bouldery leaning lieback with some fragile rock and mildly inspiring gear. This leads to a left leaning thin crack system, with some fragile face holds. Gain a right facing corner and belay on a sloping ledge. This pitch gets 10a in the guidebook, but I thought it was a bit tougher than that, with tricky gear and creaky holds.

p3. (10-) This pitch starts up a cool varnished section of corner with a bit of a run to some gear. A yellow tcu and a #2 camalot are the only gear I got for quite a bit of climbing. Continue up the corner until it begins to run out. Look right and a few layback moves up a small crack will take you to the belay. RPs help in these last few moves. If you bring a 70m rope, you should be able to make it past this belay to a huge, more comfortable ledge. The guidebook calls this the crux pitch, but I though p2 was more demanding.

p4. (5.8) The corner system becomes left facing at this point, and the quality of the climbing begins to diminish. Go up the brushy corner until you are almost to the top. We stopped to belay about 50 vertical feet below the summit to alleviate some rope drag. Here our fifth pitch took us left about 30 feet to another corner system, under a roof. It appeared to be of better rock quality than going straight up. I found this pitch hard to rate, but required effort.

Descent: Top out on the formation and start looking for the heavily cairned trail. We couldn't figure out how to down climb one section and found a tree with a rap anchor. This rappel only needed one rope. From here more cairns appeared, no more rapelling needed.

The right hand side of the Blood Wall has a big wall of varnished rock. This route is on the left hand side of this part of the wall. Look for the dead pine leaning against the wall at the start of a nice corner and crack system

1 set brass (we had HB offsets 2-6)

We took triple metolius grey to yellow (00-2) which may have been a bit overkill

double 0.5-0.75 camalot

single 1-3 camalot

These are long pitches and belays require gear, so we brought a lot.