Hallucinogen Wall Speed Record!

Boulderites Alan Doak and Stefan Griebel completed the first one-day ascent of the Hallucinogen Wall this past weekend when they did the wall in 23h39m. Alan did the aid climbing and Stefan (a 5.13 free climber) the free climbing. They are members of the local speed scrambling group (SMSC). They topped out in the rain.

Comments from Alan Doak:

Stefan and I topped out on Hallucinogen Wall after 23h39m of climbing (add 1h17m for the car-to-car time).

That was by far the hardest wall I've ever done. I led the 9 aid pitches (except for the last 25 feet of pitch 14) as a single block in about 17 hours. 4 of the pitches were A3 and 2 more were A3+ imho. It started raining as Stefan got on the last pitch, and things really got wet about an hour after we topped out... speed is safety. I took one 25 footer on pitch six and took another fall on pitch 10 when my hook popped immediately after I clipped the rope into the bolt... with the previous bolt 15 or 20 feet below me. Yikes!

I nailed 3 or 4 pins and chiseled one of Stefan's brassies into the wall. There was a ton of fixed heads and a boatload of hook moves... every aid pitch required hooking, and the 10th pitch had 5 bolts, a cam cluster and at least 35 hook moves. The first 5 pitches were 5.8-5.10 free/french-free that Stefan lead as the first block, then it was A3/C2/A3+/A3-/A3+/A3/A3/A2/C2, then Stefan did a short section of C2 to the top of 14 and a 5.9R chimney and 40ft of 5.8 choss to the top.

I've done about 14 walls, but none of them had such sustained hard aid climbing. The previous hardest was the Shield, but that felt tame by comparison. I had been psyching myself up for months and just put myself in the zone on my block. Normally I back clean heads because I don't want to replace them if I take a fall, but I started clipping all of them near the top since I was ready to bail if I took a big zipper fall. Luckily that didn't happen.