The Emeralds
Climb Review
The Emeralds are a crag with lots of trad/sport routes. However, on Mountain Project, someone found a deep water solo route—a boulder problem that looked like fun.
The rock was granite, like the rest of the Tahoe area.
The approach was about a quarter mile of hiking through a climber’s trail with lots of bush, fallen trees, and rocks.
The river was pristine, the trail was pretty clean except for some toilet paper that was seen :/
Unknown (V1; Deep Water Solo)—We found this route to be vexing but fun. First, there’s this little fun traverse just to get to the start of the route. Once there, Louie and I both tried our best, but just could not get above this section where the handholds ran out. Frankly, I have no idea how to continue, but sitting here writing about it, I have a few more ideas I want to try out. Realistically, I’d like to get stronger over the next year, go back to this spot and try this problem again.
What I Learned
It was my first time climbing over water and before my first fall, as a tiny bit nervous as the water current seemed a bit quick. Once I fell into the water, my concerns flowed away w/the river as I found the landing to be the best bouldering fall I’ve ever encountered.
I found any moisture on my hands or feet to be detrimental to sticking on rock. I knew this already, but given the swimming required, I thought this made the climbing that much harder.
Both Louie and I found that our feet gave out first. Because we weren’t used to using our toes to dig into the granite for grip, our feet fatigued way before our hands. I wonder if I can abuse my toes a few weeks before my next trip here to toughen them up.
Louie and I did not climb with chalk nor with climbing shoes. Felt very different than the normal bouldering that we were used to.
The water was pretty darn cold. Maybe it was like 45 degrees?
We looked for other climbing routes and Louie found one that was probably a V0? V0-? No other one that was as good as the identified V1.
There was oh so many insects—many of the cracks we used for hand jams had spider-webs (and spiders) all around it, ants were crawling all over our shoes and clothes, and bees were flying around us.
Friends
Louie was my climbing partner for this trip and we had a great time climbing this route. We were both great at photographing/videoing each other and had lots of stoke for each other’s attempts.
What Happened?
We arrived at the Emeralds to see that there were cars lining both sides of the road and that parking was at a premium. We drove a quarter mile up the road, found spots, and headed off to find the deep water solo route.
We saw the elusive area then hiked down 4th class rock that was a little slippery with our sandals/running-shoes. It was also hot to the touch as it had been baking in the sun the whole day. But once we made it down, nothing else mattered but to get to the other side and climb!
Unfortunately, I mistook the rock, which meant that Louie ended up climbing a random rock formation and I’m guessing that the climb was a V0 or a V0- route. On the flip side, it did give Louie a chance to jump maybe 15-20 ft into water, which looked pretty fun.
We then figured out the correct route and each tried the route three times each, with us making the tiniest of progress each time, but not getting past this glass ceiling where we just could not find a good handhold. Sitting here, I kind of wish that I would have tried out a dyno move as we could see some chalk marks on a handhold way above where we could statically reach.
After our attempts, our feet felt too spicy, so we looked for new routes down river, but could not find interesting routes with deep water below it. We decided to call it a day, with Louie executing a perfect dive into the water and me precariously traversing a rock (with a rock that was a perfect pinch hold) to get to our stuff.
We donned our climbing shoes and made short work of the 4th class terrain (we tried going up a slightly more difficult route up, but we bailed as there were too many spider webs). We hiked back to our car and started the 3+ hr drive back to the bay area.