Stone Mountain (NC)

We took a nice day trip to Stone Mountain to climb the great arch. We took block route on the way up. It had rained two days before, and it was definitely still a little wet here and there (most noticeable on third pitch of great arch), but overall it was super good to climb on. A lot of people say great arch is a classic mostly for the views and not the climbing and... I kind of agree. The spectacle of the whole thing was definitely amazing, but I honestly didn't hate the liebacking that much. Here is the link to the gopro footage, half of it is the rappel. 

Now onto the star of the show, The Great Arch (5.5). It consists of ~400 feet of almost entirely pure lieback crack climbing up the "arch" on the mountain. It was awesome. I didn't realize just how tall the feature was until we got up to it, but man was it so cool. 

There really isn't much point in breaking up this climb by pitches because... it's all the same. Like I mentioned before, there was a bit of wet spot at the start of the third pitch, but luckily there was enough dry that as long as I was careful it didn't end up causing much of an issue. 

We did have a hiccup on the initial rappel down, where I was overconfident in how long the rope would go... needless to say, I was able to practice my ascending that day. Otherwise, it was probably the smoothest climbing trip we've done yet. We took it super chill, resting a lot and enjoying the view between pitches, including eating lunch. If we tried we definitely could have fit another route in, but whatever, we had fun!