Mystery Moon

A bit of a rambly line albeit on a bit of a rambly buttress. The details of this route seem to have been lost to history so I'll describe how we did it; similar but not exactly to how the Granite Guide describes it.

P1 90' climbs the obvious arch below Texas Flake. Make your way around a bush via the slab at left to enter the arch on its right side. Follow the arch, trending left, with just enough small gear to keep it reasonable. Continue around the left side and up the following corner to a 2-bolt belay.

P2 180' A long, varied pitch with the crux right at the end. Choose your own adventure up 40' of easy terrain to the obvious slab with 2 bolts. You're aiming for the arching right-facing dihedral far above and there are a few ways of getting there. The Granite Guide draws two separate topo lines, one going directly up a 5.7 slab using bolts and the other heading up the right side and traversing left via a crack. I climbed the latter, and there's no gear in that crack, so...yeah, don't go that way.  In either case you end up below some short flaring cracks with decent gear, and finally into the dihedral proper. The line becomes more obvious here -- follow the right-leaning crack in the dihedral until it deposits you in a mess of scrub oak at the top, which happens to be the leftmost edge of the base of the Sail. The crux is where the ramp steepens and holds get worse, and incidentally, the gear gets to be rather marginal and strenuous to place. This is not the line for a budding 5.9 trad leader.  Belay at a small tree in a tangle of scrub oak. Rope drag is severe -- bust out those double ropes collecting dust in your garage to practice your double-rope technique!

Descent: There is a 2-bolt anchor below the scrub oak. The lower hanger had a rap ring, and a rather sun-bleached sling connected the higher bolt to the same rap ring.  Bring up some quicklinks / chains to connect them if you go up there. From here, the Granite guide suggests rapping way to skier's left on the other side of Texas Flake, but we ended up rapping skier's right to the base of the 5.10R Man Overboard route which sports a nice 2-bolt anchor. From there you can rap to the base of p2, and then back down to the starting belay ledge.

Or, just climb some of the choice cracks at the Sail and walk off! Hey, you're already there.

We started at the belay ledge at the top of Bizarro Duck. So you can either climb that, or wander up the easy ramp / slabs from the right side of the buttress past another 2-bolt anchor to this same ledge, maybe 150 feet up.

A double set of cams from small (green C3) to 0.75 Camalot, then singles to #3 and a whole bunch of runners P2 is long, but the first two-thirds is pretty easy without much gear anyway.