Duck Soup to Missing Duck to Cooter to Father's Day

The Peeler has some truly fantastic rock, broken up by a maze of ledges, big granite features, gullies and slabs. A friend showed me this linkup and it's worth posting. Be sure you take a photo of the topo in the Granite Guide to bring with you because although this is relatively mellow, it is a relatively convoluted outing by LCC standards. You can break up these pitches and/or link these pitches but the following description seems to give you the best belay stances.

Pitch 1:

Duck Soup

starts on the first slab off the trail about 100' to the west of the huge Slayer/Megadeth arch/roof thing. Horned Greebe is on the left side of the slab but you're heading right, clipping 2 bolts, passing a ledge, a right trending crack system, a couple of bolted belays and eventually landing on a big flat ledge with natural gear.

Pitch 2: The topo shows Duck Soup sticking in the back of the dihedral and/or climbing the unprotected patina. We chose to walk across the outer edge of the giant crack near the lip to it's end. Place some gear, head up the slab to a break with a crack straight above you. Pull the .9-ish mantle and get established on the Missing Duck ledge. Look straight left and undercling, squat, step over the seeps and hand jam a foot or so of moss. (

Super weird

but totally works.)

Pitch 3: Leave the bolted belay, heading straight left pretending you're climbing a 5.7 version of Sticky Fingers and with a piece or two of gear. Keep going left to the bolts of the

Cooter

arete. An early season venture on the Peeler is a great way to get yourself back into a slab climbing mindset.

Cooter

will get you there. The good news is that if you blow the crux, you're at a bolt and it's easy to mantle the bolt at 5.7,A1 and keep heading up and left on easy ground to the top of the first pitch of

Father's Day

. (Anytime Tyler P calls something 5.9- you know it's sandbagged. Felt like well protected, early season .9+)

Pitch 4: While at this anchor, gaze around at the (no crap) 5 bolted belay stations that have webbing on the bolts. Then look straight down at the very cool looking first pitch of Father's Day, which is a 5.5 slab full of cool patina that is strangely un-bolted. Link the next 2 pitches of Father's Day on good slab and/or cracks with bolts/gear, stopping at a 2 bolt anchor. (5.7)

Pitch 4: We thought we could head west to Dark of the Moon from here but it didn't work the way we tried. Instead, we headed straight up towards a big juniper on the skyline, passing low angled slabs with occasional bolts, a belay station and cracks. 5.5?

You'll probably never come up here again, so be sure to bring plenty of foot and water and your approach shoes so you can hike up to the incredible Ducks in Bondage slab.

Descent: Allow yourself plenty of time because the broken nature of this crag lends itself to a lot of smaller rappels. The good news is that all the stations are on good foot ledges. We used a single 70 for all the raps.

Duck Soup

starts on the first slab off the trail about 100' to the west of the huge Slayer/Megadeth arch/roof thing.

Standard LCC rack with extra long runners. 70M rope.