The dark, dark side

Before today I had never tried neither traditional climbing nor multi-pitch climbing - now I have tried both. Although, I did only follow and remove the pros. Since my only pair of climbing shoes that do not have any holes are very tight I decided to use my approach shoes to get the true mountaineering experience. The route (Packrat dihedral at El Rito) is only a 5.6 so it was not a problem to use the big shoes. We were three climbers in the team so I was tied in to two ropes all the time. At the bolted belay station it got a bit crowded and we were trying to sort out the ropes and the life lines. A big problem was to hear the person on top when he was done and ready to belay me. It all went fine but it took us about four hours to do a two pitch climb and then rappel down in two parts with double ropes. This whole exercise was to prepare us for a climb by Moab called Ancient Art that we are going to do around Thanksgiving. Then we will be four climbers but hopefully it will be faster than three as the second pair will use a top-rope put up by the first two. We will need more practice to get good rope management and such.