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Rock Climbing at Old Rag

Last weekend instead of driving up to Frederick ostensibly to help Scotty move into his new townhouse but actually to hit on his hot older sister Heidi, I decided to do the manly thing and go rock climbing at Old Rag mountain with Firefly. We went shopping at REI to get me some rock climbing shoes (I ended up getting a pair of Mad Rock ... some name that I forget) and then to Trader Joe's to buy sundries. I got a Clif Bar, a loaf of bread, and some cheese. Fly got some trail mix, jerky, and 3 liters of wine.
We finished the drive to Old Rag in about two joints. Our goal was to hike up the mountain during the day, scout out the possible places to climb, maybe climb around a little then settle into some illegal camp site near the rocks and climb them the next morning. We passed the camping line (2500 feet) and near the top we found the bushwhack trail that leads down to a number of climbing areas.
Fly had heard that Old Rag was only a winter climbing area but I guess he chose to ignore this and not tell me about it. The entire area was completely overgrown, mostly with spikey thorn bushes but there were also a lot of tightly packed regular trees with sharp sticks and entangling vines. In one hour of wrestling with this hostile vegetation I had more cuts on my arms and legs than the combined total for probably the rest of my life. I have been cut plenty worse before, but never quite so much.
We set up camp on a relatively flat rock and laid out our gear. We had brought just enough food for the weekend and a little less water than we would probably need. Old Rag doesn't really have any water sources but we figured we would just go a little thirsty. When we started to unpack we realized that I had forgotten the entire loaf of bread and cheese. At least we remembered the wine. We finished most of it, drank a few mouthfuls of water and turned in for the night.
Since we were sleeping on an incline and I had a slick thermarest pad I spent the entire night sliding slowly off the boulder we were sleeping on, waking up just before I fell off, pushing myself back up as far as I could go, then repeatin the process. Also there was an incredible amount of wind. When I woke up in the middle of the night I thought we were in a tornado, but decided not to get up and check things out, anything that could have been blown away clearly already had. I was tired though and got a pretty good rest, and when we woke up the weather was perfect, sunny warm and the sky was totally clear.
Looking over at the nearly empty gallon jug of water I turned on Fly and we began accusing each other of drinking it all last night but then we relized there was a hole in the jug and it had just been slowly seeping out all night.
We had a meager breakfast, a few tablespoons of water, and then took up our gear to find some rocks to climb. We warmed up on an easy little climb, just to get comfortable doing lead climbing, which is completely new to me and Fly has read more about it in books than he has actually done. We found that traversing the fallen logs was the best way to get around in the thorn fields. After we felt comfortable with the equipment we packed up everything we had, smoked a joint and went up the other side of the bushwhack trail. We figured nothing could be as bad as the way we took to get in. We were completely wrong. It turns out that there is no other side of the bushwhack trail, we just walked straight up the ass end of Old Rag mountain through at least 2 miles of utter shit, more stinking prickers and trees so thick i had to shove Fly's pack from behind to get his fat ass through. We popped out on the trail near the top part of Old Rag, which is what makes the hike worthwhile, there are some really amazing boulder formations, land bridges, caves, natural staircases and the unparallelled view of beautiful Shenandoah. To celebrate I granted myself one refreshing mouthful of water.
Looking for a good place to climb down, I decided to throw my pack across a little gap then jump the distance after it. Without really thinking, I threw the pack, but then held on to it, so i sort of went tumbling after it over the edge. At the last possible second i jumped as much as I could and by the grace of God found a good handhold on the other side so I didn't tumble down 10 feet onto solid granite. Fly was a little hesitant to follow me, that pussy.
Fly did all the work with navigating and setting up the belay stations and everything. We found a 70 foot 5.7 called Fern Crack on the PATC wall. In terms of relative difficulty, it wasn't anything special for either of us to climb but there was the added challenge of placing your own protection that comes with lead climbing. Fly lead climbed the whole thing without a slip then I followed him cleaning up his gear. It was pretty sweet, I can't really imagine how nerve-wracking it must be to be climbing knowing that the only thing keeping you from falling 70 feet to an unforgiving stone grave is the protection that you yourself put into the wall, but Fly seemed to handle it well. It was a pretty easy climb for me afterwards, knowing that he had set up a tight belay station at the top.
Afterwards we finished the last few drops of water we had and headed on home. I think we're going to go climbing sometime the weekend after next if anybody wants in.