Crescent Moon Buttress
Despite the fact that I've been to Potrero like a dozen times, I've never climbed at Culo de Gato or the Crescent Moon Buttress. And as I had a rental car, my buds Devon and Eric and I made a plan to head out there and do the buttress one overcast morning. We left camp around 9ish, drove NW on highway 53 past Mina, turned left for Icamole, and then turned onto some random gravel road that takes you right past a smelly chicken ranch and near the base of the buttress. The guidebook says to follow the path of least vegetation to the obvious trail to the base, but we soon realized that this "obvious trail" was a myth when we started bushwhacking through cactus to get there.
Where's my machete?
Anyway, we eventually reached the wall and found a line of bolts that looked promising. Eric started leading the first two pitches, trailing two ropes behind so that Devon and I could follow at the same time on different ropes (using a Reverso or similar). Devon then led an amazingly short "pitch" to a 3rd-class ledge that you have to walk across before starting the crux pitch, which was 5.10a. Not too hard of a pitch, but a little exposed and tricky.
Cruxy and exposed
After that, there are a couple more easy pitches until you reach the top of a flake with a gap between where you are and the rest of the wall. So you have to rappel down into a notch and then climb back out of it to do the last two pitches.
Rapping to the notch
I had the pleasure of leading the last two pitches, which unfortunately could not really be linked due to rope drag, but the last one goes at 5.8 and was actually kind of tricky and cruxy after the traverse. We got up to the top and enjoyed a beautiful 360-degree summit. It was actually really amazing. We signed the summit log, and noted that the last ascent had been done approximately 11 months earlier - apparently this climb doesn't get done much!
Beautiful summit!
Chillin
Unfortunately, this is where the hard part of the climb started. We managed to rap back down into the notch, but then we weren't really sure which way to rappel. The book says to rappel right, but doesn't really specify if it means climber's right or right as you're looking at the bolts in the notch... so we eventually rapped on climber's left into some loose 4th-class terrain. That was sketchy enough, but as we continued moving downwards we found ourselves having to actually make some scary and somewhat dangerous downclimb moves on 5th-class rock while carrying our ropes and wearing our approach shoes (or sandals).
4th-class scramble, yay!
Thankfully, we did successfully make it down the sketchy 5th-class rock unscathed, but only to be greeted with a pretty steep and loose scree field that was loose and scary enough that it seemed better to slide down on our asses rather than try to walk down. So we did that for a bit, hoping we wouldn't gain too much speed and slide out of control, and then walked across some talus to try to get back to the cactus field. We did eventually make it back to our packs at the base of the climb, and then back down through the cactus field to our car, but by the time we finally reached the car we were completely exhausted, I think mostly from the mental energy and fear of not knowing if we were going to be able to get down without accidentally hurting ourselves on the walk off, as well as the annoyance of having to navigate a cactus field.
Sunset on the buttress
To be honest, I don't think I'll be repeating this climb anytime soon due to the difficulty of the descent, but it was a really beautiful aesthetic feature to climb and a really amazing summit, so I'm glad I did it at least once =)
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