As mentioned previously, I'm writing this trip report a couple of months after the trip took place. I've forgotten many details. I'll post what I recall.
After a week of climbing at Breaks Interstate Park, we moved on to Red River Gorge. This was our first visit to the area, ever. We only had time to sample a few sub-areas before leaving.
On our first day, we just hiked and scoped out the walls of interest. Even without considering climbing, the park is beautiful! I took a few pics of some little plants as we walked around.
On Monday, we visited RRG's Front Porch Wall. It has an odd overhang and some short, mostly doable routes. Many of the routes at RRG are labeled with small, metal mediallions. These help you figure out where you are. We hadn't seen this in any of the areas where we've climbed before. It was handy but also seemed a bit like cheating?
My first lead here was Granny's Rocker, a 5.4. I expected it to be easier, but it was not a gimme!
Here's the route. You can see it's pretty short, with the medallion embedded in the rock at the base of it. The rock texture is interesting, smooth and cool, with rows of pockets.
We worked our way across this little wall, enjoying the fun and easy 4s. Then we moved over right a few hundred feet, to where the wall takes on a different character. The rock has more cracks and sharp features here.
I led the 5.7 in this section called "Unknown". I remember the rock being quite sharp, and the moves seemed tough for a 7. In "The Red" guidebook (2nd edition), this route is on page 126. It appears you are just supposed to launch yourself up the face to the first horizontal, and climb up the vertical crack. IIRC I did that, but it wasn't easy. It may help to be taller to get up above the first horizontal. Or maybe I just did it poorly. It was certainly fun, I recommend it!
Here's another look at the rock here. We didn't have time for more climbing that day, and we'd love to go back and do more climbing in this area. The rock character seemed different from other areas we visited at the Red - a bit like Rumney's schist.
On May 12, Tuesday, we visited a new area that's still under development, Ash Branch. We had a ton of fun, and hope to return. Here's Tiny Tatanka (5.5).
On May 13, Wednesday, we returned to Muir Valley's Bruise Brothers Wall. We had more fun and got a lot of climbing in, but no pics.
At the end of the day, we had some of Miguel's famous pizza. It's a typical wood-fired pizza: the crust is doughy, the toppings are fresh, though a bit sparser than I'd like. I'm biased towards NY/NJ/CT pizza. I like the thin crust pizza of CT. I like the more old-school NY pizza which is basically a cheese delivery system with lots of sauce and a slightly thicker crust (necessary in order to withstand the flood of sauce and weight of the cheese). But, Miguel's is quite okay.
I should mention that while we had a great time at RRG, we had the misfortune of being hosts to a few extremely tiny ticks - probably deer tick nymphs. We removed them before they had feasted on us for very long, and neither of us have developed any symptoms, so I think we were not infected with parasites. I'm usually a live-and-let-live type person, but the risk at RRG and Ash Branch is too high. Should we visit here again, we're definitely applying permethrin.