Decided to break the familiar pattern of Ha & C. Control and spent a couple fruitless and exhausting hours searching for the top of this climb. Anyone have any (helpful) beta...PLEASE!!

Man up and walk the Death Ledge from Westward Ha.

The start is not far from Westward Ha.

does this look familiar?

Wow! Awesome!

it seems like it would be impossible to find from above.

its not unreasonable to approach along the ledge. its a long way down, though. the book description of the start is decent enough, with plenty of cross referencing pictures and "adjacent" climbs. although we got lost once it went into the corners above.

same experience as artisan. found it ok and ended up off route on run out 5.7-8 terrain

Yellow: Approximate Williams topo line
Green: Approximate Swain topo line
Red & Blue follow Williams description. Only those variations stay at 5.5, if you follow the yellow line directly you will encounter climbing that may be mentioned by Swain as a 5.7+ variation.

Using the picture below you should be able to locate the start of the route. It follows a fairly distinct corner and passes some old pins. I think it's cool to do for historical reasons, but otherwise it's not a very appealing Millbrook climb.

For a larger image:

http://fracchia.org/oldroute.jpg

I did the yellow line. It never occurred to me to leave the corner where the blue line goes, and it is hard to imagine Fritz doing that either. There's probably an old issue of Appalachia describing what the FA party did. I don't recall any old pins.

Up at the top of the corner and then moving left there were some 5.7 or possibly 5.8 moves. Perhaps I should have climbed a bit higher before going left, that might have made it easier.

The second pitch involves thrashing through that large pine tree.

I don't recognize anything in John's picture. I wonder whether the party he photographed trended right from the top of the first-pitch corner and never traversed over to the left at all.

As an aid to location, the prominent right-slanting right-facing corner with the yellow back wall at the right side of Chris's picture is Realm of the Fifth Class Climber.