Whiskers

This is an excellent finger crack on the upper headwall of Pharaoh's Beard.

See

Pharaoh's Beard, Regular Route

for more approach beta and information on the approach pitch.

Some sections of the route have a bit of lichen on them which makes the already tenuous foot smearing that much more desperate. With some more traffic and new hardware, this would clean up nicely. In terms of it's exposed position and quality of the moves, I think this climb rivals popular tespieces at the Cookie such as Red Zinger and Crack-A-Go-Go.

From the midway ledge (top of p1 of the Regular Route) climb up a flake and then slightly right to a mungy offwidth lieback (this section is hard to protect without very big gear). This leads to a ledge just right of the large tree.

A bit of scary A0 past a very old bolt and an equally old pin leads to the crux. A series of small (fingertip sized) flakes work as sidepulls as you face climb up and right, to the start of the crack. Once you've gained the crack things get easier but it's far from over. Here things ease to sustained 5.10+ climbing with the occasional half-decent rest. Plug your way up the splitter for a while until you near the top. Here the crack thins to a seam and you must make a final cruxy move off face holds to gain the arete which leads to the top. Save a micro cam for this final crux.

It is possible to lower back down to the ledge from the bolted anchor with a 70m rope. It's also easy to toprope this climb after doing the Regular Route (which is what I did).

The topo also shows an 11a traverse coming in from the left at a point level with the start of the crack. This would bypass the mungy offwidth, dangerous A0, and 5.11+ face climbing leading up to the start of the crack. I haven't tried this variation myself but it did look doable on rappel. You would need to do 2 approach pitches (a pitch to the ledge, and then a short pitch to the tree) in order to do this variation.

LOTS of small gear (from micro to .75"), plus whatever big gear you think you'll need to protect the easy offwidth on the approach pitch.