“It's really chossy!” I yell down.
About thirty feet down, Kyle is belaying me while Chris and Ben look on from a little farther out. They probably don't want to be in the fall line if I rip out more holds.
It's a typical “Send-tember” day at Smith Rock. It's only Friday morning and mobs have already descended into the canyon - climbers are crawling all over the popular walls,
I've run out the lead up the initial, easy thirty-foot slab, which was made of quality rock. Now I'm trying to find good holds to pull myself onto the actual face, but the whole thing feels like wet coffee cake. I think about bailing, but the rock fifteen feet up seems like the regular, high quality volcanic tuff typically found at Smith Rock. I just have to get past this crumbly band.
I wedge a nut into a crack and tug on it a few times -it's solid. I clip my rope to it and climb on. I go slowly, pulling out more kitty litter holds. I'm mindful
I've climbed about ten feet above my nut and I'm not far from the good rock I spotted earlier. I haven't found anywhere to place more protection, but the climbing's easy enough -might as well power through. I just have to pull up onto a boulder-strewn, good-sized ledge. I find holds for my hands and commit my weight to a solid-looking foothold just below it. I push down with my leg and the foothold pops off.
“Ah!” I let out a little scream, but my upward momentum's carried me through and I'm already heaving myself onto the ledge. I stand up and look down at my friends. I didn't even yell “rock!”
“Did you see that?”
“Yeah,” Kyle yells back.
“That would have been a bad fall.”
“Oh dude, you would have grounded for sure.”
I look down at my nut fifteen feet below me. Kyle's right. I
would have fallen right past it, a total of thirty feet before it
caught me (or rather if it caught me), and with rope stretch
I'd have crashed into the slab -definitely a grounder.The thought makes my stomach churn -better get on with it. I put my hands on the face and have to stop. It looked like clean rock but it's actually another fifty feet of crumbling garbage. Now my stomach really churns...I need to answer nature's call.
“Uh, guys,” I call down. “I gotta poop.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah man. It needs to happen. I'm gonna get out of my harness.”
Luckily I'm on a big, comfortable ledge -no risk of falling. I step out of my gear-laden harness, drop my drawers, and crouch behind a boulder to cacophonous laughter from my teammates...hard to blame them.
“How are you gonna wipe?” one of them asks.
“Uh, with a rock,” I say while doing my business.
More raucous laughter. Again, hard to blame them. To my credit, I've taken a crap outside before, and rocks do make a good substitute for toilet paper. Rounded, polished rocks, that is. Not volcanic tuff. I try one, and, without going into details...it hurts.
“Uh, guys,” I call down, bracing myself for more laughter. “These rocks are too sharp. There's TP and hand sanitizer in my pack, can one of you toss it up?”
A few failed throws and more guffawing later, my humiliation's complete and my butt's clean. I step back into my harness and resume climbing.
The rock's even worse than it was over the last fifteen feet, if that's possible. Luckily it's slabby, so I can lean into the cliff and avoid committing too much weight
The drops hammer down on my helmet, blinding me when I try to look up. The holds are already turning into dust, and now I imagine they'll melt into wet dirt and slide me right off the face.
“Guys, this is garbage rock,” I yell down.
“Yeah, you gotta bail!” Kyle yells above the din of the rain.
“Okay! Just gotta find an anchor or something!”
I move up another ten feet, make one more shoddy placement, and haul myself onto a dictionary-sized ledge. On my left, there's just one tiny crack already filled with an ancient, two-headed piton, and on my right, two big blocks attached to the face which have each created a broad, solid crack. This must be the top
I stuff three cams into the crack between the face and the first, bigger block, and tie them all off with cordelette. I clip myself to the anchor.
“Off belay!”
I'm now a hundred feet of bad rock off the ground. Just as I look around at how I might be able to build an anchor from which to rappel, the rain stops as if someone had turned off a hose. I take it as a good omen...should we push on? Above me, the second pitch veers left into a small notch, following a clean crack into a corner system. It looks like quality rock, but then again, so did the second section of the climb. I've already lead a hundred feet of bad rock -it'll be for nothing if I go back down. On the other hand, I could give the guys a very safe top-down belay from here that would take us to this good second pitch...at least, I think it's good. Maybe I shouldn't make this decision alone.
“Hey, Kyle! You want to climb up here and take a look at P2? I think it's worth doing! I've got a good anchor up here so you're good to climb up!”
“Sure!”
Kyle ties in while I take up the rope and put him on belay, and he's up the slab and onto the face in no time. I lean back on my anchor, falling into the mechanical motions of taking in slack and keeping the top-rope tight. To my left, Smith Rock Group rises above the cliffs. Clouds drift away, revealing a flat, blue sky. This might not be such a bad day. Maybe we'll pull this climb off.
CRAAAAACK.
I haven't imagined it. A loud cracking, groaning sound. Where did it come from? It seemed close to me. Nothing's falling, nothing's moving. Something must have happened...rock doesn't just groan.
I see it. The big block. It's moved about an inch from the face.
All three of my cams are barely hanging in there, fully open like
little umbrellas, just about keeping me attached to the face.
I throw myself against the cliff, taking all my weight off the anchor. I'm standing on the dictionary-sized ledge, the cordelette strands between me and the cams limp. There's nothing reliable tethering me to the cliff anymore.
“Kyle!” I scream down. “Kyle, you gotta bail dude! I can't lower you. The whole block shifted and my anchor's worthless; you're not on belay anymore. Can you get down?”
“Fuck! Yeah, I think so. Hang on.”
“Okay, do your thing. Let me know when you're safe.”
Luckily, Kyle's trailing a second rope, which we would have used to bring up Chris and Ben. If he can just build an anchor, he can rappel from it using the other rope. While he's doing that. I stuff a couple of cams into the crack between the face and the second block, join them with a big sling, and clip myself directly to that. I'm now in a secure position again.
“I'm back on the ground, dude!” Kyle calls up. “You gotta get down too!”
“Working on it!”
I'm not sure what to do. There's no rappel station, so my only way down is to abandon gear. I try to slot a nut into the crack, but my biggest nut's too small for it -looks like I'm leaving a ninety dollar cam. Cursing my luck, I wedge my number one cam into the crack. It's over-cammed, and not even remotely budging. I push, pull, and kick the second block. It doesn't move a millimeter...much more resilient than its neighbor.
Climbers often say a piece is so bomber “you could hang a
pickup truck from it,” but the rule is to always have redundant
systems. I hate to abandon more gear, but safety comes first, so I
use a triple-length sling to connect the cam and the old piton. I
twist one strand of the sling around, creating a sliding X setup, and
clip a carabiner through it. This will create a movable master point
which will self-equalize as I rappel down -useful for such a
situation, since the rappel isn't straight down. Even as I make
traverses on rappel, I won't overload either piece. I run my rope
through the carabiner, clip my rappel device through it, and tie a
prusik knot around the rope, which I then connect to my harness.
I'm mad at the botched climb, mad at having to abandon costly equipment, but at least I'm going to make it down safely. I double-check everything and start rappelling. I only slide down about ten feet.
CRAAAACK.
I can't believe what I'm seeing.
My camalot explodes out of the rock like a bottle-rocket as the entire boulder shears away from the cliff and collapses into a handful of bowling ball-sized fragments. My brain can't process anything -I'm already free-falling.
I only have two thoughts as I let go of the rope and fall back. The first one is that I'm going to hit every little ledge and protuberance on the climb, that each impact will toss me and break me and send me spinning, tumbling, crashing down a hundred feet of cliff until my body finally splatters on the large, solid slab below. And then my corpse will slide down the slab and into the dust, landing at my three friends' feet. The second thought is that this is it. I'm going to die. I'm not scared or sad or angry. Just shocked, even disappointed that this is how it ends. Kind of a lame way to go, I guess.
These two thoughts barely register as the rope goes taut. I've let go of it but my prusik comes tight and the fall's over as suddenly as it began. I slam into a corner of the cliff, dangling on the rope. I've only fallen five feet. What happened?
I remember the falling rocks above me and flatten myself into the cliff, burrowing as deep as I can. Chunks of rock come crashing down around me. One smacks me harmlessly on the helmet while another grazes my ankle, but the rest all miss me. I hear them explode on the ground far below.
“I'm okay!” I scream out to my friends.
I'm actually not sure that's true. Adrenaline's coursing through
me and for all I know I could be in shock and have a broken leg. I
look at my body and test all four limbs. They all respond to my
commands, and I don't seem to be in pain. My right elbow is a
bleeding, grated mess, but the wounds seem superficial. A small
rivulet of blood's trickling down my ankle where a stone grazed me,
but it doesn't seem bad either.
“Are you okay?”
I recognize Kyle's voice.
“Yeah, I'm okay!” I yell back more confidently.
Why am I okay? I should be lying broken at the bottom of the cliff. I look up and, again, I can't believe what I'm seeing. My triple-length sling's fully extended, the number one camalot uselessly dangling from the end next to my bail 'biner, my rope still running through it. And the whole thing, the sling, the rope, and me, the whole system...it's all hanging from that single piton that was probably hammered in sometime in the
I haul myself over the corner and into a small platform, sliding my prusik and rappel device higher, fully taking my weight off the rope.
“Holy shit!” I yell down to my friends. “The cam popped out...that piton held me. That's insane...what the fuck do I do now?”
“Dude, you gotta down-climb,” Kyle says. “Just down-climb while staying on rappel and that'll be your backup if you fall.”
“Okay. Yeah, that's a good idea.”
There's no other choice. I climb back to the piton and remove all the gear except for one 'biner, which I clip to the piton with my rope running through it. No point leaving more gear up there. And then I start the down-climb.
It's a complete nightmare. Any climber worth her salt will tell you that down-climbing is much tougher than normal climbing. When you're climbing up, you're looking at a microcosm mere inches from your face, hugging the face, and the abyss is at your back where you can completely ignore it. When you down-climb, the emptiness of the drop falls away between your knees as your feet palpate the rock for footholds you can't see, and your movements push you down, embracing gravity's fatal pull. The entire choreography seems suicidal, threatening to drag you down to the hard, expecting ground. Many climbers practice down-climbing regularly for just such a situation -you never know when honing this specific skill might save your butt.
Down I go, ripping out holds, pushing down on chunks that crumble away as soon as I put enough weight on them, catching myself by my arms. It's the most static climbing I've ever done, moving and weighing one limb at a time, shifting my position only when I'm positive that each hold is bomber. With each movement, I move my rappel device and prusik down, hoping that the piton will hold again if I come off. Eventually, I reach the overhanging section -it can't be down-climbed.
“I have to rappel off the piton,” I tell my friends, who have retreated out of the fall line of breaking holds and collapsing rock.
Three or four times, I start sitting back on the rope before fear gets the better of me and I stand back up, hanging on to the face.
“Okay, here I go,” I tell my friends. “I'm going for it. If anything happens to me, please tell my parents and my brother I love them.”
I hope they know I'm not kidding and lean back on the rope. The
piton holds. I execute the fastest rappel ever made to the ledge
where I crapped what seems like several days ago. The smell reminds
me that it's only been an hour. Kyle tells me this ledge has an old
bolt and that I should rappel from it. I know I have no choice again
-this section is too technical to down-climb and I can't trust the
piton on this long a rappel. It's about twenty feet to the slab and
then I can easily climb all the way down.
I clip another bail 'biner to the bolt, take my rope down and run it through the 'biner, and rig my prusik and rappel device again. The bolt looks okay -it's old and rusty, but not spinning or moving. It just needs to hold me for ten seconds. I take a deep breath, lean back, and rappel so quickly I'm almost in a free-fall. I brake right before the slab and put my feet down on it. I undo my set-up and down-climb the slab, finally putting my feet on firm ground, where Kyle greets me with a bear hug.
I don't feel relief or any other emotion, just sheer exhaustion. I sit down on a rock to take a break. That was way too close.
Later on, I'll truly realize how close of a call I had on “Bruce's Traverse.” The exact moment will come that night in a grocery store, where I'll tell Kyle that I'm a little shocked I didn't die.
“Well, I mean, I don't want to agree with you,” Kyle will say. “But I mean...I was trying to look away the whole time, because...I didn't want to watch you die, man.”
Yeah. It was close. Way too close.
