Climbing Into the Void

I’m cheating here, since I’m using almost the same title as the Joe Simpson novel, the one where he almost died. And this is my little experience of one stupid thing after another leading to me nearly having a bad accident. Death probably wasn’t in the cards, but one more stupid coincidence and it was a possibility. I’ll try to explain it the best I can…

We did a climb that finishes, after four or five pitches so about two hundred meters up, with a long traverse from right to left. The first pitch of the traverse is rated 6a+ (so it’s supposed to be a bit physical but not so very hard). This was my pitch to lead, and it went okay. I arrived at the belay and it was my partner’s turn to follow.

He does, and then it’s his turn to continue another pitch of the traverse. This is rated 6a. Except the topo, which has been showing us marks where the bolts for protection are supposed to be, showed no bolts at the beginning of the pitch. We’d done this climb before, but probably six years ago? I saw bolts going off to the left, but higher up there was a passage with rotten rock that also went in the direction we were supposed to go. He goes up to the rotten rock and traverses there, since the topo doesn’t show there being any bolts.

He never “finds” the 6a. A 6a should give you an impression of climbing a bit, and he was walking. At the end of going left, he finds nothing but a wide ridge with unstable rocks going right up to a solid, chained belay. Apparently, the 6a had been those bolts going off to the left, down below.

But he’s gone left about ten meters, then right up along the ridge another ten meters. He’s directly above me and there no bolts between him and me. The rope, at this point, is not going left and right but straight up. It’s a bit overhanging just above me but I see some bolts going up from where I am from a totally different climb, one that crosses our climb. The most obvious thing to do was not to go left then right, like my partner did, but to try to go straight up following the other bolts. The line looked really hard, but how bad could it be? In addition, someone’s left a bit of gear there where they’d quit the route and come back down. I love picking up gear that way.

I start to go up and yeah, it’s hard. And the rock is really crappy. I get past one bolt, the second one, but I’m having a hard time getting to the third. I see what might be a good hold and I jump for it, but it crumbles in my hand…and I swing out, feet flailing in the air, swinging in the void, hundreds of meters of air below me.

I keeping swinging and swing and swing and I manage to get myself back on the rock, hanging on in that crappy area where my partner had walked up, where it’s easy but the rock is terrible.

I can’t get back the other bolts easily. The overhang between me and my partner means that if I wind up in the rope again, I’m going swing again, and I’m not sure if I can get past that third bolt where I slipped of in the first place. I can try to follow where my partner went, from where I am, but I really need to not fall.

So that’s what I do next, but the rope is not following me at all. It comes down directly from where my partner is and I can’t get it to flip out from the overhang to continue to protect me from above. It’s impossible to walk unless my partner lets me have just tons and tons of slack.

So I have a rope to keep me from falling, like, to my death, but if I slip or any of that rotten rock comes off in my hands again, with all the slack, this time I’m swinging down five, ten, fifteen meters and back to the right again in an enormous, scary, swinging oscillation. I likely wouldn’t die, but I’d get pretty scraped up, and there’s always the off chance of the rope pulling across something sharp as I swing and, with all the tension from my weight, getting cut. And me dying.

So I walk very, very carefully. I talk to the rock. “You look like a nice, solid hold, don’t you now. And you, a bit of gravel that I can slide on, you’re okay if I just push you aside a bit, right?” And I go slowly, slowly, slowly all the way to the left where the ridge starts to go up to the right where my partner is.

The rope, at this point, has about twenty meters of slack in it between him and me. It goes straight down from him, then under the overhang where it won’t come loose to follow me, then comes up about another ten meters to where I am. So I just take the damned thing off and my partner pulls it up to him. The ridge is easy, grassy, not the best rock in the world but I’ve walked on worse.

I’m not having a panic attack yet, and wait until we’re at the top of the climb, one more easy pitch, to have a good cry.

I don’t know how well I’ve explained this, but suffice to say that it was a stupid, unique situation where nothing happened but there was a potential for some bad stuff. And it felt pretty scary.

I’m happy to be home, safe with Foro, and not think about climbing at all for a while!