part 2.

Dave was belayed across and picked up the (completely unused) gear from Susan for the next pitch. We were huddled in a small, shaded alcove with a dirt-and-critter-dropping floor surrounded by small, crumbly spires. The crumbliest of the spires were directly in Dave’s line of ascent. Susan and I were showered with small pebbles as he climbed, and his intermittent monologue let us know that the quality of rock did not improve appreciably above. Slowly, he climbed around the corner of the arête and out of sight. The next section, on the shady face, was bolted. Dave sounded quite relieved when he announced that he had clipped into the first bolt. Actually, it was good to know that something more than a hope and a prayer would be anchoring us to the mountain as we climbed. Silly of me, I know .

It was a long pitch, and the wait time gave the little hamsters in my brain time to start running around on their squeaky wheels, reminding me that this was the 5.8 section of the climb – the steepest, sheerest part of the arête, with monzo exposure in every conceivable direction. I told the hamsters to shut up and go bother someone else. Then I noticed another critter – a chipmunk I think - peek out from behind a rock at my feet and dash away over the fins at speeds I would never have attempted. I couldn’t blame him for being disturbed at having his private bathroom usurped by strangers. I was also a little jealous at how easily he moved over the rock. Stupid rodent.

Then my turn to climb came.

I wriggled through a chimney created by two horizontal fins of rock, scraping my pack along the back fin. I was trying to avoid tossing more pebbles on Susan’s head. Unfortunately, I found the next section nearly as dire-looking as the stuff below. I rapped on the rock with my knuckles and was greeted by a sound more hollow than a teenager’s stomach. It’s supposed to go ‘thump, thump’. Instead it went ‘boom, boom, rattle’. Great.

“Don’t worry,” I counseled myself, “You’re on belay. Just don’t dislodge anything onto Susan or anyone else and everything will be O.K. Really.”

I gently tiptoed up the rock, trying to position my pulls to coincide with a direction that would not peel off the handholds. I could feel the ‘big air’ all around me as a palpable thing. My hamsters were hard at work, calculating how far it was to the ground. Enough of this! Shoot those damn rodents and focus on the climbing. Don’t look down; don’t look up, just keep within your climbing bubble.

I edged around the arête and onto the face. I had climbed much more difficult things but just then, with the ever increasing drop below, I felt overwhelmed. “Stay in your bubble,” I muttered to myself. “Focus, focus, focus.” I crept up one foot at a time. Because I was attached to one rope and trailing a second, I had to unclip the upper rope at each bolt and reattach the lower rope for Susan. The effort to do this while clinging to the face produced a huffing and puffing more impressive than any steam engine. At the start of each new move my hamsters would scream (in unison) “You can’t climb up – there are no good holds!”

“Of course you can climb,” stated my disgusted Voice Of Reason. “What about that hold right there? No there, Doby, in front of your nose. And what about that knob for your foot? Stop being such a weenie and get moving!”

“All right. All right.” I muttered. “Stop nagging.”

“Did you say something?” inquired Dave from above.

“No, nothing,” I replied. At least I was now within the sound of his voice.

At this point the climb began to get increasingly difficult, but not so much from the holds or the angle of the pitch, but rather from the drag of the trailing rope. It grew heavier and heavier until I felt like I was hauling a large gorilla behind me. Dave kept giving me words of encouragement until I finally managed to pull myself up to his belay spot and clip in. I sighed with gratitude when he grabbed the trailing rope and began to haul it up, getting the monkey off my back. I found myself a small seat where I could face inward towards the arête (we were straddling the ridge) and wrap my arms and legs around a lumpy outcropping. I might look silly, but at least I felt more comfortable. I focused upward on the crows and hawks making lazy circles on the thermals rising up from the valley floor. My suspicious hamsters immediately began to question why they were hanging around and whether it had anything to do with us.

Susan came up next with words of praise for both the climb and Dave’s excellent lead. My own praise of his lead was more along the lines of “Thank God you did this and not me!” Dave and Susan had a discussion of the next (and last) pitch. Dave was trying to talk Susan into leading it, but his description of the 30-foot hand-over-hand traverse along a crumbling crack with footholds that “are there if you really look for them” just was not drumming up Susan’s enthusiasm for leading. “I don’t even enjoy traverses on scrambles,” Susan declared. “This just sounds like more that I feel comfortable with.” That goes double for me, I stated silently to myself.

Dave gave up the unequal battle and got ready to lead the pitch. He climbed up the last of the ridge edge, cautioning us about more suspect rock at the top, and then readied himself for a two bolt haul up the face of the large, rectangular block crowning the top of the arête. Once over the top of the block, we lost sight of him and had to use our imaginations to conjure up his crossing of the grand traverse (maybe we should not have done that). When he finally announced via radio that he had arrived at the top, he admitted that the traverse was trickier than he had remembered. Surprise, surprise. He then launched into a rambling description of how I should unclip and reclip the pieces he placed along the traverse. Since Susan and I could barely hear him over the static and low volume, we just looked at each other and shrugged. I had this funny feeling that I would not be in a position to do much fine tuning on the traverse anyway.

continued in part 3