Ed’s Big Wall Diary, part 1:
Here is the story of my first big wall. I thought you all might enjoy reading the tale as you settle in for ham and holiday grog. It is kind of long and involved, but so was the wall. Enjoy, and happy holidays.
To understand the adventure, first understand the players:
> Jack: hard-man, rope-gun, and general all-around climbing maestro. The talent behind the venture.
> Adam: the mouse, braintrust behind the idea, and master chef. Adam did most of the work to get us ready for the adventure.
> Ed: general climbing novice, big wall virgin, slow-poke, and your most humble narrator.
The climb: Our original plan was to do a grade V wall: a likely two day experience, even with rope fixing. Adam and I picked out a gorgeous line called Moonlight Buttress: a ten pitch climb up a beautiful line up and under a gnarly roof. Eight pitches of pretty easy aid (the first two pitches went free ) made it an ideal two-day excursion.
The only problem was the weather. The day before we began our trip up the rock the coldest cold front of the season rolled in, pushing temperatures down into the “high teens” according to the ranger at Zion. Jack took one look at the weather report and soundly vetoed the plans Adam and I had for our two-day excursion. As would be the case for most of the trip, Adam and I shut up and took Jack’s advice.
We settled on a compromise that still turned out to be a master accomplishment: Touchstone Wall. One of Zion’s classics, Touchstone is eight or nine pitches long, with most of the later pitches going free at 5.8. The first three pitches are A1 (with maybe an A2 move or two underneath a challenging roof). The fourth pitch goes free 5.10d or so. In point of fact, a team of solid high 5.11 crack climbers could do the route all free, but solid high 5.11 climbers we were not (except maybe the hard man).
The rock: The diciest part of the climb for me was the rock. Zion walls are mostly loose, brittle sandstone. Protection seems to stick only reluctantly, and cams in particular appear to be ready to walk out at will. At the end of the climb, none of us had a piece pull, either from a free fall (which we took none of) or from an aid move. Some of our pieces (especially two nuts placed by yours truly) even stuck in the crack, and could not be removed sans hammer.
Okay, on with the story.
Day 1: Preparation
Friday Jack had a consulting interview in LA (come to the dark side, Jack), so the preparation and scouting for the climb was left to Adam and I. We roved around trying to find a climb to do that suited our abilities and would be doable by our crew. Surprisingly, the rangers were little help. They didn’t know the routes, were wishy-washy about the weather, and unhelpful as far as gear or other climbing beta.
Adam and I basically spent the day meandering around the park, enjoying the desert beauty and nice weather (soon to turn nasty cold) and sort of looking at climbs. After scouting out both the route we originally decided on and the route we did, we retired to camp to get the food and as much gear as possible ready.
Big wall food, as far as I can tell, is a breed of its own in the camping world. Dehydrated food does no good, since you have to cart all of your water up the wall. Fuel and a stove are heavy luxuries that lots of parties decide to avoid, and we settled on cold oatmeal and bagels for breakfast, tons of cliff bars for lunch, and a combination of cold chili and tortillas and cold Indian food for dinner. Not exactly the five star restaurants I am used to dining in, but it kept us going and seemed even better tasting than it was. “Hunger is the best spice” a former partner of mine used to say. As organized as we could be, the mouse and I settled into our bivies to await the arrival of the hard man.
Day 2: Rope fixing
The second day began with the Jack-inspired veto of Moonlight Buttress. We decided on Touchstone only after a not insignificant amount of consternation: we would have to do five or six pitches on Day 3, some of them probably aid, and then *get down* before it got dark. Adam and I were pretty fired up, and we three finally decided to rally for the classic. The first day of a big wall usually involves rope fixing, which essentially means climbing as high as you can on a wall the day before you launch and tying your ropes off to a set of fixed anchors that appear along the route. The climbing team then repels down at the end of the day, sleeps on terra firma, and ascends the fixed lines early the following day. This technique allows climbers to get a jump on the route the day they launch and reduces the amount of food that it is necessary to haul up the climb. In our case, fixing three pitches allowed us to do the route in one day (but just barely).
My first aid lead: The first lead of the day fell to me. It involved a forty foot bolt ladder which led straight up, then angled right, followed by about sixty feet of pretty straight thin crack. The bolt ladder was pretty straight forward. It took me a couple of pieces to get into the swing of things and to remember my aid skills (thin though they may be). Jack and Adam were probably a bit nervous after the first fifteen minutes of my lead. At one point I was high stepping on the second piece, reaching for the third, when Jack says something like “you might want to clip your rope into the protection.” Master of understatement -- I looked down, realized that I was twenty five feet off the ground and had forgotten to clip into the first piece -- nothing stood between me and the deck but a single manky old piton sitting in the Zion sandstone.
It was at that point that I began the battle with the big wall gremlin that would continue for the next two days, with a couple of rounds going to the gremlin and a couple to me. In this case, I shrugged, calmly began swearing, and clipped into the next piece. The pitons were pretty bomber and the rest of my lead was solid. The thin part of the crack was pretty easy, although the higher I got on shaky pieces, the more I wondered if I had the mental toughness to complete the whole climb, much less this lead. As the anchors rose up before me I realized that I made it without incident and called off-belay.
Pitch 2: Adam’s roof The second pitch was probably the hardest aid lead on the climb. It continued up the crack system I began to a roof, over the roof, and up into a separate system to the anchors. Adam pretty much motored up to the roof, and then began the first of several personal epics as he struggled to find cam placements in the manky crack underneath the roof. At one point he had traversed horizontally under the roof and was hanging from a pretty shaky TCU trying to reach a bomber piton placed just above the roof. If he could clip that piton he would be home free. Adam was reaching, reaching, and boom, he fell two or three inches. At that point Adam, normally a pretty clean guy began swearing like a street hood -- the cam he was sitting on had slipped and was about to pop. As fast as he could he jammed another cam into a crack below the roof and shifted his weight over to the marginally better piece. After lots of body contortions he managed to get the piton clipped, and Jack and I breathed a sigh of relief. The rest of his lead went by in a heartbeat and soon he was calling off-belay.
Jack’s lead was relatively uneventful. Expert as he was, he zoomed up the crack to a hanging belay at the top of the third pitch, about four hundred feet off the deck. The only glitch in the system was due to my clumsiness, as I dropped our day pack and had to rappel down to get it.
Jumaring
It bears some explanation for those readers who are not familiar with some of the techniques of aid climbing to describe the means of ascending following a leader. Typically, after the leader leads a pitch his partner (or partners, in our case) will ascend the fixed rope by the means of a pair of devices called jumars (jugs, for short). Jumars are connected directly to the rope and are configured in such a way that you can move them one direction (up) but are stable and will not either come off the rope or move down, even if you put all your weight on them. In fact, the method of ascending is relatively simple: the climber connects himself to both jumars by means of short pieces of webbing called daisy chains. Hanging from the jumars are longer pieces which he puts his feet in (aiders). To move up the rope, the climber stands up in the aider connected to the left jumar (if he is right handed) and moves the right jumar as high up the rope as he can reach. The climber then can hang from the right jumar (by means of the daisy chain connected to his harness and the jumar) and push the left up the rope at his leisure. Then he stands up again in the left and pushes up the right. Viola, progress up the rope.
For example, when I dropped the pack, I rappelled down the rope to the ground (fortunately I was only one pitch up, waiting to ascend Adam’s pitch), picked up the pack, and jumared back up to the anchor. Strenuous and inconvenient, but not disastrous.
The sunset of the second day found us rappelling down the three pitches we had just led, leaving the fixed ropes behind for the next day. I was a little bit nervous repelling in the growing darkness, but I had repelled before at sunset (especially in Joshua Tree) and the only difference here was three pitches instead of one (little did I know what heinousness I would be doing in the dark a short 24 hours later).
Day 3: The climb
Day three began at 4:30am. Jack insisted that we get started as soon as we could and we three awoke well before sunset to find ice on our bivy bags. After a warm breakfast we motored back to the base of the climb to our fixed lines. Headlights in full operation, Jack started jumaring up the fixed lines in the dark, as if it were the most common thing in the world. Adam, meanwhile, had to turn around to get some cams that we had left in the camp and would return shortly. For me, jumaring in the dark was an incredible experience. All you can see is ten or fifteen feet up the rock with your headlamp. I approached the rope, clipped my jumars on and looked up. The rope disappeared into the darkness above. My stomach started turning, hard. Gremlin 1, Ed zero. As Jack called off jumar, I started ascending in herky-jerky sections. Soon I was high enough that I couldn’t see either the anchor above or the ground below. I was suspended in space on a rope where I could see neither the beginning nor the end. Gremlin 2, Ed still zippo. The feeling was actually a lot like sensory deprivation: there was nothing to ground me to how high I was or whether I was in danger at all. After I got used to the shock of it, I actually started to get more calm. Not being able to see the exposure in some strange way made me less nervous about being so high (Gremlin 2, Ed 1). I continued up the three pitches and made it to the third anchor just as it was getting light. I remember the instant it got light enough for me to realize that I was four hundred feet off the ground once again.
Jack started the first lead of the day (the fourth pitch): a 5.10d crack which he probably could have done free, had it not been about freezing out. A short aid lead later and he was at the fourth set of anchors. Just about the time he called off-belay, Adam showed up at my post, having retrieved the needed cams and jumared up the pitch. I promptly began ascending Jack’s lead to take my first lead of the day. Meanwhile, Adam began his first personal epic of the day as he tried to clean the pitch that Jack led, free the rope which kept getting caught, and jumar (not Adam’s strong suit) all at the same time.
My second lead was a really nice 5.8 finger and hand crack. If it had been a reasonable temperature out, and if my mind were not going a thousand miles an hour trying to stay calm five hundred feet off the ground, I think I might have enjoyed the lead. As it was, I strapped on my free climbing shoes and started up the climb. After only about five moves I realized that it was so cold I couldn’t feel my feet at all -- sort of a sub-optimal situation when you are trying to jam your way up a small crack. At about the same time, I started getting nervous about the protection I was placing, since it all looked pretty manky and unsafe. These two factors combined to slow me down considerably as I hopped in and out of my aiders and alternately free and aid climbed. After a long delay, I finally reached the fifth set of anchors. My long lead was the beginning of the end for our venture. I had sucked up so much time that we got hopelessly behind schedule.
Adam’s free lead was next, a nice hand crack that led up and around, which he led free pretty confidently (without even bringing up his aiders), if a little bit slow as well. Meanwhile, Jack began trying to clean my pitch. Ironically enough, some of the protection which I thought was so manky turned out to be so bomber that Jack couldn’t remove it from the crack. At the end of the day, two of the nuts had settled so far into the sandstone that we couldn’t get them out without a hammer. After Jack finished cleaning and started up Adam’s pitch, I rappelled down the pitch I had led to try to retrieve the stuck protection. It is a clear ethical rule in climbing that you don’t leave gear voluntarily, unless faced with the direst circumstances. I had a little better luck that Jack, but still couldn’t get the stuck pro out of the crack. I jugged back up the pitch and began cleaning the anchor so that I could ascend the next pitch.
Jack led the remaining pitches, since he was the fastest. At the point that Adam finished his lead it was after 2pm. Knowing that it was going to get dark at 5:45 and we had several pitches to go, we went into frantic mode. Three hours later, at about 5:25 we three stood at the top of the last pitch. Jack’s pitches went pretty smoothly, except that I had my own personal epic trying to retrieve ropes which were caught in the crack below. At one point I was jumaring with two ropes, four liters of water, and half a big wall rack all hanging from my belt. The hardest jumaring is when the rope is completely free, such that the climber can’t touch anything. I have this crystal clear picture of hanging from the rope in mid-air (with about 800 feet of exposure beneath me), looking up forty feet and watching the rope rubbing against the rock.
The repel down:
As the sun set Jack began frantically looking for the first set of repel anchors while Adam and I cleaned up the gear and coiled the ropes to prepare to get down. Unfortunately, the repel was a long and twisted affair that included several repels with hikes in between to find the next set of anchors. But we had sealed our path behind us with the second to last pitch -- sometimes you can “repel the route”, but in our case the only way down was to repel through the canyon.
We managed to find the first two repel anchors before it got dark. If we hadn’t done that, we would have been “beknighted” -- forced to spend the night on the rock without bivy gear -- for sure. Jack later admitted that while he was looking for rap anchors he was also scouting bivy spots (alcoves, caves, and the like), and even had one picked out. Given that it got down to 18 degrees that night, it was a *very* good thing that we managed to get off. The rest of the trek down was probably the spookiest thing I have ever done. It was completely dark, right about dead on 32 degrees, our way lit only by our headlamps (a radius of maybe fifteen feet). As we searched for each successive set of anchors, it got more scary. Looking for anchors in the dark was really dicey: you want to find the next anchor, but you know that there is at least half a rope length’s worth of exposure just beyond the next anchor. At one point I had to down climb in the dark a short, easy section of maybe 5.3 climbing (but real scary nonetheless, with a backpack full of gear, water, and rack, in the dark lit only by a headlamp).
The decent went pretty smoothly until we got to what turned out to be the second to last set of anchors, which were set on a wide ledge overlooking the Zion valley. As Jack repelled into the dark, Adam and I lounged on the ledge, admiring the beauty of the Valley. The moon was nearly half full and illuminated the huge rock formation across from the climb (light colored sandstone monolith appropriately dubbed the Great White Throne). It was a surreal moment as we reflected on 16+ hours of hard climbing and controlled terror balanced against the gorgeous scenery. After a couple of scary moments where Jack had to pendulum across to a hanging belay and ascend the rope via his jumars we made our way to the last anchor, a really dicey looking collection of one manky old bolt and a rusty piton sticking halfway out of the crack. We backed the repel up with a cam, which Adam, as the last climber down, had to remove before he went on repel. At the end of the climb, the anchor held and we made it down safely just after 9:00.
A couple of other incidents are worth noting: First, the shit incident. Suffice it to say that there was a not insignificant amount of nastiness as we tried to deal with a sort of self-imposed obstacle on one of our repel routes. Second, the stuck ropes. It turned out that we had inadvertently left a piece of webbing at the top of the last climb that the ropes we repelled down got stuck on somehow. The following day Adam jumared up the last repel, on the manky anchors, to free the ropes and repel down again. Never leave gear behind, or something like that.
I am convinced that the mind can deal with a lot of fear, nervousness, and heinousness for a known period of time. The hour or so after we made it safely to the deck my mind had to unwind to deal with the new locale. The gremlin was finally banished, at least for a time, and the vacuum it left was filled by an odd combination of elation, sadness, pride, and an immense feeling of accomplishment. The sensation was something like an endorphin high for the brain. I had been fighting with exposure, cold, and especially fear for such a long time that walking along the flat, hard asphalt toward Adam’s truck seemed like too simple a task. I felt incredibly high and safe.