'Pass the Pitons' Pete
Big Wall climber
like Oakville, Ontario, Canada, eh?
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Topic Author's Original Post - Sep 8, 2005 - 02:00am PT
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This is Page 7 of a ten-part post which is a photo essay of my recent ascent of Tribal Rite on El Capitan. If you’re here and don’t know how or why, then please click here to return to the beginning.
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The next day I climbed the eighth pitch, which had some heads-up A3R hooking above a pinnacle. This pitch was fairly spicy, but could have been a lot harder if the first ascensionsists had kept hooking, and not placed a couple extra bolts. But I’m never one to look a gift bolt in the mouth, that’s for sure. I’ve used “tuning forks” to pull out and replace enough of those rusty old quarter-inchers to know that some of them are pretty bomber [when used with a Screamer] while others you can practically pull out with your fingers. Hard to say how good these ones were but probably not bad. Near the top of the pitch is an enormous flake that I didn’t dare cam, but rather hooked along, and then I had to do some careful nailing right over top of a completely detached pinnacle. I left the pitch fixed for Tom to clean it the next morning, then rapped back to camp in time for supper – woo-hoo!!
OK, so now it’s the middle of the night. And it’s like dark, so imagine a black photo. I wake up around 2 a.m. and glance upward to see the stars blotted out by the clouds. Uh-oh…
“Uh, Tom – the clouds are out. I think we’d better set the flies up….” Getting your ledge under your fly as you are settling in for the night is a fairly straightforward procedure, especially in the daylight. You can see, you have your harness on, and your ledge is unloaded without any gear clipped to it. Instead, I awoke in the darkness, an impending sense of doom compounding the urgency. I never sleep wearing my harness – just a daisy girth-hitched round my waist – so the first thing I did was have to get dressed and back in the damn harness. Of course I don’t have any aiders, so I had to strap the Russians back on. Oh yeah, put the damn shoes on. Sheesh.
First I had to unclip the thousand-and-one things I had attached to my ledge, in order to be able to lift the thing, and find somewhere to clip them all without dropping anything. Next I had to find the fly, which was dangling out of sight beneath everything on a Catch Line, and untwist it from the other Catch Lines.
So I got the fly clipped into the anchor, clipped the ledge [carefully!] beneath the fly, and then expected to simply lower the fly around the ledge, no problem, right? KNOTT! Do you think I could figure out how the hell that damn fly went around the ledge?! Not a chance! I was completely flummoxed, and had created this horrendous clusterf*ck for myself in the middle of the night as I cursed and swore a blue streak seemingly at the fly, but really at myself for the unparalleled stupidity of not first figuring out how to get my fly around my ledge!
I mean, you guys have to imagine this – I was really one pathetic pissed-off bastard! If I had a movie of it, you’d be laughing your asses off by now. “Dr. Piton demonstrates the Better Way of completely and hopelessly clusterf*cking his bivi…”
“Tom! Help!”
I swear, I have no frickin’ clue how I ever got my degree in engineering. I’m convinced they passed me just to get rid of me. I was always away caving and climbing, anyway. Fortunately for me, Tom really IS an engineer, and after another half hour of cursing and swearing, twisting and turning, he finally figured out that The North Face ledge fly had a floor, and two doors on either end, and that the ledge has to go right inside the fly by swinging in either of the doors on the end. All I can say is it’s a bloody good thing it didn’t start raining right away or I’d have been buggered. All in all, a two-hour ordeal.
But hey, by morning the rain had let up enough to lift the flies, and we enjoyed our coffee and some dramatic views of the clouds soaring beneath us. The green pile pants in the foreground were on loan to Tom, as was my spare bivi sack, since he had dropped his sleeping bag.
Here’s the view looking the other way out the end door of my ledge, you know, the door that you swing the ledge into when you set the thing up? In the center of the frame you can see the water washing over the shoulder of the crag in the Horsetail Falls area.
Because of the cooler temperatures, our water consumption had dropped dramatically. Even including the coffee, the two of us drank a total of only 24 litres during our final week on the wall, less than two litres per day per person. Since we were now not worried about our water consumption, we decided to take a rest day during the storm. It might have been possible to climb – we saw a few other teams climbing – but most of us were just sitting it out.
Here Wee-Wee the Big Wall Crab joins me for another cup o’ joe. He gets a little crabby before his morning coffee. He’s sitting on my big wall French coffee press, which is wrapped in blue closed-cell foam and duct tape – it keeps the coffee hot for half an hour! To the right is my big wall stove – a large aluminum pot with a small hole cut in the bottom – you screw the burner into the fuel cylinder through the hole, and the water pot sits on top inside the big old pot, which is also serves as a great windbreak. The larger hole in the bottom is so you can reach inside to light the stove and adjust the valve. With the stove fired up, it got toasty-warm inside the fly, that’s for sure. You just have to be sure that the place is properly vented.
Note the attractive serving suggestions on the box of crackers and the aerosol processed cheese product. Wee-Wee favours the big wall method – place crushed crackers in spoon and spray cheese sh*t all over the top. Not exactly Martha Stewart approved, but it works for us. And we’re not in jail, either.
You can click here to join Tom outside on his ledge and move to Page 8 of 10.
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