'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 9 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.
As per the instructions linked above, may I request that you please do not reply to this post! Instead, you can leave all your replies in the beginning post. Thanks.
As you can see, the morning turned out to be beautiful!
Here Tom cleans the eighth pitch above our camp at 7. Beneath us, The Nose climbers have already left El Cap Towers, but the guys on Boot Flake seem to be taking their time. So here you have documented evidence that I actually started climbing earlier than someone else.
The route hooks and nails up the obvious flakes above the portaledges, and the spicy bit is directly behind Tom’s head.
By the time I started leading the RURP Pitch, which is P9, the clouds had rolled in and it soon began raining again. I tried a few of the new-style Vermin gear – their version of a Birdbeak and a RURP – and found them to be a nice complement to the traditional designs. Vermin’s beak is a little bit thicker than the A5 beaks, and feels a bit more secure in slightly wider placements. Vermin’s RURP has a clever point of attachment for the cable that reduces the bending moment and makes it a bit more secure in certain placements. Unfortunately, I can’t find a picture of the things on the internet anywhere, or I’d hotlink it in. If anyone can get me a link, that would be swell.
A bit higher, the RURP and beak placements give way to heads, and I immediately felt more secure. For a guy whose nickname is “Pass the Pitons” Pete, my nailing is probably my poorest wall skill. I’m much better with heading and hooking. I don’t have tons of experience with beaks and RURPs, and I’ll confess I find it a bit freaky when you can remove a beak placement using nothing more than your fingers! But the things are solid, and it was good practice for me to place a bunch of them in a row. Yates Screamers and Scream-Aids are Emphatically The Sh|t!
Near the top of the pitch just where the angle begins to ease back towards the summit, it started raining, and naturally I had not bothered to bring up my rain gear because the sun was shining. So I had to finish the pitch with water running over all the placements – a trifle aqueous. Sheesh. Strangely, though, the smell of the wet lichen on granite was comforting – it reminded me of my canoeing and fishing trip in Ontario’s Algonquin Park a few weeks previously. I closed my eyes and imagined I was paddling my canoe next to a lichen-covered rock as the waves splashed round me.
Leaving the pitch fixed, we returned to camp, and watched as the clouds dispersed once again in readiness for a gorgeous Half Dome sunset.
With views like these, who’s in a rush to reach the summit? Not us, that’s for sure.
But I guess we have to reach the summit eventually, so please click here to top out with us and move to the final page.
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