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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Jun 30, 2009 - 09:52pm PT
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That Higgins post is one of the best I've ever seen....period.
Tom, you always did have a way with words.
I've been in so many shyte my pants moments, and you brought them all together there!
Trying to hold something with my mouth, my knee, trying to change hands, trying to get more weight on the right foot...no get it onto the left foot so I can grab the sling with my left hand...DAMN...can't let go with either hand..oh f8ck here it comes..I'm out of here....sh*t!!!
Thank you sir, for once again letting me know I'm not alone in this BIG ballgame....
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Jun 30, 2009 - 09:55pm PT
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Did you ever see that Higgins guy edge? I did, or did I? I couldn't see the edge.
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Clint Cummins
Trad climber
SF Bay area, CA
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Jun 30, 2009 - 10:05pm PT
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Yikes!!! Tom, that's wild. Thanks for sharing this epic and secret adventure from the past!
I'm glad to hear you got that reality check. As you probably know now, Jumars can easily sever the rope and are more likely to do that than to break, but breaking is definitely possible.
I recall Duane Raleigh severed the rope with a Jumar belay [Edit: not a Jumar problem - see del cross's correction below] on a desert tower - he wrote an article about it in Climbing some years ago. He was saved when his trail rope caught in a crack as he was plunging. I think Ed Webster survived a Jumar belayed fall, when solo aiding the FA of Primrose Dihedrals on Moses. I don't recall the exact details, but I think the rope sheath bunched up.
Would this have preceded Steve Scheider's second ascent? Too bad you didn't feel like recruiting a partner and gone right back to it. Or did you?
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Mike Bolte
Trad climber
Planet Earth
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Jun 30, 2009 - 10:22pm PT
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what a thread. thanks john, thanks tom!
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fosburg
climber
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Jun 30, 2009 - 11:03pm PT
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Wow!
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Aww, what a thread...
Sir Hig, that got me. Thx. Same to the rest of y'all fer this.
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Tahoe climber
Trad climber
a dark-green forester out west
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Holy sh#t.
Sweaty palms, higs!
I think I'm gonna puke.
This is why I keep coming back and sifting thru the drivel.
Thank you.
TC
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midarockjock
climber
USA
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Is the onsight a free solo?
How old is he?
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Yikes, Tom!
Glad to still have you around.
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LongAgo
Trad climber
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Clint,
To answer your question, no I never did go back to do the route after my failed rope solo with the infamous jumar. At first, I was too rattled even to contemplate going back, given the burning memory. A bit later, I came to like the feel of my rattling experience as a kind of abject lesson in stupidly and hubris. I thought if I did go back and succeed, I might begin to pooh-pooh that lesson. And finally, as the years wore on, age and injuries took their toll and while I can still do an occasional 5.10 when healthy, I’m very happy now to do short, warm, safe classics with friends, have a beer and chew over the universe thereafter under trees and stars with no thoughts of horror shows the next day.
It seems time brings all remedies, including the ultimate one of course.
Tom Higgins
LongAgo
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
Sprocketville
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where is the varian-yerrian route located?
oh wow...
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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I was walkin' out to send that Bad Dog a few days ago to show that Slacker Bachar a thing or two....
But it looked wet from the trail.
and bugs were bitin' us.
;-)
Karl
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yo
climber
a tied-off Tomahawk™
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WHOA
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
San Francisco, CA
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Alright, I WILL speak to you again.
Tommy-H whatEVER got into you? I think you must have only got half of the memo. What were you thinking? While the rest of us were marching right along on our respective hedonic treadmills padding away in pride and comfort, you were out there slithering in the scrub brush, jumar in teeth, on a crazed dusty death march to casket choices eschewing all manner of companionship and dare I say, reason. (look that word up, maybe, it could help). Can we say "logic tight compartments" or what? Jumars do not turn into WonderWoman bracelets in loads above 500 pounds no matter how much you want them to! Why in a free society would one do this?
I had no idea. I thought that the Owl roof solos and falls were just an endearing cry for help and affection coming from the general direction of your psychic bedroom. I could have been a better parent and so could have Kamps. Rue the day. Never would one have suspected that after the Owl you would go starkly clinical and put yourself within God's reach, even though we don't believe in him but he nonetheless appears to have been slowly eating us one by one and we are not even on the menu!
"Higgins-Guy" (Donininini-speak), you see now what we had to put up with back then? Hmmm??? Normal people actually died shortly after merely talking to you. Whole villages perished when they received the latest issue of Ascent with another Higgins Prolegomena. The care and feeding of you was actually a harrowing and perilous national priority as it was in fact found that you had defied gravity, and could manage standing on nothing all the time and stuff---- a matter of military importance since those bitches stand on nothing as well. You obviously were studied heavily though from afar. Heisenberg and stuff, prevented us from influencing your habitat and your native moves lest we spoil our findings and come up with conclusions like, "it was all incut buckets up there, go see!". Otherwise we surely would have helped you and put a stop to it.
So the research films from back then (1968-1972) are not only alarming in regard to what has been known to be normal animal behavior but fundamentally indecipherable in their meaning. Strange incantations, much gnashing of large perfect incisors, beady-eyed mutterings and threats into apparently thin air. Endless chanting of "I'll show them how", reminiscent of "The Little Train That Could" but grunted. Also, "I am the One". Contortions that only work on paper not on rock. Sequences that involved invisible though heavily scented elements, all ending in an even more frightening stance, further and further from the last point of protection----some shamanic gut-wrapped bone-shape hammered magically into seemingly blank granite with still more of these on your hardware sling, some in the forms of known opponents. The sky darkened and crow-filled. A terrifying stillness in the air as if to wait for lightning.
As with all things, the furies die as well. They get tired kinda of being all the time furies, you see. It's hard work and the general experience is sure negative. We are all so fond of you now that you have assimilated and your recent needlepoint and macrame has everyone talking.
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Roger Breedlove
climber
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
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Hi Tom,
When you first described your Jumar self belay set up on the Owl Roof (here on ST), I thought you were just pretending to have a self belay since there was no way that a Jumar could be expected to hold a fall and you were always a smart and thoughtful guy. I could live with the ‘pretending’ part rather than any other possible alternative explanations.
But then I read your B-Y account and-- may the gods strike me if I cause any offense--I morphed from interest, to concern, to anguish, to a smile (as you killed yourself twice), and then outright laughter as you found the cathartic energies of admitting to crimes against sense.
It wants me say, "welcome to ST", where we all seem to find the place in our memories where we can only shake our heads and repeat the mantra: "What was I thinking!"
I am so glad you lived to tell us the story.
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LongAgo
Trad climber
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Thanks and Thoughts
Thanks Roger and Peter for your most perceptive lines, including my “crimes against sense” and my “crazed dusty death march to casket choices eschewing all manner of companionship and dare I say, reason.” Both are apt descriptions, though I would take issue with the companionship part, at least as I began to grow an iota or two. And thanks too for the underlying sympathy and good cheer, the most important part of the whole shebang as we prattle and banter in cyberspace under graying heads.
I don’t wish to go on much more here given the thread is on the BY and that should remain the focus. However, there’s much food for thought in your post, Peter, not just about me and my motives, but the motives for any solo climbing. For instance, recall there is this thing called solo climbing without any belay system whatsoever! If rope solo with jumar is crazy, then what can one make of a true solo? Peek back at Stefan Schiller pictured on this very thread, sans rope if I read it right, standing there calmly in the middle of the BY, death only a broken knob away.
And yet, you will rightly counter, climbing with a flawed system takes a special kind of self delusion very distinct from the mentality of the no rope solo climber. In one case, the fool has fooled himself about possible consequences; in the other, presumably there is no self delusion as he/she knows sure death is the risk taken. But note the bit of craziness in this position too - we admire clear vision flirting with death but shake our heads at a jujitsu mental machination resulting in much the same risk.
In any case, I indeed had deluded myself, presuming the hefty looking jumar would hold some sort of fall and, what the heck, I wouldn’t fall anyhow and the thing was some sort of backup even if not perfect and … you can see the kind of self talk leading to my path. But here again, things are not simple. I think there are shades of my madness in the whole mental game of a first ascent. We all proceed with a bit of self delusion on bare Tuolumne granite, or is it love and hope, when making a hard - we think reversible - move some distance out from the little bolt below looking more paltry by the moment, committing a bit more toward what looks like the next bolt stance or is it too small or slick a depression to stand in and get the drill set and start to tap and ...
I sense we are moving to a new thread topic on solo mentality or maybe another on the first ascent mentality and motive. But staying with solo mentality, perhaps we could hear, Peter, about your self talk in soloing El Cap when the self belay system you used (was it a prussic?) got toward its safety limits, or what Bachar tells himself doing no rope solo at near his climbing limits, to argue against the broken hold beyond all his powers to control, and where is Croft or Gill on the same issue and the other true soloists. Perhaps we will find there too some specks of delusion by which we all proceeded and, I would argue, still proceed on and off the walls because some realities must be denied, at least sometimes.
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Greg Barnes
climber
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Schiller was roped, he's clipping a bolt in the picture.
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
San Francisco, CA
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To be serious here, Tom, your retelling of this is wonderful and shows how crazy, enthused and spiritualized some of us get while others are busy with other things. Thanks tons for the personal tale; it is huge. It is clear that others were watching too. By that point in history there was an amazing amount of surveillance going on both in the Valley and in the Meadows. And the B-y is not far from the highway.
Gentleman as always, scholar as well. Wholly unsupervised might I add. Funniest known man on rock, greatest friend possible to many. How long had this been going on, this soloing thing of yours? We all relish in the retelling of one Tom Higgins up on the B-y fighting his own good fight, fully curious and undaunted, Jumar in hand, a good thing. It is a moment in history. We are all honored to partake in the tale. Not unlike if Royal were at this point to divulge for most of his 60’s Muir solo he was untied because it seemed “ungainly” to be so tethered, foot slings were enough. Kind of frisky actually, you being up there with nothing better than a large roach clip between you and eternity, enormous runouts unavoidable.
Many of us have of course soloed. As in no rope, no equipment, just shoes and a self perhaps as well. This realm is beyond the purview here and really has no pretenses of being anything other than a private experience in extremis. As you suggest, we would need yet another thread on unroping things.
But as for self-belaying on the Salathe, for the record and as I describe in the AAC article of 1972, I had a hefty 8mm prussik that was tripled and worn in earlier a bit specially for the ascent and below it was a jumar. The system was thus double and if Mr Jumar might try to sever the rope it was below the triple large prussik so perhaps that knot might have done its job still. I was confident in the setup.
I tested this affair beforehand and actually had done a bunch of shorter routes this way solo. And while on the Salathe ascent I actually fell on the rig while trying to do a first free ascent of the Half Dollar. It worked just fine and I went onwards, albeit in slings at that spot. It was well known that Jumars weren’t capable of much more than 500 lbs. Now of course I would use a Solo-Aid or a Silent Partner, both of which I own.
I think the dithering between having a jumar device or any other scheme that isn’t competent and just climbing unroped altogether is not only interesting but also kooky because reality just states that the device isn’t capable so why have the Ritual No-Theater of yarding out the slack and managing the medieval process when the whole thing is mere rice paper and Caca? I think you answer all of this; it has been a good thread.
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