Adventures in Testing New Skills

The mountains are a humbling place. I like to think of myself as a rough and fearless mountain guy, but it's tough when most of the routes you can climb have names like Something Nice for Sweetpea, The Scorn of Bullwinkle, and A Dream of White Schnauzers. Sure I occasionally bag a slightly more impressive sounding route, like Gravestone Groove, but those little gems don't come along every day. The real drag of it is when you have a terrifying time on one of these happy little routes - it's hard to tell your friends about the horrifying climb you had on Chantilly Lace (the ice was in terrible form, honest!). So it was during a recent summer when Reece, Kal and myself went to climb a 170-foot route on Barrier Mountain called Be-Bop to the Top. Sounds happy right?

*Natural Protection, n (also protection, pro): little metal wedges, blocks and assorted mechanical contraptions jammed into the rock in such a way that you can run your rope through them. The general theory being that this will hold you if you fall.

At the time we were all just trying to learn how to climb using what is known as natural protection*. None of us really knew what we were doing but we'd read up on the subject and had begun teaching ourselves. What could go wrong, right? At the time I had spent a little more time climbing with natural protection than either of my friends (by about a week) and was under the mistaken impression that I knew what I was doing, so I volunteered to take the first lead. The lead climber goes first and has to find ways to place protection then build an anchor out of protection to hang from and belay** the other climbers up. Typically, the leader takes most of the risk. The plan was that I would climb the first pitch and set up an anchor about half way up. Reece and Kal would then climb up to me and Reece would lead the second pitch. I set out on my lead brimming with optimism and confidence. Have I mentioned that I believe that most of our better accomplishments only get done because we don't know in advance how hard they're going to be?

**Belay, v.: French for "hold one end of rope to keep buddy from falling to death"

The climbing was easy at first. Small children could have done it. I quickly moved up to about the halfway point - roughly 70 feet up the route and started building my anchor. To my immense pride (and surprise) I fairly quickly managed to establish the anchor (it was one of my first real anchors), and proceeded to dangle myself from it. I called down to Reece and Kal that I was going to take up the slack rope and then would belay them up. Reece stared at me quietly for a minute, scowling just a little I think.

"Is the anchor good?" he called out.
"Yep, its good, come on up."
More scowling. "Are you sure?"
"Yeah it's good, I'm pretty happy with it."
"Would you trust your life to it?"
"I am right now." I called down, a little offended, but aware that our lack of experience was weighing on everyone's minds a little.

Reece paused and looked at Kal. "You're really sure?" I was about to tell him to just get started when I decided I'd inspect my anchor one more time, just to be safe. It looked pretty good. Well, there was one piece of protection that wasn't great, but the other two were fine. I reported my findings to Reece and Kal. "Maybe you should find a better placement for the loose piece." Reece called out. I started to wonder about it and decided to adjust that one piece. I started messing with it, looking for another place to put it. I wasn't leaning back on my anchor anymore but had resumed holding onto the rock. A third placement eluded me like witty banter on a bad blind date.

 

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