'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 3 of a ten-part post which is a photo essay of my recent ascent of Tribal Rite on El Capitan. If you have somehow arrived at this point without quite knowing how, 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, would you please leave all your replies and comments here. Like thanks, eh?
In the late 70’s, George Meyers’ superb picture book Yosemite Climber was found on the coffee table of many an aspirant wall climber, if they happened to own a coffee table. Otherwise you could often find a copy beneath the passenger’s seat of most any VW van parked in Camp 4 [known as Sunnyside back then] – usually well thumbed and quite often drooled upon. In my opinion, this is one of the best climbing books ever published, and if anyone were to produce another, I’d be first in line to buy it. The photos in this book were often copied by climbers – for instance, nearly every day you saw someone taking a picture of the bulletin board on the Camp 4 kiosk. This practice may again return now that David Safanda has published a similar photo in the new McTopo big walls guidebook.
One of the most inspiring and vertiginous photos in Yosemite Climber was that of Richard “Nipper” Harrison stretched out on top of the Texas Flake. But did he have a stomach like mine? Huh? Did he? And check out that pale anemic complexion, earned over the Winter Training Session* in the Great White North, and by spending too much time underground in Roppel Cave, Kentucky. In keeping with our “alpine starts” at the crack of noon, Tom managed to click this photo seconds before the shadow passed over me, and I reached for my jacket. You’d be amazed how cold and windy this area of the Big Stone can get, right on the most exposed buttress of The Nose.
You’ll notice I’m wearing some old school Trango Russian Aiders, which I really love as they reduce the Wank Factor* of dealing with two pairs of aiders. These things are ETS*** on the steep stuff as you can easily topstep to the equivalent height of the second step in regular aiders by dint of the mechanical advantage of the foot-to-knee camming action similar to what you get in a pair of downhill ski boots.
What you can’t see beneath my feet is the rivet ladder that climbs the outside top edge of the flake [the “NW border of Texas” on the “map”] and which you can use to avoid getting scared in the chimney. I was quite amazed to see those things there, because they are invisible from below. To reach them, you need to descend the chimney and move about thirty feet west. You heard it here first.
*Winter Training Session – to train for climbing is to cheat, and negates the validity of the off-the-couch status of any would-be ascensionist. Acceptable training includes drinking beer whilst ranting on internet forums to all hours of the night, and certain athletic pursuits with your chosen hottie
*Wank Factor [a.k.a. Co-Efficient of Wank] – that unitless number, which when multiplied by the total time spent performing a certain function, equals the amount of time lost to unproductive activity [i.e. wanking about]
*ETS – Emphatically The Sh|t!
After fixing ropes to the top of Texas Flake, we returned to our camp on the ledge to the right of its base. Not many people camp here because the classic El Cap Towers is immediately beneath, but since we had portaledges, we figured the sporting thing would be to leave El Cap Towers open for any Nose climbers who happened by. It was also a direct 200’ haul to this, the 11th pitch, from 9.
While this part of the ledge is quite pleasant, the bit between our camp and the Flake contained a lot of loose rock that could easily be knocked off. We were just able to reach the top of Boot Flake with our haul lines, so we hauled directly to there. This involved Tom hauling from above, while I tried to walk the pigs across the ledge without knocking anything off.
This worked pretty well, as we only knocked one thing off – ME. I was secured by a separate rope also going to the top of the Boot, and as I was a-wrasslin’ the pigs round the far right outside edge of the ledge, the porcine bastards sent me flying on a terrifying sixty-foot pendulum to the left – fortunately there were no corners to hit! – until I finally ended up plumb somewhere around Brownsville. Scared the snot out me, that. This variation of the King Swing is not recommended by Dr. Piton.
We moved our camp up onto Tribal Rite, knocking off the crux A4 pitch which to me was NTB/NTB+. You’ll find decent placements among the rotten rock, though the route-finding is a bit tricky. It’s not immediately obvious which way to go. One memorable moment occurred near the top of the first pitch, when the flake I was hooking on blew, and I fell onto my knee onto the head I had just placed. [Remember, I’m using Russian Aiders with the hook on the knee]
Beneath us, the floodwaters are just beginning to recede, but the big white boulder in the oxbow is still completely underwater.
This is the third pitch of Tribal Rite, and with its modest rating of A2+ you wouldn’t expect it to be too difficult. It is rather steeper than it appears – check out the angle of the zipline which is hanging plumb. “Watch me, Pete!” Tom yelled down, “these fixed heads don’t look too good….”
Sure enough, twenty feet above the little roof where you see him, a fixed head pulled from the rock and Tom took an upside-down thirty-footer, ripping three more fixed heads [after fully deploying three Scream Aids] and came to a rest, shaken but not stirred, just below this point.
“Holy frig! Are you OK?!” “Yeah, what now? I ripped out all the heads!” “Well, go back up and stick some more in!” “I’ve never placed any heads before!” “Ah, shut up and climb!”
Here Tom follows me up as the stunning panorama above The Nose lies beneath him. Above him in the picture, the Boot Flake lies directly below, and immediately down and climbers’ right of the Boot, the small-looking “crack” is actually the huge chimney behind the Texas Flake. Left in the photo of the Boot Flake and lying in shadow is the ledge we had camped on, and down and climbers’ left of this is El Cap Towers, the ledge that is orange-ish on its eastern end. At the far right of the picture, a little dot of sunshine illuminates Dolt Tower.
Still only halfway up the wall, the camera is finally able to capture both us and the road running alongside El Cap Meadow. Tom makes short work packing away the Metolius ledge. You can see the ring-o-lettes of my Russian Aiders dangling at the bottom of the photo, and that’s a piece of an indispensable Scream Aid at left.
Please click here to pack up your portaledge, and penji on across to page 4.
If you have somehow arrived at this point without quite knowing how, please click here to return to the beginning.
In order to reduce clusterf*ckage and to keep everything together, may I request that you please do not reply to this post, and instead leave your comments here. Thanks, eh?
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