Mark looses 2 nuts in Learning Experience
In which, we learn about climbing on all passive pro, and can’t stop making stupid toilet-humor jokes.
There are lots of pictures from the day in the gallery.
A series of random decisions and strange events landed us at the bottom of The Pear on Saturday morning, at around 11am, with blue-bird skies above, and not another person around for miles. We decided it would probably be a good day to try to get all the way to the top of Magical Chrome-Plated Semi-Automatic Enema Syringe (5.7).
We’ve done the first two pitches of this climb earlier this year, and even climbed La Chaim (as a two pitch to the lower walk-off) before as well. But we’ve never topped out the Pear.
Also, we decided on Saturday that it was time to try a “true Lumpy Ridge rack”, which included almost two sets of nuts, and only 5-6 cams. This didn’t seem like such a big deal when we were on the ground. We’ve been trad climbing, using chocks and cams, for almost 5 years now. Surely we’d have no problem with this lighter rack!
Problems started on the first pitch, when it took me about 15 minutes of banging on one nut with my nut tool to get it out of the rock. Mark and I have been trad-climbing together for long enough that I am usually pretty darn good at getting his very weird placement puzzles figured out. He usually leads, and I usually follow, and I’ve always considered myself “The Nut Queen!” Usually I can pop those suckers out in no time. But on Saturday, my mojo was not flowing.
Mark was having his own problems as well. His pieces were good for down-pulls, but as the route has a twisting and traversing nature, he started having a few pieces actually pull out of the crack behind him! Yikes!
On the second pitch, I left one tiny nut, that was so far back in the crack I couldn’t even see it, behind on the route. In the anchor, I wailed on a giant purple chock with everything I had, cussing and scraping up my knuckles. I left two dents in the bottom of that chock, on on either side of the wire, and it never budged a millimeter.
Nuts falling out of cracks, nuts stuck in cracks, these are things that we haven’t had problems with in years. By the time I made it up to the top of the second pitch, I was feeling defeated and humiliated. Like a total n00b who shouldn’t be on the rock. I tried to convince Mark that we should walk-off, go home, and come back some other day when we had more cams.
But Mark chalked it up to “kinks in the system” due to our recent break from climbing, and he led on up past the escape ramp. I had no choice but to follow him up the rest of the route, and now I’m glad we kept going.
The fourth pitch turned out to be a lovely little crack climb, and the giant rock butt for which the route is named came into view. Mark joked about climbing the 5.9 variation that jams straight up the, eh-hem, crack, but we didn’t feel like we had the gear to protect it that day. The whole time I sat at the belay below that HUGE rock butt, I just couldn’t stop giggling. I’d think I had myself under control, and then I’d look up, and just start laughing all over the place again!
We summited the rock at around 4:30 in the afternoon. We stood on top of the butt, victorious, with the rest of our nuts still on our rack (see, I can’t stop!), at around 4:30p. There were a few distant clouds, but the sky was still clear, which was a small miracle for that area this time of year. A larger miracle was that we had not seen another person on our climb or rock all day! On a Saturday! On Lumpy! Amazing.
We screwed around a bit. Took some pictures. Eventually Mark found the rap anchors and then called me over. The book assured us that we only needed one rope to rap off the back of the summit, but looking over the edge, all we could see was a dark hole in the rock. A dank abyss beckoned us downward.
Mark, of course, went first. He made it down and I could hear his voice echoing out of the darkness “Don’t worry! The rope reaches! This place is amazing! Take pictures on your way down!!”
My eyes were not adjusted for the dark, and getting on rappel with my rope disappearing down into blackness was really creepy. I did not stop to take pictures. But it was a fun rappel.
It turns out, the rappel leads to a secrete space behind the Pear. A hallway was formed in the distant past. With vertical walls nearly 100ft tall on either side, and only about 4 ft apart. It looked like the rock had simply separated. A giant crack had formed, perhaps as the slab of the Pear inched slowly down the face of the ridge.
We enjoyed the cool darkness, and the scent of ferns in our spot. Then it was time to head out. The hike back to our bags was long, but not hard. We were packing up at the base of the climb by 5:30p, and in the car driving home around 7p. It was an amazing day, for many reasons. And I’m glad we got all of the kinks out of our systems. Heh heh.
Next time, we’re climbing with more cams.
Yeah, we could get more cams… or a hammer!
With the zig-zag of the route, I would have liked to have a lot more single-length slings so to keep those nuts from getting wiggled out. As it was, I used them as needed knowing that some of my placements would come under awkward directional pulls after I had passed them by and they had served my needs.
Sounds like it’s about time I head up to The Pear for a (ahem) booty run. Although some enterprising young traddie has probably already fished out the gear. I wouldn’t worry too much about the gear pulling – that happens to everyone. And, with the zig-zag-y nature of the route, it wouldn’t be surprising that some of them wiggled back into funny position.
On that note, a friend and I did Mainliner over on Sundance a couple of weeks ago, and he was very good at awkward placements on the two pitches he led. For the first time in a long time, I spent about 10 minutes trying to fish one of my nuts out; it was a geometric puzzle that I could not figure out! This made the last pitch mildly irritating as he was over 200′ above me, couldn’t hear me, and kept trying to pull while I was fishing. I ended up leaving the damn thing and almost a couple of others, but in the end I left just the one.
The next day, we found a fixed nut on Cheap Date also (this takes the sting a little bit out of the crux). So, this happens. And you can be one of those people who spends 30 minutes trying to retrieve these pieces, or you can move on and chalk up another 5 dollars to the entry price on a great day of climbing. Personally, I prefer the latter.
Cheers,
m
I thought I saw a sport route in that secret crevice when we were up there.
If we ever make it back to the Pear I’ll have another laugh at the expense of Mark’s 2 loose nuts! :D