An Epic Adventure

Sara and I had a weekend climbing which was a grand time. We started on Saturday at Index doing some trail clean up. The WCC arranged a crag clean up to foster a relationship so that sani-cans can be put in place. Otherwise you have hikers and climbers digging cat-holes all over the place, at best. Currently, the later is what is taking place if the individuals don't know about the park just in town.

Day two took us to Leavenworth for some visiting with friends and climbing. Sara and I are early to rise and start climbing. Thus began the adventure. We started by reading a couple guide books. Picked a climb to do an prepared for the climb.

Now guide books are to provide the climber with appropriate information to help make the climb safe but can still have errors. In our case, we started a climb that did not tell us we had to climb to the top. We made our first mistake in assuming we could rappel to where we started. Normally going to the top would not be a problem, but we were looking for a quick single pitch route so didn't bring enough gear to climb all three pitches. Not to mention the route was not clearly marked. Both books that we had reviewed had some errors.

So we began our climb. I started by setting a piece of gear to secure me before the first bolt. I climbed up and at the bolt saw two more bolts. One was a traverse to my right the other was a good 15 feet up from there. Now, normally, I'd traverse and clip in, but I presumed it was part of the climb next to us and was rated much harder than I wanted to climb. I decided to continue up and took the run out to the clip above me. It was no problem. Beyond that, I continued to climb, but there were no more bolts, and the anchors I could see (again presuming they were for the climb next to us) were far off to my right. I placed another piece of gear and then ran out my line until I got to a point where I could build my own anchor.

Now, problem two became very clear even though we knew it would be a problem. The wind and the noise of the river made it impossible to communicate. I sat at the anchor I had built and kept pulling up the rope. Finally, I saw Sara pop-up over the edge and she cleared the gear I had placed. Sara, wisely, eased out to make sure I'd take up the slack. However, she had to make a guess that I was safely anchored before making a move. When she reached me she promptly scolded me for running out the rope.

Now we had to make a decision -- Do we go up? Or down climb? We choose to down climb, because again to our right we could see the rock had been bolted and we didn't really bring enough gear to go up. I began to lower Sara to the anchors that I had skipped before. I cleaned up my anchor and down climbed and traversed to her. This was particularly scary because I had no place to put any gear to protect myself as I moved down, and it would have been a long fall that would have left a nice rock rash.

Once at the anchor Sara informs me that we don't have the rope length to rappel back to our safe place on the ground. I suggested I could rappel and see, and then just hitch my way back up if it was a problem, but we could also see more bolts going up.

There were two crews below us, so we went up. I cruised up the slab hardly using my hands. Again Sara came up and we had a choice again. We just happened to have one of our friends walkie-talkies, and we made a call out to our friends. They had four ropes between them, so if they sent up a climber we could all rappel and not lose any gear.

We got a message through to our friends and they made a plan to climb up to the anchors. Many people discourage the walkie-talkie idea, but I have to say that if you use it only to pass along commands, and only to clarify safety needs it is a great backup system. Used properly and they can be a life saver, used wrong and they can be dangerous. In our case, I was very happy to have one with us.

I had Sara lower me to the first anchors. As I went down I clipped in some gear to protect her from any falls. At the anchors we lowered Sara and Kari (who came up just to have a climb) and Mark (a new climbing friend) and I tied the ropes together, cleaned the gear and rappelled.

It was quite the adventure, but I'm very proud of how we handled it. We could have climbed our way into something very dangerous but we kept our cool and practiced our safety the whole time. We also figured that in a worse case scenario we could have rappelled the length of our rope, built and anchor and then down climbed the last bit with the gear from an intermediate anchor.

Now we have to get a second rope. And some bail webbing, which would have made our down climbing safer. Such is life though, and we live and learn. I'm very thankful for all our climbing friends who have taught us all our safety skills and didn't think we were too insane when we asked question after question.

Be safe, Climb On, have fun.