It's hard to tell in this pic, but the water goes all the way back to that building.
So on the first day of the deluge, but before it had started, we were out on the cliffs. Not the old cliffs, but new ones we found at a place called Golova Chatskaya. That translates at “Chatsy’s Head”. This is because at this site is a pile of rocks sticking out over the Teatriv River that looks like a face. I don’t know who Chatsky is nor why he had the misfortune of owning a face that looked like a pile of rocks, but it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve every climbed. The cliffs are on the edge of the river, making the approach rather dangerous as you’re constantly at risk of slipping on an angled, moss-covered rock and falling headlong into the river. More interesting is the fact that the first bolt of three of the routes is out over the water, meaning you climb out over the river before you can even clip in. Fun stuff.
No real pictures from in the rain (camera was safely away from water in a bag), but these were taken off a video of me climbing just before the rain started.
Going for a 'draw
This looks like a job for...
We climbed all morning until rain forced us off, but not before we notice that one overhanging route was staying relatively dry. We came back in the late afternoon when the rain had stopped again, but I won a 5 hrivna bet that it would start raining as soon as we got there because it did.
Grrr! Grrr!
Just kinda like this shot
Last move before the anchor
Boo yeah!
I nearly plunged into the river, a boot slipping on wet rock, back heavy with climbing gear, but managed to throw myself backwards and catch myself. This was followed by my very first “deck” during a climb, that innocuous term which actually means hitting the ground. I was leading up on that dry face, almost the length of the rope over my first bolt when I slipped and fell. The dynamic rope stretched, my belayer, Marina, got pulled into the air and I ended up falling into Jon’s lap. But the fact that I had fallen all the way to the ground meant that after two brushes with damage, I wasn’t trying for a third.
“We’re setting a top rope,” I said.
The cliffs allowed for it: since the terrain sloped down to the river’s edge, it was a matter of hiking back up and over the top of the cliffs. Marina and hiked up there in the light but steady rain, while Tanya and Jon were huddled under the overhang. With the dirt now slippery mud, I sent Marina to tie into a tree because decking with a rope is one thing, decking without it is another. We talked over the order: she would lower me over the cliff edge. I’d clip the rope into the anchor. She’d lower me down, then she’d throw the rope over the edge. With the rope clipped into the anchor, we’d now have a top rope.
Simple.
Except from where Marina was tied into the tree, she couldn’t actually see me.
And with the rain and all, she was having trouble hearing me. And, as it turns out, she was really worried about accidentally killing me.
So I climbed over the edge, boots on the tip of some slippery rock, hand grabbing another slippery rock, in the pouring rain (and, like an idiot, having left my jacket at the bottom), looking over the edge at the anchor. It was a newer one: a chain welded into two bolts bored into the rock. I clipped a quickdraw into one of the bolts. Now at this point I couldn’t actually put weight onto the rope tied into my harness because I needed enough slack to be able to clip it to the anchor. When I tugged on the rope, I found it was less than six inches from going into the quickdraw. “Slack!” I yelled into the gray rain.
Now, Marina knows this word. In fact, most of the Ukrainians have adopted it because it seems so much better suited to the task then the Russian word “svobodney”, which just means “freely”. That, and they keep hearing the Americans yell it when they climb, so maybe they think it’s cool. Anyways, it’s now not uncommon to hear one Ukrainian we climb with shout to another Ukrainian: “Die mene slack!” (give me some slack). So I’m not sure why Marina decided to pull the rope tight.
I yelled slack again and every time I yelled it, Marina kept pulling on the rope, pulling me backwards and off balance, slipping in the mud. Finally I yelled “Svbodney!” and the rope went loose, dropping me over the edge, my fingers entangled with the anchor, the rest of my body hanging on the rope, dangling in the rain. Pain tends to make me angry, so with gritted teeth and still clinging to the anchor, I got the rope into the quickdraw and then slammed in two more into the other bolt, clipping those into the ropes with the carabineers in opposite directions. Hanging in the rain, having nearly hurt myself twice that day, I was not tempting fate anymore.
“Let me down!” I yelled, first in English, then in Russian. Either Marina couldn’t hear me or understand me or was now just too worried about killing me. The rope didn’t budge.
This is how I ended up hanging in the cold rain in a tee-shirt, just over the edge of a cliff, for the better part of fifteen minutes.
After yelling myself hoarse for Marina to lower me down, I finally yelled down to Jon to go tell her, and he then hiked up to the top of the cliff, me hanging there cold and soaked and twiddling my thumbs before I miraculously started to be slowly lowered.
The rest of the operation went quickly and soon the rope was tossed over the edge, allowing us to climb safely on a top rope. All save Tanya climbed the overhanging route, and while Marina was doing it, she called for slack I got to yell at her in Russian: “oh, now you know that word!”
On Jon’s climb, the last climb, he got to spend about twenty minutes hanging in the rain. Once clearing the overhang to the anchor, he discovered my three quickdraws and for some reason had a lot of trouble getting them back out. He hung in his shirt, yelling and tugging at them while I stood in the rain belaying him (although now infinitely happier under the hood of my rain jacket), a slightly sadistic smile on my face that I wasn’t the only one who had to go through that.
One last note: getting ready to go to the club that night (yes, we did all go to the club that night), I peeled off my sock and noticed blood. What I thought had been an itch had actually been a nice little bloody abrasion the size of a quarter on my shin just above the ankle. I’m not sure at what point in the day I received this wound, but what sets it apart from every other cut on my hands, elbows and shins is that it’s directly on top of a scar I have from when I broke my leg nine years ago.
A cut on a scar
Scar tissue is supposed to be tough. How in the hell can you get a wound on scar tissue? And then not notice it?
Fun day, climbing in the rain.