My apartment has two rooms and since the other will be hers while she's crashing with me, this required cleaning it. Thing is, it had became the repositry of every lesson, handout, and resource I've made/found/been given for the past two years. We're talking stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks of papers with no discernible order covering every flat space in the room and most of the floor. It generally looked like a hurricane fought a printing press and won. As often as not I'd end up needing this or that handout for a different version of the same lesson and not having time to go through the room, would make new ones and those would get tossed in there too.
I spent a week organizing everything into five huge 3-ring binders to pass on to the next volunteer. Several big-ass bags also made their way down to the trash receptical for someone to burn later. Whoever comes after me will either thank me or their head will explode just trying to look through them. But out of a rather boring week, the following story did happen:
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So I decided that I needed a new challenge in climbing, and that challenge would be to do a circuit of the ten routes on the main cliff that weren’t 5.12s. I started the challenge by knocking through the first five. Then I came to the two hardest. Here’s where the mistakes began.
I started the sixth, a 5.11a called “Path of War” from the ledge at its base. To the right, the ledge drops off five feet to a lower ledge. I had been leading all the previous routes, but “Path of War” shares the same anchor with the route I had just done so I had left the rope up to save time.
Igor, my 15 year-old belayer, well, I don’t know if he had gotten bored or distracted or what, but he seemed to think I was leading the route, even though there was very obviously a rope going from my harness up to an anchor and back down to him.
Anyway, I was about ten feet up at the hardest move and Igor hadn’t been taking up the slack, thinking it was a lead climb and waiting for me to put in the first clip. The problem might also have been that Nadia was beside him, and Nadia is just damn pretty.
I fell doing that move and kept falling, straight past the ledge Igor was standing on and hitting the one below it, twenty feet in all, landing on my right foot-- which immediately gave out from under me--and then landing on my right side, smacking my ribs on the rock. I lay there for a few minutes, waiting for the pain to go away. Luckily the rope had started sucking up momentum a few feet from the rock or it would have hurt a lot worse.
I got up, shook myself out and decided to start climb some more, if only to assure a guilt-ridden Igor that I really was okay. I climbed the route perfectly after that, possibly due to the adrenaline-amp, took down the rope and prepared to lead the route beside it, another 5.11a called “Hakuna Matata”.
The hardest move on this route is the last one: a fun but awkward move that’s also ten feet above the last clip. If you fall, you fall twenty feet and get whipped into a ledge of rock. At least two of the network of lines crisscrossing my right shin are from falls on this move.
It’s a funky sequence: above you is a solid foot-wide ledge. If you do a pull up on that and get your feet under you and spread wide, looking like a hanging frog, you’ll find a nice foot hold on your right, out of sight around a flake of rock, and the tiniest nub for your toe on the left. You then shift your grip and push down on the ledge, raising your body up to where your waist is at ledge height. The goal is to now get a foot on this ledge.
Because the rock flakes up and left, you reach up with your left, grab a vertical edge of rock, lean back against it so your body is now diagonal, shift your weight onto your left toe to free up your right foot, and then push and pull at once, a trippy dynamic move to swing your right foot up to that ledge.
One of two things will happen: you’ll get the foot onto the ledge, stand up and be at the anchor, or you’ll aim too high or too low, your momentum will take your toe off the nub and down you fall.
The later happened, but due to a subconscious fear about the last time I fell with Igor holding me, I reached out and grab the opposite end of the rope to stop my fall. Hand clenched around that rope and body weight dragging the rope through my hand, I felt a sharp burning sensation before I let go and continued my fall. I needn’t have worried: Igor braked the rope like he should have and I found myself hanging twenty feet lower and cradling my hand. The whole thing had happened in two seconds, without any conscious thought, and now, as I slowly uncurled my right hand, I found I had rope burned it.
I always yell at my students to never hold the opposite rope and here I was with a rope burn. A straight line of skin on my palm looked like it had been glazed and the skin on the undersides of my fingers was raised and red. A couple of tiny blisters were under the knuckles of some fingers, at there were two fat ones on the underside of my middle finger.
While I waited for the pain to clear away, I realized I might have to leave gear on the wall to get down. The last move was difficult enough without doing it with a burned hand. Thing is, I have yet to leave “treasure” on the wall and I wasn’t about to start. Luckily, the parts of my hand that were damaged (palm and insides of the knuckles) were the parts you don’t use on a 5.11 climb. As long as the tips of my fingers were okay, and they were, I could keep going.
I was out of quickdraws, so I had Igor lower me a little, pulled two off the wall and traversed left to another route which I knew had an easier ending. I finished that route, put the rope into the anchor and felt like my hand was feeling better. Using the edge of the cliff, I traversed right to the anchor of “Hakuna Matata”, put the rope in and had Igor lower me (Igor being very confused about this latest set of events) to the last move I had completed on the route. On top rope and with falling not threatening to be painful, I climbed up and pulled the last move, touched the anchor, and had Igor lower me so I could, for ego reasons alone, do it again.
I finished the route again and, since my hand barely hurt during this, I thought that I could complete the last three routes on the circuit. I traversed over and set the anchor on the next route. When Igor brought my down, though, pain in my hand flared up and wouldn’t subside. My hand glowed an angry red and throbbed and the pain didn't go away for the next 20 minutes, despite being wedged between my left bicep and my ribs. I was done for the day.
Because there were only tiny open wounds, there was nothing really to do when I got home: took some IB Profin and cleaned the dirt off. This morning, the only real damage seemed to be the blisters on the middle finger. The rest had gone down and my hand as a whole didn’t hurt. If anything, it was like instant calluses at every place the rope touched. Bonus.
My poor hand
I felt good enough this morning that I’m going to make another attempt at the circuit, possibly tomorrow or Tuesday. And this time I won’t grab the rope.