A Game of Two Halves
I am standing on a small ledge 150m off the ground, looking longingly across at a road that is snaking up a hillside between two cliffs before disappearing into a tunnel, the bends closest to me curving around ridges of a mountain running down to the Cetina river. Each bend sitting on an embankment enclosed within a beautiful stone wall. Thoughts of pounding up that hill on a bike, and then swooping down it again, come to mind.
My mind is wandering as I wait for Scott to finish leading the 2nd last pitch of a 7 pitch climb we are on. This is the ‘money pitch’, being the equal highest grade, quite long at 45m and impressively situated towards the top of one of the major cliffs in the Cetina gorge: the gorge itself impressively located on the Dalmatian Coast in Croatia.
The climbing to this point, apart from the two ‘link’ pitches that I led, has been impressive: a series of slabs on non-polished limestone providing thoughtful and absorbing climbing. There has been climbing at Omis for some time including multi-pitch routes, but there has been an increase in new routing activity recently that has seen more multi-pitch routes established on some of the bigger walls in the gorge. This climb we are on, Freedom, has a ‘new’ feel to it with little evidence of the traffic that is seen in other popular climbing locations meaning there are still a high number of shrubs on the route, there is a complete absence of polish, the solution pockets still have very sharp edges and there is the occasional loose rock.
Warwick is now on the pitch, Scott having finished his lead. I occasionally look up to get a sense of which side of the bolts he is climbing, but mostly look across and think about riding up the hill, and the joy that will come from swooping down it. I make no claims to being a good descender, but am willing to let the bike run fast enough to generate the feeling of flying down the hill and swooping around one bend and onto another.
The slithering of the rope in front of me as Scott takes in the excess slack between us brings me back to my present situation and the task at hand: 2nd a 6b slab pitch on limestone, in the sun that has now come around the arête that had been shading us.
The slab on this pitch is composed of solution pockets. Remind yourself of the rock shelves along the coast that have the eroded circles in them, and then tilt that rock shelf up to about 85deg, so it is not completely vertical like the wall of a house, but leans slightly away from you – a slab. Here is where life gets unfair, you see, typically, the pockets are not evenly eroded but are deeply cut on one side and barely on the other, such that when you look up, you can see lots of features, but when you reach up and grab one, the bottom of the pocket is barely distinguishable from the actual slab of rock – meaning there is nothing to hold. The effect not unlike a venetian blind that has the louves tilted down so that if you run your hand down it there is nothing to hold, and if you look down for something to place your feet on all you see is a smooth wall beneath you.
The beauty of limestone is that it does not weather or erode evenly so every now and then there will be a solution pocket with a tiny lip that allows you to rest your fingers on, and if you place the front half of your foot flat against the wall with your heel lower than your toes, in some places, it will remain, allowing you to stand. The challenge with this type of climbing is to find those solution pockets, among a wall littered with such pockets, that have formed with just enough of a bottom edge to allow you to hold it. When you find them, you delicately transfer your weight onto it and lift a hand or foot and place it on another, very gently, and repeat. ‘Padding up’ the term used to describe the motion, as you are standing on the pads of your feet, and relying upon the friction of the pads on the heel of the palms of your hand for holds.
This I do. There being no clue on which pockets to use as this climb has not had enough ascents for the best holds to become worn and obvious, and neither Warwick or Scott left much chalk on the wall.
The technique requires you to keep your hands low, so that your ankles remain low, creating a constant battle against the urge to reach high and simply pull yourself up. Every so often though, you find yourself reaching higher and higher, in search of a decent hold, as I do now, as I have seen a seam running across the slab and hope that there is a clean break in it that will provide a good edge to grab. My fingers just reach the bottom of the seam and it is rounded. I cannot see what my hand is touching as I must keep my head turned down so that the wrist of my other hand is kept at the correct angle to use the slight edge in a pocket. Slowly I creep my fingers deeper into the seam, my body fighting the dual needs of being supple to remain standing on the slight holds, but stiff to enable my reach to be extended. My fingers have still not found an edge that would allow me to transfer any weight onto that hand. As I reach a little further I realise that I am in danger of ‘leaving my feet behind’ – reaching so high that it is as though I am lifting my feet of the holds they are on.
Trapped! I have reached so high, and found nothing, that my feet are now gaining very little friction from the rock as my ankles have risen so high that the angle of my feet is such that they are no longer actually resting against the best part of the pocket. My hand, having found nothing to grip, is now smeared across the rounded edge of the seam. At this point, I am trapped, I can neither drop back down as I am unable to transfer any weight onto my hands to allow me to place my feet correctly against the rock, and I cannot go up because I cannot hold any weight with my hands that would allow me to lift a foot to a higher hold. Welcome to slab climbing.
Breathing is important. I have been told this many times, as I often find that in these situations my natural reaction is to hold my breath – maybe due to the sensation of an impending fall, and my climbing partner, whoever it might be, is inclined to offer some advice at this point, like, “Neil, breathe”. My current climbing partners at this point are completely out of sight so it is only through experience that I remember – to breathe. And what’s more, not pant like a dog on a hot day, but simulate a meditative deep breathing exercise. Eventually, you work your way out of it, promising never to over reach again ….
The pitch steepens and I pull onto the belay. Above us the last pitch. Scott leads it and lowers back to the ledge, sport climbing style. The climb does not ‘top out’, instead finishing just short of the top. So on the last pitch we treat it like a sports climb – lowering off rather than each person staying at the top when they have finished.
We started climbing at 7:30, topped out at 12:30. Our descent is via 6 abseils. Three experienced climbers, 6 abseils – shouldn’t take long. Don’t really want it to with this sun on us …
This climb is a game of two halves.
My climbing partners for today are avid Australian rugby fans, and if there is one thing an Australian rugby fan knows, it is the score at half time is meaningless, especially when playing the All Blacks.
Where the climbing was splendid, the abseils were …. difficult. On a slab, there is much that can catch a rope; bushes and spikes of rock the main culprits. And catch the rope they do.
You know the procedure, stand atop the cliff with a the rope neatly coiled in your hand, toss the coil into the air such that it uncoils as it falls, landing in a nice straight line down the cliff. Let me introduce you to reality. Almost every pitch we climbed had a traverse of some type, and at times there is a breeze blowing, so there is no point lofting a coil of rope as having a rope drop immediately beneath you provides no benefit.
The real procedure runs like this. Throw a short coil of rope in the general direction you can remember the pitch went, after a group discussion on which way this particular pitch went. Watch it snag and knot in front of you, kick the remaining rope off the belay and start abseiling. Every 5 metres, stop and clear the rope until you reach the next belay. Pull the rope so it can be used on the next abseil and watch it catch on many things on the way down. Clear them somehow, and then repeat. All the while hanging in your harness either during the abseil, or on the semi hanging belays found on all but one of the pitches.
We make it back to the packs at 3:30, making it 3hrs of work to abseil 200m using a 60m & 70m rope.
It was a game of two halves.
