Subliminal

Please read note on attribution of photo at bottom of story.

If you want to get yourself caught on a cliff during a thunder & lightening show, give yourself a fighting chance and pick a climb that you know you can retreat from.  But if epics are your game, then attempt something new on a bottomless cliff, and best of all, keep the charade to yourself lest your companion be rather sensible and cut short the fun.

Attempt the climb in a season that is hot and warm, and a year that is hotter, warmer and wetter than most, like a few years ago, when the storms rolled into Sydney with the reliability of the train services they disrupted.  The storms, like the trains, will arrive, just not according to the schedule you had checked.

Allow the best part of the game to come as a surprise by picking a cliff that faces east, so the storms that roll in from the west will not be seen until after they have been heard, and then felt.  And then as I have said, to make the day truly epic such a cliff should have an architecture that offers little chance of retreat if the climb cannot be ascended.

Such a cliff exists: it is overhung, adding difficulty to every manoeuvre; is spit in two, with an upper and a lower; the climb to be attempted sits on the overhung upper cliff, which in most places hangs over the cliff below, such that a rock dropped from the top of the upper cliff falls freely past the ledge separating the two cliffs to the valley below. 

Now we have a setting and it is Sublime.  The game is already known – epic.  And if the game be unannounced to your companion, but will eventually be perceived, then it is – Subliminal.

Standing atop the chosen cliff, with the 70m abseil rope swinging in space, is quite unnerving.  Reason enough to re-check the harness, by which time the companion, Giles, has stepped in and taken the risk of abseiling first and locating the belay ….

My hesitancy came with a price, as it so often does.

By going first, Giles had the challenge of finding the anchor point that marks the start of the climb, to do this he clipped gear on the way down to keep him close enough to the rock so that he would be able to ‘land’ at the anchor point – a completely hanging belay positioned above the cliff below.  By going second, I had to unclip each piece of gear in order to retrieve it, resulting in a wild swing into space as I did so, the swing becoming bigger the lower I descended, my voice becoming more high pitched and shrill with each swing.

Together on the anchor point, we surveyed our situation.  The first pitch of the climb rose only a short way above us before traversing across some distance to the left to another belay point.  From there the next pitch soared up the overhanging face and around the arête with the next belay out of sight.  Beneath us – space.  Just visible beneath us the edge of a ledge that formed the top of a bigger, lower cliff.

The first thunderclap hit as Giles was attempting the series of hard moves at the start of the first pitch.  The steepness of the face protected us from the deluge of rain that followed.  Looking up to monitor Giles’ progress, it was possible to make out individual drops of rain as they plunged past us, just out of reach.

The lightening, thunder, and rain continued as I followed Giles’ lead and climbed across to the anchors at the end of the first pitch.  The comfort of staying dry during a storm and the relative safety of a secure belay, juxtaposed with the emotional brittleness brought on by the closing gap between lightening and thunder signalling an increasing probability of a dreaded strike.

Again, we surveyed our situation.  The top of the next pitch was almost certainly wet – too wet to climb.  The continuing rain washed away my confidence of completing the climb, and the haunting thought that another storm could follow the first were strong factors in the decision to retreat.

The face we had climbed across was slightly bowed, meaning we had climbed towards the back of the ledge below, opening the possibility of reaching it by abseil.  This would leave us on a hanging ledge halfway up a cliff face, with no possibility of getting back onto this face, and no other known routes to the top: an epic beckoned.  Rattled by the continuing lightening I prepared the rope for the abseil, while Giles continued to gaze upwards ….

Making our way along the ledge in the post storm drizzle, uncertainty replaced dread.  When still on the face, discussion of the retreat had centred on the probability of this ledge continuing to the point where the cliffs above us petered out to the broken rocky ridge connecting the valley floor to the plateau above, and so it did, albeit with a short section of difficult unprotected climbing.

Back at the packs, standing in the drizzle, eating our lunch, the full descriptions that lay behind the clipped sentences spoken during the ordeal were shared.

Laughing at our misfortune of again being caught in a storm, Giles exclaimed, “I can’t believe this storm came through.”

“Oh, I knew there was going to be a storm, I just thought it would hit later in the afternoon like it has most other days.”

In the silence that followed, it was agreed that I would haul up the rap rope that was still hanging over the cliff, made immeasurably heavier by being completely wet.

The photo for this article was taken by Paul Thomson, who was the first ascensionist of Subliminal.  I have attempted, and failed, to contact Paul via the email address on his website to ask his permission to use his image. I eventually decided to add the image to this story prior to obtaining his consent because it brilliantly shows the position of this cliff and climb.