One Hold Missing
A climbing day starts in the caf. This I can state with confidence. There are no rules in climbing. There is etiquette – slowly declining, there are ethics, questionable and self serving, but no rules. So I cannot state it is a rule: but it is a truism. The café owners in the Bluies will without doubt back me up on this: climbers start their day in the caf.
What of adventurers, in their mountains, with their alpine starts and all, do they start their day in the caf. Of course not: but they would if they could.
But today, all we have time for is a takeaway, in a keep-cup of course, suggesting a day beyond the norm, if not quite truly adventurous.
The first abseil started innocuously enough, but discomfort grew quickly when I started spinning in space high above the valley floor as I descended the long section below an overhang. The second abseil, as long as the first, a full rope length, dropped us onto a small sloping ledge, and it was from here, some distance above the bottom of the cliff, and quite some distance down from the top, that we started the climb back out.
The first pitch off the ledge offered a perfect example of the exquisite face climbing that has made the Blue Mountains a destination. Small sharp edges mixed with faint variations in the rock, carefully arranged to contort your body through a series of delicate dance like poses. With the slight dusting of chalk left by Scott diminishing at the end of the long sequences, I was often left stranded mid-way through a movement, mentally scrambling to decipher the pattern of holds into another move.
The second pitch began easy enough, on rock with the look of mud but with the feel and surety of marble. The pitch steepened towards the end, forcing one to look down to the void beneath when searching for foot holds.
Till now, Scott had done all the hard work, first down each of the abseils to clear the ropes and leading each of the first two pitches, and it would only have been right to allow him the joy and honour of leading the last pitch. But by the time I’d climbed onto the belay ledge the ropes had become hopelessly tangled: “Scott, I think I might lead the last pitch”.
The climbing was stiff right from the belay, with a particularly difficult clip above the lip of a small overlap. Afterwards, the climbing eased and I mentally sat back and enjoyed flowing climbing movements at the top of a big cliff on a perfect windless sunny autumn day.
And that’s when the hold broke.
Although the difficulty had eased on this last pitch, the climbing had continued to be thoughtful, requiring complete focus through each series of moves. This pitch had contained a series of mantle type moves, so named for the likeness to climbing onto a mantle-shelf above a fire place – a narrow ledge with few holds below, on, or above the ledge. Mantle’s require not so much power and strength, as balance and poise.
The unsettling thought when performing a mantle-shelf move, is that were a fall to occur, you are likely to fall over backwards, rather than simply falling straight down, so the fall will be messy and potentially injurious.
Any fall was likely to be a long one, as it is common on multi-pitch climbs for the protection to become sparse as you reach the top, as the likelihood of hitting something during a fall diminishes.
None of this was in my mind when I started the last mantle move onto the ledge that marked the end of the climb. I was already thinking of the chai back at my pack that I was about to enjoy, so I had not set myself properly for the move, and had been somewhat careless with my body position in anticipation of an easy manoeuvre to be followed by the longed for exhilaration felt at the end of a climb.
The realisation that you have broken a hold does not occur immediately. The pressure on the arm eases instantly and the legs crease rather than straightening as expected. But the mind takes a moment to process these signals, and to recognise that the body has taken a different shape during the move than anticipated. But realise it you do. The overwhelming feeling that something is not right crystallises into the clear sensation that you are falling.
The broken hold is flung into space, the belayer hears a plaintive cry and instinctively the body throws itself back onto the ledge.
Days that start in the caf often finish in the pub, it being a very agreeable way to end a climbing day: but today the tonic is a stiff whiskey upon arrival at home.
