rock!
I’m starting a new category on my site called “flashbacks”. I wanted to have some way to capture or record some of my memories and reminiscing from the pre-blog days. I have some good stories you know. I know what you’re thinking, but honest… I do have some stories! So, from time to time, as the need strikes me, I’ll jot down my memories of experiences in the past. I suspect that not everyone will enjoy them, but I’ll try to keep it fresh and exciting for a wide audience. No promises of lengthy posts, or well composed prose – just documentation, mostly of my near death experiences. This post is the first in what I hope will be a series of flashbacks.
Back in my high-school days, I was into Rock Climbing. Let me clarify that statement. Actually, my brother Dave was into Rock Climbing and I just happened to be a default climbing partner. Note, that at the time, I wasn’t the most ideal climbing partner. I was a bit on the larger side, but I made for a good anchor for belaying my brother while he scaled the rock. I was perfectly happy with this arrangement, because it was incredibly fun not to mention a great bonding activity for my brother and I.
Dave and I decided to make our way up to Broughton Bluff one weekend to get in some climbing. The bluff is located at the Lewis and Clark State Recreation Site on the Columbia River in Oregon. The rock itself is nestled up in the woods, and after a short hike there is a veritable treasure trove of multi-pitch and short sport climbs. Maybe not a treasure trove… but it’s definitely a passable climbing spot.
We spent most of the day hiking around scoping out the climbs and we finally set our sights on a multi-pitch 5.8 climb which was probably just over a hundred feet high. We bagged that climb fairly easily and we set out to find another. My memory is hazy of this part, but I think we climbed yet another 5.8 climb. All climbing and hiking was starting to take it’s toll on me and was reaching my climbing limit for the day. As we started to head back down the trail, my brother scoped out a 5.9 climb near the trail split that leads back to the car. He looked at me and said “Let’s do this one before we go, come-on. Just one more. It’ll be quick, I promise!” I resisted initially, but I really didn’t have much of a leg to stand on. Dave had the keys to the car. What the heck, I thought, there’s plenty of daylight and it didn’t look too hard so we hastily setup for the climb.
As usual, Dave lead the first pitch which was really mostly a bouldering exercise. There were several large rocks (think 10 feet tall) that were strewn at the base of this climb which you have to negotiate before you get to the actual rock face. He made quick work of the boulder section and started in on the face of the rock. He reached around to chalk his fingers in his chalk bag, and somehow managed to dislodge the bag from his belt/harness. It promptly fell from his waist and dropped down into the boulder pile. And when I say “into” I mean that it found it’s way into a crevice which had absolutely no possible chance of retrieval. Dave, having a strong personal and financial attachment to his chalk-bag started into the expletives. This was our first sign that this last climb was a bad idea.
After a brief moment of mourning for his lost bag, Dave continued to climb until he reached the first anchor point. He clipped into the anchor and started the to belay me up. Next to the anchor point, a small tree jutted out of the rock, just big enough to be a nuisance. As a reached Dave, we swapped positions as he readied himself to climb the next pitch. Dave borrowed a bit of chalk from my chalk bag and began to climb onto the next pitch. With the tree next to me, it seemed logical that I could drape the bundle of rope over it and belay from that. It was nearing the end of the day and I was definitely feeling tired. I made the command decision to go ahead with the lazy route and lay the rope over the tree. I quickly realized why this would be a bad idea. As I was letting out the rope, the bundle that I had laid over the tree was binding up on the bark and making it difficult to let out slack. As Dave climbed further up the pitch, the rope got more and more tangled up in the tree. Eventually it got to a point where I couldn’t let anymore rope out, without fixing this tangled mess. I called up to Dave to find a safe spot to clip in so that I could fix the rope situation.
Luckily, Dave was near an outcropping. Actually, it was a small boulder the size of a large beach-ball. It was perfectly shaped to hang a sling around, so Dave grabbed a sling from his harness and slung it around the outcropping. He clipped in, and yelled down to me that he was safe and that I could fix the rope. I took Dave off belay so that I could start organizing the rope. It was at this point that Dave decided to give his anchor a good hard tug to see just how stable it was. Bad idea. The tug was enough to pull the boulder free from the side of the rock. Unfortunately, Dave was still attached to the sling that was around that boulder. I watched in almost slow motion as the boulder began it’s slow tumble down the rock face. By some miracle, the sling unraveled from the boulder as it rolled toward me. “Oh crap!” I thought, as the boulder was now headed directly for me. Being relatively immobile, it was difficult for me to avoid any flying debris, but I managed to move myself to the side and narrowly escape being crushed by the heavy rock. After I was out of danger, a looked down at the path below to see a toddler (no older than 4 or 5 years old) ambling along the trail with his father, not a care in the world. “Roooockkk!” I yelled down to the father and his son. In an act of amazing neglect, the father leaped off of the trail and left his son, still unaware of the boulder plunging down the cliff directly for him. At the last possible moment, the father grabbed his sons hand and pulled him out of path of the boulder. It hit exactly where the son was walking and most certainly would have ruined his day.
At that point, we called it a day and rappelled back down the face. We left Broughton Bluff with our tails between our legs and barely spoke of it on the way home. That day were humbled by the sport of rock climbing. I’d like to say that we learned our limits, but I’ve got plenty of other stories that will prove that we just continued to test them.
Until next time…
November 14th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Wow, I’d forgotten a lot of that, definitely forgotten the climb ratings and that we had successfully summited at least something. I totally forgot that I lost my Metolius chalk bag! man that was a cool chalk bag. I can’t wait to hear about the Madrone wall incident, or the failed day at beacon rock, or even better the sunburn and severe dehydration of that route at smith… was it the zebra route, or bloody sunday, red cuba or something like that?