When: June 19-20th, 2009
With: BRC (Basic Rock Class, BoeAlps style)
Goal: Learn how to place and clean pro, set anchors, rescue techniques, knots etc
Andreas and I had car camped Thursday night in Leavenworth to avoid an earlier than 5am wakeup call. Andreas isn’t in the BRC class but opted to come east so he could paraglide in Cashmere.
The BRC team left the parking lot for the Playground rock area slightly after 8am. Our first steps were tying basic knots. We went over all the knots we learned in the BCC, including the waterknot, double fishermans, figure 8, bowline (on a coil and on a byte and the regular bowline), and coiling a rope. We also were introduced to the SUPER handy clove hitch and munter hitch. The clove hitch is an amazing way to set up an anchor while you’re tied into the rope (without using any additional piece of gear – just the rope you’re tied too). The munter hitch was also really cool because you could use that to belay yourself if you were found without an atc belay device.
We also practiced tying off a fallen climber. The scenario this would be used for is if you were at a hanging belay (or belaying from the top of the climb) and your climber screamed and suddenly all the weight was on the rope and it continued to be this way for quite awhile. It seems that your climber is hurt (or it could have been your lead climber who took a nasty whipper (aka: huge fall) and they are hurt). Perhaps the wind is too strong and you can’t hear anything from them when you call down to see if they’re alright. So, you need to start figuring out what’s necessary to get everybody out of harms way. First you would tie off the fallen climber! While you’re belaying the responsibility is on your brake hand to make sure the climber is safe. You need to releave your brake hand from work to be able to climb down and see what is wrong or to be able to continue on to other rescue techniques.
Although we had practiced this in the BCC and I was fairly confident in my skills, it is surely good practice to go over all rescue techniques. I can’t imagine the stress involved if there was actually a problem, so you want to make sure they’re second nature.
There was a lot of comradery and if anybody was struggling with something students and instructors would come together to help out. This experience may be heightened because everybody is working on techniques that are life dependent.
Soon we moved on to rappelling. Many of us had experience with this, but it can be scary because of the height and once again, you can never be too comfortable with a climbing skillset. We practiced basic rappels, rappelling with a backup prussic (if you’ve been climbing for 20+ hours you may not trust yourself – it never hurts to have a back-up. Rappelling is one of the only things in climbing where your life is dependent on yourself – interestingly this is also where the most climbing mistakes happen). We also practiced using a munter hitch to rappel. I enjoyed using the munter hitch; the only problem with rappellings off of it, is that it puts a lot of twists in the rope, especially the smaller diameter ropes.
After this it was time to practice climbing. Every student teamed off with another student and climbed between 3 and 6 routes. Brian and I made a great team – both of us are efficient climbers and we’re somewhat similar height and weight (basically, this means Brian isn’t a 6 foot giant). It was fun to see the difference in our techniques up the cliff face. My favorite route was touted as the hardest route. I was rather embarrassed at the end of it because when I came down from the route I received many compliments about how fast I did the route and how easy and graceful I made it look as well. I liked how it was a multi-faceted route—you had to change your balance mid-hold to be able to reach the next hold. Pretty much every route we worked on was slab (not totally vertical, but the hand holds are almost non-existent and you really have to rely on your shoes gripping the rock. The temperature was great—sunny but with a breeze and the rock shoes were able to grip well.
We ended Day 1 with a Italian dinner in downtown Leavenworth where I had a scrumptious dish of cheese tortellini with basil pesto sauce.
Day 2 started at 7:30am at the Mountaineers Dome. This is a great section to practice crack climbing.
After the short hike to the cracks we were given a lecture on traditional protection (hereon referred to as trad climbing or placing pro). We learned the good and bad of placing cams (old name: friends), hex’s, nuts, and tricams (a real love or hate piece that is almost obsolete these days).
We were then given a rack (rack = all the gear necessary to climb, so you’d have varying sizes of cams, nuts and hex’s. This gear would be at least $1000 worth) and told to build anchors. For a solid anchor you want at least 3 pieces of well-set pro. If you have an iffy piece, like a really small nut, say half the size of an acorn placed, it is recommended that you place another nut to offset this.
I was done pretty early and Emily (an instructor) challenged my protection by having both of us hang off it and jump on it. Fortunately it held and none of the pieces even tried to move. She then started pretending that my pieces of pro had fallen out and would test to see that my anchor was still solid, once again, my anchor won. Then she challenged me to place the entire rack on the wall within my arms reach while we waited for all the students to be done and the next lecture from the instructors. I had placed about 12 pieces (out of 30+) before it was time to learn about the hanging belay. Then I had to take them all out... *sigh*
The hanging belay is essential! I had seen it implemented before but had never used it myself. This is what you would use if you were multi-pitch climbing. The lead climber would climb up, set up an anchor in the middle of the route, and then belay the second climber to the same spot (hopefully a nice ledge, but not always). The second climber would either continue climbing (leading the route) or you would switch spots and the original leader would continue to climb. I’m super super excited to climb multi-pitch routes.
After the lecture we practiced lead belaying (when you belay a person setting up a route vs regular belaying where the ropes are already set up), and also cleaning pro that the leader had set. For instructional purposes, the leader set pro about every 4 or 5 feet (normally you’d set this between 6 and 15 feet depending on your comfort level while taking into consideration what you need to put on the wall to not take a ground fall).
Cleaning pro was really fun when it was on the route. For most pieces you could just hit the trigger of the cam and it would release from the rock. Other pieces, mainly nuts, might be a little harder. Some of them would come out if you jerked it up, but others were jammed in cracks and just didn’t want to come out. This meant you might have to use your nut tool (a slender tool that can slip in the crack that you can use to jar the nut) to assist in getting the piece out. Sometimes this wouldn’t work either and you’d have to really think “how did this piece get into the wall” and reverse that process. It kind of made it like a puzzle or an investigation, both which I enjoy greatly.
While some students practiced cleaning pro and the hanging belay other students practiced rappelling past a knot. This is another skill that will hopefully not need to be implemented, but if you don’t know how to do it, you may be screwed.
Each of these two skills took a lot of time and there was downtime for some of the students. During this time some people made tape gloves (to protect the back of your hands when you're jamming them into the cracks). Others basked in the sun, and others would borrow pro from the instructors rack and practice placing it in the cracks or making anchors.
Once this was done we got back into groups and did some top rope climbing (where the ropes are already set up; either an instructor led them, or somebody climbed an easy side of the rock to get to the top of the route and then hung the ropes down).
The day ended a little after 4pm when I met Andreas in the parking lot. We split an ice cream in celebration of the weekend (or perhaps moreso because of our denial of an ice cream stop the weekend before) and then made our way back to Seattle.
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