Watch Your Exposure
Over the past couple of days I’ve had the chance to get outside and do a bit of climbing, and it has been amazing, there is nothing like it in the world for me that completely clears and resets my mind like climbing does for me. It combines all the great elements of problem solving, sort of like a puzzle, with the added flow generating aspects of highly intense physical activity. Basically, it requires all the effort, focus and attention you can give it to be successful, and when sloppy errors happen and serious injury becomes a real possibility, I try to avoid that.
As we were out yesterday we found ourselves climbing up this face, without a rope to get to the bottom of a route we wanted to try, and halfway up my friend and I looked at each other and said why are we doing this? With all the climbing gear that we needed we were climbing up this face to get to a climb and that was probably more dangerous than the actual climbing would have been. Luckily we didn’t fall the 50 feet down to our death on that little free climb and found some anchors to tie into and secure ourselves.
Once we achieved that vantage point we looked across the gully we had climbed up and saw another route, one that looked far more fun to attempt. We set up the rope and threw on our harness and repelled down to the base of that climb that we had unintentionally walked right past.
Upon starting that second route, it rose quickly along a fin like ridge of rock protruding from the mountain. I reached the chains and set up an anchor only to realize that above me was another set of anchors dotting the rock all the way up the ridge. Perfect a nice little multi-pitch climb.
I yelled down below that it was a multi pitch and my buddy threw on his shoes (after I was anchored in and off belay of course), and I started belaying him on up as he cleaned the route. Then we started the second section all the way to the top. By the time we reached the top we were overlooking the whole valley a few hundred feet up, after just 2 sections of climbing. It was amazing, I highly recommend it. Although the climbs where rather easy, the exposure of the face we were on added a whole new level of scariness.
It was amazing.
