If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.
– John Archibald Wheeler
As typical the trip had been a long time in the planning. Some of the usual suspects were involved, as well as some welcome new members to our eclectic league. We started to gather in Las Vegas on a Friday night in late March. It was technically spring… just, but even so it was uncharacteristically cool for the time of year. Our other friends wouldn’t be joining us until Monday so we had a couple of days to kill with just the four of us. We decide to give Group Therapy a try; the climb, not the psychiatry. One of the appealing features of the route is that it has a nice short approach. On paper the climb seemed really straight forward; 6 pitches in length and 5.7+… give or take. We climbed in two teams of two. Andrew and Bruce went first. Franck and I waited for them to get to the first belay before we started up. The climbing was pretty straight forward although I made a right mess of the second pitch, and we wasted some good amount of time there. Climbing in the gym is no substitute for trad leading on real rock…duh. You would think that I would figure that out one of these days, and maybe move back to some place I can get outdoors on a regular basis.
Pitch 5 was certainly the crux. Andrew and Bruce climbed it a bit differently than we did however. Safer I think. We ‘extended’ pitch 4 and ended up right underneath the roof crack where we set up our belay. The belay itself although semi-hanging was pretty solid. The problem was there was no way for us to really protect the belay as the leader climbed through the crux. One would need a hellacious big yet to be invented cam or Big Bro; which we didn’t have with us. The crack was pretty wide, almost like a squeeze chimney. It was certainly no harder than the advertised grade, but it was run out. What was that catchy phrase of Andrew’s? “You couldn’t fall off” Well you could, but you probably shouldn’t. I still get a kick outta the inflection he uses when he says it.
Looking up to the belay at pitch 5
So Franck is leading with his usual aplomb and, in his usual ‘more nerve than Dick Tracy’ style he gets through the roof and onto the ramp above where he eventually fiddles in some gear. I was more than a bit concerned up to this point. If he came off it looked as if one of two outcomes were possible. One is that he might wedge in the crack. The second is that he would fly past me and we would have a genuine Fall Factor 2 situation. For those of you out there who aren’t familiar with fall factors, this is a bad thing. Worst case scenario stuff. Fall Factor is simple math. It is a numerical ratio equal to the length of fall divided by the length of rope that is paid out.
F=h/L
A Fall Factor of 2 is the greatest you can have. It places a tremendous amount of force and stress onto the system. My back of the napkin math ciphering says we could have shock loaded the belay with over 7 kilo-newton’s of force.
Our anchor was three cams equalized (sort-of) with a spectra cordollette. Plus I was also clipped into another separate piece using a PAS. The number one sin in multi-pitch climbing is not protecting the belay by placing a directional piece of gear close to the anchors. You should do this even if the climbing is easy and especially when you are about 165 metres off the deck as we were.
Fall factor = 2
You can’t fall off.
The belay
Looking down from belay at pitch 5
So maybe what we could have done better is this….
I think the better situation would have been for us to belay from lower down like Andrew and Bruce did. That way we could have easily protected the crux by placing gear where we had our belay anchors set. A fall going through the crux would have still been pretty big, but at least it wouldn’t have been directly onto the belay. Those guys also used only hexes and nuts for the entire route; Old School… all the way baby… no problem. Also, I don’t think cordollettes ever get things one hundred percent equalised. All you have to do is just shift a little bit and guess what? You are no longer equalised. And, sure, Spectra cordollettes are light, super strong, compact, and easy to rig, but they have zero shock absorption as well. Maybe fat dynamic nylon is a safer alternative. Save your grams somewhere else perhaps.
It was a long pitch and still run out past the roof but at least some opportunities for gear finally presented themselves and the climbing was great. I took the last pitch which was the easiest. The lads were patiently waiting for us on top. It was a bit of a gully scramble back to the base with one rap thrown in for good measure. We probably could have down climbed the rap if we had really needed to. It sure would have been nice to have had some approach shoes for the descent to save the toes. All in all it was a good day out, and we were soon back in Vegas knocking back IPA’s, and planning for the next day’s climb.
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