Fear and Risk

“I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.”

- Moby-Dick

Ontario Noon, the phone-in show on CBC did a segment on risk and rethinking it with Will Gadd yesterday. The main thrust of it is that he’s an ice climbing champion, paraglider, you name it, who started to rethink his relationship to risk when a friend of his was paralyzed in a paragliding accident. (Admittedly, he’s already lost dozens of friends to accidents – but maybe it’s a combination of getting older, and the difference between being killed and being rendered quadriplegic.)

So people called in with stories. And I got the willies. But I kept listening, fascinated. Even reading books on climbing can get me freaked out: John Long’s books on anchors cause me to picture the falls or the possibility of failing. I’m maybe far too good at thinking about the possibility of things going wrong. I can be hanging off the rope in the gym and I’ll suddenly picture my harness splitting and giving way. Walking on wet clifftops on our last day out at the escarpment this season, I could vividly picture that awful moment of freefall if I fell. Every time I have to get on rappel, I get butterflies. A couple of weeks ago I had a nightmare where I was ridge walking with my sister and saw her suddenly slip and vanish. Two days ago I dreamed I was climbing a mountain (which kept changing under me, in that way dream landscapes do) with those narrow ledges to inch along and steep chunks of  climbing that we were having to do unroped. I even, sometimes, run through in my head every gear anchor I’ve ever built or climbed on, trying to picture it, trying to figure out where its weaknesses might have been, and what would have happened had it failed.

Lately – in the last part of the season – I suddenly realized I had issues with fear that hadn’t really been there before. Some fears – I think the unjustifiable ones – have faded away. I no longer get nervous on top rope (and yes, I used to, when I started out.) But other things have taken their place. I’m more cautious on cliff tops than I ever was before. And I know that I have got to get over my fear of falling on lead if I’m ever going to get anywhere. The last time I led in the gym was downright humbling: inexplicable fear and reluctance. Pissed me off.

Will, however, is saying that fear is part of what you have to do. It means you’re never ignoring the danger or the risk. He said “when someone rolls into the parking lot with a No Fear sticker on their car, I get scared.” A nice quote – and it echoes the one I started this post with (there’s never been an uncool Starbuck.) And I feel a little better. I need to be reminded of that every so often – it’s not just okay to have fear, it can be useful. People don’t always get that unless they climb, or do something else like it. Climbing is scary, and I love doing it.

But it’s weird. I don’t watch horror movies because I don’t like to be scared. I even avoid some social situations because I don’t like to be scared. But I like to climb. And I ride my bike down the main roads, in the winter. It’s not because I ‘like adrenaline.’ It’s not really got anything to do with ‘thrills’ as people seem to generally see them. Maybe it has to do with levels and types and qualities of fear. There is the useful fear that acknowledges risk, and then there’s this quite un-useful fear that gets in the way of climbing. And that fear has been something that I lately need to deal with. Face, figure out, get around.

2011: Looking back

Someone on Twitter today asked people to post a one-word summary of 2011. Mine was:

Instructive.

I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way. It’s been a hard year for me in many ways; chaotic, unsettled, impoverished, stressful, demoralizing at times. It’s also had its share of adventure, new experiences, and new friends. But when I look back, most of the year was, at its core, instructive; both the good and the bad.

A whole lot of the good has come from climbing. From my first trad lead, back in early April, through an enlightening moment with crack climbing, to my August epic and a night spent out on the side of a mountain with my crew, to developing a new unclimbed area and all the learning that goes with that, it’s been a big year.

The characters at the start of this post (so I’m told) say “warrior.” I bought myself a pendant today with those characters on it, to take into the new year. It’s partly because I’ve been reading Arno Ilgner’s The Rock Warrior’s Way, and I’m reading that because it’s a book on mental training for climbers, and I really think that the kinds of things you learn climbing become useful in the rest of your life. In fact, to be more specific: the person  I want to be in my climbing life is also the person I want to be in my day-to-day life. I’ve been learning a lot, through all the craziness of the last year, and I can actually feel that I’ve changed, in small but important ways.

So I look at all the things I’ve learned in this past season of climbing. I feel like I grew. I’ve learned a lot of things about my fear, and about my relationship to it (how it ebbs and flows, and that, apparently, when shit gets real my fear seems to back away and let me drive.) I’ve felt that moment when I say to myself, “yes, you’re scared; just climb,” and I’ve felt the fear slough away from me as I plow through the next moves. I’ve also felt that blissful moment when your movements flow and you think about nothing but balance, with your whole body contained in your mind.

I’ve learned things about humility, I hope, and about my chattering ego. I’ve climbed in rain, snow, and dazzling sunshine, in a winter jacket and in a tank top, and I’ve learned that I am just as happy and content top-roping in 0-degree weather, clutching my thermos lid full of tea with my hands raw, as I am leading on a sunkissed face when it’s 18 degrees out with a light breeze (and that therefore, there is hardly ever any reason not to go out and have adventures, certainly not the weather.) And I’ve made new friends, which for me is a fairly rare occurrence.

All of this mostly to say that the time I spent rock climbing has been some of the best and most agreeable bits of a year that’s been stretching me into a new mental shape. I can’t wait to see what I’ll be like next season.

My gear bit me… and other adventures in gym leading

A couple of times today, I found myself looking up at the rest of the climb and thinking, “Just climb it. Just fucking climb it.”

I was at Altitude with David, Céline and Phil for a day of lead climbing. (You can lead at Altitude as long as they check out your belaying and say you’re okay: at Coyote you can’t lead till you’ve taken their lead course.) I haven’t actually been sport leading all that much, or even gym climbing much, for a while now, but I went with the intention of making myself lead some stuff. I still get sketched out about falling, and the only way to get over that is to climb stuff, and fall.

So I did that: for a while anyway. And I did get better about falling, although I still don’t lead at the level I’d like to. Once or twice I had a lovely moment where I just climbed, fearlessly, forgetting that I was on lead. It only lasts until you get to the next draw and have to stop and clip, but while it lasts, it’s pretty sweet. That mental space, though, is probably also how I wound up with the nickname “Runout Kate” this summer: when the climbing felt good and fluid, and I was trad leading, I would forget to stop and place gear on easy terrain.

But also, I had even more moments where I looked up at the rest of the route and had to tell myself, “No, you are not coming down now, just keep going. So what if you fall? You’re fine. Just keep going.” And when I did, when I didn’t let tired or scared stop me, I was pleased with myself.

But as it turned out, I didn’t just learn things about leading. I learned things about belaying too. Particularly when I caught David on a massive fall. . .

He was about three-quarters of the way up on a tough route when he peeled off. As I looked up, I saw him falling toward me, and he was falling long enough that I had a sudden flashbulb delusion that I somehow wasn’t on belay, that he was coming all the way down. And then I’d been grabbed and whisked off my feet, hauled a good six or seven feet into the air myself.

It turned out he’d been above the draw, bent down to clip the rope at about the level of his ankle, and popped off. With the draws something like a meter apart, that meant he fell something like six feet, plus the six feet I was pulled into the air, plus the stretch of the rope. It was spectacular. The rest of the people in the gym turned to look at us as I hung, surprised, a dozen feet below David, who was hanging, surprised, another dozen or so feet below the last draw he’d managed to clip. It’s the first time I’ve been hauled off my feet belaying. I’m not light, and David and I probably weigh about the same: there had to be a lot of force in that fall to haul me up like that.

My ATC bit me.

In the meanwhile, the ATC had grabbed the flesh on the back of my thumb as the rope yanked my hand against it, and it wasn’t until I was hanging in midair and had caught my breath that I pulled it free. Leaving a nasty bite-shaped bruise which I’m pretty sure is going to get worse before it gets better. . .

It wasn’t quite as entertaining as the fall David took when the staff were testing Phil on lead belaying, though. Partway up the ‘bunny wall’ test route, David pitched off to test Phil’s ability to catch him. But Phil weighs just about a hundred pounds: he’s a really small man. David came down, Phil went up, and Phil’s head wound up between David’s legs. It was actually pretty funny. Céline and I applauded. And asked if this now meant David was an ass hat. The staff member then took Phil off to the weight room and found him a thirty-pound plate from the barbells that he could lash to while on belay.

No no no

I’ve been slowly, given the expense of it all, collecting my own gear this summer. And I discovered, as I was climbing on my new gear over this past season, that I made a mistake when I bought my set of sport anchor carabiners. I wanted some rounded ones to run the rope through, and some flatter, lighter ones to go through sport anchors (the kind you find on most sport routes around here.) The ones I got to run the rope through are blue, and the ones I put through bolts are gold. No real reason – they were just appropriately shaped, and hey, I liked the blue ones.

But then I realized that the carabiner on my Metolius “personal anchor system” – which is what I use to secure myself if I’m going off the rope – is also gold, and looks a whole lot like my anchor biners. This is not a good thing: if I happen to mistake one for the other, and unclip the personal anchor when I’m not safe, well. Then I would fall.

After realizing that, I figured I was going to have to buy myself another biner, to avoid mixups. But then today I decided it was probably just as good – and a little more entertaining – to do this:

Because nothing says "I have my own gear" like gear that's been wrapped in grimy, fraying finger tape and written on with a Magic Marker.

Spider silk rope… we can only wish.

Just watched this TED talk, and decided to post it here, a propos of not much, except that the discussion of stretch and tensile strength reminded me of stuff I’d been thinking about rope (while not able to sleep.) TED talks are great when it’s 2 AM and you can’t sleep (and are, for some reason, thinking about climbing gear while lying staring up at the ceiling.)

 

Alone in the gym

I went to Coyote on the weekend, on my own: not to climb hard, just to climb well. I’m hoping to get out of my 5.9/V0 plateau, and Step One is technique, right? (Step Three is Profit!) So I went to the gym not planning to challenge myself grade-wise, but to have a day of practice, which is easier to do on your own than when you’re with a bunch of people. Climbing in a group is great: you talk and work on problems and challenge each other and generally are social. But climbing alone, while you do have to try and make yourself keep working, means you can do boring-ass things like taking one problem and running it over and over and over just to see how gracefully you can do it, or how silently. Which is what I did.

I picked something that would have a couple of moves on it but not wipe me out, and did the ‘silent feet’ thing for a while. I have to admit I was also sort of hiding in the upstairs room, which has fewer people around, no children (if I’m actually doing training, I really don’t need the birthday-party kids running up and jumping onto the wall right where I’m trying to work on something) and not so many of the really strong climbers, who can intimidate me, particularly when I’m just doing training exercises on something in the middle of my range. I know I shouldn’t worry about what other people think, but I do sometimes, and I wanted to keep myself focused on what I was doing.

And there’s something very satisfying about getting to continuously climb gracefully. When you use good technique, it looks good, and you can feel it, and when I’m challenging myself on a harder problem, it doesn’t look good, or feel good. This was an afternoon of deliberately climbing slowly, with focus, with precision, making each move as well as I could. And in that regard it was quite satisfying.

 

November?

I met a guy named Phil recently, while working a 60-hour week at a warehouse toy sale (it’s a long story) and discovered that he was a climber. He’s just moved to Ottawa from London, UK, where he’s been climbing on south English sandstone. I told him he’d like the Canadian Shield, and promptly put him in the loop of people I usually climb with. We figured we might be able to get together at some point in the spring to go out on real rock, and in the meanwhile he’d have people to meet up with at the gym.

As it turns out, we got him out onto the Shield a little sooner than next spring, and started him with a bang, with two days straight of chilly, late-season Gatineau rock, an intro to trad leading (and multi-pitching,) and two of the longest routes he’d ever climbed. We don’t do things by halves around here, I guess.

We went out to Home Cliff last Friday, with David, who took the day off work. Hard to believe: November 25th, and we were out in the Gatineaus. And it turned out to be a really beautiful day. It was grey and misty until about 2:00, but the rock wasn’t freezing (it was wet and cold in spots but the face itself was dry, and I’ve climbed on colder.)

It may be a fantasy, but it seems to me like the stone at the end of the season is less cold than in the spring, because the warmth from summer is still buried somewhere, deep inside the crag. At least, while my fingers did burn a little, the stone wasn’t bone-cold the way it was this spring. And Phil’s first exclamation on pulling up onto our warmup route, Back to the Wall, was, “Speaking as someone who’s been climbing sandstone… That is some grippy shit!”

Phil and David scoping out the crag.

And then at around 2:00 the sun actually came out, and suddenly the grey rock and all the faded colours brightened. The pink feldspar lit up, we shed our jackets, and the cool air was just perfect. My fingertips stopped being cold at all on the stone. It was fantastic.

My favorite climb of the day was probably Peggy – an area classic which for some reason I haven’t done before. I had to start it a couple of times, but the tough bit is right at the start, and is really more of a mental puzzle than physically strenuous (if you’re doing it right, that is: I have some major bruises now on the inside of my left leg, just above the knee, from where an ill-advised attempt to brace myself into a gap in the rock with my knee led to a couple of spectacular falls, as my hands popped off the glassy feldspar and in falling, the outcrop caught my knee and sent me off on an almost-inverted, counterclockwise spin. Came close to whacking my head on one fall and the guys fetched me my helmet which, like a silly person, I had not been wearing.) Once you’re through the crux, right off the ground, the rest of the climb is what I think of as ‘tourist’ climbing. You just enjoy the hell out of it. It goes up through a mid-sized dihedral, out onto an airy exposed arete, and up a wall that overhangs just slightly, with huge handholds, so at the top, you have to lean back and make a big move up and over open air. Awesome.

Phil tackling a 5.11ish route at Home Cliff: love the blush pink of the rock in this section...

I bailed on climbing Saturday – David and Phil went though, and apparently Phil got his first taste of trad leading when he red-pointed Rocketman, a three-pitch climb -  and at the last minute we decided that Sunday’s weather looked like we might be able to squeak some climbing out of it as well, so Sunday found me, David, Céline and Jessica back at Home Cliff in the decidedly more damp weather. It sprinkled rain for most of the day, to be honest, but not enough to really properly be called rain, and it didn’t stop us from dropping a couple of top ropes and playing. I climbed Peggy again, surprised at how dry the lower section of it, sheltered by overhang, had remained, and slightly spooked by the wet, gritty, slippery upper half (my hand slid on the wet stone and popped off one of the big holds you have to use to get over that slight overhang at the top, which was a little adrenaline kick.)

No one really felt a need to work particularly hard on anything – in the wet, the rubber on your shoes gets really untrustworthy – so we just played, no pressure, no stress. When the temperature dropped enough that we were all starting to shiver, it was time to pack it in. I was the last up, to take down the anchor on Back to the Wall, and it was particularly uncertain: at one point a foot slipped and I actually fell off it, which was kind of laughable, given how easy a climb it is. But, I made it to the top, and with my fingers going numb, starting to shiver in my windbreaker, I took the anchor down, rappelled back down, packed up the rope, and we hiked back out.

Leaving in the rain - very possibly the last descent of the season...

Stopped on the way home for bread, cheese and wine, and finished the day – the weekend – probably the season – with some mulled wine, baked Brie, and a fire at David’s place.

Late season, bolting in Calabogie, and boots for Alibi

Yesterday David and Céline and I got out to Calabogie for some late season climbing: the kind where your fingers get so chilled on the stone that it’s hard to feel edges. Calabogie’s full of these lovely small ledges and crimps which have taught me a lot about edging, but there is something kind of unique about using those edges with finger pads that don’t actually feel anything. There’s always (for me at least) the nagging feeling that I’m actually slicing them open on the stone and not feeling it.

Also, you have to climb smarter when your shoes are cold: they’re less sticky feeling and that forces you to think harder about your foot placement. I felt a really lovely intense focus on a couple of climbs.

It was probably only about 6 degrees outside, so I warmed up while climbing, although the stone still held the night cold for the first couple of hours. But I was also grateful for my thermos of tea, and we regretted not bringing a lighter so we could have a fire to warm up at between climbs. (Céline’s more cold-blooded than David and I, and she felt it more.)

There were a couple of new sport climbs set up that we hadn’t seen before, so we put a top rope on them and checked them out. David rappelled down on one of them, and noticed that the anchor looks like it’s set in a detached block that’s part of another huge detached block. “It’s not coming down right away,” he said, declaring it safe to climb on, but since the time we were climbing at Montagne d’Argent and found an armchair-sized block of stone lying on the ground at the base of the cliff with an anchor bolted into it – and realized that it had come off the clifftop above us, about three or four years ago, according to Gaëtan, the guy that seems to be in charge at MdA – I think we’ve all been more aware of the impermanence of rock. It breaks, in the winters.

So we climbed the line – it was a really fun line, a crimpfest at the bottom, all tetchy and balancey, with a stretch of easier stuff in the middle and a very cool hand traverse along a finger crack at the top, with your feet on slanting ledges down under a bulge so you can’t see them – but all agreed that the anchor looked sketchy. The bit that we thought looked detatched is the size of a Smart Car, so it will take a lot to shift it, but we still wondered who had set the anchor and if we were missing something that they’d seen.

We didn’t have to wonder long: as we were setting up on the last climbs of the day, a guy came by with his partner and a couple of dogs. We asked if he knew who’d bolted the new routes and he said it was him. So we asked about the detached block. He said he’d thumped it and kicked it and checked it out and it seemed solid. We told him that it looked like the small block it was in was solid, but that it also seemed like the whole nose it was sitting on was detached. He said he’d keep an eye on it and take another look, thanked us for mentioning it, and we talked a bit more about where he was bolting and why. He’s a local, and he’s bolting 12A and 5.13 projects out there, but also setting up projects like the ones we were on, which were probably 5.8ish. I really appreciate that – someone who can climb really hard and who sets up lines in our range. And nice lines too.

We also really appreciated that he listened to our concerns about the anchor, said he’d keep an eye, and didn’t say something like, “Hell with you, I know what I’m doing,” or “If you don’t like it, don’t climb it.” Some people would, and I’m starting to learn that ego really shouldn’t have any place in climbing. He genuinely seemed to simply want people to come out and enjoy the crag (but not too many: he was talking about writing up a guide to the new routes, because anything you can find on Calabogie is twenty years old and doesn’t include a lot of the new sport routes, but didn’t want to make it public. He wanted to write it, then seal it up in a tube and hide it somewhere along the crag so people who know about it can find it. “I don’t want everyone finding out and coming here,” he said. “That’s what happened at Luskville and now it’s closed.”)

Ah yes, and then there’s the thing that really brought a smile to my face yesterday: Alibi’s boots. Ali is Céline’s dog, and he loves to come with us. He’s not usually a big fan of scrambling over talus, though, and we’ve had to push or lower him, unceremoniously, up and down some tough scrambles. (Céline pays him back in Brie. He puts up with it like a trouper.) A while back he cut his paw pad badly, so he’s been off climbing for a month, so he was overjoyed to be back:

Alibi, in his 'approach shoes': clearly happy to be coming with us.

So Céline got him some boots for the winter because of the ice and snow and salt, and because his paw had been cut open. And these are some seriously technical boots – made by Ruff Wear, the same manufacturer as his harness (which solved that problem of having to push him up and down fourth class scrambles.) These things are hardcore: grippy rubber soles, boot-clamp closures, gaiters, the works. He actually did have an easier time on the talus at the base of the crag, jumping up and down boulders that we’d had to lift him bodily over the last time. They made a difference.

Technical shoes for man and dog!

Add those to his harness/pack, and you have one serious climbing dog. All those other dogs you see at the crag that don’t have sweet gear like this? Pussies.

Bad ass climbing dog.

Found the good stuff

Up until now the rock we’ve found at Lac Sam has been good, fun, but nothing’s been really challenging; all in the 5.7 and under range. The weekend before last – the 17th-18th – was a toprope sort of weekend, though, and we got to climb some harder stuff.

On Sunday David and I hit Lac Sam again. We’re spending a lot of time there, yeah – but it’s so much fun. We decided to open up some of the other rock we’ve seen in the pictures on Right Wing, so we headed a bit further along the crag (climber’s left) to the next face down.

We hit the jackpot with this one. There was a gorgeous big ledge to build our anchor on at the top (once we found it with a bit of nervewracking clifftop bushwhacking) for one thing, and David constructed a pretty elaborate and technically admirable anchor.

We rappelled down (it’s always scary for me, looking down at the cliff from above and then rapping into the unknown: and yet I do it, and have actually started to make friends with the fear) and discovered a couple of bulging slight overhangs and a huge bouldery overhang at the base. This section of the cliff has a base that sort of vanishes at the sides, so you’ve got this one big ceiling to break no matter what. You can’t walk climber’s right to Easy Street: the base is too steep. And you can’t walk left to get out either, same problem. So when you rap down into this wall you have to climb back out, and of the three routes we put up, we were only willing to try climbing one with packs on at the end of the day. Everything else was in the 5.9 region. Whee!

Everything starts below a ceiling which is big enough to get in under when you’re belaying. The first climb we did has a start that you’d swear was designed: two handholds on top of the overhang, one high step (I could step up onto it with the left foot: David had to hop it. I love being flexible) and a really pumpy rockover with nowhere for your right foot, pull up onto the slope above, and head up. The climbing’s not bad from there on in, until you hit a slightly right-facing, near-vertical face with tiny crimpy edges. You head up that (I fell. A lot.) with the toughest move being a very balancy wide step to the left with your right hand on a sidepull crimp, and a tricky weight shift so you can go for a big jug at the top and use that to clear the last of the face. It was hard work, and when I got through it I declared that section 5.10ish. But we settled on a 5.9, maybe 5.9+ rating for the whole climb, and David named it Welcome to the Machine.

We put up another one next to it with a lot of big burly moves up an overhead dihedral and around an arete, past a spooky big detatched nose, and then on up the face. Where the first was technical and balancy (more balance and finesse needed than anything I’ve climbed in the last couple of months) this one was big and chunky. Fun. We called that one Shine On You Crazy Diamond (5.8) (seeing a theme here)?

And then I got the dihedral. I always get the dihedrals, I guess. It was to the right of everything, and was actually a sort of set of dihedrals with spaces where you could slip from one to the other. Since it turned out to be the easiest thing on the cliff and the only way out with packs – and since I discovered, when we tried to climb Welcome to the Machine again as the last climb of the day, after we’d taken our packs up, that you can get to this dihedral from the crux of WttM if you’ve completely run out of juice and can’t do that 5.10ish move – I named it Escapism. It’s about a 5.5 I think.

Because hoo boy. The first time I went up WttM I pulled that big opening move off after a try or two – with some effort, but I did it. The last climb of the day, though? I fought my way through that thing tooth and nail. Fell several times. Actually roared with frustration once. I’d pull up onto the left foot and my right foot would find nothing, and my knee would touch down, and then I’d be screwed, with my triceps screaming at me as I crouched at the edge of the boulder unable to stand up and free the right knee. Every time. It was amazing. You don’t feel that tired at the end of the day, but man. The juice just isn’t there. I eventually got through it though. Had to bail on the crux, and head over to Escapism, though. I was just shaking.

Which was really satisfying, I gotta say. Nice to get outside on a gorgeous September day and pull some hard stuff.

Climbed:

Welcome to the Machine (5.9+) (TR)

Shine On You Crazy Diamond (5.8) (TR)

Escapism (5.5) (TR-FA)

Playing around

Céline and I hit Calabogie this Saturday to mess around (and actually road test my new rope.) It was fun – quiet, peaceful, and cool, the rock nice and dry and sticky. We were both breaking in new shoes, so the edging was lovely, and Calabogie offers some nice edging. I dropped a top rope on some unknown quantity of a route near the descent gully, and we had some fun route finding. There was some added interest for me, because as the more experienced outdoor climber, I was the one setting up the anchors (also, the rope and anchor gear was all mine.)

The first one I set up meant reaching over the clifftop to clip the biners in, and then rapelling down – getting over the edge when I was a couple of feet above the anchor was scary. I had clipped in with my daisy chain, but in the slithering down onto the rope, I got the slings and biners (of outrageous fortune, as I keep calling them) wrapped up around each other. To make matters worse, the biner on my daisy chain had gotten wedged in and around the biner attached to the anchor slings (really, in hindsight, I should not have been using the daisy, for just this reason. Ah, you live and learn.) In short, the whole thing was a mess, and I was clipped in to the anchor bolt via a personal safety line that I couldn’t, now, unhook, because I’d weighted it, and wedged it in the anchor system. Plus, there was virtually nowhere to put my feet to try and gain any slack in the rappel system, because I was still in my approach shoes. There was a bit of inglorious struggling, where I wrapped the rappel rope around my leg a couple of times to free up my hands, got Céline to back me up with a fireman’s belay, and then fought to winch myself up to the point where I could unclip the daisy chain carabiner and wiggle the daisy chain out of it, leaving it there.

It was actually kind of scary taking the daisy chain out of the carabiner – the last loop is coloured alert orange, in a “do NOT disconnect” kind of colour signal. But I got it free, and rapped down safely after all.

We popped top ropes onto a few different routes – one of them had a lovely vertical crack which turned out, about four metres from the top, to have a wasps’ nest built into it. I thought it was abandoned until I got higher, got a finger lock in the bottom half of the chink they were in, and then heard a dry buzzing. I backed right off the route, and managed the fastest and most efficient traverse I could do on small edges to get away from them.

The last climb of the day was an impulse and an unknown. I was at the top of the cliff with the rope, and offered to drop a top rope on another route. We looked around for a route I had climbed maybe once before, and couldn’t find the top of it, but Céline , below, spotted a line she wanted to try, so I scrambled down and put a rope on a big cedar.

The route looked easy, except for the base, where it was hugely undercut and overhanging. But, Céline thought it would go – and it turned out that she was right, although it took a lot of struggling at first. There was a big jump to a couple of good handholds, with feet way in under the overhang, and I struggled for a bit and then gave up. Céline tied in and fought with it for a while, and with a certain amount of “belayer assisted” climbing she bashed up high enough to figure out the sequence. So, she climbed it, and then I got back on and synched up the moves, flashing the route.

(We found out later the route was called Grunt and is rated 5.9, mostly for the bouldery big opening moves and the fact that on lead they’re unprotected.)

We’d both meant to lead a showy 5.6 near there, but agreed that it was actually more fun to throw top ropes on tough stuff and really work our muscles. At least, that day it was.

Climbed: a couple unknowns, in the 5.6/5.7 range, and Grunt (5.9)