Abseiling,. Fun for the masses?

If you've been climbing long enough then that chances that you've had to abseil (or rappel) are quite high. Whether it's to back off a route because of worsening weather, rescue a stuck piece of gear, to gain access to the base of a sea-cliff or just to get back down to the base after finishing a route, like it or not abseiling is a pretty important skill to master. I guess you only get it wrong once, right?

I also love it when you take to any non-climbers who you (god forbid) might end up in a conversation with about climbing. After the initial "what's the highest mountain you've climbed? have you climbed everest? Have you seen that guy in TV that climbs buildings? then there generally an anocdote about climbing somewhere in thier childhood... and more often than not there is another story about how great abseiling is and asking you've done any. I see a lot of climbers faces drop when asked this. I remember abseiling as a kid and I've worked in outdoor ed so I know how safe all the set-ups are. It just annoys me that the masses normally don't get how bad abseiling can be.

Either way I thought I'd write something about it. This is mostly a regurgitation of information already out there, but some people won't know it and I've been using it for the past few years without any problems. I think the original idea was posted up here (on Andy Kirkpatricks site, when it was still psychovertical) but someone has produce this awesome image (originally from here):

I use this method to abseil pretty much all the time. A 120cm sling is larks footed between my belay and leg loops and then knotted with a simple overhand knot about half way along it's lenght. My belay device is clipped into the loop nearest to the harness and a screwgate is clipped into the end of, what is now pretty much, the cows-tail. My prussic is clipped to my belay loop (is use a french) and I'm ready to go. 

This all may seem a bit much for just abseiling back to the floor off a route but I've found thast if you force yourself to set everything up the same way each time you abseil, regardless of the situation (wind, rain, sun, shine, tiredness, stress, lack of time), then when it is really bad your brain is already set up to do it properly. I find it helps me.

Two things that are really useful about this method of abseiling are that you've already got a cowtail to clip into any anchors on the way. When I've had to descent more than one pitch or arriving at a hanging belay when sea cliff climbing having something already attached and ready to clip in make life a load easier. I know popular opinion at the moment is to not use slings to attach yourself to a belay but as long you keep the sling tight and t your weight below the belay (therefore reducing any possibility of shockloading) it should be ok. See the DMM video here for more information. With all this in mind if you find yourself abseiling a lot then maybe purchasing a nice chunky 120 nylon sling would be a good idea (although I don't use one). The other useful thing is that I can see my abseil device and everything is in line. It's simply nice and neat. 

I'll put up something about rigging abseiling and testing them soon.

hacked off at the weather (among other things)

I've basically not been climbing in whats felt like weeks. The most I've managed since I was last out with Soames has been a couple of evenings at the Churnet. One was excellent, one less productive. There is a severe lack of motivation going on as far as climbing is going for me, which is ridiculous! I've the alps to prepare for in the summer (like 2 months away or something stupid) and I break up from work in like 4 weeks, thus I'll need to fill that time climbing (or slack lining, or high lining, or something equally pointless, dangerous and self-fulling). So why do I lack the motivation to do anything?

I have no answers.

Having said that I've got the next weekend away with Soames working on a couple of little cliffs in Wales. It is a little dependant on whether I can acquire/manufacture some kind of belay stake as we've currently go nothing at the top of some of the cliffs. A crowbar will be needed as well, and a peg hammer. It should be a pretty interesting trip by all accounts.

It looks like my week will be spent in the shed or workshop at School or climbing to try and get a little fitter. I felt I should post something anyway.

Going back to the same problem over and over...

and over and over and over and over... (you get the idea).

After spending a weekend grounded by the bad weather (I did realise too late I could have gone to New Mills and hung out under the bridge to boulder) I ended up watching lots of climbing film. This of course wasn't a bad thing but a lot of them seemed to feature some pretty hardcore sport climbing peoples redpointing hard routes. These people would spend days, months and even years going back to the same problem over and over trying to get it completed. What struck me was the level of commitment that they showed in pursuit of thier goal. Now for someone like me who tries to climb everything onsight and if that fails ground up it all seemed a little alien.

I was struck by a something Steve Maclure said (which went along the lines of) "people don't realise how much pressure falls on you when you're redpointing. When you're trying to onsight a route you either get up it first time or fail, and then the pressure is off. You've onlg got the one chance. But if you're redpointing a route and you've worked each section till you know it all and you're still failing on it, that massive pressure is still there and it increases everytime you think that maybe you can't do it".


I never really thought about all the effort that goes into a hard redpoint. We discussed redpointing at lenght and came to the conclusion that neither of us would be caught working routes like that. It wasn't until we ended up at Churnet the next day and went to ousal crag that it hit me. I work boudler problems all the time. Infact a spent about 4 hours working one problem at Wright's, only to head straight back there on my next free day to get it done. 


Climbing is a weird obessive pastime. For some it is simply a sport, and by sport I mean a form of exercise that they are interested in but for others (inlcuding me) it's a more like a life. I tend to spend my time getting up early and going to bed late, doing a lot of driving. At the end of the day when I think about it, it's not actually that odd an activity to go back to the same place over and over to work a route or problem.


Here's some photos from churnet:

(View through the trees)

(The little shelter that was here last time still stands)

(The chalked up holds of the 7a traverse, something

I still can't complete)

Another weekend new routing in wales...

With over 300 miles of driving and 2 days in Wales we came away having climbing only 4 single pitch routes. I bet there’s quite a few people out there who’d be pretty disappointed with something like that, but not me. I had an awesome time. 

If you’d not guess I’ve been to Wales, specifically Rhoscolyn in an attempt to finish off the cliff and get it all done and dusted. Well it didn’t exactly go down like that, the cliff is not finished but that almost doesn’t matter. There was a lot of exploring done, loads of scrambling around the base of little zawn, walking along to top of the cliff trying to make head or tail of what’s actually there (poor guidebook descriptions) and some dangling around on abseil ropes cleaning off loose rock. Considering the rest of North Wales was experiencing flash flooding, I’m pretty happy I came away with a little sunburn. 

Saturday was spent wandering around various bits of the coastline because the weather refused to actually settle. It wasn’t wet enough to bail on the entire trip, neither was it actually dry enough to go climbing. Every brief period of dry weather lulled us into a false hope that maybe it would stay dry this time. With all this interesting weather we actually had a pretty good day out. It all started like it normally does with an early start, picking up Soames and breakfast somewhere along the way. Early was clearly the key word here because we’d made it pass Llangollen before 0800. This “forced” us to stop at Pete’s in Llanberis instead and sat drinking a pint of tea and watching the rain. The rain was supposed to have let up by 9ish that morning thus we arrived to park up for the cliff around that time. It was still raining. 

And that pretty much described the day. Arriving at different places and watching the rain, which was never too bad to justify not being there! Our first walk into the cliff confirmed our suspicions that it was damp and greasy, so with hope of it drying out anytime soon Soames suggested we have a little explore up “The Range”, a section of cliff from Porth Dafrach to Gogarth South. I really should have taken my camera out with me (god only knows why I didn’t) but we went armed with waterproof jackets, print outs of the gogarth wiki and the old gogarth guide. You’d have thought that with all this useful and informative stuff we’d have had an easy time finding the cliffs, but no. The guidebook was clearly written by someone who either had never been here before or someone who was a local user and thus left out all the information that a non-local would need. It was frustrating to say the least but we did get there in the end and what a place to climb. The established lines look pretty wild on some interesting rock. The guidebook kept referring to “mousetrap” like geology, which would have been helpful if it wasn’t everywhere. 

Thus cutting a long story short we spent about 2 hours trying to decipher the old guidebook, making precious little headway in the process. Actually that’s a lie as we managed to identify a load of routes (and by load I mean about 7) and establish where most of the zawns are. Relating all this back to the information I’ve got off the Gogarth Wiki is going to be a pain.

As soon as the weather looked up we high-tailed it back to Crag X, only to arrive to find the air thick with either some air born mist which was greasing up the rock something rotten or just plain rain. We spent a lot of time sitting under a boulder before moving to the top of the crag… where I promptly feel asleep (so did Soames). I woke up about 3 hours later, feeling chilled to the bone and we bailed to the promise of Soames’s cooking, a few beers and a warm sleeping.

What a difference a day makes! We spent most of the evening watching the weather clear up as we ate our curry. The went the most amazing sky-blue-pink (I don’t care what anyone says, it is a colour) as the clouds started to break up overhead. It had all the makings of a cold night but we actually woke up to a warm morning with the sun streaking in and cooking me in my tent. Breakfast was a problem as we’d not actually brought anything but we were saved by the best £2.50 4 item breakfast bap we found in the bakery attached to the shop in Treardur Bay.

We soon found ourselves gearing up and complaining we were too hot at the cliff. Due to its reasonably sheltered location it just became a suntrap and we’d both been expecting another cold day. We jumped straight to it really with Soames leading a fantastic route which he called “the Lineback offensive”, HVS 5a. I hung around belaying and trying to keep the weight off my hip (bruised hip, yet another injury from football) and watch as he climbed up the wall, trying in vain to shoot some decent pictures. The crux of the route required a really high foot jammed in a horizontal crack, heel-toeing like crazy to keep you on the wall. It’s a really wild move and a great addition to this section of cliff. I put a route up called “sunshine and showers” which probably goes at about E1 5b. It’s more of an eliminate line really and took a flat wall with shallow horizontal breaks and cracks in it. I took ages leading it, trying to build up the courage to make these tentative little moves (which formed the crux) off the good ledge, conscious of the poor cams placed above me. It was quite a weird climb for me in some respects as I just felt like I didn’t have the complete control over my body and I couldn’t trust me limbs properly. Still I didn’t fall off. Then we finished off Gambler’s Wall with Soames putting up a lovely HS 4b with hidden pockets and odd gear placements (and a hands off knee bar for those in the know) up the arete at the end of the wall. I lead a direct start to Joker’s. It’s a good route in its own right, but nothing compared to Joker’s (original).
 
And short of me soloing a Diff gully out of the back of coffee pot area that was pretty much it for the climbing. Sure there is some big lines to be done at the cliff, but it was still a little greasy. I opted out of abseiling the line of “elephant graveyard” simply because it overhangs the sea so much that it I’d have had to prussic back up the abseil rope rather than get a soaking. Instead I abseiled the groove line to the left of The Vipper/Hydrophobia again. This time I made a serious effort to work out the moves and find some decent gear, which is something I’ve not done before. I’ve never worked a route on abseil before but because of the nature of the line (overhanging, with big wild moves involving some heel hooking above bad gear) I figure that ethically it’s alright. If and when I do lead it I know it’ll be right at the top end of what I’m capable of, and I don’t want an accident on it. We have to abseil in anyway so getting out would be hard.

I said “if and when I lead it” because well I didn’t lead it this weekend. The rock was pretty greasy in the bottom section, which although doesn’t look that hard it does have pretty poor gear. My head also wasn’t with it. It’s easy to make excuses for yourself but I can just be honest and say I didn’t have the motivation to focus on a single route. There was too much stuff flying around in my brain. I swung round the arete on abseil and soloed a Diff gully next to coffee pot to get out of there.

This left us sitting at the top of the crag wondering what to do and me feeling pretty responsible for our lack of climbing. I’d opted out of leading and there wasn’t anything Soames wanted to do either. I don’t know why I ended up going back through the guidebook again (the gogarth wiki one) and trying to identify different lines and I noticed some of the lines like the Vipper have either descriptions which are wrong or we’ve marked them in the wrong place… like on the wrong crag. We set off back along the coastline looking for new lines instead. I think the original idea was to find the original line of the vipper, but instead we found something more interesting… much more interesting.

(route cleaning...boom)

We found a massive 30 metre high slab, which had some clear lines running up it. We actually ab’d it and cleared about a tonne of loose material off it. We came up with a little ethical rule that if something can withstand 3 strong kicks on abseil then it’s fair game to leave it one route. We might have to rework this rule if it prove unsafe, but for the moment it’ll stand. This slab really looks amazing, but we really need to give it a good clean and bang in some gear, in the form of pegs. Pegging, for me at least, opens up another ethic debate because even though some of the harder routes have been pegged along the Holy Island coast we’ve tried to climb everything with hammering away. Maybe our ethics are slipping in our quest for new routes?

And then even more fun. After leaving the first massive slab and scrambling around every piece of rock and zawn that we could get to, we found another slab of compact hard black rock with a series of about 30 metre high single pitch possible lines on it. Soames started cleaning it on abseil and we found that a lot of the material at the top is pretty loose but it can be cleaned off. 

So I’m pretty excited to get back there. We’ve added brushed to our sacks and I’m trying to find some decent stakes for our next trip. I just simple can’t wait to get back. 

(no one said new routing was a light excerise!)

Just something worth watching

Shattered from Tyler Stableford on Vimeo.

A serious lack of posting

It's now the middle of half term and I've spent most of it sitting indoors watching the weather. I'm been watching it do one thing mainly... and that's rain. I don't dislike the rain, but I'd like to be out climbing, not that I'd been mush use on rock at the moment. Playing football against the year 11 team in the staff vs year 11 match I slipped and fell during a tackle. It was no-ones fault, other than my own inability to stay on my feet but it doesn't take away from the fact my hip is still swollen and bruise 6 days on. Climbing hurts at the moment. 

So in a weird way I'm glad its raining. I need this time to sit around and heal up and there is plenty to do around the house. The majority of this is sorting through all my stuff as me and my partner have broken up. I'm living out of boxes and bags and there's piles of climbing gear everywhere. There is a lot that needs sorting. 

All work on the guidebook has sort of stagnated. I've noticed this with essays and big projects in the past that when I'm nearing the finish line motivation drops. I think it probably has something to do with actually achieving something than then having to find something else to move on with. Either way there isn't that much at actually do on it. There is a lot or flipping through paper work sticking in names and dates mostly.

In reality I've got a lot of posting to do, I've actually purchase some new guidebooks and guides and I've managed to get out on the grit a couple of times, in between the rain of course so watch this space.