chickenfeet

Sir Edmund Hillary has died. I haven't felt this sad about the death of a climber since we lost Pete Boardman.

A little while ago I saw a post by mizalaina on her first experience climbing on "real rock" (as opposed I imagine to an indoor climbing wall(1)). Her first climb was at a very respectable standard. Indeed. fifty years ago, it would have been the province of the elite climbers of that day, and I might just have managed it in my prime.

Anyway, the other day I was glancing idly through the climber's guide for Cwm Idwal, 1974 edition, and I saw the notes I had made against two climbs that I did on 10th October 1982 with one Carol Becker. Neither climb was anything like as hard as mizalaina's effort in the Kananaskis (which impressed me mightily!) but the first was long and the second, as a consequence, was quite high on the mountain. For those who know Idwal we climbed Faith and continued up Lazarus. As is normal in mid October in North Wales it was decidedly cool and the rock was damp in places. Carol, in particular was suffering from numb fingers and I was having a few problems that way myself. As I said, Lazarus isn't particularly technically difficult (It's about 5.4 in good conditions) but it has a long exposed, very delicate and totally unprotected traverse followed by a seriously insecure step up into a groove(2). In North America that traverse would have been bolted by now for sure. It's also highly polished. This is another problem that one rarely sees in North America because there simply isn't the same density of climbers.(3)

I'm looking at my annotations here and the I appear to have underlined the phrase "not hard for its grade" and added a question mark and added several exclamation marks after "the crux is open and not well protected" and heavily underlined "a serious pitch"(4). It clearly felt much harder that day than the guide book suggested!

I'm wondering how an indoor wall jockey would go on such a climb on such a day.

fn1: I did most of my climbing back in the 80s when climbing walls were relatively new and definitely thought of as just a training tool for real climbing and the idea that somebody might regularly use a climbing wall but rarely, if ever, climb on rock would have seemed as ludicrous as, say, someone who only ever ran on a treadmill.

fn2: The traverse is as nasty for the second as the leader though at least the final groove is secure enough with a rope from above. On another occasion I led the route seconded by my ex. She was back and forth on that traverse like a pianist practicing scales. At one point as she retreated and, wanting some slack rope, she shouted up "give me another six inches" at which point one of the two squaddies waiting to do the pitch shouted up in a loud Yorkshire accent "Ay, that's what my missus says too". The ex shot up the rest of the pitch like a greased ferret.

fn3: It's amazing how what were once genuine rugosities can become little mirror smooth bumps just through the passage of feet. One time I was climbing with an older gentleman on the Alphabet Slabs on Glyder Fach. I had just led him up some particularly smooth and shiny horror when he announced that he had once led it in nailed boots. My jaw hit the bottom of the cwm some hundreds of feet below us. He continued "Of course, it had holds on it in those days".

fn4: serious (adj) - you could easily die here