Big Aid Weekend 4

Friday Night: 

Loaded Adam's car with ledges, haulbags, racks, ropes, food, & all the stuff we'd expect to need for 3 wall days. Erick met us there. In keeping with annual tradition, the bachelor was assigned with the care and well-being for Rosalita... the big wall doll for the weekend. Erick aided the arch and established a camp below Gumby's Roof for the night. The rest of us jugged to Rock Opera's anchors and set up ledges there.

With the help of the FA (providing the hardware), and Dom (providing the drill), I rebolted the old anchor for Rock Opera as well as the sole lead bolt on the slab. The rusty lead bolt was chopped but the old anchor remains. We found it useful for hanging ledges and hauling... and since we plan on doing this again soon, we decided to leave it in place. If anyone is truly offended... be my guest to go chop the old anchor.

Spent the evening trading insults with the Moncton Crew camped at Exfoliated. Aiding is awesome... Moncton sucks!

Saturday: 

Woke up at nearly first light after little sleep, had breakfast, and I led through Gumby roof. A nice aid practice, it went rather easily through the roof but I managed to get stuck and only worked it out by unweightting my daisies with the kneebar free-beta. Wicked! I think I'm going to try to free this route in the future!

After hauling through Gumby we made it to the ground and started up Menage A Trois with the goal of camping on top of the detached pillar. Chris & Adam freed the first 2 pitches and set up two independent hauls. I jugged the 60m while wrangling haul bag #1. Arriving at the pitch 2 anchors, I relieved Adam of hauling, and he belayed Chris up pitch 3 after his solo-aiding hit a roadblock. The haul is getting dialed. We went quick.

The excitement came as the haul was finished and Henni was still only half way up the last pitch. Rain, thunder, and lightening rolled over us. Erick & I started thinking that camping on top of the pillar with a bunch of metal lightening rods wasn't such a great idea and thought about bailing. About 15 minutes into the storm Henni still hadn't finished his pitch and the weather started to ease up. Sticking through it paid off and we set up of the night hanging off one of the coolest spots in Welsford!

Sunday


Another early morning and it starts off with a mini-epic no-doubt. We lower the haul bags two pitches down to the Waterwalk pitch 1 ledge and then do a double rope rap off the tree behind the pillar. Despite making every effort to pick my spot... I manage to get the knot connecting the ropes stuck and they won't pull. Henni decides to be the hero and jugs up the full 60m to free the knot! Nice work bro!

Erick, Chris and I then decide to explore Eagle Rock based on rumors of aid lines there. After considerable bushwhacking we find it. This place has considerable potential. There are some nice unclimbed cracks and some overhung faces that are featured. The existing lines seem to go up the obvious treed slabs and weaknesses but there are more difficult lines there. There is also height. 2 pitches for sure.

I go to aid the Great Roof and Erick solo-aids Diurnal Pegs. Erick get's nowhere fast when the rusted, quarter inch bolt placed in 1977 by the FA party shears off just as he's getting off the ground. It's now gone. Exploding bolts. Nice. I should have taken a picture of it before he ripped it. The Great Roof goes better for me and it's a fun aid-boulder problem followed by 60 feet of slabby blueberries to a tree anchor. With another easy looking pitch above us that rounds an arete to a nice view of the valley the three of us top out Eagle Rock and soak in a great view of Cochrane lane. We find at the summit a prospectors claim stake and drill hole, and stumble onto a funny geo-cache which we sign the log-book for. Silly geo-cachers!

A great weekend.

Cochrane Lane Trailmap

Given that a number of climbers have been going out of their way to make Cochrane Lane a nicer place, I thought of a way I might be able to contribute. Today at lunch I developed an updated trail map with the intent that the painted version at the sign-in box might be replaced. This version is somewhat inspired by the style of a classic Colin Bell sketch map of the area but is made to scale, with modern names assigned to areas. I could plot and laminate a large version to post... but before going to that expense, I thought I'd post this draft for comment first. Hope it's of some value.

And... the data behind it:

Big Aid Weekend 3

Sunday was another day for aid training. I had a few things I wanted to accomplish. First was to get my system for solo-aid dialed and the second was to get some more mileage jugging and cleaning on a traverse.

The solo-aid bit went pretty well. At one point it was actually pretty cool to see the four of us solo-aiding across the entire span of Joe's garage simultaneously. Erick on Astroboy, myself on Trundling, Chris on the Arch, and Adam at Sticky Fingers. I managed to figure out the flow much more quickly than last time and had two pitches start to finish, cleaned, and rapped in about 2.5 hours. Not bad. Easy stuff when every piece is bomber and the falls are clean. For anything else I gotta say that I'd still much prefer a human being at the other end of the lead line.

After finishing with that Henni had half-finished his project for the day: a traverse across the entire length of the Arch... finishing on the anchor for Bone Machine. He'd fixed a cleaning line for me and I got started. I made quick progress thorough the slimy, wet, arch until I arrived at the tat below Gumby roof. At this point, the line traverses approx. 30' horizontally and it appeared as if Chris was either forced to hook considerably, or decided to back clean in order to link pitches. There was as I could see, only 2 pieces for the entire traverse, separated by 10' horizontal stretches between them. Without having cleaned the right gear to re-aid the traverse, my first option was to try to hook through it. Before unclipping my last good directional and committing to the traverse I tried a few hook placements... each one blowing... with the potential to send me whizzing off on a pretty big pendulum. Eff that! Instead I thought I'd use the Gumby tat as a lower-out with the spare cleaning line I had. I rigged it up and after some horrible awkwardness, I managed to get myself on the correct side and weighted the system. Problem was that once that happened, I was dangling in space with no way to get back to the wall to clean Chris's cam back in the crack. Totally stuck, wet, and fried at this point (this had taken me about 90 minutes of struggling) I lowered out and ended up at the Rock Opera anchors.  From there, I bailed. More on that later.

Earlier on in the arch I made the decision to remove an old, horribly rotten pin that was presumably in place since the FA (perhaps 35 years ago). Last summer I'd actually weighted this thing and gotten away with it... a feat which now I can't explain. I decided to give it two light taps up and down with the hammer in an effort to prevent breaking the biner-hole with direct funking. It moved almost completely out. I simply connected a draw to it and gave it a light yank by hand and she flung out no problem. The metal on the eye was rusted thinner than the edge of a dime and the main body of the pin is badly fatigued. It was removed as it was of limited value in place and it obscured natural gear placements readily available. The same could be said of all bolts on this beautiful arch.

Overall I was disappointed with myself for not making it successfully through the problem at hand. Hennigar jugged back up to my high point and re-aided the section back cleaning his gear as he went. The problem was do-able, but I didn't see the solution, and I wasn't willing to accept the risk of the pendulum... even though it looked clean. Clean or not a 15 foot pendulum fall doesn't sound nice. I'd just wish now that I'd been able to invent some other way out of that situation... having bailed doesn't sit well with me today.