Exasperator
Posted by markhwebster on August 23rd, 2018 • 0 Comments • Full Article
Vitaliy and I went to Squamish over the weekend. We climbed at Octopus Garden where I led the nine on the right. I wasn’t as calm as I’ve been in the past, but it was a clean lead. We also did Vector. Two fives would be nice up there, or one plus the green big bro. It’s only 5.8 but the #five section goes on for 20 feet and it’s very insecure.
We also climbed Exasperator. He led the first pitch. When I arrived at the belay we both looked at the second pitch and knew we couldn’t do it clean. The jams are too small for my big fingers. We talked about bailing and driving home early…maybe doing some 5.9 nearby. But then I got to thinking that I could just climb up a few cams and bail. I’m good at down climbing. I could just pull the cams and climb backwards to the belay station. No harm no foul.
So I started up, placed a couple cams and had Vitaliy. Taking means he locks off the belay device and holds my body weight as I rest on the cam. It’s safer than falling because there is no acceleration. I place a cam, pull up the slack rope and wait for him to hold me. It’s called hangdogging. I rarely do it because I prefer climbing stuff where I don’t need to “cheat”. Cheating is defined as using the rope to get up the climb….it’s also called aid climbing. While I never pulled on a cam, I definitely rested on cams while placing better gear.
As I was hanging up there resting and feeling bad about the sh*t show, some climbers down below complimented me on a “putting up a good fight”. Later, after watching several other climbers I realized very few people get that pitch clean. And no one climbed it with white hair. I’d love to go back now. I’m sure I could do it with much fewer hangs. It’s basically a series of bad jams followed by good jams, and then repeat, every 8 feet.
In my spare time in the evenings I’ve been trying to finish some paintings I did at the Grand Canyon on vacation back in June. The paintings were ok, but needed a lot of TLC. I almost have one of them done. The colors of the canyon walls 8 miles away are very difficult to paint. I don’t think I’ve ever had to be so precise in mixing colors, which means it’s great practice.