Two Climbs in Boulder Canyon
This is the 2nd installment concerning good and bad judgment; the first installment was the 2/28/21 Note titled 1st Flatiron.
About 11 miles up Boulder Canyon there’s a formation called Castle Rock, offering options for vertical and overhanging climbs. Our climbing instructor was Pat Ament, in the 70’s among the best technical climbers in the country—probably the very best. He’d already put up many first free ascents (meaning without the use of direct aid), sometimes forcing new levels of difficulty to be added to the technical climbing grading system. In the 60’s Royal Robbins and Pat did the first free ascent on a Castle Rock route (Athlete’s Feat) about 150 feet East from where our climb (on a route called Jackson’s Wall) was to start; Athlete’s Feat was considered at the time the most difficult free climb in the country.
Full disclosure: we student climbers were by no means the best student climbers in the country—we just happened to live in Boulder, which was Colorado’s ground zero for bouldering and technical climbing. Frankly I never became more than mid-level climber in my time on walls.
When climbing with Pat Ament I was as intimidated by being in his presence as I was by the exposure and challenge of the climbs. But Pat was always extremely witty and engaging, and generously shared his climbing wisdom and technique during each day’s challenge. He was also beyond fierce when it came to technical challenges. As an aside, he once demonstrated for us the level of commitment he was willing to make: we’d been in Eldorado Canyon practicing small-hold climbing on a smooth quartz face called Supremacy Slab—afterwards Pat took us back behind the Slab to a crack that was overhanging at the same angle, called Supremacy Crack, rated 5.11. Pat was the first person to free climb, and later the first person to lead this shallow, bottoming, severely overhanging crack. He matter-of-factly explained that your blood lubricates the crack making it more difficult, but getting your finger bones jammed against the quartz gives you the holding power you need—as he climbed, a few thin rivulets of blood ran down his fingers and hands as he quickly worked up the crack. He then asked if any of us would like to try the route. No takers.
Back to Jackson’s Wall: on this particular day Pat had chosen a route to give our small climbing party the opportunity to practice laybacks diagonally up a vertical face, and farther up, to work our way over an overhang. A layback involves (for instance) placing your fingers into a crack and pulling while at the same time pushing against the far side of the crack (or a corner wall) with your climbing shoes—the opposing forces keep you from falling off the face and you can climb by repositioning one limb at a time as you move up. A roof (or if smaller, an overhang) is a section of the rock face that juts out from a vertical wall, forming a significant obstacle to climb past.
The first two pitches (a pitch being the distance from one belay point to the next) were up a 200-foot long stone flake that had partially separated from the face, partially filled with talus, and stabilized. At ground level the gap between the wall and the flake was several feet; it gradually narrowed, and maybe 100 feet up the route we began the layback practice which involved placing your hands on the edge of the flake and sort of hopping out while hanging on and turning to get your feet positioned to set up the opposing pressures mentioned above.
After working on laybacks we reached the top of the flake and worked directly up the vertical face to a small platform just below the overhang.
Pat then demonstrated how to attack the puzzle. The first climber worked over the overhang, but the second climber dislocated his shoulder in the attempt—which immediately changed the climb to a rescue.
No photos were taken during the climbs described. This photo (© 2021 Jade Guttiérez) shows the location on Jackson’s wall from which we abandoned our climb. The overhang just above the climber (Nick Myers) was to be the crux move of this portion of our climb. In this photo Nick is belaying Jade as she leads the next pitch. Jade and Nick climbed Jackson’s Wall June 11, 2021; my thanks for permission to use this photo.
The part of Jackson’s Wall we were on was just slightly past vertical. We tied two of our ropes together and clipped them into a fixed bolt. (Back then one used a carabiner brake on two ropes for rappels.) Looking straight down, the ends of the ropes looked to be hanging free, perhaps 2-3 feet away from the wall, but because I was looking down along them I couldn’t tell how close they got to the ground—my guess was they were short by 15-20 feet. Pat asked if I was comfortable rappelling down to check out the situation. Time was of the essence, as the longer the injured climber’s shoulder remained dislocated the harder and more painful it would be to get it back into position.
I started my rappel, wondering all the while about how exactly Pat was planning to get the injured climber down. Unfortunately, somewhere along the descent I lost track of the little business of paying attention to where the ropes ended. I was looking up at our climbing party as I glided down, pushing away from the wall and dropping 15 or 20 feet and repeating, when the ends of the two ropes popped through my right hand, which was positioned behind me to make the ropes slide against my hip for a little added friction and control. In the tiniest fraction of a second the ropes shot through the carabiner brake to which I was attached. Released from the force of my weight, the ropes sprang wildly up the face.
Some dendrite at the back of my head reported, “You’re dead.”
Rappelling off the end of your rope can not only kill you, it likely will also posthumously brand you among your fellow climbers as having just slightly improved the gene pool.
But before I could even react, much less ponder the upcoming ignominy of the unforced error of my death, my feet hit the ground with no more force than jumping off a curb. Steadying myself, I looked up at the ropes, which were settling down some 15 feet above my head. Kernmantle climbing rope is very elastic and my weight had stretched them enough to basically completely fill the gap to the ground.
As I was the smallest climber in the party it was safe for the other climbers, and I called them down. The unaffected climbers rappelled down, both to get them to safety and to get them out of the way. Then Pat lowered the injured climber, rappelled down himself, and reset the shoulder.
In the meantime I was going into mild shock over what I’d almost just done to myself—my dumb luck had cancelled out my extremely stupid act. But of course the injured climber was our focus, and my incident was just the making of a little self-deprecating story over a cup of tea (or whatever you’re drinking).
There’s another incident though, that still haunts me.
It also took place in Boulder Canyon, but only a mile or so up the canyon from Boulder, on a rock formation called The Dome. Again it was a climbing class, this time part of a course led by Harv Mastalir, a long-time member of Rocky Mountain Rescue (btw, having the leader of your climb be a member of Rocky Mountain Rescue is a sign of excellent planning). Rocky Mountain Rescue was and is a Boulder-based volunteer organization performing rescues related to hikers, technical climbers, avalanche victims, downed aircraft, and more, under the most difficult possible conditions along Colorado’s Front Range and in the Rocky Mountains. Harv was a force of nature: a great climber and teacher, experienced in situations none of us wants to even imagine, and completely fearless.
Our first pitch on the Dome was a crack climb on a slab, not difficult, only rated 5.4. This brought us (after a traverse) to a roof to work over. Once again, a student climber attempting the roof dislocated his shoulder. Harv quickly asked me and another student climber if we were ok with exiting the face via a narrow ascending ramp with two of the team’s 150-foot ropes to set a strong belay from above. In the meantime, Harv arranged another climbing rope into two coils across his shoulders so that the injured climber could put his legs through the coils and ride piggy-back when Harv rappelled down the face—once we set the belay.
The other climber and I reached the summit but couldn’t find a suitable tree, or even a decent stone protrusion close enough to the face to secure the rappel ropes. Meanwhile the clock was ticking; we couldn’t communicate with the rest of the climbing party, because the roar of Boulder Creek flowing directly below the face of the Dome erased all other sound.
One thing we did find, but initially rejected out-of-hand, was a scrawny bush growing out of a crack just behind the summit of the Dome. But after scouring the summit area and finding nothing else, in desperation we tied the two climbing ropes together, looped them over the bush, and looped our own climbing rope over the bush and through the rappel rope going in the opposite (uphill) direction; each of us took one of our rope’s two ends, and wrapped them around ourselves to belay both the rappel rope and bush. We braced ourselves against whatever we could, which wasn’t much, tossed the rappel ropes over the face, and a few seconds later we yanked them twice to signal the belay was set. When the belay rope tensioned we pulled back as hard as we could to offset Harv’s weight and that of the injured climber. In less than a minute, which felt like a lifetime, the tension stopped—Harv had gotten the climber off the face.
We were elated of course that this worked, and started our descent to try to catch up to Harv. Some weeks later, reviewing the climb in a quiet moment, I began to feel uncomfortable about what I’d done. And at least a hundred nights in the decades since, I’ve lain awake in a cold sweat wondering how reckless I’d been with the lives of two people, plus possibly our own lives if the two of us at the summit had been pulled over the edge ourselves. If that scrawny bush had pulled out, would our in effect ‘friction belay’ on the rounded stone outcrops alone been enough to hold Harv and the injured climber? I don’t know. In retrospect, there may have been alternatives. For instance, if I’d gone back out onto the face to tell Harv what we’d encountered, might he have decided to bring the injured climber off the face by walking him up the ramp we’d used, and set the shoulder on the summit? Harv then might have had us as a group help the injured climber down the steep scree slope that was our non-technical, though admittedly difficult, exit from the Dome’s summit.
Of course I’m not second-guessing Harv Mastalir. But I continue to second-guess my judgement and actions that day, and what the consequences of my judgement might have meant for the two lives we had on so-called belay, back in Boulder Canyon.