Not My Day..............

Although I had a good time anyway. Here is a picture of the bail biner I had to leave on a 5.11 that I thought I could pull the roof. I ended up falling off and cutting one of my fingers on a sharp hold, getting a couple of blood blisters on some of my other fingers, and banging up my leg a little bit. I also managed to bleed on Ryan while he was belaying me.

I tried to clean myself up a little, but when I got home Amy asked "what happened?" I said "what" like I didn't know what she was talking about. Then she said "I suppose you want a picture for your blog?" It's just scrapes and bruises, but my shorts may never be the same again.

We did get to do a couple of really fun routes though. Bottoms Up is on the left of the arete, and Cheers is on the right face. I looked and they are rated anywhere from 5.8+ to 5.10a. Cheers was probably 5.9+ and Bottoms Up was significantly easier.

We did a good deed too. Here is Mike and Paul with a guy in the background. He was part of a rope team that were bound and determined to get one of them killed. We kept hearing things like "that's to much slack", or "what do I do now?"

At one point Ryan and I looked over to see the guy on the ground climbing un-roped. I went over to see if I could help before I had to help carry out a body. It turns out that the guy on the ground had no idea what was going on, and the guy at the top of the climb knew only slightly more. All of their gear was fresh out of REI. I think they had cut the tags off that morning, and possibly bought it on the way out.

Turns out the guy on the ground had just unclipped the belay device from his harness and left it on the rope with the carabiner when the climber told him to take him off belay. When the climber started to pull up rope the belay device wouldn't pull through the quick draws (imagine that). I told the climber I was going to pull some rope back and got the belay device off the rope. I told the other guy to come down. We were on a ledge above a long rocky slope. If he fell it was going to be a long tumble. He slipped, but was able to stop himself. I was sure glad because I didn't want to roll down the slope with him if I had to try to stop him.

They finished climbing and left for another part of the crag. One of them came back a little while later to retrieve a cam they had left sitting on the ground. I walked over to where they had been climbing to look at the route and found a chalk bag and some garbage they had left. They came back later for the chalk bag and all four of us made sure they knew we were not happy that they had left their garbage too. I still don't think they got it.