Trolls, Mordor, and Flesh

It finally happened this weekend. No, not the apocalypse. The weather finally got nice in New Hampshire (sort of). Sure, it rained now and then, but for the most part, the sun was out, and so I put away my design draft for an ark, and clipped my daises to my harness. See, climbing is a cool sport *because* it's so "extreme" (read: unpopular). If I were into something lame like, oh, golf, I probably couldn't even hire Tiger Woods with a million dollars to glance in my direction, let alone coach me. Fortunately, in something as esotetic (read: stupid) as aid climbing, I can hire Mark Synnott, a bona fide big wall man. So, he took some time out of his busy adventure-related scheming and parenting schedule to teach me about aid climbing. You know, you flip through the aid climbing chapter in Freedom of the Hills, and scoff. Yes, you are ascending using gear, and a lot of gear at that. Yes, it's very complicated. But no, it doesn't appear to be any fun whatsoever. You didn't become a climber to become a bloody rigger, did you? Well, I decided to do it anyways because I had heard it teaches you a lot about placing good gear, seeing as you test every single piece, and unexpectedly found it to be really fun, as well. And that's what climbing is about, right? Yeah. I mean, try to explain even "pure" forms of climbing to people. Uh, yeah, I dip my hands in a pouch containing the ground up remains of ancient sea creatures and climb to the top of the scariest rock I can find. And if I manage to do it without a rope, risking my life completely needlessly, well, I'm extra badass, so can I have my unbridled adulation now? In this, at least, the existentialists have the right idea.

Nut? Ice tool? Pin? So many choices!

Friday, we went to Trollville. We were at Cathedral yesterday, and we explained this fact to a passerby, and he asked "Trollville? Never heard of it." How typical. An added bonus of it being completely deserted most of the time, particularly the summer, is no one gives a fuck if you pound pins, bolt, or drytool away. So this was the perfect place for me to learn how to pound in pins. I mock-lead this A4 seam on the diciest placements, with multiple pieces ripping out on tests, and trying to stack pins and nuts to make things work. I fell about halfway up, which I thought was pretty good. That thing is pretty hard. I fell because I had to get a very marginal micro BD stopper, which was fine when weighted from below, but terrible when I got a bit higher on it. I think if I were going to do it again, I would "free climb" the very blank section in the middle using ice axes. Yes, you can drytool in the summer with rock shoes, and yes, it's totally absurd, but I had a lot of fun doing it anyways:

Absurd drytooling in summer. M7?

I had tried the route before in the winter, and thought it was hard, but it went pretty well this time. I would have sent it, but I got my tool stuck in a slot. Oh well. It's not really a mixed route though, because it never gets any ice on it. However, topping it out was quite tough without any frozen turf at the top. It was totally cool though: leashless trickery, hand jams, heel hooks, torquing sidepulls... I also aided this climb, and it was much more straightforward.

Leading the Mordor Wall. A2, I think.

Well, yesterday I got my first aid lead in at the Mordor Wall on Cathedral Ledge. This thing is no trifle. The first move is off a somewhat dicey looking talon placement:


And you can't see in the pictures, but the next move is to thread a little rivet with the wire of a nut, and slide the nut up to make a "bolt." And then there were a lot of microcam and micronut placements. I think I used almost my entire rack. At one point, I was running out of pieces and had to place a BD C3 (#000) cam and a BD micro stopper (#2) next to each other and equalize them. Those are tiny pieces, to be sure, but I bounce tested them very aggressively and was impressed to see that they held fine. It also took forever...four hours to lead it and then a surprising two hours to jug it. Every time I did something slow, like fifi in too much, Mark would say "Ah, but what would Chris Mac do here?!" and I'd try to ignore him, only to discover an hour later that he was totally right. And jugging a traverse is not trivial. If you thought cleaning a traversing sport climb was hard, wait till you try to do this. Mark told me he's seen people on big walls stymied for hours trying to do stuff like that.

Hey, Mark? Why wasn't this in the brochure? Nobody said
this was going to be awful!

Well, I'm pretty pleased with what happened. I didn't whip, and I only had one piece blow out on a test. I did almost poke myself in the eye when I whipped out a nut, but fortunately, I was wearing safety glasses. I've decided that nut tools, despite their name, are virtually useless for taking out nuts. You can get out most nuts just by yanking up on them. Why didn't anyone tell me this before?! I learned a ton about placing gear and jugging properly, and feel ready to tackle harder aid objectives. I think it will make me feel more confident trad climbing, too.


Well, I polished off the weekend by going to Rumney and having a go at Flesh for Lulu. It actually went pretty well, and I linked a lot of it together. I think I can definitely send it this season. It's 5.12a/b, but nothing feels harder than V3 or V4. It's just very technical and pumpy. It's really my style--slightly overhanging, balancy moves on crimps. Jeremy and Chelsea had a great time on it too:


I also went to Mark's slideshow about his excursion to Borneo with various contemporary climbing luminaries including Alex Honnold, Jimmy Chin, and Conrad Anker. I won't ruin it for you, because I'm rooting for him to come back in the fall and give a slideshow to the HMC, but there was a lot of gossip about these guys. In no uncertain terms, it was made clear to me that: Mark is crazy and bases all of his sponsored adventures on books which document doomed expeditions where dumb people venture somewhere they have no business being and end up having to practically eat each other before being rescued; Alex Honnold is ridiculously good and has almost no fear, to the point where he makes fun of Mark for being "Mr. Safety;" Jimmy Chin is incredibly charming, to the point where he can solve problems with local officials by whipping out his iPhone and showing them cool videos ("Ah, here I am skiing down Everest. What have you got to say about that?" Incidentally, one dude walked out of the room before the slideshow started, as soon as he found out that Mark wasn't going to talk about climbing Everest. He mumbled something about not wanting to see the "Not Everest guy." What a tool.); and Conrad Anker is both a bloodhound when it comes to routefinding and also totally tough ("You guys want to go down because there's a little typhoon? You're such wimps!"). Well, I'm going to end the post there, with that incredibly long sentence. It was a great weekend.