Lake Willoughby

I headed up to the Lake with Kevin today. I'm training for a linkup of the Sorcerer and Hydrophobia in the Canadian Rockies in March, so I told him to take me up as many hard climbs as possible. He's always psyched, but he seemed extra psyched today. I'm guessing his shenanigans on Endangered Species at Poke-O probably had something to do with it. Unfortunately, it was about -10 F when I stepped out of my motel room at Lyndonville this morning, so that put a bit of a damper on things. It made the ice explosively brittle pretty much all day. Good training. We started climbing around 9, just as the sun poked around the cliff. We climbed on these 70 m 7.8 mm twins that Kevin brought. The idea was that we could link all the two pitch routes in the Mindbender area into one pitch. So we'd climb, rap, climb, rap, etc, and that would be good training.

We started on Plug and Chug (NEI 5) which, I'm sad to say, didn't actually involve any plugging and chugging. It actually involved a lot of insecure, wide hooks on ice mushrooms and munching our way through snow with a one inch crust of useless ice on top. I thought it was pretty hard--if you ever go and do it, don't be fooled by the sandbagged rating. Next, we did a line on the left of Mindbender (NEI 5+) which involved some pretty awesome stemming. I thought it was actually easier than Plug and Chug. Then we did Renormalization (NEI 4), which felt pretty easy after all that. Then Kevin looked at his watch, saw it was around 4, forgot that he had to go out to dinner with his wife, and took me up the right side of Mindbender, which did indeed blow my mind. I'd say it was a pretty full on grade 6 climb. (We've done a bunch of other 6s together--Nemesis, Curtain Call, Omega, etc., and this felt as hard as any of those.) At one point, Kevin crawled into a cave in the ice, and then crawled out of a hole on the other side, such that the rope actually went through the ice fall. Then the climbing got really hard...bulge after bulge of overhanging daggers, those nasty candled things that have melted together, and some light drytooling. I was pushed pretty close to my limit on that one...after a 20 m section of that, it went back to regular straight up 5+, but by then I was kind of smoked.

Now I'm sitting in my motel room eating a subway BMT sandwich with southwest sauce on it. That last climb, and this sandwich, have me really psyched. This year, I took on a new appointment as a lecturer in the chemistry department, which has made me the busiest I've ever been. I haven't been in the regular gym or to Metrorock as much, but I've found a new way to train: enlist Dave Ford to go do ice tool hangs every day. I never used to be that disciplined about it (it's pretty intense, and it's too easy to put down your tools, and eat a sandwich instead), but it's a cool doing it with a friend. Forearm endurance has always been my #1 problem in climbing (this is why I always try to climb as fast as possible without making any mistakes), so I'm finally working it directly. I think it's helping. But I'm kind of plateaued at the moment as an ice climber. On the one hand, I have a good swing, pretty good footwork, and can crank out some hard pitches as a follower when I get psyched. But on the other hand, I still get scared leading straight up, vertical ice when I have to place screws from positions while hanging from one arm. It's pretty crazy, because when I'm following these things, I'm solid and I'm fine. So I think the problem is in my head and by training my endurance, I'll give myself the extra margin to hang out on steep terrain without getting scared.

One thing that Smarter Climbers have told me is that when climbing ice is to never fall and be super solid. So, don't do what these guys did:

http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/1407819/On-Topic-Sick-mixed-route-video-Palenville-Coronary

A few years back, Scrappy told me that I should test every placement and showed me what a good placement felt like. Every placement, he said, was like your belay--and if you fuck up, you'll probably get hurt. What I'm realizing now is that he was right, but I misinterpreted what he said in a sense. You know how sometimes you'll swing your tool really well, and it will fly into the ice, and this "dwunk" sound will vibrate through the shaft of your tool and you'll know it's a bomber placement? I got into the mindset that every tool placement should be like it. And OK, yeah, in an ideal world, that's true. I'd also like another sandwich right now, but getting one would be too much trouble. I think it's the same way with these hard ice routes--too often, you're just going to have to accept the fact that you're on a wobbly hook, keep your elbows low, stay static on it, and try not shit your pants. Or maybe you'll be on steep terrain, and you'll swing and get a decent stick, but it won't be the awesome super solid kind. I think my new strategy will be to test the placement with body weight, and if it's good enough, just move on to save energy. Welding your tools can just be pointless--the laser picks on my Cobras got stuck about a dozen times today, and it seemed that most of the time, it was because the placements they were in were too good. I'm sort of experimenting by following more stuff this way, but I think I have enough experience now to know when these "pretty good, but not perfect" placements are good enough. I think the other key to this strategy is to have super solid footwork. There were a lot of times today when I'd slap the side of my tool on some crust, send a lot of it down, and then try and rake my tool ineffectually through the snow underneath, only to move up properly just by standing up carefully. If you don't lose your balance on less than vertical terrain (which it often is), then in principle, you don't need to hang from your tools...

So I'm trying to be more solid by being a bit less solid, if that makes any sense. Maybe it's a shocking departure from my previous "be solid, be solid, be solid" stance. What do you guys think?

In other news, hooray for Egypt and boo for this:

http://www.petzl.com/us/outdoor/news-2/2011/02/11/warning-regarding-presence-counterfeit-versions-petzl-products

Tomorrow, I'm getting after it with Bayard at Cathedral. I hope you guys get out climbing!