Half Way Down

The Descent:

 I hate rappelling, and though I was so happy to have reached the top,  I couldn't feel the total sense of accomplishment because I knew that the we still had to rappel.  I really hate rappelling, it is far more dangerous in my opinion than climbing.  For instance while you climb, you are always tied into the rope and there is for the most part more protection placed in the rock, and your hands and feet  grip the rock. Rappelling puts you at the mercy of a single anchor, and your gear that connects you to that anchor, there is the possibility of going off the end of the rope, it is possible to miss the next rap anchor, you are constantly tying in, and tying out of the rope increasing the chance of a mistake, rapping a big route is done after a long hard day, you are tired, and it is easy to make mistakes,  and daylight is typically failing (as was our case),  the dynamic rope feels like a long rubber band and you bounce around in a most unnerving manner, there is always the chance that as you pull your rope through the anchor above you, that it will get caught in a crack, forcing you to abandon it.  And as they say, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

I hate rappelling.

The first two raps went well.  The third rap... well we ran into a little trouble.  We had tied a knot at the end of each of the ropes, to help prevent us from going off the end.  As Grant rapped down the rope, on a down bounce the knot got wedged into a crack, and on the up bounce, the knot lodge itself... arg!  Grant was almost stuck midway down the rappel.  It took us an hour to fiddle around in the failing light and steady sleet with our  third rope, before the knot was free.  We had to be so careful that we didn't get ourselves into any bad situations "if I untie here, and I'm clipped here, and the rope here meets the next anchor, can I get the rope back, and will Mark be able to reach me..." well we just had to make sure that we knew exactly what we were doing, there was no room for error.  Obviously all I heard from  Grant 50 m below me was a long string of the profane...

We finished 7 raps down to the ledge.  By the time we reached the ledge, it was just about pitch black, we were wet and cold.  We decided to spend another night on the ledge.  We huddled in our sleeping bags under Grants tarp, eating leftover food, sipping carefully at the last of our water, listening to the rain.  It rained on and off throughout the night, and when it stopped raining, we would peek out from under the tarp and look around at the view.  The moon was visible occasionally, and besides gusts of wind, everything was dead quiet and still.

We started off down the face being very careful not to break our chain of safety. We both had two daisy chains that we would clip into the belays. We also tied knots in the end of the ropes as another precaution. When I had done this in the past I had had problems and these days I didn’t bother. Today however I was very tired and we thought the extra precaution was worth it. Not so!

The bloody knot got stuck in a crack through the roof.  I could still descend so I got to the next belay before I started working on the problem. It was really stuck and the rope was being held under tension. I couldn’t get my belay device off the rope!  I was starting to get frustrated - You miserable son of a perverted goat molesting … etc. etc. ( I was now really frustrated ). In the end it took my full wrath, my entire obscene vocabulary, the third rope (I’m glad we brought it) and about an hour to get the thing free! It was now dark and those clouds had sprung a leak. We were being slowly but surely soaked by wet sleet. Not much choice but to keep rappelling. We made it to the bivy ledge in silence and just started getting out the sleeping gear. No one needed to say anything. It was obvious we were staying on the ledge for a second night.

And it was not a comfortable one. We lay there in the wind and the inevitable happened sooner rather than later and it rained - quite hard. We huddled under the little tarp/ground sheet I had brought up in place of a bivy bag and neither of us got any sleep and neither of us was stupid enough to take the tarp off when the rain stopped - lest we invoke the rain gods again. They let us have it again anyway several times through the night. The morning however was clearer and we were still kicking.  It could have been a lot worse.