a self rescue epic in the big ditch

[markwebster]

We were very, very hot. All of us were long out of water, even though we'd each started the day with 2 or three liters in our camelback packs. Jill had managed to save one small package of juice, which she drank just before rapping as we watched with dark, brooding envy.

 

I had an inkling that we were skirting the edge of disaster as all of us were fading at the rap station. Jill dozed off several times. I asked her if she was ok, and she said she was "just taking a little nap".

 

I'd given them the last pitch as it was too hot to be fun, choosing instead to stay at the baking belay station (top of pitch one of Sons of Yesterday [pitch 4 of Serenity] ) and slept deeply, dreaming about cold mountain streams. They were grooving on the girl power thing, rock paper scissors for the lead...and all that feminine macho crap. I admired their gung ho attitude, but it looked like just another nice 10a hand crack, and I was too hot and dry to enjoy it.

 

My fingers were still screaming at me from falling off the crux of Serenity. I'd ripped a large flapper from the tip of my little finger, it being the only thing that would fit in the dam crack. As I hung there resting, I ripped off the flapper and tossed it. Jill was watching from the top and said later she almost yelled "Rock!" because the flapper was so big. It floated gently down through the baking air, dripping blood.

 

I was having a wimpy day as I'd also bailed after taking a leader fall, and then completing the friction traverse on pitch 2, letting Sandra finish the last 40 feet of 10a fingers.

 

Sandra was so baked from leading the 10a pitch of sons of yesterday that she simply lay down in the crack under the bolts and zoned out. "You guys do what you want, I'm resting".

 

Jill rappelled over the edge. She was a long time rappelling. We expected her to be off rappel but she was just hanging there, for a very long time.

 

Sandra and I talked about what could have happened. We were 4 pitches up. Sandra leaned over the edge to see Jill but Jill was out of sight. We shouted, but could hear nothing.

 

Sandra extended her daisy with a couple of slings, backed it up with a cordallette and was able to lean out far enough to see Jill.

 

"Oh no! She rappelled to the wrong tree! She is a hundred feet climbers left of the anchors, three pitches up on an overhanging wall. Does she know how to prusik up the rope?"

 

"We've talked about it," I said, "but she doesn't have true prusiks, just shoestring alpine slings."

 

Sandra walked down the bulging dome until she could see Jill again, 60 meters down ,and shouted into the wind: "Can you prusik up the rope? Shit! I can't hear her."

 

Sandra came back up to me and slumped down in the crack.

 

"We will just have to wait and see if she can prusik," she said, "Damn! Do you have any water left, it's baking up here."

 

"Dream on," I said, "I've been out for 2 hours."

 

Nothing happened and the rope sat motionless on the hot cliff. After 10 minutes Sandra walked down to the end of her extended cordalette, and hung there over the edge, balanced precariously 420 feet up in the air.

 

"Damn, I can't see her!"

 

"Where did she go? How could she just dissappear?"

 

Suddenly the rope went slack. We wondered if she had anchored into something, but in the back of our minds was a far more ominous possibility. We had knots in the end, and she has done many 15 pitch rappels, just days before she and I had rapped the entire 16 rappels of royal arches in the pitch dark, reaching ground at midnight. Still, as heat stroked as we all were, there was a possibility that the worst had happened. My heart gave an awful lurch as I thought about it.

 

The double 60 meter lines went taught again and we looked at each other with big smiles.

 

"She's still there! We may have to consider the possibility that we will have to lift her up with a z-pulley," I said, "Do you remember how to do it?"

 

"Um, maybe...I've done it before in rescue classes, and I was reading that book on the way down," Sandra said as we stared at the unmoving taught double strand representing our partners life.

 

"I've done it before too," I said tentatively, "but it's been 32 years since we pulled each other out of crevasses at Mt. Rainier."

 

"Let's see if we can remember how to do it, at least we'll be doing something!" Sandra said.

 

********************

 

From Jills perspective: You guys told me it was ok to go first, and I thought I could easily find the rap stations, having just led the third pitch. It looked too hard to go to the top of third pitch of serenity since it was far off to climbers right, so I rappelled down, angling off to climbers right, but heading for the top of the second pitch instead of the top of the third pitch.

 

After 150 feet, as I rappelled downward on the dual 60 meter ropes, I found myself angleling down to climbers right along the edge of an exposed arete. I saw a sturdy tree, and thinking it might be the top of the second pitch, I headed toward it.

 

Suddenly, my feet slipped and I pendulumed leftward off the arete, flew over an overhang and slammed hard into a right facing open book. I managed to hold onto the rappel rope, but I was stunned from the force of the impact with the open book. Because I was now below the overhang, I was hanging in free air.

 

20 feet down I saw a lesser angled slab, so I rapped down to that. I rigged up my thin alpine slings as prusiks and tried to prusik up to the tree, which was now above me. With mounting frustration, I realized the prusiks would not allow me to climb the rope. They would grab, but were so thin and flat that I couldn't slide them upward. They would lock under load, and stay that way.

 

Once Sandra leaned out far enough for me to see her I tried to tell her I was going to try to prusik up to the tree and anchor, but she couldn't hear me. When I heard Sandra yell: "Do you want us to lift you up to the belay?", I tried to tell her my plan, but the wind blew my words away. After a few minutes, when I again heard the distant, wind blown words: "Do you want us to lift you up to the belay? Yes or No?", I thought for a moment about my options and yelled "Yes!"

 

End of Jill's perspective.

 

*******************************

 

It took us half an hour before we could figure out how to get the z working but eventually we had our prusiks on the line and we were ready to start hauling Jill up the cliff.

 

"Ok, ready, set, pull!" I pulled directly on the rope while Sandra pulled on the z pulley cordalette. The rope came up 5 inches. "Can you hold her while I slide the my prusik down?" I asked.

 

"I've totally got her, it's easy to hold her weight with this z pulley, slide the prusik!"

 

I slid the prusik down the rope and Sandra eased off on her z pulley strand until my prusik held Jill.

 

"Now we've got to slide the z pulley prusik down the rope as far as it will go and do it again" - Sandra.

 

We lost track of time after that as twilight approached and the desperately hard work of hauling Jill and the two ropes up the cliff continued for what seemed like forever. The z-pulley wasn't able to haul Jill up at all, even with both of us pulling on it. It seemed to add only about 20 percent of lifting force, and was great for holding her while we maneuvered the prusiks. But the bulk of the lifting power came from me, yarding up the line.

 

Despite the screaming pain in my back and arms I was giving it everything I had. That was my partner down there and I was not going to give up on her. Not that day, or any other day. Jill had the one cell phone in the party, and at one point we saw a helicopter fly into the valley and we wondered if she'd called for a rescue. (She hadn't.)

 

The hauling took so damn long, and only through the combined efforts of both of us could we pull her up, and our progress was measured in inches. Many times I thought it was not going to work, it was just so damn slow, but gradually the rope came up the cliff and we actually had a 20 foot loop of slack line that needed to be tied off in case the prusiks broke.

 

We took breaks now and then and Sandra would walk out to the end of her cordalette and shout down to Jill, who, once the sun had gone down seemed to emerge from her heat stroke and said she was fine, and that we should keep hauling.

 

Finally she got up to a ledge that led to our position and was able to climb up it to us. "I know you're not touchy feely," Sandra said, "but I need a hug after that. We are just so glad to see you!" Sandra and Jill embraced.

 

I looked at Jill, and remembered all the times she had said she is not the hugging type. The hell with it, I thought. "Give me a hug Jill, I am just so glad to see you alive. We thought we had lost you!" Jill and I embraced, and Sandra joined in. My eyes were brimming with tears as I thought about how much worse it could have ended.

 

The rappels down were uneventful. It was dark by then, and the temperature was no longer making us stupid. When we reached the ground and tried to pull the double ropes, they were stuck. Sandra wanted to come back in the morning, but I knew we all needed to sleep in to recover so I volunteered to prusik up and clear the knot, which had got stuck in the crack at the top of the first pitch of serenity.

 

The prusik up was uneventful. Just another long dry exercise in the dark, by headlamp. When you can't see the ground, it seems less scary, you get very focused. Sandra and Jill hung around to cheer me on, telling me stories and singing bad songs.

 

I've since re-enacted this situation at the gym. You have a loaded rope and two anchors. How to you start hauling? We found that we could untie a long cordalette (I'm going to be buying a 30 footer) and rig up a 3 to 1 z-pulley using two prusiks. You pull on the z-pulley until you get enough slack to use the rope as the z-pulley. It goes better then. It's possible also to rig a 5 to 1 with the cordalette, which "might" be enough lifting power to do this by yourself, I have yet to try it but plan to. Jill could also have rigged a bachman or a kleimheist knot with her slings, but she had never learned those knots.

 

In retrospect we realized we had all become cocky. We thought rescue was something that happened to other people, and we were too smart to need to practice it. We know better now. I'm working my way though a great book called: "Climbing self Rescue", I recommend you do the same, it could save someone's life.

[Buckaroo]

It might be poor team management to allow someone to take off on the first rap not sure they knew where they were going. (dehydration could have contributed to this error in judgement)

 

And going in the wrong direction on rap is a mistake but forgivable.

 

Climbing without working prusiks is not.

 

Furthermore not having a pursik on the brake side of your rap setup is just about as bad. What if she had been knocked unconscious when she pendulumed into the open book? Brake hand lets go and she slides off the end of the rope.

 

Just the other day at the base of Godzilla met a couple of climbers that barely even knew what a prusick was, much less had them on their harness or knew how to tie them.

 

I used to be nonchalant about a prusik backup until I slid part way down an icy rope on a free hanging rap. Never again, that's your life sliding through your brake hand, how about some backup.

 

Part of the problem is as mentioned, a sling prusik that doesn't work in optimal fashion. Well it will if you experiment with the number of raps and such beforehand. This all needs to be done on the ground, finding the correct diameters and number of raps and such, before you get in a situation like this.

 

[goatboy]

Good story and good advice, Mark.

[LostCamKenny]

Totally epic - glad it didn't go too sideways on y'all!