“I put my jumar on and looked up … What I did not expect was a white section on what I remembered to be a red rope along its full length”
If you happened to climb at Perry’s Lookdown in the Blueis you know how steep that cliff is. It does not have the usual gardening ledges half way up which most of the Blueis multipitches share. You hop over the edge and if you were not attached to the rope you would not touch the rock again. It’s probably better not to think about it this way. Well, there I was, shitting into my pants occasionally while abseiling down and following Chris and Julian. The plan for the day was to shoot Julian’s new route Stilleto. A 9 pitch long master piece which finds the way through the Perrys steepness at a very consistent grade (26,26,26…). I was not sure where exactly the route went so I clipped a bolt here and then as I passed overhangs of various sizes to stay close to the rock until I found a cool angle which worked for the lower pitches and got the camera out. Julian performed his technical dance and quickly send the lower pitches followed by Chris. It was time to start the hard work and move up.
I put my jumar on and looked up … What I did not expect was a white section on what I remembered to be a red rope along its full length. It was roughly 20 meters above the useless dangling myself and all of sudden I started to feel rather unwell. The exact part of the rope which so magically changed its color kept rubbing over a lip, exposing the inner twisty universe of shiny NYLON shoe laces which no climber should ever see. Underneath this overhang, the rope was clipped into a draw, the root cause of all this trouble, which together with my weight made the edge of the lip function like guilottine. Have you ever cut a rope with a knife? It goes surprisingly easy.
I shared my little drama to Julian and Chris who were at my level but about 10 meters to the right. Somehow, they did not seem to be sharing the same level of excitement. I felt like a little kid who was about to ride a bike on his own for the first time surrounded by teenagers. Empowered by Julian’s story that one of his mates was bouncing on a single core thread for a while until it eventually pop the decision was made to jumar up and get to a position where the guys can pass me a rope from above. It was the slowest and bounce-less jumaring I had ever done. I felt like a lion which delicately approaches his prey just before he storms off to kill. Except somehow, I was the lion and the prey at the same time. A few minutes later when I learnt another valuable lesson that jumars do not really work on the “sheet-less” part of the rope I was stuck. The only thing I could do was to take a few pics. At least I had a lot of time to nail the composition before the nicest ever rope came to the rescue from above (Thanks Chris & Julian!).
The rest of the shoot apart from a few lost quick draws and a crawler (yep, it really was not my best day) was comparing to what just happened rather uneventful. A lot of hard work to navigate around the steep cliff but great angles and Julian’s chicken winging technical brilliancy was fantastic to shoot.
