Off-the-Shelf Climbing

Shelf Road, Colorado

It may be November, but that doesn't mean the climbing season is over! Amy and I joined our friends Joe and Stephanie on a trip to Shelf Road, about two hours south of Denver. Joe and I work together and have talked climbing many a time, but we've never actually been out on more than a bouldering-after-work expedition. He is one of those natural climbers that is comfortable on 5.12 rock, completely out of my league. Their friends Adam, Ellen, Jesse, Colleen, and Claudia joined us as well, hard-persons all. We'd never been to Shelf before and hadn't been camping with the new dog either. It was to be a very instructive weekend.

Dawn came on Saturday morning, chilly and partly cloudy. We were camped in a nice BLM campground in a dry field. Vertical limestone cliffs could be seen in the various arms of the canyon. As the other climbers stirred, it began to cloud up and finally snow pretty hard for about an hour. So much for climbing! But we stuck it out and the snow departed as quickly as it left leaving things beautiful and sunny. We packed up our gear and drove out to the Cactus Cliff area.

The sudden snowstorm clears from Shelf Road.

Shelf is a strange place to my trad-climbing, multi-pitch brain. Everything is vertical. Everything is one pitch long and everything is bolted. Generously bolted. Including the multitude of beautiful hand and fist cracks. Weird! Since the walls are so steep, there isn't much in the 5.6ish range that I feel comfortable leading. But our party was so well stocked with hard-persons, we had ample opportunity to toprope harder routes that they put up.

First up was La Cholla Jackson (5.9), a long climb up a finger crack in a corner. I toproped it first to get the feel for an eventual lead, but decided that it was steep and pumpy enough that I didn't want to try the sharp end. Good, sequency climb which I ended up doing twice on TR. The second time up, I took down the TR anchor and rapped off. This was to become a theme for the weekend.

About 20' to the left, Adam was hard at work leading a stiff-looking crack system called I Claudius which I understood to be rated 5.10a/b. This is about the limits of my climbing at this point and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of 5.10b routes I've done. Ellen and Stephanie tried it on TR and thrashed their way up it with grace and style. What the heck. I'd give it a shot.

Adam belayed me and gave advice while Amy and Luna provided the cheering section. Cracks are not my strong suit, but I'm slowly learning the art of hand jams. The first 30' of the route was mostly face moves with occasional crack holds. I hung a couple times but made progress fairly steadily. After the face moves, the crack opened up into a moderately flaring crack that varied from finger to wide hand width. Goody! My progress slowed and I nearly gave up except for Adam's gentle encouragement and tight belay from the ground. I thrashed up another 30', hanging every third move, and finally came to the crux. The crack narrowed down again and the slope increased to slightly past vertical. The holds were there, but it was more than my pumped hands could handle. I gave it two half-hearted tries before being lowered off, pumped, satisfied, and bleeding from the hands. This crack thing is quite elegant, even if my rendition of it features a lot of yelling and puffing.

Turns out that I Claudius is a 5.11a/b!!! What?! The ratings at Shelf Road tend to be a bit generous and I didn't make it through the crux, but it was still probably 5.10c or so. Wow!

Stephanie leads La Cholla Jackson (5.9)

Ellen leads a 5.10 route (left) while I rappel from The Raven. Cactus Cliff is a busy place.

We ended the day toproping The Raven (5.9+), a strangely mixed climb with a little bit of everything. It starts with an overhanging off-width made feasible by some face holds and a chock-stone, then a flaring chimney, a surprisingly dicey traverse, a set of full-on laybacks, another traverse, some face moves, and finally a series of mantles around a roof. Much harder than it looked from below. I derigged the anchor from a spacious ledge, enjoying the spectacular views of the Sangre de Cristo range to the west, and rapped off.

Joe belays Jesse on something hard.

The spectacular twilight view of the Sangres.

The sun set in the west and the Venus joined a crescent moon as we drove back to the campsite for the usual fire, dinner, and high spirits.

Sunday looked like a repeat of Saturday, but without the snow. My hands were still pumped from yesterday's exertions, so I wasn't looking for anything too hard. We packed up the camping gear and hiked up the Sand Gulch to the Contest Wall, setting up in front of a pair of 5.9ish crack-and-face routes. Top ropes were set up by Stephanie and Claudia on the respective routes. Amy scampered up The Opportunist (5.9-) with relative ease, somewhat to her surprise. I followed finding it a pretty mellow, but challenging enough to be interesting. At the top, I derigged the anchor and rappelled back down.

Enterprise (5.9+), the right-hand route looked a bit harder. Amy opted out but I gave it a go. Another party arrived as I was putting on my shoes and looked interested in toproping it as well. We needed to pull our gear pretty soon, but I volunteered to trail a rope for them and replace our TR anchor with theirs.

I puffed and clawed my way to the top of what was an excellent and challenging pitch. Very similar to The Opportunist, but definitely a notch harder, and a great deal of fun. The anchors were a pair of cold shuts and I clipped myself to each of them independently. Next step was to unclip the top rope anchor we'd been using and replace it with their anchor. Then run the new rope through the new anchor and tie it in to my harness. Physically and mentally fatigued from two days of hard climbing, I fumbled around up there and dropped a carabiner. But I double checked the anchor and everything was up to spec: both quickdraws clipped to the cold shuts and equalized, rope running through both draws, carabiners opposite and opposed, etc. I yelled down to Amy that she should prepare to lower me. "Which rope?" she yelled back. "My rope" I answered. She put me back on belay and took in slack. I checked the anchor one last time and unclipped.

I'm a big chicken when it comes to being lowered on top rope. It doesn't matter who is doing the lowering or how much I trust them, but I always grab hold of the belay rope and ease myself down five or ten feet before fully trusting my weight to the belayer. I'd gone down about five feet from the anchors and was ready to commit, but there was still a great deal of slack in my top rope and the trailing rope (the one I had climbed up on that was now hanging uselessly from my harness) was unusually taught. Looking down, I came to the full and horrifying realization of what was happening. Amy was belaying me on my rope, exactly as instructed, but I was lowering on the other one! My life hung by a rope that ran from my harness, through a pair of carabiners, and down to a flaked-out coil on the ground! The only thing keeping me from a 70' free-fall was my right hand gripped firmly on the top rope.

Fortunately, there was a bolt at about knee-level. Without relaxing my right handed death grip (quite litteral in this case), I clipped a runner from my harness to the bolt with my left. I frantically yelled down to Amy what was going on, and she quickly put me on belay with the correct rope. After making quadruply sure everything was right this time, I unclipped from the bolt and was lowered to the ground. It took a couple minutes before the uncontrollable shakes started and I still shiver as I write this story. I was closer than I have ever been to probable death/vegetative state or at the very least, serious, messy, permanent injury.

It was all my own stupid, inattentive fault. Amy did exactly as I had instructed. Being located half a rope length below, there's no way she could have spotted my error. Also, since both ropes in the system were blue, it wasn't neccessarily obvious even to me, thus requiring extra attention. I've been climbing for ten years and have derigged top rope anchors like this hundreds of times before. However, adding something slightly non-standard (swapping ropes in this case, something I've still done many times before) requires extra attention. I paid extra attention, but not to every part of the sequence. Toproping from bolts seems 'safe' to me where traversing a narrow ledge above a thousand feet of air does not, and hence I wasn't as keyed up as I should have been. Both situations can kill you equally dead.

Needless to say, climbing for us was over for the day. We somewhat shakily gathered up our gear and said goodby to the rest of the crew. Stephanie walked down to the cars with us and we had some good, deep conversation along the way. "You know, it wasn't luck", she said. "You have a last fail-safe against falling and that is holding onto the rope." This is true, I suppose and I escaped responsibility for my inattention this time. Next time... I'm going to work very hard to make sure there isn't a next time.

Despite the drama and close calls, it was a great weekend. The dog did very well camping. It was great to see a new part of the state and climb with new people in a new style of climbing. I feel like this has brought me back to my routes and made me work on techniques that have been stunted or rusty for far too long. Laybacks, crack techniques, balance on steep rock, etc.

Rock On!

Neithernor