A world opens up

On Friday the 16th, Adriaan and I learned how to lead climb a rock climbing course. In theory, this has opened up the world of sport climbing for us, since we can now climb anywhere in the world where bolts have been shot into a rock-face. In theory. The reality is, for me anyway, is that for now lead climbing is s*** scary. I don't mind heights, I don't mind falling, it's the hitting hard surfaces part that I have a problem with.

The jump from being able to climb a rock wall using a top rope, and climbing that same course via lead roping is quite a big one. In top roping, the climber is attached to one end of the rope, the belayer to the other end and the 'middle' of the rope is threaded through the chains at the top of the climb. This allows the climber to take a lot of risks, simply because you can't really fall. But lead climbing is a whole new ball game. First off, at the start of the climb, the climber and belayer are only separated by approximately 2 meters of rope. The climber then proceeds to climb up the rock face and at each bolt attaches a piece of equipment, called a quickdraw, to the bolt and then threads the rope through the quickdraw. This act may sound simple, but as we found out on Friday, a lot can go wrong at this point. Finally, the climber reaches the top of the course, attaches two quickdraws to the chains at the top, threads the rope through and is then lowered to the ground by the belayer. When clipping the rope through a quickdraw, there are three important things to remember.

1. You MUST thread the rope correctly through the quickdraw. It is very, very, very important that the part of the rope that goes from the belayer to the quickdraw lies against the rock face to the back of the quickdraw, while the piece of rope going from the quick draw to you is to the front of the quick draw. If you thread the rope the wrong way and you fall, it could happen that the rope forms a loop back on itself, and clips out of the quickdraw.
2. Clipping must be quick. There is nothing worse than literally hanging by your fingertips and struggling to clip a rope through a quickdraw. And the more you struggle, the more you panic, the harder it gets. Fortunately, we were taught a few different techniques for clipping, and all that is needed now is practice.
3. Don't z-clip. Basically what happens is that when you try to clip the rope through the next quickdraw, you accidentally take in rope from underneath the previous quickdraw, instead of from above it. This results in a system that loops back upon itself and the increase in friction in the whole rope system is so great that you can't climb any further. This happened to me once and I swore the air blue around me, because I had to climb back down, hang from one arm and try to untangle the whole mess.

Once we had the above principals firmly ingrained into us, we were taken to a relatively easy wall and given a chance to practice. Which was fine. Until they told us that the next part of the course was learning how to fall. For the first controlled fall that we had to do, we were told to climb to a quickdraw, clip in and let go. Which went ok. However, for the next fall, we had to clip into a quickdraw, climb to the next one, but instead of clipping in, we had to let go. Nuh uh. I had a right royal fight with myself in order to convince my hands to let go. The reason for this hesitation was that I knew that once you climb past a quickdraw and you fall, the distance that you are going to fall will be twice the length of rope that goes from you to the last quickdraw through which you clipped. In the end, survival instinct lost, mainly because I knew I could trust my equipment, but more importantly, I knew I could trust Adriaan.

With this ordeal past, we were allowed to play on the climbing walls to our heart's content. I have to admit, it was a lot of fun, but the only sad thing is how much more quickly lead climbing tires one out, as opposed to top roping. Consequently we did not climb all that much. But after climbing, we did go and play around in the bouldering room for a hour or two.