I'm still in the process of writing my Premeditated TR and am hoping to get a bit of help from you guys.
We're all aware that there's the normal tap and hollow sound that climbers do to test the rock they climb on. We also know that the Pinnacles has a special grey area in that hollow sound. The good hollow versus the bad hollow. (I've had many conversations at the Pinns where I knock on a rock and my belayers goes "sounds hollow, I wouldn't use it." to which I respond, "yeah, well, it's hollow, but it's not hollow hollow... sounds bomber to me")
I'm having trouble creating a section in the TR that described that special Pinnacles good or bad hollow sound. If anyone is interested in trying to describe that sound in the way they think about it or hear it, I'd be most appreciative.
Kevin
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A small excerpt from the TR in progress for those that care... first draft, unproofread, unedited and out of order and still with notes to myself in it, so take that as a grain of salt:
"The final moves of the route involve moving over protruding corner of rotting rock with the bolts of the anchor peaking over that bulge like a rising sun, the end of this horrible night.
My fingers tap along the head of my holstered hammer as I sit on a driven arrow. I am a gunslinger now, staring down a deserted road long after noon has past. I arbitrarily decide that this iron placement will be my last on this route. Dust devils spin about along the empty street, mini twisters with enough spinning wind to restoke my clean-aiding sails.
I find a slot running horizontally on the bottom of this bulge. A placement in it will be enough to reach for the crack system above the bulge. It would be the perfect C2 practice placement if I were aid-cragging with a top rope backup. A cam placed into it would squirm about in the flared edges and grind out rocks as weighting it pulled the stem up, over the lips of the slot and then down at a 40-degree angle from the direction of the feature. Perfect if I was on top rope.
I work my first cam choice in, a large offset Metolius. Its head buts against the edges of the slot awkwardly, a rhino confused by the placement of a barrier at the zoo. I clip it back to my harness and raise both sides of the harness up to allow the remaining gear to drape along either side like the skeletal structure of a bat or Pterodactyl (A bat if I can make these last moves, the dino if I can’t) I don’t have the size I need.
Routes shouldn’t have difficult sections at the end. A climber can create mad experiments with a full rack, once that’s dwindled, we begin to trust our lives to junkyard sculptures that we used to make as kids during the summer to turn back time or fly into space.
Premeditated has a difficult section at its end.
<insert alien cam at tahquitz story>
My girlfriend’s single piece of gear hangs from the back of my harness, hidden between twist-tied anchor settings and nests of biners – each wearing their own twisted prussic necktie -. After wiping out the bits of gravel and dust excavated by the offset Metolius I had tried to place earlier, I unclip the red Alien and place it into the slot.
Part of the security of a single placement is the security of the placements that will come soon afterwards. I look at the solid-looking crack above this bulge. I can see two obvious small offset cam placements that will allow me to work my way around the corner into one more unseen placement before the climb will be over. Summit fever: on a route that ends halfway up the wall.
I clip my ladders to the Alien and give it a smooth-as-silk tug. It holds. I give it a few more jerks. Bits of dirt around the cam lobes start to roll out of the slot around the lobes. I notice that when I pulled on the ladders the lobes of the Alien bounced open, moving closer to the shape of a mushroom each time. I take the cam out and replace it: jerk, roll, slide. It isn’t getting any better. I place it one more time shrug my shoulders and ease onto it. The head mushrooms out but holds. I begin to inch up the daisy and release myself from the piton I’ve been standing on. I breathe longer and longer breathes, each inhalation a countdown. Fully resting on the cam now I slacken my daisy from the piton and clip the rope through the draw attached to it. With no screamers left, I try to ignore the obvious arc that will be my flightplan should the mushroom Alien blow and cause me to test every sillyputty-encased piton I’ve placed across the crux traverse. Instead my mind focuses on the strength of mushroom stalks and remembers how I would get in trouble for breaking them in the grocery store when I was younger. With a final breath, grab onto the rock, attempt to smear my boots against the surface of the wall and move up the ladder until my fifi is hooked into the biner of my ladders. Stars come and go quickly before my eyes and I realize that I had been holding my breath the entire time I was moving up. I don’t exhale until I’m resting on the fifi, my hands and feet doing extra work around me. The cam holds, but not without plenty of free climbing support.
Free climbing should be used as a synonym for time sensitive. I know that the longer I wait, the more of my weight will go onto the fifi and onto the piece. I look at the piece now sitting there at my gut level and try to put a bit more of my weight onto the fifi. I imagine I see the cam moving and I put my toes back in contact with the rock and transfer weight back onto my hands.
It’ll hold. I control my breathing to make it go in and out smoothly. Hell, a placement like that? It’ll definitely hold. I try to move the way I was taught to in high school ballet. By now, this placement’s as solid as everything else I’ve stood on. My heart is starting to become more prevalent, its beats a rhythmic bounce that must surely be transferring through my body and onto the cam. All the other placements held, this will hold, this is bomber. I haven’t moved my body in a few minutes.
The problem with calling something bomber is that, in the right mindset, you imagine pressure sensitive jumping betties, ticking time bombs, car bombs waiting for the torquing of a key exactly like a cam would do in such a placement.
“How’s it going!?!” Dixie breaks the silence she’s proved as her main method of support.
“Bomber!” I yell back
I grab both of the pieces I know will fit in the upper section of the bulge before I make my move. Take out a sling and begin to tie a loop to one end. I rehearse the sequence before hand, place piece one, clip, tighten the daisy, weight off of the bomber red alien, one end of the sling to the piece, step up, reach out, place piece two, clip, clip rope to sling on piece one, weight piece two, equalize other leg of the sling to piece two. I rehearse again. The third rehearsal happens at the same time my body acts and begins the sequence. Like all of my difficult moments in climbing, I am simply along for the ride.
I prepare the equalized sling before I move because I cannot see the final placement I will have to make. Prepare to fall off of the invisible; I spend the time to protect myself from the unknown. This is perhaps the worst part of this route, the constant unknowing of the specter just beyond your reach. Cracks that deteriorate into blank faces once you brush your fingers across them. Flakes that dream of flight, stones that dream of being meteors. 40% of your time climbing the route, 60% of your time preparing for the possibility of the route that fading away into the heatwaves of a desert highway mirage."
