"Button and then Zip, or Zip and then Button?"

I think that's the second reference to Babylon 5 in this blog.

It's hard to keep this blog dedicated to something more than rock climbing. I try to fill it with musings and stories, all the while I try to keep the climbing related things to an exciting minimum. What do you care what I sent today, or yesterday, or the day before?

You probably don't. In fact, there isn't too much of a tale to tell about them. Every day is almost exactly the same. Except every now and then something terrifying happens, and I am again reminded why I love rock climbing. It scares the shit out of me (sometimes). I could get seriously injured. I could die.

A few weeks ago, before I took Eric Chastang to the airport, he was giving me a belay on Wild Yet Tasty (5.12a). While going for the send (which I still haven't done) I took a fall.

The first three bolts of the route are fairly casual. I could walk through all the moves with my eyes closed, not get pumped, and maybe chug a beer if the necessity was present.

But the necessity didn't exist until I started to pull through the crux.

My left hand was in a pinch, solid. I stepped my left out, brought up my right hand to a crimp straight above my head, I pulled up as my left found a side pull on the inner side of a dish. Okay, now I need to concentrate.

I moved my right hand up again to another crimp as I placed my left foot on this tiny sloping pocket. Then I bump my right hand way out right for a three finger pocket: GOT IT.

I place a heel-toe cam into the dish my left hand is side pulling on. I weight it and it's solid. Without even announcing it, I grab the rope with my left  to clip. Luckily Eric is an attentive belayer to watch my every movement, and has belayed me enough on Wild to know my sequences. Well. I had enough time to grab up slack drag it to the carabiner before I felt my right hand slipping.

About fifteen feet below me is a ledge, on which I had to start the route from. With clipping slack out, a lighter belayer . . .

I uttered the only fragment of a desperate thought I could manage as I dropped the rope: "FUCK"

And immediately I tore off the wall. I fell hard, my adrenaline pumping wildly, the wall dropped away from me in a blur. I saw Eric stemming off the ledge. "I almost got sucked down that crevasse" I remember him telling me. There is a large drop between the boulder one belays from and the ledge the route starts at.

I looked at the crevasse and him, then I noticed the two feet of air separating me and that ledge, separating me from a broken ankle, leg, or worse.

All in all. I was lucky to have a belayer who pulled in the clipping slack as much as he could before I fell. So I apologize if you are ever offended at me denying your belay, but I know who I can trust on the other end, and I am skeptical of everyone else.