Tinker Toys Trad Rope Solo

A break in the rain inspired me to hike Rock Canyon as a break from work, and try a trad lead rope solo.

The pack weighed a ton with all the trad gear. Well, actually only about 45 lb. I had issues before with my Edilrid Eddy being a bit "grabby" on the rope, and I ended up accidentally fixing it twice - more in a second.

I got to Tinker Toys in a record 15 minutes and had it all to myself. I quick set up an anchor at the bottom of "Tinker Toys" 5.6 trad crack on the far right side of the crag. Only about 35', it would be a good first trad solo lead.



Above shows the whole mess, from a 3" cam at the top (finally set a top anchor to hold all the gear pointing upright), to a .25 tricam at the bottom.



Top part - in the middle is a #6 nut slotted in really good (bottom) and a .5 tricam used as a chock (top).



And that's the .25 tricam at the bottom. The first time I pulled it multi-directional it popped, so I really yanked on it to set it. With the top SLCD it shouldn't pull.

I took all of 10 minutes to unpack, flake the rope and set the bomber anchor. Good timing. One of the main differences between pro and anchor is that pro only needs to hold a fall, normally in only one primary direction. An anchor must survive through a potential of multiple angles of force, and in addition, could (in a normal belay situation) be the one main point of failure that two or more lives depend on. In a rope solo situation, the bottom anchor must hold an upward pull during a fall, but must resist downward (gravity) and outward (climbing past initially) forces as well. So it's really important to be totally bomber, as your life probably depends on it holding just about anything that happens.

I tied into the locker near the SLCD and threaded my GriGri (fix number one) with my blue rope. It's a short (30 Meter) thin (9.8MM) rope I got off GearExpress. I climbed up about 5' and drop tested myself. It held. Good. BUT when I wiggled at all, it fed rope. Wild. I repeated it. And it did the same thing. I downclimbed and tried it a bunch of different ways on the ground. Same thing.

Two fixes to one problem, that caused another problem. GriGri's are not rated for rope under 10MM. 9.8MM is too small. It catches, but releases itself with any change in tension. I could be hanging and just bump the wall to unweight just a little bit, and it would feed rope. Drat.

So I packed up and headed for the car. Ran into two guys coming up looking for Tinker Toys, so I gave them beta, and they asked about setting a top rope, so I gave them some "advice" and continued down.

SO: future concepts - when I take the GriGri I take a 10.2MM rope (like the yellow or pink) and when I take the Eddy take the 9.8MM rope (blue). That should fix the problems. And get me climbing.

(P.S. - it wasn't worth risking a fall that may not catch - rope solo is about safely belaying yourself, not being macho)

Raining in Utah

sucks!

Was going to go outside tonight to get my climb on.

Oh, well.

Swan Mountain Road - Toprope Crag

Got into Keystone about 5PM and decided to head out quick to toprope solo the crag at Swan Mountain Road. Tossed on the backpack at the trailhead and peeled out. Got to the Traverse Wall in 4 minutes (far out) and top of the little cliff at 12 minutes (with a small delay as someone with a lot of cheap beer was camping in the middle of the trail and I did a little scouting to make sure I wasn't crashing someone's hot tent session before I went down the trail. At the top I saw that the bolted anchors were in fact all gone but one. I tested the one remaining and it spun. I found a pulled-out hole from an old anchor right next to it (looked at my beta photos on Mountainproject.com to see what they used to look like).

I didn't see any suitable trustworthy anchoring options on top (that didn't require like 30' of rope to tie into and drape over the edge - for the most part it's loose microwave-size blocks up there). I went down to the bottom to check out the existing stuff and found some interesting future-worthy trad leads, but ran out of time so headed back to the condo by going down to the main campground road (closed for logging).

Wonder if I should call this blog "Thinking about rope solo while hiking" instead?

lol

Rock Canyon Hiking Scouting

Tuesday afternoon I went up Rock Canyon to scout out some possible areas to solo on.

I went up to Tinker Toys but it was swarming with people (guess school's out now) and I didn't even get close to the wall.

I crossed the raging river (guess the snow's melting now) on the logs (which were dang slippery in running shoes) and checked out The Appendage (couple people loafing around on the bottom of the South Face - bouldering?) and got some great beta on a few I'll try this season.

Then I headed up toward The Wild. The sky got darker and darker. I got there and heard some loud obnoxious annoying screaming coming from The Zoo/Project areas (dang college kids - probably still in the subarus borrowed from their parents) but started looking for the bottom anchor placements on "Call of the Wild" when it started pouring.

I booked it down the trail, running with a 35lb pack - which wasn't so bad now that I'm down to 192 lb. (from my all-time high of 235 lb in 2006).

Oh, well, drat the weather and all. Maybe later...

Colorado Keystone Montezuma Swan Mountain

whew! that's a mouthful. About the way Mountain Project lists it.

Anyway, was going to work on a toprope solo on the crag East of the Swan Mountain Traverse Wall, and found that the top anchors are all messed up - like someone chopped them or the block they were on took a dive heading for Lake Dillon.

Since I had the family with, we ended up going to the Traverse Wall and I set up some topropes and we played around. I did do a nice V0- problem topping out in a crack, and Dallin (8) followed right on my heels, and then Brennan (5) did with a bit of spotting and beta from Mom. Then finally Mom came up. Was pretty nice, and a ton of fun. More later if all goes well.