Last weekend I was climbing at Seneca Rocks with Felipe Trevizan. The weather was 
gorgeous: a cool, 41 degrees, blue skies, sunshine, leafs turning yellow. As we hiked up the East Face trail it became obvious that, owing to the low temperatures, everybody had decided to start the day on the East Face. Felipe and I had planned to get onto Conn's East, but three parties, with a total of 9 climbers, were ahead of us.
gorgeous: a cool, 41 degrees, blue skies, sunshine, leafs turning yellow. As we hiked up the East Face trail it became obvious that, owing to the low temperatures, everybody had decided to start the day on the East Face. Felipe and I had planned to get onto Conn's East, but three parties, with a total of 9 climbers, were ahead of us. We abandoned our original plan in favor of doing some exploring. I had always wanted to find one of the 5.5s that get you into the Gunsight Notch from the East Face. We scouted around, checked rock features against Tony Barnes’ guidebook, and convinced ourselves that we had located Eeyore's Tail. Off Felipe went to onsight it.
This climb, however, quickly turned into somewhat of an epic. The guidebook mentions that you need large gear, and, thanks to a loaner piece from Toni Price that we had taken with us to do Thais Direct later in the day, we did rack two #4 cams. But what the book neglects to point out is that what you really need is truly humongous gear, like some Big Bros. Felipe got the offwidth done with nearly no pro, and a lot of soul searching and moxie. He anchored to a good-looking tree on a ledge, and decided to bring me up to deliberate further route finding. Seneca, you know…
This is when it happened. When I took Felipe off belay, I &@#^%#! dropped my ATC.
I was surprised followed by fuming mad on the inside, unbelieving of my clumsiness. But this was a beautiful day and I didn’t want to spoil it. “Not to worry,” I thought to myself, “this is the reason why I carry a backup ATC.” So, I made no fuss and joyfully seconded up the first pitch to meet Felipe.
It was not clear where pitch 2 was meant to be, although I thought that
I could see the rap tree in the Gunsight through a hole in the flake behind our anchor tree. After first climbing up a 10-foot-long crack in that flake to look over it, then downclimbing it, abandoning that path in favor of an exposed traverse, and then peeking around the south end of the flake, Felipe announced that he could identify a possible path into the Gunsight. It would require him to build a gear anchor, me to traverse over to him, pass him and the anchor, tiptoe around the corner of the flake, then downclimb into the Gunsight. This day was rapidly turning into our day of “first descents.” But as Felipe pointed out, we do it all is our club motto after all.
We got all of that up-, around-, and down climbing done, and met up at the rap tree in the Gunsight Notch. Felipe abseiled first, and then it was my turn to descend over Debbie and Banana to resume the afternoon’s climbing on the now sunny West Face. I carefully and very deliberately took my backup belay device off my harness, thinking, “I won’t drop you!” I started to squeeze the two strands of rope, fumbled, and promptly let my backup ATC fall from my unbelieving hands.
It was later reported back to me at The Gendarme that climbers heard a seemingly very cheerful Regina shout, “Felipe, I dropped my ATC!”
Why was I so happy sounding in the face of that calamity? Well, I had just dropped not one, but two ATCs in one day. I’ll have you know that this is the first time that I have ever dropped any gear. When it happened I just couldn't believe that I did something this stupid. What other's thought of as my cheerful voice was actually my ding-dong-I-can't-believe-I-did-that voice of despair.
Dropping gear. What a disaster for a trad climber. But wait, that's not all. Lately, I have noticed how much more I am dropping things around the house! I throw my coat on a chair, it slides all the way down to the floor. I put my keys on the stand by the door, klunk, down they go to same floor. Reading glasses slipping off my nose, books slithering floorward off my lap, mail jumping out of my hands spilling in the entrance, clink-boing-splat, what else did I drop lately? Oh, an ATC or two?
Is there some well known “dropping disease” that begets the aging climber?
A google search on “dropping things” yields a surprising number of pages. Apparently, a great many people are troubled and feel klutzy because they are dropping things more and more often. A sufferer called Tom writes “I sometimes involuntarily drop things. This is beginning to happen more frequently.” And on another site, a woman shares, “I' m always dropping things. My neighbor recently had a baby. I hoped she was not going to ask me did I want to hold the baby. I was so relieved when she didn't, I was so afraid I might drop him.” Sadly, many of the “dropping things” threads point to diseases, such as Multiple Sclerosis, and Lou Gehrig's Disease, for which this is one symptom.
But “dropping things” is also an affliction of the aging. Elizabeth Bergner Hurlock's book on “Developmental Psychology” mentions awkwardness as one of the common changes in motor abilities in old age. Accordingly, old people become clumsy, which causes them to spill and drop things. Many studies have demonstrated that reaction time and motor speed slow progressively with advancing age. In the neuroscience literature, brain aging and functional declines are often considered synonymous.
Am I the only aging climber who suffers from dropping gear more frequently? I think not. Ack Kearns, owner of The Gendarme who looks to be around about my age, tried to console me by saying, “You climb long enough – you will eventually drop an ATC.” I mentioned my mishap in an email to Phil Hodge who was climbing at Seneca that same weekend and has over a decade on me. He wrote back, “Dropping your belay device is more like frozen fingers than getting older, even if it had warmed up by then; just on principle it can't be due to getting older!” There you have it.
If you wonder how I got down from the Gunsight without my ATC, and in keeping with the day’s theme of “first descents,” at Felipe’s suggestion I rappelled for the first time with the Munter hitch on my HMS carabiner backed up with an autoblock. Massey Teel, the Seneca Rocks Climbing School guide who had spread the story of my cheerful drop-loss at The Gendarme, later that evening showed me how to do a carabiner break, just in case I am experiencing a little clumsiness again. Realizing that the carabiner break requires five carabiners, it may just be beyond my menopausal mental and motor might.
Climb on!
This is when it happened. When I took Felipe off belay, I &@#^%#! dropped my ATC.
I was surprised followed by fuming mad on the inside, unbelieving of my clumsiness. But this was a beautiful day and I didn’t want to spoil it. “Not to worry,” I thought to myself, “this is the reason why I carry a backup ATC.” So, I made no fuss and joyfully seconded up the first pitch to meet Felipe.
It was not clear where pitch 2 was meant to be, although I thought that
I could see the rap tree in the Gunsight through a hole in the flake behind our anchor tree. After first climbing up a 10-foot-long crack in that flake to look over it, then downclimbing it, abandoning that path in favor of an exposed traverse, and then peeking around the south end of the flake, Felipe announced that he could identify a possible path into the Gunsight. It would require him to build a gear anchor, me to traverse over to him, pass him and the anchor, tiptoe around the corner of the flake, then downclimb into the Gunsight. This day was rapidly turning into our day of “first descents.” But as Felipe pointed out, we do it all is our club motto after all. We got all of that up-, around-, and down climbing done, and met up at the rap tree in the Gunsight Notch. Felipe abseiled first, and then it was my turn to descend over Debbie and Banana to resume the afternoon’s climbing on the now sunny West Face. I carefully and very deliberately took my backup belay device off my harness, thinking, “I won’t drop you!” I started to squeeze the two strands of rope, fumbled, and promptly let my backup ATC fall from my unbelieving hands.
It was later reported back to me at The Gendarme that climbers heard a seemingly very cheerful Regina shout, “Felipe, I dropped my ATC!”
Why was I so happy sounding in the face of that calamity? Well, I had just dropped not one, but two ATCs in one day. I’ll have you know that this is the first time that I have ever dropped any gear. When it happened I just couldn't believe that I did something this stupid. What other's thought of as my cheerful voice was actually my ding-dong-I-can't-believe-I-did-that voice of despair.
Dropping gear. What a disaster for a trad climber. But wait, that's not all. Lately, I have noticed how much more I am dropping things around the house! I throw my coat on a chair, it slides all the way down to the floor. I put my keys on the stand by the door, klunk, down they go to same floor. Reading glasses slipping off my nose, books slithering floorward off my lap, mail jumping out of my hands spilling in the entrance, clink-boing-splat, what else did I drop lately? Oh, an ATC or two?
Is there some well known “dropping disease” that begets the aging climber?
A google search on “dropping things” yields a surprising number of pages. Apparently, a great many people are troubled and feel klutzy because they are dropping things more and more often. A sufferer called Tom writes “I sometimes involuntarily drop things. This is beginning to happen more frequently.” And on another site, a woman shares, “I' m always dropping things. My neighbor recently had a baby. I hoped she was not going to ask me did I want to hold the baby. I was so relieved when she didn't, I was so afraid I might drop him.” Sadly, many of the “dropping things” threads point to diseases, such as Multiple Sclerosis, and Lou Gehrig's Disease, for which this is one symptom.
But “dropping things” is also an affliction of the aging. Elizabeth Bergner Hurlock's book on “Developmental Psychology” mentions awkwardness as one of the common changes in motor abilities in old age. Accordingly, old people become clumsy, which causes them to spill and drop things. Many studies have demonstrated that reaction time and motor speed slow progressively with advancing age. In the neuroscience literature, brain aging and functional declines are often considered synonymous.
Am I the only aging climber who suffers from dropping gear more frequently? I think not. Ack Kearns, owner of The Gendarme who looks to be around about my age, tried to console me by saying, “You climb long enough – you will eventually drop an ATC.” I mentioned my mishap in an email to Phil Hodge who was climbing at Seneca that same weekend and has over a decade on me. He wrote back, “Dropping your belay device is more like frozen fingers than getting older, even if it had warmed up by then; just on principle it can't be due to getting older!” There you have it.
If you wonder how I got down from the Gunsight without my ATC, and in keeping with the day’s theme of “first descents,” at Felipe’s suggestion I rappelled for the first time with the Munter hitch on my HMS carabiner backed up with an autoblock. Massey Teel, the Seneca Rocks Climbing School guide who had spread the story of my cheerful drop-loss at The Gendarme, later that evening showed me how to do a carabiner break, just in case I am experiencing a little clumsiness again. Realizing that the carabiner break requires five carabiners, it may just be beyond my menopausal mental and motor might.
Climb on!
Regina
Great story Regina. I know of a few ATC's laying at the foot of the East Face. None are mine yet, but I carry a spare one, too now. But you can bet I'll be practicing rapping on a munter next chance I get.
ReplyDelete