Postcards from the Ledge

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Spaceshot - Party of One

What happens when you are hanging on a big wall, on a couple of pro, in the dark, with no one else but your scared self for company? 

3:30 A.M.—I jolt up, wide awake.  I am so nervous, I barely slept.  Coax the hog to life and punch it down the highway into the inky blackness.  Gliding through Springdale, everyone is asleep—I should be too, but instead I’m here, acting out this crazy scheme.  And that’s all it really is, a scheme. I’m not really 100% about the details of rope soloing.  In theory, yes, I have it all worked out in my head.  But as for applying that theory into actual practice, I am uncertain.  Slipping past the park entrance, I recall the details of the phone conversation with my dad the last night.  How do you self belay?  I hesitated to explain the details of a complex system I myself didn’t fully understand.  But he just wanted the bottom line.  “Is it safe?” he demanded.  “Yes!” I exclaimed, marveling at the false confidence in my voice. 

The walls of the canyon soar up on both sides of me—breathtaking.  How could this benign little stream, the "Virgin River",  have wielded the mighty forces necessary to sculpt such monoliths? I find the pullout at the base of Spaceshot and, motor still running, poke my head out the window and gaze up.  It’s still dark, really dark.

I munch silently on soggy oatmeal in the back of my car, then start to rack. Goddamn that’s a lot of gear. I’m going for broke on this one, packing light to try to do it in a day—I take a bivy sack as my only insurance.  It’s a gamble, but it seems like the most logical way to approach the route. Light and fast, I say to myself. Yeah, whatever. The rack and two ropes, plus a backpack with bivy sack, candy bars and jacket all seem to weight a ton as I scramble up to the base of the route. 

Moonlight has begun to creep down the face.  At the base I find fresh fixed lines.  No need to make things harder, I think to myself, and prepare to jug the lines. 

It takes forever.  All this crap weighs ton; the backpack threatens to flip me over backwards.  When I reach the top of the fixed lines, I am demoralized—I must be moving slow.  It’s fully light out now, which means it must be at least 7:30 A.M.  I find my way to a bolt ladder on the headwall, the actual start of the route.  Set the belay, stack the ropes, tie in with the clove hitch.  Deep breath, double check.  Then I’m off.  I make good time on the bolt ladder, but am surprised when it ends at a crack.  No worries, one sketchy offset move, a string of bomber C1 placements and I’m at the belay.  I rap back down to the pack, clean the pitch and check the time.  It’s 9:30 A.M.—no worries, I’m right on schedule!

No worries, my ass!  Difficulties start immediately on the next pitch, right off the belay. A traverse move to a bolt leads to a perplexing corner, full of flared blown out pin scars. Nothing seems to stick, everything I test keeps popping. Finally I stuff a #1 offset in a pod and pound on it with my nut tool to paste it as far back as it will go.  I cross my fingers as I bounce test it. “boing boing BOING BOING BOING!”  It seems good.  I survey the placement, the soft sandstone has crumbled around it during the test, obscuring it, but the piece seems solid.  God that took forever; I begin to worry about running out of time. 

The rest of the pitch goes smoothly and I reach the belay without further incident.  Due to the traversing nature of the pitch, I find myself swinging around on the tag line in the middle of a sea of vertical sandstone blankness, trying to get back to the last belay.  Incredible exposure and I am getting tired.  I feel lonely and a little bit scared.  For a fleeting second, a little voice in me considers going down.  But I have no time for that—when I clean the pitch and arrive at the top of 4 it is noon.  My fingers ache, my harness feels like its made of piano wire, my hands are black from the grime and I am really low on water. 

Pitch 5 is shorter, and goes smoothly except that I am getting tired and moving slower.  I check the time at the top of the pitch—2:30 P.M.  Yikes, I start up the long pitch 6, which requires leapfrogging #1 and #2 Camalots.  I am run out but it’s on bomber placements.  It gets steeper, overhanging, and I can almost smell Earth Orbit ledge. I step out of my aiders to mantel up onto the ledge but come up short—the rope is taut.  F***!  Panting, I thrash back down and with trembling arms feed a few more feet out of my clove hitch.  I flop over the top again, and marvel at how cool a name “Earth Orbit Ledge” is, but how shitty a ledge it really is. I go down and clean the pitch, and it’s getting darker now.  I am out of water and dead thirsty.

I start up on the last pitch, which traverses off the right end of Earth Orbit ledge, then throws you out through a roof right over the HUGE overhang.  MASSIVE AIR, I’m a little scared but I don’t have time for it.  Immediately I identify my error—I’ve left my headlamp back at the belay.  Stupid stupid stupid.  Thankfully the last pitch is a bolt ladder and I yard up through it.  A race.  The sun has set; it’s getting dark fast.  I’m at the anchors, I set the belay and it’s dark.  Carefully, I rappel in the night back to the pack, and rescue my headlamp.  LIGHT floods forth—thank god!  Jugging the pitch is crazy, but its dark now and at least I can’t see anything, although I feel the yawning void tugging at my heels. 

I am at the top, exhausted and nursing Kalahiri throat.  I’m sooooooo thirsty.  I sit and rest for a bit in the dark, tangled in a nasty mess of cams, ropes, slings and biners.  From experience I know there is usually booty water on top of climbs like this, so I pack the gear and hunt around. I’m disappointed—I find nothing.  For some reason it doesn’t seem quite fair, to have finished all this work and not even a wee bit of water as a reward. 

Exhausted I dump my gear behind a fallen tree and stumble out into the darkness in a vain attempt to find the descent.  Almost immediately it becomes obvious that to do so is futile.  I resign myself to the facts—I’m in for a night out. 

I wriggle into my bivy sack, dirty and tired.  In a strange sort of way, I’m a little excited about this—it’s something I’ve always read about in hardman stories.  At first it doesn’t seem so bad, after I’ve forgotten about my thirst.  But as if in response, the wind picks up, followed after awhile by the rain, light at first, but steadily increasing in intensity. Now I am freezing, shivering, miserable.  I curl up into a fetal ball inside the sack.  Goretex seems like the biggest hoax—it’s sopping wet inside the sack, and attempts to ventilate the bag do little to remedy the situation.  I do situps to keep warm, and talk to myself about my girlfriend to keep from going crazy.  The night seems to last forever.  Finally, out of sheer exhaustion from shivering I fall asleep for a precious hour or two. 

I wake, sopping wet, and rip open the bag to reveal daylight!  Massaging warmth back into my fingers and toes I survey the minor cloud systems still brewing over the valley.  It’s a terribly beautiful sight.  With the night over, things can only get better from here.  I smile—getting down may take awhile, but it is inevitable.  I’ve just had a great adventure out, I’m safe, and in another day or two I’ll be ready to climb again.  I pack the stuff one more time, and several hours and rappels later I collapse into the back of the car, exhausted.

-Scotty Nelson