Matt's T-TRIP SOLO REPORT
Will S. Johnston
“nerves of toothpaste”
You said love is a hell that I can’t bear;
and I said give me mine back and then go there, for all I care.
T.T. had been a route of burning desire for me for some time. The
name, the history (Charlie Porter 1973), and its reputation for being
relatively moderate had kept me thinking about doing TT the whole long
dreary winter. The other thing is that for one reason or another TT doesn’t
see nearly the traffic of Zodiac, which is right nearby on this steep and
stunning part of El Cap. Initially however, I never had the least
inclination to solo the thing-- I just wanted to do it and get out of my
nowallsforayear funk.
My friend Will and I went up in early June to hop on TT when it looked
like we were finally going to get some decent weather. Yeah right. We were
barely able to fix the first four pitches before we had to run away in the
face of yet another grim storm. I left my ropes in place planning to return
with Will or whoever else could come back with me as soon as the weather got
good.
I ended up having to wait two weeks because of the weather and pressing
concerns here in Santa Cruz. During this time I mulled over what I had
learned on my initial foray with Will. Tangerine Trip is a seriously
traversing route. The fourth pitch actually traverses downhill. Retreat
will not be an option beyond the fourth pitch, I told myself. As far as I
was concerned, sideways down-nailing is a hideous concept; not an option.
Surprisingly, I welcomed the commitment. After a long winter struggling
with the somewhat mindnumbing realities of trying to run a small business,
the thought of true commitment was welcome. So it goes with the big wall
game.
In the end I had to solo. Everyone was busy or didn’t want to go.
Secretly I had been hoping for this scenario. Don’t ask me why. I guess
when it comes down to it, my ass needed kicking. Deep inside I knew I
needed to get slapped around physically, emotionally, spiritually. A solo
ascent of TT would provide this in spades.
Two exhausting hikes up the Zodiac gully and I was finally once again
at the bottom of my fixed lines--staring up at the intimidating initial
overhangs. The plan was to jug the lines, haul the bag, and then sleep at
the top of the following pitch, the super-classic fifth, which takes a hard
left for 165 feet over the slimy roof of the previous pitch. It turns out I
was a little overly optimistic. After hauling and jugging 330 feet there
was only time and energy for setting up the ledge and falling immediately to
sleep.
The first day was spent re-acquainting myself with the solo system and
all of its finer points. Cleaning traverses has always been a secret
shameful weakness of mine and I suffered because of this. By the end I had
the system dialed but I wasted energy. Critical energy. And I was having a
problem with getting too frustrated with myself whenever I did something
that was less than the most efficient way. While soloing, saving energy is
more important than gold, and I cursed whenever I made mistakes. I hadn’t
soloed anything in two years and was pissed off about how rusty I felt.
Two guys from Tahoe were right behind me and I knew that eventually
engineering a pass would become an issue. My goal was to climb fast enough
so that they wouldn’t need to pass for a long time. Having them behind me
was a good motivator to climb fast--which is what I wanted to do.
On the first day I only completed two pitches, one less than my goal.
Fortunately Doug and Bob, the Tahoe guys, were moving pretty slow at that
point also. When I went to bed they were one pitch below me. We talked a
little bit that evening and they seemed like real nice guys. Having them
there was good because it eased a little bit of the loneliness that was
creeping over me.
The next day I awoke feeling late and groggy. My body was now
officially very tired. I stared in a confused stupor at all the mess around
me that would have to be organized and put away before I could begin the
next pitch. The leg-loops to my harness would have to be put back on. The
sleeping bag would have to be stuffed. Food and water put away. Ledge
broken down. Haulbag re-packed. Gear organized. Ropes stacked. Topo
reviewed. Water, Clif bar, caffeine pill and only then could I start
climbing.
Day two was when everything began to feel for real. I was committed
now and was feeling excited, lonely, and vulnerable. However I was also
very absorbed in the tasks at hand. Things were somewhat clicking. My pace
increased to three pitches a day, which is a critical pace to maintain, I
felt. The system became rote. Lead the pitch. Set up the anchor. Pull up
the end of the lead line and tie it in. Take the rope out of the GriGri.
Switch the GriGri and the ATC. Carefully set up the Haul line in the hauler
and pull out the slack. Slightly take the weight of the bag then back up
the line with an overhand knot to a locking ‘biner. Do your best to get on
rappel (you will have to bite the haul line and swear at least once). Rap
the haul line. When you get to the previous anchor release the
munter-on-a-mule on the tether line and lower out the bag. Tie in to the
end of the lead line. Get the jugs on and break down the anchor. Clean the
pitch. When you get to the anchor get safe and untie yourself from the end
of the lead line. Take this end and stack it in the rope bag until you
reach the anchored end. Clip the rope bag somewhere that meets the
criteria (for the all important tangle-free feed during the next lead).
Haul the bag. Tether it. Stack the Haul line. Start all over with the
next pitch. Do this over and over again from the crack of dawn until the
setting of the sun day after day. And during the entire process talk to
yourself and soothe your rising fears; your rising sense of vulnerability as
both the ground and the top feel very fucking distant.
Also on day two a new player entered the scene. The Russian. A few
issues back in Climbing Pete Takeda reviewed a titanium wall hauler made by
Ushba, a Russian company. He said good things about this hauler and so I
bought it for this climb. The Ushba hauler was such a nightmare for me that
it became key figure in the daily dramas, especially on the third day. Its
name became simply, the Russian--and I cursed it. On the third day I spent
hours cursing the Russian. See postscript for more about this frustrating
piece of equipment.
Sometime during the second day I tapped in a BD bird beak--the end of
my try for a hammerless ascent. This was a bit of a disappointment for me.
I knew that slowly but surely I was losing my nerve. With every day the air
felt a little heavier, the vulnerability a little more intense. Breaking
out the hammer was like admitting that my nerves of steel had turned to
nerves of aluminum. Next they would become nerves of wood, I feared. After
that, nerves of clay. Then nerves of toothpaste. Don’t ask me why nerves
of toothpaste came after nerves of clay; it just made sense at the time.
The point is, having nerves of toothpaste is not a good thing high on a big
wall. This was my secret fear and I talked to myself about it a lot. Here
is a sample: “Fuckin’ nerves of toothpaste, man. Now that is path-etic!
The climbing isn’t even that hard! Nerves of toothpaste. Jesus. What a
loser!” Berating myself in this way actually felt good at the time. A
sense of humor is a very important thing.
On the third day I really did lose my nerve--to a greater extent than
ever before in my climbing career.
The thirteenth pitch looks like nothing special and I was wondering
why one of the guys from Tahoe had taken a whipper on it the day before. It
wanders up a groove/corner thing and then crosses out a minor roof onto a
rivet ladder. As I looked over the pitch while eating breakfast I wondered
where a fall was even possible on this pitch. The groove looked A2 with a
couple of fixed pins and a rivet or two and then it looked like a hook move
or two got you to the roof (small cam?) and then to the ladder. Hmmm.
When I got to the so-called hooking section I realized what the problem
was. The entire twenty-foot section had recently exfoliated. Things were
looking loose and shifty but not too bad, I thought. Standing high off a
rivet I was able to get a larger micro-nut to stick behind a creaky flake.
From there I spied a hairline crack behind a short, shallow corner that
would get me to the roof, which looked to be a solid small cam placement. I
stood up high on a ‘beak that fit nicely in the hairline crack and put the
blue Metolius TCU in my mouth as I prepared to slot the roof and then get on
the rivet ladder which was beginning to look like the promised land. The
TCU sucked all-too-easily into the shadowy pod in the roof. Instead of
being suspicious however, I just assumed that the pod was just one of those
made-to-order cam placements--or maybe its a gritty, flaring nightmare--at
the time I didn’t seem to care. I experienced a lapse in concentration.
Ambivalence where ambivalence has no place. ‘Whatever dude’. For some
reason I didn’t take the time to really bounce test it before committing my
full weight to this invisible placement.
I was falling before I had a chance to realize what was happening. The
Birdbeak ripped, taking the entire corner with it, and so did the micro-nut,
the rivet, and the small Alien before the rivet. I came to a stop in a
clattering heap just below my portaledge--after falling for about forty
feet. As I tried to catch my breath I heard a sound like cannon-fire below
me and realized that all the rock I had pulled loose was hitting the talus.
Everything got quiet. Even the hammering on Zenyatta Mondatta was no more.
“Are you OK Matt?” The Tahoe guys.
Physically I was fine but my nerves were shot. I went into auto pilot
and began to re-lead the pitch. I knew I had to quickly finish this pitch
or it was total melt-down time. Koo-Koo for Cocoa Puffs. Mommy daddy help
me. “CLIMBER ON TANGERINE TRIP, DO YOU NEED A RESCUE?”
I got back to the fixed pin that arrested my fall and saw that it was
going to be tough going. My fall had exposed ten feet of rock that was so
loose it was hanging by a thread. To get to this area required two
placements not likely to withstand shock-loading--as my previous fall had
proven. Upon reaching the loose area I tried to hook a detached granite
dinner plate but it immediately moved when I put any weight on it.
Nightmare. “Keep it together Matt”, I said out loud. I looked up and saw
Bob belaying the pitch above. “I don’t know how to get through this section
without pulling off a lot of loose rock...” My words hung in the air as I
waited for Bob to answer. “I don’t think there is anybody down there to
hit...”, he finally replied.
I screamed “ROCK!” as loud as I could and pulled off three or four
dinner plates and a block the size of a toaster. I watched the rocks zip
through the air with sickening precision. The impact was so far away that
the granite dust explosion far preceded the cannon-fire sound. Once again
the hammering on Zenyatta stopped. I was making everyone this side of
Mescalito feel very uncomfortable.
Among what was left was a small, loose edge that took a skyhook.
Holding my breath I stepped high to Doubloon a tiny, downsloping remnant of
a rivet that I hadn’t noticed before. The Doubloon felt sketchy so I
switched to a #0 rivet hanger. Only the rusty threads of the rivet kept the
rivet hanger cable from slipping off. Totally precarious. Once again
stepping high, I fi-fied off and surveyed the scene. One more
doubtful-looking placement separated me from the roof that had spit me out
before. And then the solid looking rivet ladder. “For the love of God don’
t fuck this up”, I told myself matter-of-factly. The thought of taking that
same fall again was nauseating.
The remnants of the shallow corner that the ‘beak had ripped off was my
only hope. I pounded in a knifeblade behind the crusty bulge but it oozed
downward and then popped out when I bounce-tested it. “Dogshit!”, I said
through pursed lips. In my fragile state this was almost too much. I
needed everything to go smoothly. I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead
against the granite. Breakdown time. “If I take this fall again I will
only hit air”, I sobbed to myself. “Fuck that shit...if you take this fall
again you’re going to have a melt-down up here!” I knew it wasn’t true
though.
“Na-na-na-na. Be the ball, Danny.” Some old lines from Caddyshack
came to me. Chevy Chase. “Do you take drugs Danny? Good Danny. Be the
ball, Danny.”
Buzzing with fear, I pulled out a #3 alumi-head and set it into a
gritty indentation above the knifeblade hole. I was pretty surprised that
the crappy rivet hanger had held this long. I stared at the mashie in the
indentation but didn’t pound it--the placement seemed doubtful. I looked up
at Bob again. I was so tempted to ask him to lower a rope. This thought
filled me with shame. Then I got mad. I set about pounding the mashie like
there was no tomorrow. “This bad-boy is going to stick.”, I said with
fervor.
With the Mashie set I got high in my Aiders and was able to reach the
roof. I blew out the copious grit and was able to slot the Hybrid Alien--a
new piece bought specifically for this climb. I bounce-tested the shit out
of it and before I knew it I was in the promised land--the first of the
rivets. The preceding twenty feet was the most harrowing aid I had ever
done. Luckily, it was only twenty feet. I can’t imagine doing one hundred
and forty feet of stuff like that.
For the rest of the day I was in a world of fragile nerves. The
climbing wasn’t hard but I was cooked. I was ready to get off this thing.
The so-called “loose 5.7” at the end of the next pitch was hell. Like an
idiot I didn’t wear my rock shoes and spent the last forty feet of the pitch
greasing off rounded footholds and trying not to commit to the shifting
car-door sized blocks that were the only handholds. My calves burned like
fire as my Nikes smeared for dubious purchase while I reached back to feed
myself slack to keep the lead line from yanking me backwards and off into
the void. I trusted nothing--#3 Camalots might as well have been #0 RP’s
for the confidence they inspired. My nerves were shot. I was turning a
straightforward pitch into a living nightmare. “Why didn’t I wear my
rock-shoes?...” My whining query hung in the air and then floated away. I
said it out loud but I might as well have said it to myself. El Capitan did
not care.
When I finally reached the belay I set everything up in slow motion.
Every knot was checked and re-checked. I built an anchor that was redundant
to the point of being silly. Nerves of toothpaste. I didn’t care though.
I knew I just needed one pitch to go completely smoothly so I could get back
into some semblance of a rhythm. “The last two pitches were a disaster but
this next pitch will be mellow...”, I told myself. I looked up and indeed
the next pitch appeared to be pretty chill--cams out a small roof to a 150
foot rivet ladder. The top was getting closer. A flash of hope shot
through me like a small electric current.
However, before I could lead the next pitch I had to descend to the
previous belay. I committed my weight to the haul line and jumped up and
down hoping to force the Ushba to fail before I was out in space. Under my
body weight, the cam in the Russian always failed and shock loaded the
back-up knot, resulting in a six-inch free fall that I came to call the
horror. Unfortunately, I could not get the horror to come prematurely. I
rappelled down the rope, staring into the abyss and cringing in the face of
the inevitable. This time the cam failed about half-way down the pitch--a
six-inch free-fall while staring at the talus 1800 feet below. Sheer
terror. “You must make a friend of the horror.”, I quickly told myself. I
looked up the tiny red thread that was my lifeline and followed it to its
point of attachment, eighty feet above me. Marlon Brando’s line from
Apocalypse Now; so very appropriate. I set my jaw and smirked into the
void. After the rope severed and I free-fell for more than ten seconds,
what would I think about? I heard once that while falling the length of El
Cap some poor climber looked down and screamed, “LOOK OUT BELOW!!!”. That
person deserves to have the words ‘Polite To The Very End’ carved into their
tombstone. This made me chuckle. I was beginning to regain my composure.
Nerves of wood.
I led the next pitch with nerves of wood. Unlike nerves of toothpaste,
wherein you are swimming in a world of bile and inadequacy and shit, or
nerves of clay where you feel like a deer caught in the headlights of your
on-coming demise, with nerves of wood you feel generally competent.
However, all it takes is the shift of a ‘biner or a slight delay in finding
the right piece for a placement and you are instantly reminded of how
fragile you feel.
The fifteenth pitch is actually quite stunning. You crest out on a
bulge and now finally all of El Cap comes into view. No longer climbing
behind corners or under roofs, you visually experience yourself in the
context of the ocean that is El Cap. The granite stretches endlessly in all
directions. I thought about every line up the cliff between me and the
Nose. The zeniths of so many lives compressed into less than a square mile
of granite. I listened to a team on the Pacific Ocean wall. They were
screaming at each other in German. Their voices sounded high-pitched and
quaky with tense fear. They traveled thousands of miles to experience
nature at her most unforgiving. Life is pretty fragile on the P.O.
wall--judging by their tone of voice, I thought to myself. It is not skill
that you need up there, I reflected, it is artistry.
In the movie Quest For Fire I remembered that life was pretty fragile
for the first humans also. They too experienced nature at her most
unforgiving--not just for a few days but always. To survive, these people
became not skilled technicians, but artists. Life was cheap back then and
they faced the abyss of death constantly. This fact changed them; brought
out a mystical side. Why? Because at the interface between the ego and the
cosmos there is an indeterminate wilderness area called the human soul and
there a person learns how to face the truly tenuous toehold that we call the
individual human life. That place is the perilous inspiration behind true
creativity. Every time a situation in life causes you to confront your own
death, your own ego destruction, feelings of vast trauma are prevalent. The
ego rears up like a mad elephant as if to chase the abyss of death away.
But the cosmos is not some creature that can be frightened. The cosmos is
just fact, plain and immutable, like the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. Or
the Pacific Ocean wall. When we first
experience the trauma of the likelihood of our own impending death, real or
imagined, the experience is not fun. However, successive trips to the abyss
and we become familiar with the shenanigans of the ego, that great paper
tiger. In time we learn to ignore the trauma of the death trip, and are
able to take in the abyss more objectively. And we learn some pretty
bitchen’ stuff. Stuff that isn’t very easy to articulate, but has something
to do with feeling stronger and more healthily detached when we return to
the everyday world.
One of my customers for my business is an accomplished Triathelete. He
was telling me how lately he has been getting into adventure
racing--Eco-Challenge type of stuff. He now wants to become an accomplished
adventure athlete. We talked for a while about it and I kept asking him
questions. I didn’t tell him at the time but something was bugging me.
Since then I have figured it out: the whole adventure athlete thing bugs
me. Athletics and the whole Nike generation are about competency, about
being the best. But true adventure is about self-discovery, spirituality.
One person frees the Salathe’, another climbs Nutcracker for the first time
and both lives are equally enriched--at least potentially. Both make the
pilgrimage to the abyss and both lives are enobled. That’s the beauty of
it. When the Just Do It set take over adventure climbing I’ll be bummed.
Or maybe they will be converted and see the more profound side of climbing.
The Germans on the P.O. won’t feel at one with their mission until they
let the spectre of death inspire them, not revile them, I thought. “You’ve
got to tap in, dudes!”, I screamed in their direction. No way they heard me
though. That I had such philosophical thoughts during all the rivet hopping
of pitch sixteen shows that I was regaining my composure after a hard day.
The rivet pitch ushers in the end of TangerineTrip in effect, because
you gain much altitude quickly and the top comes fully into view. There are
some long reaches between rivets and I found the pitch to be physically
exhausting. My hands were now officially wasted. Pus and blood oozed from
numerous lesions. Neither hand would open all the way.
When I finally crawled into my portaledge that evening I was a zombie.
I talked to myself softly, in broken sentences. Mentally, this was one of
the hardest days of my climbing career. All I had left for dinner was a can
of fruit but I was too tired to eat it sitting up so I laid down and slurped
the juices and chunks the best I could. The contents of the can dribbled
all over my face and neck but I didn’t care. I fell asleep with wet
claw-hands still clenching the can of fruit cocktail.
I awoke the next morning feeling focused and ready to finish. Finally
I was beginning to feel like myself, competent and unafraid of this moderate
trade route. It would be a lie to say that I had fully regained my
composure, however. As the caffeine pills kicked in and I set off to lead
the next pitch one fear tugged at my sleeve: the 5.9 free climbing on the
seventeenth pitch. The memories of the “loose 5.7” of the day before would
not go away. Thoughts of horrible run-out face climbing on self-belay made
me queasy. This would be the final obstacle. If I blew it and took some
screaming, tumbling whipper, my resolve would be grinded to a pulp. I would
end up like the guy on the staircase in Saving Private Ryan. See the movie
and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Soloing big walls: five days of
trying to keep your head together.
As it turned out the seventeenth pitch was a cakewalk. Even on
solo-belay. As I clipped the anchors I realized the hard climbing was over
and my mood was transformed. I suddenly saw Tangerine Trip for what it
is--no more, no less. Was it easy? The words easy and big-wall don’t
belong together in the same sentence. Was it hard? Well, it is only as
hard as your mind allows it to be. And that can be pretty fucking hard, as
I found out. As I topped out after the final 5.6 cruise to the summit tree,
I felt humbled and in awe of the experience. I had felt nerves of
toothpaste and yet found out that my real power had never left. Or at least
that losing my nerve is something that I can endure. At the summit I packed
my haulbag feeling like a professor on the philosophy of fear. A
non-swimmer drowns because he won’t stop thrashing his limbs long enough to
feel secure in his ability to float. My fear of death causes me to act in
ways that make me lose sense of what life is all about. I can spend my
whole life dying, I realized. Or I can feel competent and vital right up to
the last micro-second. And when that time comes I hope I have the presence
of mind to scream, “WATCH OUT BELOW!!!” Before Tangerine Trip I didn’t
think I could afford to lose my nerve the way I did while soloing a wall.
Now I know it’s all part of the party. The whole process of losing my nerve
and then gaining it back has made me more, um, elastic. Yeah, elastic.
There is something better than having nerves of steel, I realized--nerves of
rubber. Nerves of rubber are the highest level of all. But not just
regular old rubber that breaks if you stretch it too much. I’m talking
about some super high-tech polymer that never loses it’s ability to stretch
and stretch and then snap right back, better than ever.
After coiling my ropes I walked to the precipice and stared down to the
valley floor and the Cathedral group on the other side. The wind was
blowing hard and the beauty of the setting sun was overwhelming. Slowly I
raised my arms and basked in the triumph of it all. “I SOLOED TT!!!!”, I
screamed as loud as I could. After about 30 seconds I overheard the party
on Zenyatta yell to the party lower down on TT: “WHAT DID THAT GUY SAY?”.
After a while one of the guys on TT yelled back: “I THINK HE SAID, ‘I SAW
E.T.!!!’” I laughed and felt relaxed. My nerve was back and I prepared
myself for six hours of hell through the East Ledges Descent.
P.S.
I want to warn people that the Ushba hauling device is inadequate for
hauling static lines and especially inadequate for a solo system that
involves rapping a loaded hauling device as mine does. The problem is that
the cam that is designed to stop the rope from feeding backwards (the wrong
way) is not aggressive enough to automatically grab the rope as in Rock
Exotica’s Wall Hauler. So you have to manually poke the cam with your
finger or the Ushba will act like any pulley without a cam-stop. Stuffing
your finger in the hauler every time you pull on the haul-line is tedious to
say the least.
However this was just the beginning of the problem for me. Before I
began rappelling into the void on the Ushba I of course backed it up with an
overhand on a bight which I clipped in. However there was still necessarily
at least a couple of inches of slack between the hauler and the clip in
knot. Whenever I committed all my weight to the rappel, usually when I was
about halfway down the pitch, the cam-stop would fail and I would take a
six-inch free fall, as described earlier. This didn’t seem to damage the
rope but it was hell on my nerves. If you haul on a stiff static line (as
all static lines are after a few walls), avoid this hauler. Also, if you
plan to solo using the same system I did, do yourself a favor and throw the
Ushba in a deep hole and bury it. I sent my hauler back to Ushba and all
they did was send me a new hauler, same as the first.
Matt Niswonger
August, 1998
Matt Niswonger
August, 1998
Karl Baba
Peace and Love (and of course Fear and Transformation)
Karl
Robert Fonda
months!!! Then a solo soon afterward. Thanks!!
rlf
Ed Diffendal
>
> Dude, that was an amazing post about your solo up Tangerine Trip. You
> have an
> incredible capture of the spirit of climbing. Keep up the good work!
>
> "Our process was never merely technical, or one of getting to the tops
> of
> climbs. It was necessary rather to know the soul of climbing and the
> particulars moment by moment." -- Pat Ament
>
> Ed.