This is a story of an abseil where the rope did not reach the ground.
5pm
Leave work with Kaspar, young motivated new-to-climbing climber and who has been studying wide-boyz videos the whole last week. Just wants to go crack climbing. Spotted a place called Lexby which has cracks. Arrive at crag 10 min drive from work.
5:30pm
Kit up and decide on objective. Been flicking through the guide book endlessly to be sure abut the choice. Decide on some wicked looked crack up on the second tier of the crag. Rig up and scrabble up a sloping ledge to the base of the 2nd tier. Place is like a dream. Brilliant position and splitters and flakes as far as the eye can see. And lots of blank granite 30 meter above the deck and 30 meters above. A sea of rock.
6pm
Weary about the chosen objective which is called Great Crack. Clearly the line of the crag and looks amazing. (See photo). Guide keeps going on about “crack just a centimer wider than a camelot 4” which the biggest piece of gear I have. The route is 30 meters long and already fairly exposed starting up from the ledge. So anyway, plenty other lines, same grades same problem. All mentions the gear needs to be “fairly large”.
6:30pm
Decide to bail on the Great Crack and find the easiest route out. It also “need big gear” so we spot a line that looks more like it’ll take my size of gear, but is graded a notch harder. Considering bailing completely, but then – the yoor is mustered and we go for the gear friendly looking line. Rack up, and off I go. Climb was as hard as ever for a completely incompetent crack climber like me, and I was glad to get up it despite a short fall and rest on a well placed 3 nut. Kaspar comes up in style (struggled getting my weighted 3 nut out), and we are topping out in – well urban darkness. The place is semi lit from a nearby football field, but the young swedish footballers are calling it in and we are in a hurry to get off the face.
8pm
We find the abseils anchors described in the guidebook and rig the 60 meter single rope in two. It flows beautifully down a completely blank granit face to the ledge below. Excellent rappel, and Kaspar’s first!
Second rappel is the interesting one: we are at the midway ledge and scrambling down in darkness isn’t really what we fancy and we can see the deck below. It’s quite a bit down but I am fairly certain it’s not 30 meters above ground. I throw the rope out and start rappelling as Kaspar mentions “what if you can’t reach the deck” scenario. I ignore this and start rappelling. This rappel is a out-from-a-ledge and then free-hanging type of job. Brilliant, and spectacular, although it’s all pretty dark. I can sort of see the rope in the distance and it does look a bit tight. As I approach the end of the rope I can see that it doesn’t actually reach the ground and that the last bit is on a blank wall type job. I judge the rope to be close enough to the ground to figure something out when I get there. Turns out it’s like 1.5 meters above the deck and thankfully I had measured the rope ends equally long, and I hadn’t tied knots on the end. This allows me to elegantly abseil off the rope ends and drop the last distance in a nice drop to the ground! Wicked!
Problem is that now the two rope ends are floating 5 meters above me, now the rope stretch has gone. I tell Kaspar to start abseiling as I expect the rope ends to just reach me once he puts weight on the length of the rope. About 2/3 way down I can now reach the ends and I quickly tie a figure 8 knot on the one rope end and let the other loose. This way, when Kaspar arrives, he should be pulling one end down with him in the belay device. He arrives and is just short a safe “abseil off the rope end” distance and I let him drop onto my shoulders as the rope snaps away from him and whistles up. The one end remains stuck to his belay device as planned and we can safely pull the rope down and all is good. Fairly unorthodox abseil I suppose. But what end to an evening!
Happy to be down
The place need some jamming masters. Well worth a visit!
Oh, and yeah! We got properly benighted, and made the pub. A perfect evening climb.