Labor of Love-- Traditional Climbing in the Longwang Range

jackmarr - Aug 8, 2008 1:21 pm - Hasn't voted

Hi Climbhighnow.

Have been inactive lately. Would be very interested in your feedback. We repelled from a solid equalized top anchor on a 60 m rope. Then the pitch leveled out for about 5 m and then dropped off again for another 10 m or so. We were on a 60 m rope. The picture you see is a tree above the last section of the climb. I set up two equalized quickdraws there and belayed behind it from my reverso on the final pitch in a solid stance. In my thinking, as the climber below was on toprope, this provided an intermediate belay point as belaying from the very top-- basically 60 m of rope above-- would create massive rope drag and leave the climber out of sight on the lower part. Setting that up provided an additional friction point for the toproped climber below, and I used my body stance and belay device to take the toprope fall (low factor) from below. In the worst case scenario ie the 5" diameter branch snapped I was still behind a thicker tree, through my reverso, and roped into the main anchor above. I actually took a number of toprope falls on this rigging with my belayer above me, trying out a difficult section, and it held extremely well despite her being much lighter than me.

I think there might have been a simpler way to go about it, but did not want to pull down the super bomber top anchor to rerig it at this section for a small cliff. That would have taken a lot of time, and I felt the lower anchor would have been less bomber-- particularly as we were toproping the whole pitch.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this-- ie how to stay on one toprope anchor and repel/ toprope several mini-pitches on ground that goes quickly from vertical to flat back to vertical.

Thanks, Jack