My old friend, Hamish, frequently opined that two pitches is not multi-pitch climbing. Three pitches, presumably is, but what if all five pitches are really short, and altogether only total the length of a two pitch Red Rock route? The answer, like life, becomes less clear. What is clear is that we were not equipped for multi-pitch climbing because we did not intend to multi-pitch climb.
Doug and I had driven up from the coast to climb at Mount Alexandra, and, the night before leaving I had checked Mount Alexandra Reserve on the web to make sure there were no closures. Australia, if you live under a rock and are not aware, is the world’s largest Nanny Country and closures of trails and natural areas occur with increasing regularity as access is perceived by our risk averse overlords to be “dangerous” due to a variety of increasingly infinitesimally inconsequential risks. Pubs, cafes, junk food shops, gambling dens and brothels never close. But natural areas do. Timid populations are easily controlled.
With that foreshadowing, it’s not hard to guess that Mount Alexandra Reserve was closed. My nephew, Mitchell, was driving down from Sydney to climb with us and had already left home so we needed a back-up plan and quickly. Luckily, there are two main climbing areas close to Mittagong, the second being Mount Gibraltar. We have climbed at Mount Gibraltar before but not for about seven years, hence our recollection of access and routes was lost in the back of our brains and not readily accessible. We were however, able to download the Crag guide, although reading these guides on mobile phones is difficult as the images are small and the text becomes a bit garbled rendering finding your way around the routes a bit trickier than using a standard paper guidebook.
Deciding on Slab Walls, we set about sorting gear to enable three people to climb multi-pitch routes. Mitchell does not climb frequently so had nothing on his harness at all, partly my fault as I had neglected to tell him to bring a belay device or PAS. If you climb regularly these pieces of equipment reside on your harness and you forget that gym climbers do not follow this practice. Essentially, we took everything we had with us that vaguely resembled climbing equipment: one rope, a clutch of quickdraws, two 30 cm draws each equipped with one standard carabiner and one screwgate carabiner (as the Aussies call them) which we use for top anchors on single pitch routes, two BD ATC-Guides, two PAS, and between us three short lengths of cord usable as safety backups for abseiling.
What we would have taken had we been appropriately prepared would have been two half-ropes instead of one single rope, two cordellettes and some extra ‘biners so that two stations could be equipped at the same time. Of course, it is possible to use the rope for this instead of cordellettes and rock climbers who argue on the internet quadruple the time they actually spend rock climbing frequently site the practice of using cordellettes to equip all intermediary belays as silly when a rope can be used. But, realistically, having two anchor set ups on multi-pitch routes results in more efficiency in the long run. Likewise, two half ropes enables – with an appropriate belay device such as the ATC-Guide – the leader to belay two seconds at the same time. On meandering routes, such as the ones we climbed, two ropes also reduces rope drag, and allows the leader to combine pitches.
With only one rope, we had to tie Mitchell into the middle using an alpine butterfly, while I climbed on the very end. This meant we climbed singly instead of both climbing at the same time. It also meant that on routes with very short pitches that wandered a bit, or pitches that were over 30 metres long it was difficult or impossible to link pitches. But, it worked, and no significant safety issues were encountered. Which is why, at the end of the day, it is necessary to work with principles not rules, because sometimes you get caught out without the perfect set-up but you still need to make the day work.
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