I'll do my climbing in the rain

I was belaying Aaron up a climb Wednesday afternoon when the wind started to pick up. At first we thought, “Oh what a nice breeze.”

We’d been climbing all day at a crag that has jungle running up to the edge of it and over the top of it, so close that sometimes lowering off a route meant lowering into the trees. The mosquitoes were fierce and the ants tenacious enough to crack even the most dedicated of backpack zippers. I’d been climbing routes I’d usually use crack technique on, bracing a palm on one side of the rock and a shoulder or elbow on the other, but mix sweaty, sunscreen-coated skin with limestone in humid air and I might as well have buttered my limbs before every attempt at moving upward. I mean that in the best of humor. I was climbing strong and had partnered up for the morning with Sunny. At every foot placement and finger grip I could hear him saying, “Uh huh, uh huh,” the vowel-sounds twinged with his Australian accent—and I’ve decided accents makes all positive reinforcement more effective.

The wall had been mostly quiet when we arrived. The tide was in and to get to this cliff with the tide high, you either have to swim or take a boat. We’d hired a boat and then hiked through the jungle, among towering palm trees whose fronds are as long as a kayak.

Aaron was leading what we’d expected to be the last climb of the day when the wind started to pick up. (For the non-climbers: in lead climbing, a climber ties his harness to a rope that’s attached to the harness of his belayer through a belay device, which basically employs the physics of a pulley system to allow me to easily stop his fall. Then he clips quickdraws [two carabiners connected by a piece of flat, nylon rope] into bolts placed about 10 feet apart from one another in the rock and clips the rope into those quickdraws. Were he to fall while climbing, he would fall as far as that last quickdraw and I would catch him using my belay device.) He was more than half way up, but really, the first bolt on this climb set a point of no return. If he wanted to take home all his gear with him, then he had to finish the climb, regardless of the weather.

And that weather pretty quickly turned from a “nice breeze” to a steadily increasing wind. Leaves were swept off the cliff above us and rained down onto the jungle around us and the wind blew hard enough to loosen some of those palm fronds and one came crashing down into the jungle behind us. In a matter of seconds, the light went from an overcast day to the dark of twilight. I could see the rain across the treetops; it looked as though there would be one hard, silver line between being dry and being drenched, and it was moving toward us with the certainty of a steamroller. Stephanie and I discussed whether he should clean the route as I lowered him, but the route meandered, making it tougher to clean on the way down than the way up… and, of course, I do like a challenge.

So I agreed to follow and clean the route, meaning he anchored the rope at the top of the climb and I climbed the route after him, removing the quickdraws he’d left behind as I made my way up the route. An overhang at the top of the cliff had kept the rock fairly well sheltered from the rain, so the rock was only damp in a few spots, and that breeze dropped the temperature toward something quite pleasant. It might have been my favorite route of the five we did that day.

We hovered in a cave with a group of other climbers, waiting to see if the storm would roll over the top of us and move on, and then conceded to hiking back in the rain. The tide had gone far enough out that we could meander along the shoreline. Usually, while heading back to Ton Sai, we get soaked from the bottom up, wading through water. This time, it was soaked from the top down, rained on and cooled off while watching mist and clouds move over the dark green hillsides behind Ton Sai.

(And I'd have photos to show you, but I just accidentally deleted them. I was sure I'd saved them to my laptop, but they are no where to be found. More visuals soon, I promise!)