Moscow

 

 

 

 

5.6

 

Trad Three Pitch

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joel had been hinting about this climb ever since we started climbing together.  He always said he preferred this climb to Super Slab.  Since I enjoyed Super Slab so much, I was really excited to get on this and move quickly on it.  I absolutely love doing easy multipitch routes.

It was the middle of the fall of 2003, and we knew our evenings, after work, were getting numbered at Smith Rocks, Oregon.  It was just a matter of time before we would sneak over to the Northern Point and drop some top ropes down to climb on shitty basalt in headlamps.  We generally don't like doing leading after dark.  Especially without headlamps.  The weather was still perfect for some spectacular evening climbing.

We all worked at a sign shop that rhymes with Blavigational Sign Company in Redmond, Oregon.  Every day was a hell unto itself.  It was a soul sucking marathon repeated every hour, every day and every time you had the misfortune to have to sit down with the owner; a hairy woman who had an uncanny resemblance to Bill Clinton.  This was a family operated business that took the "Fun" out of "Family."  Never before had I seen a more dysfunctional, spiteful group of people.  The shop was filled with ex-cons with various drug and attempted murder charges, your usual assortment of professionals around the water cooler kicking around the idea of a heavy metal death party filled with meth, weed and hopefully some high school girls.  The hook was the owner knew a parole officer who quickly employed them into her shop making slightly above minimum wage.  He was later relieved of his duties very rapidly with lots of airs of a good old fashioned firing.  It seemed innocuous at first, even christian-like, to extend themselves to perfect strangers under the airs of "helping" them, but the family quickly put it's talons in by giving out loans to the ex-cons.  They knew damn well that if you didn't remind those guys of their debt every day, or just deducted it from their paychecks, that they would never even try to pay it back.  Anytime they needed leverage on the workers, they simply brought up this debt that they were going to garnish their wages until it was paid off, basically tellling them that the two weeks of pay coming up was going to be zero and maybe the one after that.  Most people would call this extortion.  They called it a christian act of trying to save them.

I think that was what was most insidious about them.  Deep in their hearts, all of the evil crap they pulled was justified in some way.  They felt they were trying to help.  It was so misdirected as to be shameful.

Joel and I had started climbing earlier in the summer of 2002.  We climbed all through the hottest part of the year, sweating and watching me flop on the easiest of stone.  I was a truly humbled person by the fall time.  As the summer wore on, we found that our nights after the drudgery of Blavigational were starting to get shorter and shorter.  Late one evening we decided to do Moscow, a three pitch 5.6 trad climb that Joel had wanted to do with me since we started.  We had done a little bit of multipitch before taking this on. 

A non ex-con who had been working there entirely too long, and it visibly showed on him, went climbing with us a few times and had wanted to go on an easy multipitch climb.  Joel said he had done a three person ascent and, while taking more time, wasn't really much different.  I was indifferent but didn't want to take all night doing a single, easy climb. 

We hopped on Moscow a little later than we wanted, but figured we had more than enough daylight left to hit this thing.  The first pitch went easy with Joel leading, me cleaning and towing a rope to Brian for third base.  But I noticed by the time we all got up to the belay cave that it was getting dark.  We still had two pitches to go!  This was late fall meaning it wasn't real warm once the sun drops off the horizon.  I was in shorts and a t-shirt, not really setup for this type of outing.  Plus, the only headlamp amongst the party was leading it, and he had left it in his pack, eighty feet below us.  There aren't any anchors at the belay cave, and Joel didn't feel like leaving gear to rappel off of.  Our only option was to finish it out and hike down. 

This meant Joel gets the last of the daylight to finish out a really long lead, trying to link the last two pitches into a single long pitch.  He only had a 50 meter rope while I used a 60 meter rope.  He took a long time and it was well past dark that we got the opportunity to climb.  The clouds had rolled in hiding a full moon behind it's glowing heads.  I was pissed that I had put myself in this position and reiterated this to Brian about every three minutes.  He was taking it all in stride, not really caring that we were up on a virtually black night, with no headlamp, traditional climbing in shorts and t-shirts on a late September evening.  I, on the other hand, was pretty much just pissed.

Joel led the entire rope out.  He was pulling on my waist and I was yelling up at him that there was no more rope.  Basically, Joel had to downclimb a bit to a perch on a rock.  He stuck in an iffy piece of gear and called this a belay station.  I couldn't get off belay because there wasn't enough slack in the rope unless I moved above the cave.  After getting untangled, I grabbed my trusty nut-tool, my gear holding me into the safety of the rock and headed up.

I found myself in an odd place at that moment.  I could only see about fifteen feet in any direction.  The area outside of my fifteen foot bubble was dark gray, hazy and completely inconsequential.  I was all of a sudden very comfortable.  I could hear Joel whistling up above me after a while and that seemed to soothe me.  I watched the moon dodging the passing clouds, sometimes invading the canyon with ambient light.  I found a bit of an off-width almost to where Joel was sitting.  It wasn't hard, but it was small, desperate feeling moves.  I got up to Joel with a full rack of gear; he had used every single piece in his rack except for the one hex holding him now.  When I saw it, both of my eyebrows went up, demanding a bit of an apology.  Needless to say, none was given.  He was a bit put out by my lack of faith. 

I ended up having to do the 4th class scramble up the last 20 meters or so of the climb.  It wasn't very fun nor were their many places to put gear on this half-scree patch.  I bet I swapped out the gear ten times while I was belaying them up and past me, but it didn't do much good, I was sliding down a pile of scree at the top of the cliff.  There was a drop-off on my left that led to finding out if I am right about spirituality.

I looked around at the canyon walls guarding the north side, curving east and out with the soft roar of the Crooked River in the gorge.  The moon came out and at the top of my lungs screamed:

DAY-OH!

And it splashed back with conviction, echoing and rolling around like a pleasant taste on a dry toungue.  I started yelling them longer and louder, from my tip-toes.  I am sure I scared the piss out of the other two.  There was a scared "ok up there?" from briefly below.  I just yelled out more Day-Oh's, and then belting out the rest of the verse.  I can't sing worth a damn and I am sure there were lots of animals thinking something was either dying or mating.  Joel and Brian both ended up passing me, asking what the hell the wooping and grunting was all about.  I told them to mind their own flippin' business and shut the hell up.

After we hiked out, stopped at a bar in Redmond that was less than savory with few patrons possessing a full set of real teeth.  We got a few looks, but we were dirty enough and dog-eared by this point that they accepted us a little bit.  Enough not to kick the crap out of us anyways.  We each brought up a beer, clinked them and said we wouldn't ever do that again.