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Spain 2005 - continued
Wednesday 9th March
ORIHUELA
We decided to try a totally new part of Spain, which was about halfway between Alicante and Mercia. This meant driving south, all the way down the motorway for about an hour and a half. Past Alicante, past the airport and on to junction eighty-one, where we turned left towards the town of Orihuela and a brand new crag called The Pared Negra. I had first noticed the prospects of this new area whilst browsing on the Internet and later on, noticed that it had been included in the new 2005 edition of the Costa Blanca guidebook. This particular crag boasted two, multi-starred, fully bolted, four pitch, 500ft routes, and it was also supposed to get more than its fair share of sun, if there is any sun around at this time of the year. Hence it’s got a good chance of being warmer than most of the crags in the Costa Blanca area and so you need to be aware that in the height of the summer it may well be much too hot. This, we were sure must happen because we noticed straight away when we arrived that its ledges were littered with large prickly pear plants that one obviously needed to steer clear of at all costs. Although the drive to the crag was a bit further than we had previously driven, the journey seemed to pass by quite quickly because it mainly consisted of motorway driving. Only the last fifteen minutes were on ordinary roads and both the crag and the parking were easy to find when the four of us finally disembarked from Rose’s hired Punto.
The plan was for the two ladies to do their own thing. (i.e.). Rose wanted to lead the whole four pitches herself, even the grade 5 pitch, followed by Joyce. John and I would start off first and would make sure that we were never too far away to lend a helping hand if it were needed. Which, in reality it never was. The route that we chose was a three star classic, called, ‘Derecha del Espolon’ and it was quoted as being the most popular route on the crag, with good reason. Its four pitches totalled 500 feet in length and there was maybe up to five abseils to get down to the sacks again from the top. The crag looked pretty sizeable as we craned our necks back to gaze up into its upper reaches so as to eye out our prospective line. There was still plenty of crag left beyond where our route seemed to finish so we knew that we didn’t have much time to spare for dilly-dallying. We ate and drank a quick lunch and started up the first pitch, which looked easy, but as often is the case, wasn’t in practice. It seemed to follow a long groove and most of the climbing was on what I would call faith and friction holds. You know what I mean, no good handholds, and only friction on sloping ledges for the feet. Although the bolts followed the course of this obvious groove, you could see that the easiest line of holds weaved their way both rightwards and leftwards and were difficult to suss out as one advanced. Yet we all made it OK, knowing that for each of us in there own way, the game and the day had seriously begun. This pitch was graded 4+, so we all thought tentatively about the next pitch, which was a grade 5, and the hardest one of the whole route. It shows you though, that too much thinking and analysing can be detrimental to one’s confidence if you let it, because an apprehensive Rose ensured the fact that John and I would stay at the top of the second pitch just in case she found it hard to lead. In reality though, we all found it no more difficult than any other pitch on the route. In fact, in the end, each of us found different pitches to be our ‘hardest pitch,’ so you could say it depended on one’s style and maybe one’s physique that denotes the difficulty of any particular pitch.
Eventually I arrived at the top of the last pitch and the climbing, (so I thought), was over. John followed, as he had done the whole day in good style and on arriving at the belay carried on to find out where the abseil point was located. Rose quickly followed John and set up her belay alongside me ready to bring Joyce up but as she started to shout down to her, it became clear that Joyce couldn’t hear anything from such a long way off. Rose tried to pull the rope taught so as to signal to her to come, but nothing happened. I tried an even harder tug and a louder shout of ‘come on Joyce, climb when your ready’, but there was still no sign of any movement. Finally I knew that I had to find out what’s happening, so I set up an abseil and went down part way to see what was going on down below. When Joyce came into view I could both see her and hear what she was calling out. ‘I’ve dropped the stitch plate’ she worriedly shouted up ‘and I can’t seem to undo this screw-gate crab I’m belayed to’. I reached her at the belay and to my astonishment, also had difficulty in unscrewing the gate of the crab. I first had to belay myself on so as to get both hands on the crab, and even then it took all the finger strength I had to loosen it. How it had come to be so tight, I just don’t know. Anyway with both Rose and John belaying us, Joyce and I climbed the top pitch together and in due time arrived at the top of the route with the dilemma of how to get down the five hundred feet to the bottom of the crag.
Time was moving on, it was gone five o’clock and we had to do four or five abseils down the full height of the crag to the bottom. There was no time to have a discussion and linger about what to do, so I decided to ask Rose if she would lend Joyce her stitch plate to abseil on and would let me lower her down the cliff to the next belay point. Bravely, she consented and was quickly down at the next abseil point followed by John and Joyce, who started sorting out the second abseil. Whilst all this was going on, I was still at the top deliberating on what would be the best way that we could all get down to the bottom at a reasonable speed. I knew of a knot that could be used to abseil on called an Italian Hitch, but didn’t know how to tie it or use it, because there had never been a need to. So after a ten minute, self instruction course on how to tie a knot that I thought was right, over the top and down the cliff I went, with only the knot as a friction brake to slow me down. As it happened it was quite good and the only trouble that I had, was the fifteen minutes it took me to tie the knot whilst standing on the small belay, getting ready for the second abseil. After the first abseil using the Italian Hitch, I gave Rose my stitch plate to abseil on to save time. Whilst I was trying to make the knot again, the others were steadily descending the rest of the five hundred foot face. In the end, we got down about half past six with just enough time to spare to walk the short distance down to the car in the last of the daylight hours. Which was good, because before we started our descent, I was fearful that we would be still going down the cliff when it got dark and to say the least, that wouldn’t have been a very good idea. Travelling home in the car though, we all decided that we had had a very good day’s climbing and the only detriment was the loss of Joyce’s stitch plate.