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Spain 2005 - continued
THE CASTELLET RIDGE cont.
After a rest and refreshment stop, the real reason for coming here was at hand. It was time for the four of us to gear up. Ropes were got out and harnesses were donned for the start of the crux of our day. The whole ridge looked long enough to take a lifetime of climbing and scrambling, but the first section we were to traverse over should only take somewhere in the region of five hours or so. The plan was to use the ropes to pitch the more difficult sections and solo-cum-scramble the other parts. Even then I knew, that there would be many parts of the ridge that would feel very exposed and the drop to the ground on both sides an alarming distance. I led off first, on the thirty-foot down-climb that leads on to the ridge proper and continued onwards until the full fifty meters of rope were used up. Joyce came second with the added protection of a backrope from behind. Rose followed Joyce and John came last, downclimbing without a backrope because he was left with the short straw. From then on for the next two pitches, we climbed and scrambled along the exposed and exhilarating ridge as two ropes of two. I was leading the first rope and Rose was leading the second. Eventually we all unroped and began to solo our own way along the ridge, weaving left and right at more troublesome traverses, up and over sharp pointed pinnacles, across, both clefts and cols. Each problem in itself wasn't a major problem but the hundred foot drop down both sides of the ridge very much enhanced the, ‘Shit, this is a bit hairy,' feeling we all felt.
Rose and John carrying on along the ridge
We carried on like this until we came to a particularly awkward step down where I decided to arrange a belay for Joyce and the added security of a rope. I knew that she could make this awkward step quite comfortably but the back-rope would ease the worry and eventually save time. So she started to move down to the little traverse that led to the long step and as she fingered and eased her weight out using a crack behind a block, the whole chunk of rock, to our horror, came away and she started to fall backwards into oblivion. I can still picture her face, as she looked towards me only six feet away. For a fraction of a second, before the rope became taught, she was falling backwards with a look of astonishment and alarm. The instant that she felt secure the alarm vanished and she got on with the problem of ‘what to do with this bloody great big lump of rock that’s resting on my knees’. It was about fifteen inches long, by ten inches wide, by about six inches deep, and therefore wasn’t particularly light. Dropping it onto her foot wasn’t to be recommended so, to her credit, after a short pause for thought, she eased one leg slowly to one side, juggled it free and to all our relief it fell with a thumping crash down the cliff face to the ground below. Retrospectively thinking, I think good fortune shone on Joyce and us all at that particular moment in time.
The route along the ridge carried on until we came to a very definite drop, where we arranged our first abseil. I thought by now the abseil point would have been upgraded, but alas it wasn’t so. When we found it, it turned out to be two pegs in a crack, each fitted with a screwed up maillon. After sorting the ropes out we descended in turn to the first resting-place we had come to since starting the ridge. Whilst Rose and John were coming down the abseil, Joyce and I started on the next section until there was a loud shout from John. ‘We can’t get the rope down!’ Sure enough, when we turned round, we could see from the fifty or so yards that we had progressed along the ridge, John, trying to pull the abseil ropes down from the belay to no avail because they were somehow stuck. I retraced my steps back to where he was trying earnestly to recover the ropes. Then slowly, using the combined weight of the two of us on the ropes, they yielded bit by bit until after ten minutes the last piece of rope came tumbling down and the panic was over.
The time was beginning to march on by now and we still had a fair way to go that wasn’t easy and as we started on along the ridge again I was glad that the next abseil came sooner than expected. It was only a short one, but it was down a, narrow arete-cum rib, that in Derbyshire you would solo down, but here, with an eighty-foot drop to each side and a possible swing off the narrow rib onto a very steep rockface, it needed particular care. This was followed by more airy or you could call it hairy scrambling, until we came to the penultimate abseil which took us to a large flat sort of col. There, I had time to take stock of our situation and the hour of the day, because, for us, at the spot where we were, it was getting late. The distance down from the col. to the safety of the upper hillside terracing below, was difficult to judge, but if we could reach it from here, I thought it would save us a lot of time. So using my ‘decisively indecisive’ method to take a tentative look by abseil down the face from the col., I was relieved to find out that the double ropes just reached the floor with not an inch to spare. By the time we were all down and the ropes recovered, it was getting on for half past six. We knew that there was only an hour of light left in the day and we still had to reach the small valley road and slog the four or five miles back to the main road and the car. So we quickly set off on the final stage of the day. The last few miles along the Finistrat road were walked in total darkness until Rose and John, who reached the car first, brought it from the carpark to pick up Joyce and myself. We finally finished our ridge at the very late hour of eight o’clock all feeling tired and happy. For any one who is interested, this first section of The Castellet Ridge, is a fantastic day out and well worth the overall effort it takes.