August 9th, 2008. Booty Call

i just got home from the most epic day of climbing. thomas and i played hooky yesterday so we could go up to whistler and climb the showcase spire. we thought that the chairlifts on blackcomb would still be open, as they usually are all summer, it turns out blackcomb mountain closed to the public on july 27. for about 2 and half hours we tried to find a way up blackcomb, we decided hiking 5,500 vertical feet before a 5.11c alpine multipitch was out of the question. on our last effort to get up the mountain before we were going to head out to pemberton to sport climb we met a blackcomb snowmachine maintenance guy who took us about 4/5 of the way to the summit of blackcomb. we had to hike then for about an hour up through snow and summer glacier conditions to reach the showcase spire, our climb de' jour. luckily we found some cord and ski poles to aid our adventure.
the base of the spire is located about 70m from the edge of the cliff we hiked to so we rigged a 70m and 60m rope together and double rapped down to the base. i won the rock,paper,scissors so i got to rap and lead first. i got to the base, found a old petzl pulley (booty!) and got psyched to climb the 25m 5.11c first pitch. thomas built an anchor when he arrived at the belay ledge and put me on belay. the crux was, for me, the first 4 bolts with a pretty high first bolt with serious groundfall potential. i got a bomber .4 cam placement to protect before the high first bolt (it turned out the 2 cams from our rack we chose to bring were pieces that we had great placements for!) i pumped out at the 4th bolt, taked, rested and then climbed to the anchors on the next burn; almost onsight. i rigged an extremely slow, messy, and less than equalized anchor and thomas seconded. he got up to me and then went for the lead of pitch 2 (he left the station about 10 minutes after our turnaround time; the first of our logistical problems). we had the single sketchiest moment of our lives with me shorting thom on the first clip of the pitch, if he had fallen he would have taken a leader fall directly onto our anchors creating a factor 2 fall which is very bad - something you never want to happen because it could shock load the anchor and cause it to fail. he took after he stuck the clip but couldn't go on. at this point we are 25 minutes passed our turnaround time 1 pitch off the ground without our 70m rope to do a tyrolean traverse which he had planned on doing to escape the spire (because of logistical problems: our rope being to short we couldn't take it with us), we are low on blood sugar, stokage, and getting scared. we we're alone on the side of an alpine route on the summit of blackcomb. we used some good judgement, rather than succumbing to summit fever, and bailed there leaving one wiregate biner. not bad for bailing off an alpine route. we had to rig 2 30m raps to get off the spire down into a gulley which we could hike out on to get back to the top of the cliff to retrieve our other 2 ropes. after we got back to cliff we had a 3 hour +, 5,500 vertical feet over like 14km, hike down from the summit of blackcomb to the base where we were parked. we got back to our van and crashed!
that is the craziest adventure of my life, and we didnt even have to summit!