Sunday 8^th.

At about 11am I call up Leon and ask him to chose between squandering this gorgeously bright autumn day by staying in bed or going climbing somewhere in central Connecticut. When he opts for the latter I give him two hours to wake up and prepare himself. He sounds like he's still suffering a bit from the flu though. Leila and I go and do a little shopping for our home-improvement projects and then come back right on 1pm. The dudette, our subaru, is experiencing oil problems so I ring up Leon and ask if we can take the dude, his subaru, instead. Ten minutes later he's at our front door and coughing like a coal-miner.

Leila chooses not to come climbing today, preferring to do some gardening and furniture painting/sanding instead. So it's just the mad Mexican and me. We have the Ragged Mountain Foundation's guidebook, map of Connecticut and a burning desire to climb somewhere that isn't at Sleeping Giant National Park (our usual playground). We hit interstate 91 and cruise north, turning left onto the 691 and taking exit 6 near Meriden. The plan is loose, we are going to take a look at a number of climbing areas between here and Ragged Mountain and climb at the first one we think looks ok. First and, as it turns out, last on the list is Cathole. We park on a pull-off by route 71 and go for a quick look, not terribly sure where the climbing actually is. We bump into a local, who is no help, and then a couple of guys from the north also looking for the cliff. In a few minutes we find it. The other two are top-ropers who started climbing this year and they are nice enough blokes. Leon and I find what looks to be a very tempting line right away. It's about 2pm.

Pegasus, rated at 5.8 in the book, is a right facing dihedral crack which leads to a small but severe overhang at the top and is positioned near the right end of the cliff (see topo map). I practically begged for the first lead on this one. Leon wanted to lead this one too. So we agreed that after I led it, I would drop the rope back to him and walk off the top to come back down and belay his lead. A fine plan. But it didn't work out that way. No sir, not like that at all. Anyway, we both suit up into our harnesses and shoes. Leon sets up a solid belay anchor by girth-hitching a handy tree and I grab as much climbing-stuff as I can carry on my harness loops and gear sling. Up I went.

This was a really scary lead, and my hardest one to date. The right face of the dihedral was largely featureless and the left face, although well supplied with infrequent but good hand holds, was mostly overhanging. The crack was great for fingers and hands too, but not so hot for feet. Up to today I had been relying almost exclusively on my feet finding solid stances so I might use both hands to play with protecting routes. Really easy stuff. Not this time though. Almost from the beginning there are no real resting places, the nature of the climb was truly sustained. Right foot placements were smears as often as they were not. The greater majority of hand holds lay on the left, overhanging, face and I was forced to sort and place gear one-handed every single time.

At one point, in a particularly difficult spot, I felt myself in real trouble. I had climbed high above a piece below me and into an uncomfortable and difficult stance. I knew I couldn't downclimb safely from here. My left leg was very tired and lifted up onto a short and sloping ledge. My right foot was smearing as usual. I had small hand holds, but I had no idea where to go from here. Looking down I realized how high above the last piece I was, and as my left leg started to shake my confidence drained completely away. Protection here looked thin, even worse it looked non-existent. The crack was flaring too much for wired nuts, too shallow to try an active camming device, the left face was severely overhanging. I was truly frightened. This time, this time I would fall. I could feel a part of me freezing in place. With my left leg shaking so violently it threatened to literally kick me off the wall. I looked down in some disbelief at the fall that I was so sure was about to happen. That nut down there looked precarious when I placed it. Moments ago I heard Leon swear and thought he said something about a piece popping out.

No, in fact I had dropped a wired nut which missed Leon by about six inches causing him to utter an imprecation. Leon told me about this after the climb.

In extremis I had to force myself to drive down the building fear. I pressed down on the shaking leg with much of my weight and finally got it to steady. I grabbed an active camming unit, pushed it high up into the slightly flaring crack and released the trigger. The damned thing seemed to bite in ok. I heaved my rope up and clipped in. I was so tired by now that I was prepared to test the piece's strength.

"Take!" I yelled down to Leon.

No doubt he could hear my discomfort. He tightened up the rope and I allowed my full weight to hang on that small 4 cam. Not enough, not enough, not enough. Like a mantra that phrase played over and over inside my head until I had found a place in the crack for a wired nut too. Clipped into that one with the rope as well. Why am I doing this? Is this what I was looking for up here? What the hell is the point in climbing like this? It's harder than I anticipated, much harder, the 5.8 rating seems clearly underestimated. My arms were burning, my legs kept shaking, my heart was thumping hard. After a while I decided I could keep going up, totally and conveniently blocking out the roof-like overhang at the very top. I moved out onto the right face, into a realm of painfully narrow finger holds and toe-jamming desperation. Somehow I moved up and then back left to the crack again after the left face of the dihedral eased back with the overhang-thang.

Somewhere near here Leon and I changed the plan. He wouldn't lead this one, but he would climb it as a second normally does, with me belaying him from the top … if I could reach it. I remember he offered to lower me back to the ground at least once. Guess I'm too stubborn for that.

The foot holds started to get a little friendlier on the left, but remained at nearly zero on the right. At least the overhanging left wall was no longer overhanging. Suddenly, it seemed, I was under the roof-like final overhang. Up here was scary too, bad foot placement on the left, nothing on the right. Both hands trying to crawl into the crack. It was hard to get one hand to release its grip and go searching my rack for a big wired nut. I got a big fat one in at the very top of the crack I had followed from the ground, but it wasn't in deeply enough to make me feel safe. So, sketched to the max, I pulled it out and got a smaller one in deeper and securely seated. Snap in a carabiner, pull up the rope and snap that in too. Again I asked for tension and hung back on the rope as Leon tightened it up. My eyes glued to that wired nut in the crack, waiting for it to slip, or pop, waiting to fall. Down below Leon gave me the thumbs-up.

I felt exhausted as much by the mind game as by the sustained physical demands of the climb. I looked at the roof and all my aspirations of crawling across and then over it disappeared right there. Not only was it featureless and smooth, my brain was tired of decoding the wall, so there was no way I was going to play the hardman there. The only way over it, for me, was to go around it. That meant either going left around the arete (yeah, right, the visible terrors had been almost too much already) or finding a path across that damned featureless right face. Just below me there was a deformation in the right face that flared out a thin line of stone, sort of a microscopic ledge. Way out to the right, there was what looked like a good hand hold … too far from here to reach, but if I could follow that ledge … maybe.

I got Leon to lower me a little bit so I could place my right foot on that so-called ledge. He kept the tension up, so it really wasn't much to lean out right and grab that hand hold after all. I got out from under the roof and climbed up and, eventually, over the top of the cliff. Flooded with relief I cast about looking for a decent belay, all the while the adrenaline tremors were slowly fading away. I felt ok though, the sun was shining and I was still alive.

Communication, once I topped out, dropped from poor to zero. The road noise from route 71 was so pervasive that we could make each other heard. It was so bad that Leon tied off the rope to the tree at the bottom and then walked around right and up to the top so that he could organize things with me before he walked all the way back down again to do the climb. Perhaps he sensed that I was a bit strung out.

Well, unable to communicate with him I belayed by brail. Take up the slack, monitor tension, take up the slack, nothing else to do. He was still for a long while near the end, I could hear he was close because he sounded like he was coughing up a lung. Apparently the nut under the roof, which I had loaded with my weight, was jammed in too tight to remove. So he left it there. Oh well, buy a new one next time I'm gear shopping I guess.

Leon said my placements were really bomber. It's been a while since I've placed so many pieces and had none of them come out … good, it's about bloody time I got my act together in that department. He agreed that this was a difficult lead for us too, in future we need to be more careful.

Back at the base we eventually (after a bit of hunting around) decided to do a nearby route our friendly top-ropers had just completed. Pink Elephants, rated at 5.6, seemed to be just the ticket for a Mexican who sounded like he was dying of lung cancer. Leon prefers to travel light and decided not to take the MacGregor hexes and also left behind the largest tri-cam set (I hadn't used either hexes or tri-cams on my lead). We sorted the belay and he stepped up to the climb. A big crack that opened up into off-widths every so often.

Well, this one was no walk in the park either. The ratings here seem a little tough. Leon had only climbed about three feet up when both feet slipped off their microperches, he missed hitting the deck by maintaining a vice-like grip with his hands. I begged him to place some protection as soon as possible.

Like Pegasus, this climb had two distinct faces … one friendly to feet (the left), the other not real helpful at all (the right). Leon was forced to jam into an off-width crack as much as he could of his right arm and right leg in order to gain some security while scoping for pro. About halfway up there was a hard move with poor protection, but he secured that well enough after some cursing and heaving. Once there though, Leon saw that the remainder of the crack was too large to take any pro. He would have a long run-out before he could put in a piece. He opted to follow a steep crumbling ramp to the left and soon disappeared out of view. He must have topped out not long after that, because the rope started going up at a rapid rate. Eventually I realized he was no longer in need of belay and took out my ATC and watched the rope continue to snake upwards. Eventually I yelled (fruitlessly) "That's me."

After an eternity of us both yelling incomprehensibly (bloody traffic noise, and now the wind had picked up too) at each other, I tied off my end of the rope to a nearby tree and walked up around to make sense of what was happening. We sorted something out and I went down to complete the climb.

Bloody hell, this one really was hard for a 5.6. I fell almost immediately and grounded. Grrrr. I got up on the wall again and felt all the perplexment that Leon had communicated to me when he was still within earshot. I found a nut that Leon must have dropped resting on a ledge inside the crack. That crux move would have been very exposed to lead and there was little in the way of a comfort stop after it either. I followed Leon's ramp and got up to the top and found him shivering with cold. The sun had sunk behind a range of hills during his climb, and during my climb a chill wind had sprung out of nowhere. It was cold! Winter's a-comin' folks, make no mistake! Hastily we cobbled together all of our gear. Lots of stuff was lying about because Leon had spent some time trying to decide where exactly he would belay me from. Anyway, once we had everything back on harnesses and gear slings we hightailed it off the top and back down to the base.

At the bottom the top-ropers were having a crack at Pegasus. After some friendly chit-chat and taking a couple of photos of them with their camera I asked if I could climb up on there top-rope and try to retrieve that stuck nut. They agreed readily enough and up I went.

Surprising how much easier a climb is second time around (and top-roped at that), I'm still a little dazed to have managed to lead it though. Anyway, I got up there and used a big MacGregor hex to smack the end of my nut-tool with so I could dislodge the recalcitrant piece. It worked! Coolio.

So on this day neither life nor limb, nor wired nut was lost. Despite our best efforts.