Sunday 4^th.

Woke, showered, breakfasted, rang Leon. He was ready. Let's go! Today we were determined to make up for last week's fiasco. Last Sunday we had driven to Meriden's Hubbard Park with the intention of going up to East Peak and climbing the classic Thor's Hammer (5.9), but we had driven off because we were too lazy to walk in the approach, and dearly did we pay (see trip report).

Not this time dammit. We wouldn't be turned around by anything short of a major natural disaster today. So we parked, reparked, assembled our packs and lugged it in. The weather was overcast and pretty cold, there was still a lot of snow lying about on the ground. There were a number of other cars in the carpark and a few folk walking their dogs around the Merimere Reservoir. Dog crap was everywhere and you had to watch your step.

While we were walking along the reservoir road a small utility truck pulled up and the driver asked us if we were climbers. Oh great, I thought, here it comes. I was half expecting them to be Water Authority goons with a mission to keep climbers away. Recently there had been climber related trouble in the area (principally between climbers - it's a long story), and municipal bodies tend to solve these sort of problems by banning the group involved as a whole.

"Yeah." I responded warily. The older guy was an earnest looking chap, the younger bloke beside him (who remained silent during the entire exchange) wore a camera and an expression of honest concern.

"You should be careful. This morning a couple of guys with three pit-bulls walked in here and started chopping down anchor trees, trundling big rocks off the main faces and destroying holds." (He mentioned a few other things, but I forget exactly what he said).

I was a bit interested in this sort of thing, as I had been reading about an on-going campaign between a few nutters that ostensibly involved the protection of existing climbs in Connecticut. The methods of some of these guys were a little extreme and it was these methods that was the principal source of friction between camps. Being curious by nature I opened my mouth.

"That wouldn't be …" fortunately my brain managed to shut down my voice just before I could utter a name. It had occurred to me, see, that the name I was about to say might actually belong to the chap in front of me. Besides, who was I to suggest that anyone in particular was prone to such activity. So I let him finish the sentence instead.

And he did. He mentioned two names. He even went to the trouble of carefully spelling them out. Which was a pretty disingenuous thing to do when you think about it. He was trying to get us to believe some pretty ugly things about two particular guys with whom we had no previous contact or experience. I also realized that, very probably, the name I had unthinkingly almost blurted out really did belong to this accusor.

"OK, thanks for the warning." I said as neutrally as possible and the weirdos moved on.

Leon grinned at me, he knew who it was that I almost named. He also thought that the guy I had been speaking to was the owner of said name. That was close. We basically just shrugged our shoulders and walked on. Occasionally I would concentrate ferociously on any pawprints I could find. It didn't do much good anyway, I couldn't tell the difference between a pit-bull and a labrador by their pawprints alone. I guess I would have to wait until one of them chewed my leg off.

When we got to the reservoir we looked across and spotted the Merimere Face, and square in its middle was the instantly recognizable route named Thor's Hammer (5.9, see topo). We staggered up the screefield on the far side of the reservoir, recognizing the Amphitheater and the Fall Wall cliffs as we passed them by. Leon pointed out the Amphitheater climbs Volcanic (5.12a) and Dol Gulder (5.11c) as two of the most well known climbs in Connecticut.

Eventually we made our way to the Merimere Face. Thor's Hammer looked beautiful and scary. There was some icing up of the lowest crack. Unfortunately we realized that we didn't have the gear needed. The main crack was very big, we only had one big cam that could be used for it, and one cam was certainly not enough. Awesome looking climb though. We agreed to find an easier line to lead up and then set a top rope above Thor's and play on it that way.

So we moved back left along the face, which got chossier and chossier looking as we went, until finally I spotted something I thought Leon could do. It wasn't on the topo map that we had, but I thought it might be a decent run. It was Leon's turn to lead, he checked out my suggestion and satisfied himself that it was certainly within our reach. So we suited up, climbed into harnesses, flaked out the ropes, sorted and exchanged gear. The weather had been cool, but no precipitation was obviously in the offing, and only occasionally a slight breeze would nip at any exposed skin.

Leon started up. The first third was pretty horrible. Chossy, broken, flakey, rotten. Not quite as bad as last week, but bad enough. It seemed that with every step or reach he had to call out "Rock!", trying to catch what he could and toss it away from me. Down below I dodged what I could and maintained my grip on the belay. He made it up to a crack which was barely off-width, left leaning, and slightly overhanging. If things weren't so loose this might have been a lot easier. Still, he managed it, even though the fear level was quite high. The left side seemed very unstable and many dish-sized pieces sluiced off the face as he scrabbled for purchase. Above it the bones of some multibranched bush held a loose grip on a pocket beneath a second even more overhanging crack. This bloody bush made his life pretty miserable and it took a lot of guts for him to claw his way up into and then over it. Leon managed to jam a cam into the higher crack and find a position to rest for a bit. He was wacked by this stage and the crux was yet to come.

This second crack represented the middle third of the climb. It was also, clearly, the crux. Mercilessly sustained and with poor hand and footholds, the only relief come from the fact that it was relatively clear of the loose stuff. As Leon reached higher, fist and handjamming his way up, it became more and more of an off width. For the first time in his leading career Leon found himself having to hang on a single piece and rest. In fact he had to rest on the same piece a couple of times. The overhang was burning up his arms, and his feet battled fruitlessly for a decent purchase. At one point he placed the handle of a camming unit between his teeth for a moment (while readjusting his grip) and the trigger mechanism sliced a gash in his lower lip. He was unaware of this until he started tasting the blood a minute or so later. Arm jamming like a madman he actually squeezed his whole body into the widening crack and tried to slowly inch his way up. Gear caught on edges, he cursed in frustration and the cliff looked like it was having Mexican for lunch. Meanwhile, down below, I continued to dodge a hail of stones as Leon kicked away at some of the looser stuff around him.

Eventually he clawed his way out of the top of the crack and up onto a small ledge above it, scattering a fresh hail of stones and crap in the process. One stone hit me just as I looked up, half fist-sized it smacked my helmet square above and between my eyes. It's difficult to decide on either trying to watch stones or just crawling into your helmet and hoping like hell you don't get hit. Leon shouted down from the ledge that the last bit, maybe ten metres, looked pretty easy. Relatively easy anyway.

He was out of sight after getting over the crux and soon he was almost out of earshot too. Only by dint of yelling at the tops of our voices where we able to make ourselves heard. It didn't take him long to finish the last bit though. With a lot of yelling and triple-tugs on the rope we managed to get organized for my second. I tied the packs onto the end of the second rope, the other end of which I would trail, my intention being to haul them up afterwards. Leon belayed me from the top on the first rope. I followed, and although I was quickly up, it was a shock to discover just how hard Leon's lead must have been.

The crux overhang, upon which I did take a fall, must have been brutal on his confidence. To climb above your protection into completely unknown and overhanging territory, knowing that the quality of the stone was generally poor (broken), is a frightening thing. Going second I wondered how the heck he managed to dig up the courage to do it. Leon said something to the effect that being on a hard lead narrows your choices quite considerably, so one's concentration is focussed on a fairly simple set of motivations. Just don't fall.

It was a pretty chilly day, towards the end of Leon's lead I had started to shiver uncontrollably and was glad to be moving again when he was ready for me to follow. At the top Leon had pulled his hood up to ward off the worst of the wind, as it was very cold there too. Oddly the stone was not so bad, nowhere near as cold as Cathole Pass had been a few weeks earlier, so climbing itself was not too uncomfortable.

Being so cold we abandoned our earlier plans of setting a top-rope for Thor's Hammer and decided to go home instead. It had been a truly fantastic climb, the sort that leaves you with adrenaline shivers and lingering doubts for your sanity. Leon eventually came up with an appropriate name for the route too, "Loose Marbles" (5.9).