Last Day of East Coast Climbing

In the name of procrastination, I decided to take a break from packing and taking care of last minute errands to go climbing with my good friend Shaw. Because of the both of us forgetting our cameras in our cars, I don't have any pictures for you all which, at least for today, may be a good thing. We decided to meet up in Great Falls Park (NPS) to climb in Mather Gorge. Now, both of us knew that there was a chance of showers for the day. That, of course, did not stop us what so ever. Anyways, for those of you that have never been to GF Park, the climbing there is done on a hodge-podge of various igneous and metamorphic rock very close, if not right at, the banks of the Potomac River. Mather Gorge is a canyon about a mile or so long along the river down stream of Great Falls that has a lot of dihedrals some topping out at nearly 20 meters or so. We picked one of the more popular and taller climbs to screw around on. We decided to lead climb everything for the day so we wouldn't waste time setting up top rope anchors. The first couple climbs went great. We then moved our attention to a dihedral with a huge run-out/slab section. While leading it, as I went to place a hex for protection, my foot placement slipped and I started to fall. Luckily two things happened: 1) The hex caught the crack I was trying to place it in and held and 2) my pinky managed to find my way into the loop of the hex and held me from falling 15 to a couple dicey tri-cams placed below me. Unfortunately that luck came at a price of supporting my entire body weight on my pinky curled around the cable loop of a hex. I managed to flail a bit to find a foot hold and take my weight off my piece of protection (and off my pinky thank God!). My finger tip looked like a miniature ice-cream scoop. I managed to shake it off for a few minutes and attempt the run-out section again. As I did, an ominous looking thunderstorm began to approach pretty rapidly. I decided at this point to bail on this climb and climb one of the routes we had already conquered to get back to the top. Normally, you could walk a little ways to walk back up to the top but this option was 5 feet below a swollen, rain-flooded river pushing class V rapids. With climbing back up our only option we made sure to do it very quickly considering the thunder crashing around us was doing so more and more frequently. I made it to the top pretty fast and began belaying Shaw as she followed only to realize that a cam I had placed (an orange TCU) was way over cammed and Shaw was having a hell of a time trying to clean it. I waited patiently while Shaw insistently tried to fish it out of the crack that had imprisoned it (she had a decent reason for being so persistent considering that cam costs $50+). But as the thunder and lightening's separation between their occurrences shrunk from 5 seconds to 1 second, I began screaming "fuck it" a few times and prayed that someone from the Potomac Mountain Club, of which I'm a member, would fish it out later if I left the club a heads up. The worst of the storm hit as we were packing our gear and sprinting the mile back to the parking lot. While running through the monsoon like rain, we passed a news van that had managed to beach itself on the trail. Not thinking much about it, we made it to the parking lot, said our good-byes, and went our ways for the day. I got back only to find this video being talked about on the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club/Potomac Mountain Club (PATC/PMC respectively) discussion group . It turns out we missed this hilarious spectacle by a couple hundred feet! Not bad for my last bout of climbing before heading out west...


[note: these events happened on 22 April hence the time stamp for this post but in actuality I'm writing this on 26 April. Since then I have placed a post on the PMC Discussion Group explaining my predicament and pleading to anyone that happened to climb that climb and free my cam to return it in return for some non-monetary compensation for their troubles. Within 2 days I had a reply and a retrieved cam!]