Busted: Two guys, an obscure quarry, and a sledgehammer
This article originally appeared on Climbing
John and I had gone to Egerton Quarry for the first time and had squelched through swamps and bushwhacked around, doing a route or two. Egerton is a post-industrial excavation on the outskirts of some northern-English urban spew, and as such, you don't go there expecting to enjoy yourself. We then spotted a nice-looking arete. The guidebook called it Renaissance and showed a man doing a strange-looking move on the first ascent.
It was graded E5 6a and had one peg as protection. It looked dodgy. I don't know who writes the guidebooks for that area, but you can't trust them. As such, just launching up things near your limit would be unwise.
We tried to abseil it but could find no anchor on the verdant slope above, and went off and climbed something else instead that day. Eight months later, though, we marched in with a pair of metal stakes four feet long, a long-handled sledgehammer and some static line. I held the pipes steady as John swung at them with the sledge. It took only three blows each to sink them to their depth in the hopeless upper slope.
"They'll do," someone who wasn't me declared.
I got sent down first. The peg seemed sound, the rock was clean, and the holds were solid, apart from a flake-jug near the top.
"Seems loose. I think a nut tool would have that off in no time."
"O.K.," John said. "I'll have a look on my way past."
I continued to the ground and wandered off to rack up below another route, our warm-up. It really was quite nice here, for a grotty quarry. It was a spring evening, the sun was shining, the new leaves were out. Listen to the birds. And that other noise. What was that, church bells?
No, it was coming from the direction of Renaissance. I walked over and looked up to see John sitting on his haunches on top of the crag. He was leaning down with the sledgehammer in his hand, and he was whacking the loose flake. I had never seen anything like it before. He caught my eye just as a thought went through my head: Social-media gold! I turned and scurried ratlike toward my sack for my phone but he read me.
"I know what you're doing, you bastard."
When I came back, he put the sledgehammer down.
"Do it again, John, please. It looks so brilliant."
Amazingly, he did.
It looked so wrong I had to have a go. I legged it around and up to the slope and clipped the stakes. He gave me the hammer. I lowered a few feet and laid into the flake. John had already been at work for awhile, and still it refused to budge. I was engaged in an orgy of destruction when two people appeared below and glanced up.
I could tell from their dress and demeanor that these were bumblies and would know little about the realities of top-end rock climbing.
"Don't you cats worry," I reassured them.
"Just prospecting."
When I was exhausted I passed the hammer back up to John and abseiled to the ground. I unclipped and said hello to the lower-grade people.
"Something loose up there?" the bigger one asked.
"Yeah, there's a jug rattling near the top, and you wouldn't want to fall off up there."
"Oh aye?"
"I mean, it seemed loose, but I've had a good go at it, and it's still there. But you don't want to go trusting the descriptions too much. I mean, the peg is all you get."
"I know," said the big one.
"Oh aye?"
"Aye," he said. "I did the first ascent."
"And I seconded the first ascent," said the other.
"Right."
It is hard, here on the page, to convey how I felt upon hearing this information. I am tempted to leave a gap in the words that stretches out over a page or two, but that wouldn't capture it. As I stared, I knew from the guidebook who this was. Geoff Hibbert. Mister Egerton. His name was beside the majority of the harder routes in the quarry. He had just found me smashing the shit out of his three-star classic at his home crag.
Should I run? Flight or fight? I sized up the two honchos standing next to me. They were big guys, with workers' muscles bulging from tight T-shirts. I wondered whether they were going to do to me what I had done to their flake; first ascensionists are notoriously protective of their babies. Stories filled my mind about car-park punch-ups over a crumbled crimp, or the guy who got laid out in the pub in North Wales after he survived a 60-foot fall onto a single wire behind a flake but the impact took the edge off the flake.
Silence hung in the evening. I was going to get pulverized. Unless we could maybe decide this whole thing never happened. A commotion: The hammering started again, and cursing filled the air …
"Come off, you fucker. Come off, you loose bastard."
We three watched John spend himself upon the jug the way a 3,000-mile fetch across the Atlantic Ocean would spend itself onto Stevenson's Lighthouse, which rises up on the most ferocious rocky tip of Cornwall.
It remained a beautiful sight.
"Come down!" I yelled.
Down he slid, looking pleased with himself.
"Think it'll go now."
"Hi John. This is Geoff and Adam. They did the first ascent."
"Oh aye?"
All eyes turned now on John, providing me with much-needed relief, and in this relief I watched John's face over the course of several moments play out the emotional range of a Hollywood epic. Joy and enthusiasm gave way to horror, regret, sadness and internal rage, all acted out by the twitches on the edge of his mouth. It was like Eastwood in his prime.
Geoff and Adam stepped forward and shook both our hands.
"If it's loose, get it off, that's what I say," Geoff said. "You don't want to crater."
He smiled. And I felt that way I felt when I walked out of the Kathmandu police station
as a free man after my attempt at a false insurance claim went bad.
***
We gassed on for awhile and went off to our respective routes.
I wasn't climbing well enough to lead the arete so I threw myself on the ethical hand grenade and toproped it. The climb started on a dusty ledge that sloped toward a rubbly subsection. From there I followed tricky moves up the angular arete, and from time to time I rested on the rope. I checked the peg and lowered, and we strolled over to chat again with the lads.
Great climb, peg seems good, we reported. Tricky moves off the ledge.
"The ledge?" Geoff interrupted. "You're starting halfway up!"
"You mean it starts in that pit?"
"The lower wall, you mean? Well, that's if you want to do it properly."
The bastard. Of course the guidebook is utterly ambiguous about where it starts but he was telling us this and again had the upper hand. We traipsed back, and I was sent into the rubble-filled pit on a rope from above. I brought a stiff-bristled brush and cleaned and chalked a line of sidepulls that led directly to the upper arete, and John tied on hoping for the flash. Cheech and Chong appeared and folded their arms.
"Where are you going?"
Chong pointed to my chalked flakes.
"I'm sure I went farther right."
Six feet to the right was a dusty fissure that looked like an aerial photograph of the Battle of the Somme. That had never been climbed.
"Don't listen to them, John. Off you go."
He did. And on the last move he laid one onto the decayed remnants of the loose flake. Everyone was psyched, and the two locals lost control of their emotions and agreed to second it. They were still bantering on about the variation start, implying we had done it wrong, and Adam made a deal of going where he swore they went on the first ascent.
We watched him scratch his way up left of Somme crack, trying desperately to avoid its parched innards, awkwardly using inverted holds and off-cambered slimps. He clenched upward in rictus determination and eventually pinged off. His hand gravitated to the crack, and it vomited dust and small rocks. He grovelled upward for one more move, then relented and came down.
"You were too far right, as I remember," Geoff chided him.
Too far right? Jesus. Between our flakes, which they didn't use, and the dusty crack was six feet of blankness. Adam's supposedly off-route attempt must have taken up two feet of that, John the opposite
two feet. Which left Geoff's King Line somewhere in the middle two feet. He was coaxed into demonstrating.
There followed the most amazing sight, as Geoff attempted to go upward while avoiding all the holds John, Adam or I had used, his hands remaining within the confines of his bodywidth. It looked unnatural. "This is starting to ring a bell," he forced out, before losing his footing, then raising his hands in a tight display of surrender. He lowered.
The sun was lowering now as well, and the rocks at the base moved into soft shadow. A loving late evening sun lit up the springtime leaves all about us. Birds sang somewhere in the trees, deeply chirruping. Little flies lit up against the shadowy background. The four of us pissed ourselves with laughter, and I was left with no idea about who was tricking and who had been tricked.
First published in Rock and Ice issue 247
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