Rewritten

There's nothing better than a good old fashioned epic to remind us all why we climb in the first place.

      Sam and I had gone out drinking the night before we were supposed to go to Eldo and have a nice easy day climbing Rewritten. After staying too long at the Dark Horse and missing last call on Pearl Street in Boulder, we miraculously made it onto the last Hop bus of the night. We stayed on the bus past our stop to join in on heckling a strange pedophilic man, and because of this we had to walk through a neighborhood to get back to my place. On the way home we saw a guy out in front of his house smoking a cigarette, we got to talking with this kid and turns out his name is Alex and he is also German. Sam, being fluent in German, started talking to him in his native tongue which led to a long conversation and us getting invited inside where we met Thomas, who is also from Germany. This was all very funny to Sam and I as Thomas and Alex Huber are famous brothers at the forefront of the climbing world. Actually the entire situation was pretty hilarious; things like this always happen to Sam and I. Well, one thing led to another and Alex was coming along with us to climb Rewritten the next day.

Sam and I at the base of Rewritten/Green Spur, psyched as hell for a cruiser day of easy trad climbing.

Sam starting the day off right.

At the I-bolt belay above one of the first pitches, Sam led every pitch and then Alex would go up, unclipping his rope from every piece, then I would go up last cleaning. Alex had some climbing experience, but none on trad or multi-pitch, so I belayed.

Sam on the best pitch of the day.
After pulling on jugs then scuffling up a fun chimney on the third pitch, this pitch is an awesome traverse out into space on a juggy rail with smaller feet right to a perfect hand/finger crack with jugs and huge feet intermittently. After that fun crack you go up the corner with really fun movement with interesting eldo holds to a nice ledge belay. This is where Rewritten and the Green Spur kinda mix together, maybe, I'd have to look at the topo again.

Looking from Alex's point of view after the traverse up at the juggy hand/finger crack.



Cleaning the anchor and wanting to warm up, it was January after all.



Alex climbing on one of the most fun portions of the route above the crack off the traverse, and me trying to get a fixed cam out with my nut tool with little success while I waited for Alex to get higher up. You can see the awesome chimney down and left of me.



This was such a cool pitch. This is the part around the corner with fun movement on classic eldo face/crack climbing. There is a reason this is a classic route.



Rebuffat's Arete! The 5.7 knife-edge arete 500ft off the ground. So fun and so classic. I want to go back and lead this entire route.




Chalking up like an addict



The view from the top, you can see the top of yellow spur there on the right in the foreground, Eldorado Springs past that and Denver past that.



This is where the epic began. After topping out we found no obvious rap station close to but Sam said the walk-off is heinous and time consuming (I thoroughly believe him). Since it was getting dark and time was of the essence, we decided we could get down in three raps. We tied off some cord where two huge boulder were touching and I took off hoping to reach some trees below us. We had no planned rap station-to-rap station plan for the descent so this was largely guesswork. I got down to a large ledge with rope to spare and two big trees to tie off. After Sam and Alex got down to me, we tried to pull the ropes ... they wouldn't come down. We yarded on them as hard as possible and doing all sorts of interpretive dances to swing them around and get them untangled with whatever it was that they were tangled on. No success. I started rigging up some ascending contraptions with a tibloc and other stuff, the best being a tibloc with a 2:1 carabiner pulley system. Keep in mind it got dark as soon as the ropes got stuck, everything we did from that point on was in pitch black. The only light sources we had were the camera screens. Lesson #1 bring a headlamp no matter what you're doing. After pulling myself up with the tibloc for about 15 minutes...and getting about 15 feet, I gave up the job to Sam to see if he would do better than me. His strategy was to self top-rope back up to the anchors, climbing in the dark on rock that is not climbed. Everything around us was loose chossy crap, we didn't know if the ropes would suddenly come down and Sam would be screwed. We didn't know if we were gonna have to spend the night or not. At the ledge would have been big enough, and at least we had both ends of the ropes. It was also getting very cold (it would end up snowing that night), and we hadn't brought up coats or anything. Sam and Alex brought their jackets but I just had a plaid long sleeve wool shirt. The plaid helped.




 

Alex beginning to wonder why he agreed to go climbing with us the night before.
Sam was able to successfully climb up and free the ropes. Afterwards he said that the notch we thought it had been caught in was not the culprit but actually a crap tree, so it is possible that we could have pulled hard enough on the ropes to free them without hurting them which was our fear. We slung one of the big trees on the ledge and I set out into the darkness hoping that my ropes wouldn't end. I made sure there were knots in the ends. After a very long blind rap I made it to another nice ledge in a gulley system with a few feet of rope to spare (70m ropes are nice). I told the others to come down and started searching for an anchor with the camera LCD screen. I found a small tree that I decided would probably work and determined this would be our next anchor.

Sam and I preparing the ropes for the last rap into the void, we may have actually touched the void, not sure.
At least the baguette stayed in tact.

There were a couple roofs in the second rap and Alex went over one and hit his knee pretty bad, he was complaining a lot which was a bad sign. Sam and I were starting to have fun again and started joking around and laughing a lot, so Alex probably thought we had gone insane. So we slung the last tree which was questionably small, but solid, and I took off again hoping that this would be the last rap. This one turned out to be the most sketchy, there were huge crevasses and multiple large roofs with tons and tons of big loose rocks that were begging to get knocked down the gulley. Hard things to deal with in the dark. I managed to get down without knocking any loose or cutting the ropes, touched ground and practically tripped over our packs. Yes! We were right; three raps and we got to the right place. I called "off" and ran uphill and away from the gulley to avoid getting hit by anything Sam or Alex might kick loose as the potential for killing ourselves or each other on this stupid gulley rap was enormous, probably worse than we realized since we couldn't see anything. We all got back to our packs a little before 9pm. It got dark at about 4pm. So it wasn't the worst epic. Probably more of a minor inconvenience than an epic, but it was cold too.

Sam and I took Alex home and booked it to my place where Sarah was making dinner for us, thanks Sarah! It was weird getting home so quick after we got down from the route. I'm so used to getting down from an alpine route and having to hike fore hours then drive for another hour or so just to get home, all while starving and being exhausted. We were reminded what can happen and reviewed our ascender/headlamp/food/clothing choices and decided it was fun and we can avoid a couple things next time. It think, though, that Sam and I are sick in the head and actually enjoy the suffering that events like this provide. Evidenced by the fact that we were having way too much fun on the way down in the dark, cold, and uncertainty.

-Jonny