Today I made about seventy feet, all drilling. Nothing but bashie holes, so I’m continuing to put in real drilled placements, and a lot fewer of them. The FA team apparently thought that a two-foot reach was just plenty good, while I’m going for at least five feet between my drilled placements. Can’t always do that because of the endless bulges and hollow plates. But I do my best, which is turning out to be about half the drilled placements of the FA team.
One thing that’s really weird about what they did is that they drill bashie holes just out on blank rock, but at times they employ their “mini bolts.” I just don’t get why they acknowledged the blankness at times by leaving permanent placements, and most of the time they apparently thought they weren’t “drilling” with the strings of drilled bashies. Just makes no sense to me.
Oh, my, the heat! It was well into the nineties today, with full-on sun and not a single cloud to be had. TMI warning: I peed about half a cup today, and it was brown. NOT GOOD! Clearly I’m not making it on almost a gallon a day. So, this weekend I’m going to have to rap out of here, go to town, and get LOTS more water! I can make progress in the heat; I handle heat pretty well. But I have to stay hydrated, and that didn’t happen today. By the time I got back to my Portaledge and started drinking again, I was weak and shaky… early-stage heat exhaustion. I need much more fluid up here!
It turns out that larger-diameter holes are faster to drill than smaller-diameter. So, the Zamac rivets are taking too long. They are one-quarter inch in diameter, and I have to go in about one and one-quarter inches. I can literally drill a big, deep, half-inch in diameter bolt as fast as one of those Zamacs.
So, when I was home for the reunion, I picked up about 40 sleeve anchors that are five-sixteenths by one and one-half inches. These are full-on (mini) bolts. Today I found that I can drill those out about fifty percent faster than the Zamacs, which is a huge net gain. It’s still slow going, but way better than the Zamacs!
Because of the many obstacles (there is nothing “flat” and straightforward here), I’m always drilling in terribly awkward positions, and it’s quite exhausting. By the end of the day, I’m just a whipped pup. I look down, and all I want is out of the sun and to be laying flat on my back in the Portaledge.
And the ledge is NICE. I designed the thing with Baffin Island in mind, so the thing is overkill for a typical El Cap route. But for this it’s perfect! The fly is made of coated pack-cloth instead of the typical ripstop, which makes it about ten times as resistant to penetration as ripstop. And today that feature came into its own in a big way.
While leading today, I was directly over the camp the whole day, and there was just no keeping mass quantities of mud clods and rocks from falling right into camp.
You can’t keep it from happening, because just your feet moving on the wall kick loose these chandeliers of hardened mud, and then gravity takes over, as it is wont to do.
One particularly huge chunk must have weight at least ten pounds, and when I felt it go I said, “Oh no! That’s a big one!” It hit the Portaledge straight on, and it actually bowed the fly in pretty significantly. But then the fly rebounded and deflected the hulk out into space. NO damage. Sweet!
Given all the random junk that falls down this wall, it’s really nice to be IN this thing at night, instead of out under the stars.
Also, there are these little beetles meandering on the wall. They BITE! So, being able to close up the inner fly, with mosquito netting for the breeze, keeps them outside where they belong.
In short, this Portaledge really makes the difference, such that I can sleep at night if the wind isn’t too bad.
Finally for tonight, I occasionally encountering chunks of wood in some of the horizontal seams, and the stuff is not petrified. They are almost like little pegs of wood, and they are very buried! I can’t imagine they are the remainders of small bushes, because nothing grows on this wall. And they would have rotted away long ago. These look pretty fresh.
The most recent one I encountered was in a small horizontal seam that formed a sort of pocket, and this one looked like it had been bashed on. It as also obviously cut off flat. Now I’m wondering if the FA team also resorted to using wooden pegs in some places, and then broke or cut the ends off when they were done. Most of these are in the perfect spot for a placement, and I now wonder if the FA team was using even this tactic. (SO wrong!)
Well, it’s a mystery, and I’d guess that the FA team won’t be forthcoming about things like this.
We’ll see what tomorrow brings and what sort of progress I can make. Ack… the heat!