Ascending Up Big Walls

We're here to follow up on the last episode of the How Not to Big Wall course. We're going to show you, as a follower, how to clean a pitch, leave the anchor, and do some lower outs. Anything to follow up with that? We're going to do a really short pitch where we're both actually climbing. Finally, we actually get to do a big wall on a 10-foot wall. So you guys can... It's 15 feet. You guys can see the whole process here of what it looks like as a team of two climbing. In case I came up with a really clever thumbnail and you stumbled upon this as your first video here, my name is Ryan Jenks and I have been climbing big walls for several years before I ever started this channel. And now that we're hundreds of videos deep into this, we are breaking gear for all extreme sports and this A to Z content is showing people how to do different things. And the Big Wall Bible is the overarching project where we can include your feedback into this project. If you wanted to demo what we're doing today, you could submit that in the How Not to Contribute section of that book and submit basically a finished, ready to post file in there and we'll include it. We want as much of your guys' info in there as we want to include all of ours nice and organized. My name is Jeremiah Letourneau and I am a climber from the Midwest who decided to join Ryan on this project. I've gotten a chance to climb eight big walls in Yosemite and I've got a lot to learn still. But over the last five years, I've been training for getting comfortable to climb in Yosemite. So I've got a lot of book knowledge that I've been kind of searching and seeing different systems, which attributes to why we do things a little bit differently based on the style that we've learned. What's really great is he had way more book knowledge than I had because I lived near Yosemite. I would just go and try things and he only has his summers off because he's a high school math teacher. We arrived at the summit, but we took different routes. Ah, and therefore it looks a little different, but we are showing the same things. So I'm going to show as a follower, me leaving this and going up, and then we'll show him as a follower going up because he has a different anchor, which allows him a rope to do different things. I tie into the rope. He uses a micro traction as his backup. And, uh, yeah, I'm excited to show you this. What I'm also excited about is to climb. Is it climb time? No, no, no. It's Rocky talkie time. This process is a lot easier when you have a Rocky talkie 10% off. If you click the link below rocky talkie.com slash how not to, and it helps support us 10%. I know I plugged these a lot in these videos, but they did help sponsor, make this free for you guys. And what's cool is a lot more people I think are going to benefit from this course because it's free and dirt bags are cheap. And I have learned about 1% of people are willing to help invest in what we're doing. And we're looking to get a thousand patrons, which were almost there at $1 per episode, which would make this thing more viable that we do here on this channel. Rocky talkie help cover the cost of designing the website that you are now able to see. And that allowed me to do this course with Jeremiah, because this is taking like a big wall, twice as long as I was expecting. We are also going to include different for sure ways of rope communication to make sure that if this were to get dropped or your partner accidentally turned theirs off, that you can still understand when you are properly fixed and when the bag's ready to be hauled and things like that. So now is it climb time? Start climbing and I'll follow you. Yes, it's been cooped up at Brent's house for too long. Brent allowed us to use his wall. Brent is who we made the canyon course with. You can start climbing. Oh yes, thank you. Brent is the guy we did the canyon course with and he had such a sick wall and this is like a much more controlled environment. Some of the videos will include a real rock and some of the videos will be here. I need to get him on belay. Oh, I'm sorry. I fell asleep. Jeremiah was taking forever at that anchor up there. So he's on belay and I'm sitting on the bag, which is not full enough to be totally comfortable, but I still have my quad anchor that I built here and I am even between my two bolts and my legs are between the two bolts. So I can stand up at any time and access what I need to. Now my bag is docked with my releasable muncher mule overhand that we've shown in the other videos. So either he's really stretched out his pitch or he's pulled up this whole line and is getting ready to haul. So this is the thing I really want to emphasize is I want to make sure that I put my snacks away, that I have my shoes on, that I do anything I was going to do before jugging and get ready to go. There's nothing worse than somebody starting to haul and then you take 15 minutes to do things you could have been doing while they were light climbing. I am ready to go because we've spent way too long preparing for this scene. I am clipped in with a carabiner to a clove hitch here, and that's going to come in handy when I lower out later. And I'm in my two personal anchors, which are not either one technically personal anchors. I like to be connected to the rope. Ryan, your lines are fixed. Okay. Another way I can know that is if he starts pulling this up all the way, that means it's fixed. I'm going to leave this Grigri on for now until I get ready to go. He is not ever going to start hauling unless I am fixed. So if there was some miscommunication, that is a for sure thing I can be sure about. Ryan, ready to haul. Okay. That means if Jeremiah says it's ready to haul, that he likes the way it's in the protraction. He's ready to pump. Now the weight's still on my releasable system, and we're pretending that the lower out is more than it really is. I think it's going to go about three feet to the left. Now my left leg's in the way. So I'm just going to do this, kick the bag over, and get ready to make sure that I'm not going to be in the way of this 100, 150 pound bag. Once it starts to lower out, it's something snagged around, it's going to suck. So I have my cord. My personal anchor is not going to get in the way. I could even click this up here for now. Knowing that he was off belay, knowing that he was at the anchor, I would have been already at this stage, by the way, not napping to be funny for the camera. Because we have these, it's easier to say, start hauling. Don't get too ambitious. And cool. Now this is on a munter, so I'm able to get it around the corner and then lower it out until it has slack. And what I could do is I can just pull the whole thing out, or I could just open this carabiner and unclip it and drop this whole thing and it's free to go. It's 100% on him. Now he's going to haul this faster than I can ascend the rope because it's only 10 feet high. But if he communicated that my rope is fixed and he still has to pull up 100 feet of haul line, I could already get my ascenders on the rope and clean off this since I don't need it anymore. Take this off and clean up and be ready to go as much as possible. I have all the freedom in the world to get on this rope if he said it's fixed. A nice trick is I can put like an aluminum quick link right here so I can actually use this as a solid clipping point since only one hole can fit a carabiner. The way I ascend is I sit on my top ascender, stand on my lower one. So I want my left personal anchor on my left or left hand ascender. So I'm going to tighten that up. I'm going to pull that off. I'm going to loosen this. I'm going to clip it and I'm going to raise it to a full arm length. And then I'm going to tighten it just a little and that's about where I like it. And if you practice this on a short rock, you will know what you like and how it works. Don't do this the first time you go out on a big wall. The next thing I want to do is get my foot ascender and this string is the alternative and if you don't have a quick link and I'm going to stand on the bottom one and I'm going to foot pump myself up this. Now there's no weight on my rope so I have to put my thumb here, lift it up, otherwise it lifts my rope. So stand up and sit. Now I'm sitting enough that I can loosen up this personal anchor and I can clip it to my ascender. Now that I'm connected to this ascender, I'm going to want to take this oval carabiner and I'm going to want to clip it through that eye in case for some reason the teeth pop off, which could happen when I'm traversing over and passing pieces. I just keep this personal anchor loose. I sit on this one. Because this is vertical, I might be able to just walk up both ascenders. I'm going to take this and clip it to my quick link. So now I have eight or one, eight or two and I can clean my quad anchor, which is relatively easy. It's my quad anchor and my rope still attached to it. What I'm going to want to do is take this off and I'm going to do a little trick because he didn't pull any of the rope up. So I'm going to clip this rope bag underneath me so it's not hanging on me. So there we go. As long as my rope doesn't fall out of that, then I have all my rope with me in between my legs and it won't interfere with me going up the rope. At this point, he's 100% off belay. I'm tied into the end. I'm on two ascenders. You always have to ask yourself, how am I connected? So I'm just going to leave my open right here for now. And I'm going to stand up on the bottom one, stand up on the top one. And then I sit, I lift my foot up and then I stand up and lift that top ascender. So I have gotten to a piece where the rope doesn't go straight up, but it goes off to the left. So there's a couple ways to deal with this because I can't take this piece out or even unclip this quick draw on this bolt if there's pressure on it. So I got to get my pressure on above the rope. But as soon as I do that, it's going to want to swing me over. There's several ways to skin this cat. If I am going to do something gnar, I could clip another time in if you wanted to stay safe, which I recommend. You can just muscle your way through it. I'm going to lift that higher, put my foot on that piece and I could unclip it, putting my finger through there, taking my weight off of the rope enough to unclip and be willing to swing if I don't lift this guy up and lower out or swing. I just don't want to do that on this wall. So you can use different pieces and then come back over here and clean that off. Now this is within reach. What happens if it's not within reach? Watch this guy struggle so hard on half dome doing that. Doing the way I just did? Oh yeah. Well, that's a lot of work. It's really nice when you did a great job explaining it. You stood on other things too, right? You have to get your weight off. Yeah. So if you can, that's great or low angle or something. But what I want to do and what I did do is set this up. I'm going to stand on this lower one, taking all of the weight off of this guy. You lift this up, you clip that down and you clip this around the rope to make sure if those teeth get pulled off the rope that I'm still attached. Now I'm going to cinch that down and you can see as I sit, it wants to swing me in, but my ascender is going to get pulled up. Let's have that happen real quick. And now I'm stuck. So what I want to do, if it's not too much of an angle, I grab below the rope here, open it up. You can see it doesn't come off because of this carabiner and I jam it sideways and I treat it like a lowering device. And then I take it off and I put it back on and my carabiner. And all I have to do now is go about, let's see here, stand on the lower one, sit on the upper one, and now I can just lean back and unclip it. And that's how you can clean that. But what if it's even a bigger lower out? If this is a common place for people to have to lower out, there's going to be something permanent here for people to do that. Now I'm attached to two ascenders. So what I'm going to do, because I have a lot of rope with me, I'm going to put this through here. And one thing I could do is just tie back in an eight and clip in. And then that Grigri I had earlier, I just put that back on, but for rappel. And I would rappel off of this piece. So now I can two-to-one myself up here and I take all my pressure off of these ascenders and all my weight is off this rappel station I just made. That's all a lower out is. So I take this gear and I make sure that I didn't smash this gear in with whatever I decided to do. And then I just rappel down. Now I'm rappelling. Now as I rappel, I'm going to want to lift this up so I don't go down further than I should. Really like make this cool V. Slide this up so I don't leave that behind. Lower myself a little. And I'm getting below the next piece. When I'm all done, I'm just untying this. Untying this, I'm going to pull the rope through. Now the problem is I can only go to where the middle of my rope is. Or I take a predetermined amount, tie the figure of eight right here, and then my grigri would be on this side and just rappel off the end of it and come out of my grigri. Either way, you're rappelling. And so now when I take this off, I'm going to pull this through just like you would rappel. Take that and tie myself back in and throw my foot in the bottom one and stand up, sit on my top one, bottom one, stand up. And it's really hard to watch a video and know how to do that. Just get on some eighters, get on a fixed rope, and practice standing on this one, sitting on this one. If it is vertical, like this scenario here, or even low angle, you can just get your body up close to the wall and you can just do this. But if you lift your right hand, you got to lift your right foot. You lift your left hand, you got to lift your left foot. And you can just shuffle up the wall. What are some good alternative places besides for a wall to do this, Ryan? Maybe a tree? I think so too. If you live in a super flat place, you could set something up in a tree. And if you, farmers, you have silos, you have trees, you have barns, there's a lot that you can do. You can do the hay mound up there in your rafters. There's a lot of situations where you can get a rope up there and jog tall height. I mean, you have 200 foot silos that you can rig up to the top. Become friendly with your climbing gym. Maybe they'll let you practice. But you want to practice low angle, vertical, and overhung. And overhung especially. Three different styles of jogging. Yeah. And this video would be way too long if we try to cover all of that. But that's what, maybe we can show some extra video clips in the, what Bible is that? How Not to Big Wall Bible. The Big Wall Bible. That's where we can show those clips. But that is overall what I'm doing to follow and clean my gear. And just ask the next person who's going to be leading, if it's not you, ask your partner how they like their gear wrapped. I put my stuff off here, but I think Jeremiah. I like everything on a sling. And we can talk about this on the ground. I love being this uncomfortable. So when I get up there, I can bestow this upon him. We decided to fix a pitch for the next day. So we have our rope up. And sometimes you end up using both ropes and go two pitches higher, because you can use the full length of your leader rope and your haul line and get a lot of pitches done at the end of the day. So we're just going to come down off the haul line here, back to our base camp, where we have our portal edge camp down below, where I'm going to go. So I'm going to show at the end of a pitch, I'm all done jogging up, kind of cleaning everything, organizing everything for the night I need. But right now I'm on my ascenders, and I'm just going to go down on a rappel. So all I do is I take my Grigri, I orient it in the correct orientation where the climbing strand is going up, the brake strand is still going down. I'm going to pull up tight on the Grigri so that I'm actually on the Grigri and I no longer have any weight on my ascenders. I just take the top ascender off, unclip it, get it onto one of my hips, take the bottom ascender off, and put it on one of my hips, and then I go down on rappel. See you down there. This is one of the ways that I like to be in my belays if I'm in a hanging belay and I don't have a nice haul bag to be able to sit on, is I use one of my aid ladders that I've still clipped into my master point with my personal anchor system, so I'm still connected with something. And same with the other one too. Then I just throw a locker or an open gate or the two extremes, a locker or any other kind of beaner in this thing, and then just clip it somewhere where I can sit in it and it just takes a lot of the load off your feet, so then when you're belaying you can have a nice comfortable belay as you're climbing. But I can see that he got up there and he's already pulled my haul line tight, so I heard him also say a line's fixed, and I saw this nice and tight, so I'm going to go ahead and do my changeover. So as soon as he said line's fixed, the first thing that I'm going to do, as soon as he said line's fixed, I'm going to go ahead and start working on getting up on my ascenders. So I'm not going to worry about the haul bag quite yet. I'm going to worry about me getting transferred over. So what I do here is I put my ascender on. I do the locker as well on the top, but I just put my ladder in this bottom loop and then my personal anchor system is connected to the the back side and not the gate side of my ladder. And then I jack that thing up as high as I can and try to get it weighted on it as best I can first. So that's nice and on there. I'm going to go throw the next one on and transfer my ladder to it as well. So my ladder's onto it. My locker or my personal anchor system is in there as well. That's all I need there. Now what I can do here is stay on a Grigri, but I like to not use a Grigri as my backup. Instead, I like to use a mini traction. So I'm going to explain why here. It's on a mini traction or a micro traction or any kind of progress capture besides for a tie block. It'll speed through very, very nicely. That's the opposite of what you want. Yeah, seriously. That's an essential step. Yeah, it is. Really not be tangled up. All right, so I put my micro tracks. What I do is I put where the hole is going to be on the top and notice I have a little tag line here. Typically the locker never leaves that. That's just a little backup so I don't drop this device. I attach it and that's my backup while I'm jugging. So you can even see that that's now holding all of my weight if I wanted to. So I'm attached at three different attachment points. It can be overkill, but I like it. All right, so what I can focus on now here is taking care of the anchor. Since I see that he hasn't yet started hauling, by setting it up this way I can still fully disassemble that anchor. So I might as well do that since he has not started hauling yet. You're saying I'm slow? Yep. Must be still unracking, but I can still work just because I don't have to sit at the anchor and wait. I have a job to still do. There's always something to do. So I'm cleaning my anchor starting with my two end straps around my head, fold in half, and then around. So what I can see here is that this thing is slowly moving upwards. It is slowly moving upwards. It's slowly moving upwards. Great. Awesome. So I can see that he's for sure hauling this thing. I heard him also say hauling. All the way, Ryan. Now I get to this point and I still have control on my munter, but I can just go ahead and start lowering it on that munter, have a little bit of control, and once I 100% know that it's hauling really well, I can just let it go. Let that keep going. That bag is moving upwards and all I have to do is clean that one beaner and I can get to work. So I'm about to start here. The last thing I did need to take care of is all the rope and keeping that nice and tidy. So what I like to do is since I already had it flaked and ready to go, it's already in a nice orderly pile here by me using my sling, but I don't like to trust that sling. Instead, I want to use whatever leftover rope is on it and tie it around it. That's not the end of the rope, right? That's correct. This is actually what I was playing with, my end of the rope. That's a lot of rope. I did a very short lead. Yeah. Okay, so I wrap it around it and then I oftentimes put a bite through the rope. I pass that through and then I throw a locker on the bite and the loose strand. It does not have to be a locker. When I do that, it cinches the rope really tight and keeps a lot of weight on the traction. I'm about to start now. This rope is going to be a nice weight to be able to pull through my nanotracks as I jug. Now, as I go, I will eventually need to pull back up more to keep it from blowing off in the wind, but just keep that in mind. I'm going to get jugging. The nice thing is it's the same system that Ryan uses, but I want you to watch how smooth this feeds through as my backup. As I go up, it automatically keeps the progress as I go up. Now, you're walking up both 8ers evenly. Correct. Yep. I pretty much go left, right, left, right because this is a vertical wall. I can go left, right, left, right. Now, I'm at the step where I'm at a lower out. I need to do the same thing he did, but I'm going to use a different method. Instead, because I have a cordelette from the anchor before, I'm going to use this as my lower out cord. My very first step is going to be the same, where I need to pass this top ascender over. I'm going to do that, pass it over, and then trap in the rope. That's good. Move it up as high over as I can. I'm going to put weight over on that leg now too, allowing for this one to get split up and even the backup up if I need to. I'm going to transfer over the bottom one, but this time, I'm still going to keep this here, and I need to unweight this by using the ring. What I'm going to use is the second belay loop that comes with the harness. It's awesome. What I do is I clip my locker to my belay loop. I take from the middle mark, and I pass it through, and I just come back, and I clip that middle mark. Then, I'm going to throw a munter on here to add a little bit control. I'm going to pull up nice and tight, which allows me to then unclip the piece, take the piece out because it's no longer weighted, and then I can just lower myself on my munter. It wasn't trapped. It'll essentially do the same job. It works. Yeah, it works. I've seen it work. It's just on the wrong side. Lower myself into position back until I'm fully there, and now the line is still on me, and I can pull that back to me, and then I do like to take the time to re-get that ready, especially if I know that all my lower outs are done. I might need it for other ones. Do you wrap it up if you do? If it's all done, otherwise, no, I just have it on a bite connected to the locker and just dangling between my legs. Then, I'm ready to keep on jugging. Oh, man. It's all twisted on me. Okay, let's get that all nice. You do left hand, right? I do left, right, left. I do left, right, left, right, et cetera. Cool. I'm at the top of my pitch, top ascender off. Now, what I'm going to do right away is since I'm still connected, I'm going to take my personal anchor system, and I'm going to get in on my anchor, and I'm just going to go ahead and start unweighting this stuff so we can start pulling up rope. Take that off. Get in if I need to. Take off my backup, and then immediately start pulling up the spare line, and then getting ready to flake it and organize it. If you didn't get much from that, it's all right. It's not how big your jugs are. It's how you use them. Oh, my gosh. I didn't know you were going to do that. That's really great. Thanks. I think this is the one episode that has the most insufficient amount of information you need to go do what we showed you. Ascending's not that hard. Step in ascender, ascender, or sit and lift. That's not hard, but it's not natural. It's not in natural motion, so go find a way to go practice this. Watch the video again and practice it, and try to find other scenarios too. What we had today to work with is a vertical wall, and so it's very hard to try to show what jugging on an overhung wall would look like or a slab wall. We are going to try to go out to index and do some climbing there as well, and we'll be able to see and fill in some gaps where we can. The last video of this course is putting every piece that you saw in this whole video and putting it together on real rock, and we're going to do a one-pitch big wall, and we're going to show all the components of it, but an overhanging wall is very similar to the lower out on this except you're getting pulled away from the wall. The problem is you can't put your feet on stuff to like compensate for a lack of technique. Pulling out the gear is going to be found in the placing gear video. You do kind of the opposite of whatever they did to get it in. Now a lot of this gear is a little bit more technical. Where could I get some more of this gear? Good plug. Extremegear.org. 10% of what you buy at extremegear.org supports this channel, and about 70 or 80% of what we're showing you here is sold on there. Very few stores have 100%. A lot of stuff is still made in garages. A lot of it you can tell is niche, but if you're going to a bunch of money on a gear-intensive sport, please support what we're doing. This allows us to make it free for everyone, and I think that is an amazing thing to be able to do. Thank you to my patrons who support what we're doing with $1 per episode. I only need a thousand or 1% of the audience, a thousand people, to do that to make this very viable, and as you can see on our new website that I'm excited to finally release to you guys, we have made a store filter type of thing for all the content we've ever had. We got 400 or 500 episodes written down into blogs, so you can search if you want to look up microtraction brake tests on real rock with Bobby or with whoever. You can refine it down to exactly what you want to see. I just ask that you don't let the algorithm refer the next video to you. We make videos for all extreme sports, and no one's that into every extreme sport, but I do encourage you to watch things that aren't related to the things you like to cross-pollinate the information. For instance, just think back to how we refer to a VT prusik. Not very used in big walling and normal climbing, but very used in the arborist world and the canyon world, yet can be a very critical component to a following. If you dropped your ascender, you might need a VT prusik to go up that fixed line. Or if he got stuck ascending and the line's taut, and I didn't have a second rope, I don't know why that would be a thing, but I could go down a taut fixed line while he's on it and get down to him and help him. So anyways, it's really great to cross-pollinate all the sports on this channel. It's really great that this is a community-driven thing, and the feedback that we are going to be able to contribute to the big wall bible is going to double, triple, quadruple, 10x what you're even watching in these videos. So not only can you learn, but you can even help contribute. If you don't like something we did, there's a platform for you to share it. Respect. And since this video does not contain all the information, and it's just a small picture of a very large book that we are writing, your contributions can make this chapter a little bit bigger. And it's nice to have written content with video content. I think that really helps. And everything, of course, in all these videos is going to be timestamped, so you can skip around to the parts you need if you want to review something specifically. Put in the comments below if you like A-Z content, or if you just want me to stick to breaking stuff and going, wow, after every single snap. Thanks for watching, and hit this before you go to the next video.