How NOT 2 Establish Big Walls

Okay, so we're on the fourth pitch of the nose here on El Capitan and I'm going to show you how to dock the haul bags that I have just hauled up. You're not supposed to drill yet! What? So you want your docking cord to be at least like seven millimeters. That went the belay lid. Just kidding. This is not the nose. Please do not drill on the nose. And please not use a battery-powered drill anywhere in Yosemite. I'm trying not to get canceled. That was just a joke. Anyways, we're going to talk about how not to establish a big wall. Sam here has been establishing multiple big walls. And that's kind of what we were working on on this trip in Nebraska. This is the first big wall in Nebraska. We're just going to talk about kind of what goes into it and how much work it is. Holy cow, it's a lot more work than just pulling up something somebody already put up. And I also just really want to show you this view before it went away. Hi, my name is Sam Boyce. I like to climb dirty rocks. So you drilled above your head yesterday. Yeah. For 12 straight hours. Seems like a, uh... Is it normal to put in a lot of bolts on a big wall? No. It's normal to put in a lot of bolts on a big wall free climb. In the end, it should go free. Not today. It should be free in the 513 range. I think the route goes at 58C1. We wanted to preserve the fact that the route was aided on the first ascent. And make it approachable by two different user groups. So rather than just drilling bat hooks, which is what is typical for most big wall free climbs. Like most people just drill a bat hook, make it so it's not really repeatable in that fashion. And then either patch it or leave it. We've filled in probably a bunch of unnecessary bolts. But that's kind of an interesting experiment that we've had with this route. And we'll see how the reception is. We'll find out in the comments. It's okay to use a power drill in Nebraska. Whereas, if you were trying to do this in a national park, you would probably approach it very differently. Yes. Out here in Nebraska, we are not in wilderness designation. We're legitimately not in wilderness destination. We may or may not be in Nebraska. Only the Nebraska part is. Establishing a route like this with a hand drill would be... Not possible. Not possible without devoting half of your life to it. This wall has very bizarre rock. It's all compact and nice that seemingly doesn't have a single crack. I think we went 400 feet without seeing a single beak crack. Which is really bizarre. It's something I've never seen before. The other route that we put up a few years ago was 5.9.A4. A lot of the 5.9.A4 features got trundled by our friend Kyle on the way down. But that route was intended to be a nailing route. And I think it was actually really classic as a moderate to medium hard aid line. And it would be probably a really awful free climb. The features just don't seem like they'd be very conducive to free climbing. Everything is downsloping. And she would also have to install another 150 bolts to make it reasonable. It's probably sustained 5.12. At what point did you decide this one was going to be this? How high did you get up before you were like, oh, this is going to be this? The first time I came up here with my friend Kyle, we got up the first few pitches or fourth class basically. And then the first pitch up the actual wall is this off width. And there was an anchor on top of the off width. As soon as we got to that point, we realized kind of what we were getting into. And it was pretty clear why other parties had bailed. They probably didn't have enough hardware to go up. The more natural line that we could have theoretically taken would have taken us down there. Big garbage chute, gnarly slot canyon. That's where the trash compactor is in the middle of Nebraska. It's where you go to die. Pretty clear as soon as Kyle started leading that first pitch off that ledge that there were no cracks. So you're the route whisperer. You're letting the rock tell you what to do. Like what's best for, what you're going to get out of it. I try not to force the line that I want in my head when I'm walking up to it. And whatever the route seems like, it's going to produce whatever is best. Should we check the topo before you go up this next pitch? Yeah, what does it say? 5.9, right? 5.7 C1? It's whatever you want it to be. Trundle Town is a new location for me in Nebraska. What makes it okay here? So I get HOA fines for not doing my yard work, but when we come up here, it's I think a little bit more fun. Holy moly. I guess it's technically never really 100% okay without a spotter, but this feature has only been climbed maybe a couple other times. And there's no rational reason for anybody ever to be coming up this talus field unless they're coming up to climb this route that nobody knows about. Oh my gosh. You can also see your run out. You can see the ground. 1,000 feet away, 2,000 feet away is not really far enough away to not see somebody in the talus. So that's kind of as good of a setup as you can for letting choss fly without really notifying people. Actually, the biggest hazard in situations like this is the general public notifying the police. I did actually have the police called on me while I was developing a sport crag outside of Las Vegas on some limestone. That was kind of hilarious. They thought I needed a rescue. I had a helicopter fly by and a blowhorn at the parking lot. They made me communicate with hand signals to see if I was okay. That was hilarious. So what did you establish next to Sendero? First of all, El Sendero Luminoso is a famous route in Mexico. It goes up the main face in El Pochero Chico. My partner Lonnie and I established a parallel route that starts pretty close and then diverges and climbs kind of the secondary summit of the tower. We did that last winter. It's like a 1,600-foot sport route that we developed. How hard is it? 512 C or D, depending on who you ask. Felt about as hard as the crux of El Sendero Luminoso, which is rated 12D. Might as well try and be consistent with the grades. Yeah, that route was decidedly in a more popular zone. The choss that we were cleaning, we were kicking cactus off pretty freely, but whenever we had to trundle loose rocks, we'd either go up in the middle of the night and rain terror down on the valley kind of willy-nilly, or I'd have a haul bag, and I'd jug up with the haul bag, and I'd fill the haul bag with rocks and then rappel back to the ground. I think I lowered probably 1,000 or 2,000 pounds of rocks in that fashion to try and make the route safe for future repeats. Yeah, because here, you didn't have a choice. These rocks are coming off. You're either going to haul bag them down. It's less than body weight. You're going to knock it off with your rope or... Yeah, you're actually pulling up one of the bags, knocked a rock loose where I was, and that was a wow moment for me. To my knowledge, nobody's ever climbed this face. Nobody goes to Nebraska to go rock climbing. How many batteries do we have up here? I don't know. We have 44 amp hours worth of battery. That's a lot of battery. How many bolts did we bring up? There was 150 bolts, which luckily we didn't use them all. We broke a lot of bits, and the ones that didn't break all got dull, so we almost had to bail a pitch from the top. That pitch, there's one spot where it's a weird phenomenon that can happen where there's, I think it's usually iron ore deposit or something, and a bit hits it, and it just really disagrees. So I broke three bits in one spot to get one bolt in the wall. That almost fucked us. What do you call it? We call it unobtainium. We hammered in a monument to the drill bit gods at that belay, so anybody repeating this, you have to kiss the drill bits. So what's a route like this cost you? They're all different, but what's this one? Is it mostly just the bolts? Bolt costs, yeah. Because I think we just fucked one of your new ropes. Yeah, you kind of expect to burn through a bit of rope. I mean, the route's not even done yet. We're going to probably be destroying some more rope. Usually the ropes that we're using for cleaning and stuff are semi-retired ropes that we don't care too much about. Bolt cost on this guy is probably around $1,000. Definitely the most I've ever spent on a route. Another route that we bolted earlier this year in Potrero was probably second runner-up. I don't really remember. I think we had a bunch of hardware, so the monetary cost wasn't in the forefront of my mind. And these are 3 1⁄8-inch, 3-inch-long wedge bolts. All stainless, yeah. Healthy. These are DeWalt. DeWalt. Half the bolts are Hilti's, though. What was your thing you were having a hard time knocking in? Which brand? The DeWalts. The DeWalts were hard to knock in. It was when the bits started wearing out, the holes would get smaller. I never actually had a problem with that, noticed a problem with it before. So the DeWalts must be a little tighter tolerance than other bolts. Previously I'd mostly used Hilti and Powers, but those have become harder to find. I guess the Hiltis have become harder to find in the secondhand market because they're way too expensive to buy retail. How dirty am I? Super. Does it look like I just got out of a mud wrestling competition? Yeah, you did one of those mud runs. Your lips are so white compared to your face. How hard of walls have you been able to free up to this point? The hardest free route that we've climbed is 12b, Mexico, and Freerider. The two other bigger free routes we've done in the grade. I'm not necessarily a big wall free climber. Definitely that's Lonnie's inspiration. I kind of follow around. What do you do for work? I'm a guide. You show people how to do this? I try to, yeah. I do a lot of instructional courses and sometimes guided ascents. I think our niche is definitely teaching. At what level do you teach? All levels. We teach everyone from their first day to... We've done a couple extended advanced big wall courses where we get into harder nailing. That's really fun. Or higher end alpine courses. Sometimes people come with specific goals in mind and cater to it. We really enjoy teaching big wall courses. It's really fun. It's nice to hear about those. Maybe they existed but I didn't know when I first started. That would have been a worthy investment versus the suffering I did. I think the frustration when I was getting into wall climbing was the complete inconsistency and I'd rather say bullshit that you learn from a bunch of people. Then you climb with somebody who knows what is the modern industry standard and you're like, everything just makes sense and everything clicks. It's kind of nice to teach people that the first time and not have to go through the growing pains of learning how to do stuff and making all these mistakes. You're going to have to make all these mistakes in some fashion but you're not going to have to make all of the mistakes. You're not going to make the really big ones that shut you down on an objective. You don't have to reinvent the system. We are The Climbing School. Our website is TheClimbingGuides.com because the people who own TheClimbingSchool.com wanted $15,000 at the time. We're TheClimbingGuides.com Gotcha. We're based in Washington. We travel to Mexico. We're going on a Europe trip this year. We're selling a few fully inclusive climbing trips. One is in Spain and one is in Guadalajara. It will be a super ride to get people out in Guadalajara. What time of year are you going there? We're going to be in Mexico in January and then Spain in February and Jordan in March. I wish I could show you this view because it's really pretty but we really don't want you to know exactly where we're at. Who else helped you on this? Was Kyle? Kyle. And Lonnie? Kyle and Lonnie, yeah. Kyle has been a consistent, willing partner in The Stupid. He's working on a next level Stupid project in southern Washington right now. He said he just bought the hardware. An actual straight up bolt ladder that wasn't put up with the intent of being freed on some volcanic choss tower. He's putting up another one. So Kyle put us in touch because he was too busy making a large order of stuff for my new secret that you have to sign up for my emails to find out about and to get really cool discounts when you go to my secret. So make sure you go sign up for my emails and find out what I've been up to and kind of what led up to this point here. Thanks for watching. Not a bad summit. It's pretty sweet up here. We got at least a little view. The clouds opened up for us. Ta-da!