Tom Approaches 5 – Cape Wild Bivi

This is photo #20 in a series of 32. You can click here to return to Photo #1.

Ha! I must have been scared. Check out the doubled Scream-Aids above the Screamer near the top. A superb photo of our sub-loads on their multi-coloured Catch Lines, and hanging beneath everything else, our fragrant Wall Flower.

After Tom finished cleaning P4, I fixed half of P5 and equalized a bunch of rivets, then rapped off and returned to Cape Wild Bivi. Our accommodations for the night consisted of nothing more than four manky quarter-inchers in a horizontal array [the topo showed five - sheesh] - so it felt good to have the belay backed up to the rivets above.

The next morning, I tried some crazy Rubber Band Man pendulums across and towards Aurora in an effort to score the booty. With each subsequent swing, Tom would whip me farther across the wall in giant forty-foot arcs over five-hundred feet off the deck! After I caromed and bounced off porta-ledges, pigs, and sub-loads, got tangled in the Wall Flower, and spun round like a top until I felt sick, I finally succumbed to the futility of my actions, and escaped the vertiginous exposure to collapse exhausted in my ledge.

[But not before wearing a core shot into the sheath of my 3-month old 11mm x 60m Mammut Flex lead rope. - Tom]

Nothing to do but climb the A4 expanding Poison Pill, and try to swing over from higher.

Now, you may be wondering what an expanding flake actually looks like. Believe me, it looks better once you're past it then when you're actually climbing it.

You can click here to see it from the friendly side.