Sara Rice carefully palms her way up Wave Length (5.8), Whitehorse Ledge. With your latest sticky rubber, they should be a piece of cake, right? Whitehorse Ledge, N.H. So if you’re curious how good your footwork really is, see the following pages for some of New England’s most classic balance climbs.
KENS HOOK SLAB GRABBER HOW TO
Slab climbing will teach you how to stand on your feet like never before, and as Surette explains, “When you’re using your feet really well, you don’t have to pull that hard.” So why risk a severe road rash by climbing slabs? Simple: it will make you a better climber. Today, with countless steep sport climbing crags across the country, the art of delicate slab climbing on sweeping faces, with its emphasis on balance, smearing, and precise footwork, has somewhat lost its allure with the mainstream.
KENS HOOK SLAB GRABBER CRACK
It was not uncommon to crack two or three bits per hole, which often meant balancing on delicate smears for an hour or more to create a single piece of protection. This was before the day of power drills quarter-inch bolts were placed with hand drills, whose bits were notorious for breaking. But if a bolt was needed, the first ascensionist had to figure out a way to drill it on lead, whether by balancing precariously at a no-hands stance or using aid off a hook. The obvious cracks were picked off during the 1970s, so by the 1980s most of the last great problems were slabs and faces, which often necessitated the use of bolts.
KENS HOOK SLAB GRABBER PATCH
If a patch of stone could not be reached by climbing from the ground up, it was left untouched. The basic idea, which peaked during the 1980s, was to preserve the rock. Surette was one of the leading proponents of what might be called the Golden Age of ground-up, traditional climbing in New England. (Not the route described in Surette’s misadventure).
Katrina Zalenski tiptoes up Future Shock (5.11b), Whitehorse Ledge. When Surette got back to his house that evening, his parents asked how his day had been, and he simply said, “fine,” leaving out the details of his botched winter solo. He was soon able to reach a ledge, where he traversed off the face. Bearing down, Surette prayed that holds would keep appearing.
He took a deep breath and made an iron-cross move between widely spaced edges, his shoes pedaling on the blank face. It wasn’t an established route, but he was pretty much up a creek without a paddle. Sussing out his options, Surette spied a line of face holds that cut diagonally across the steep, blank wall to his left. He considered yelling for help, but back in those days, the town of Hales Location hadn’t yet been built below the crag, nor had the White Mountain Hotel-Whitehorse Ledge was a lot more remote than it is today. But, despite his youth, Surette was already one of the most talented climbers in the country, and he knew how to keep his balance. “At this point, my unwavering confidence fully melted away,” he recounts. Surette watched in horror as water dribbled down the wall and doused the crux moves he’d just pulled. He was feeling inspired, in the way you only can when you’re young and ropeless-until he looked up and realized that the next pitch was soaking wet. Poised on a sloping foothold 200 feet up New Hampshire’s Whitehorse Ledge, Surette had just pulled a balancey and committing 5.11c move around an arête. It was late afternoon on a bluebird day in February 1986, and 17-year-old Jim Surette had climbed into the worst kind of dead end.
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