Similarly upon slabs he will be selecting holds, not according to their size and obviousness, but according as they are arranged well within his comfortable span. He avoids at all costs getting ‘spread-eagled.’ The surest safeguard against getting stuck is to select the holds beforehand, and then be certain that your feet and hands use them as you designed. Let nothing tempt you to alter your plan once you are moving. This is the hardest lesson to learn. If you have any eye at all, your alteration will never be for the better. Whenever, as must occur in awkward places, your sight of the holds is interrupted, keep your head and stick coolly to your recollection. Many climbers get slightly flurried once they are ‘blind.’ They forget their plan, even the existence perhaps of the one hold that made the passage seem possible in anticipation. They revert to struggling and arm-clinging. Their agitation often takes the form of a combative recklessness. They feel they will fight it out with the holds they have got rather than descend and recover the safer line they planned. This liability to flurry may take years to master. Most of us have suffered from it; and notably in those attractive holes under chockstones or overhangs—holes so irresistibly tempting to thrust one’s head and shoulders into, but from which, blinded and out of balance, it is extremely trying to emerge. Notably, again, on those steep problem-slabs, where a single tempting hold has spread-eagled us helplessly and left us wondering how long the single nail will support us.
The only protection is foresight, a steady adherence to plan, and the resolution always to climb as far out as possible from the rock.
If the hands are allowed to pull the nose into the rock we are easily pounded. The protection is footwork and the flexible ankle. It is the business of the ankle to bend and stay bent at whatever angle may keep our body in safe balance and away from the rock, and to transmit our weight to the foot at just the right angle to hold it firm on its sloping stance. The farther out from the rock we can keep the weight, the steeper the apparent angle of foothold which it is safe to use. On steep slabs a very flexible ankle will often let the foot rest flat, getting an overlapping or friction hold on several rugosities of surface with its whole sole where a less practised ankle or a stiff-sided boot must trust to the less secure catch of a side-nail on one such roughness. Quiet movement is essential; to leave a slight hold hurriedly is as dangerous as to arrive on it clumsily. If you have to use a knee or hip or forearm as a friction hold, set it as gently and relieve it as lightly as if it were a single finger.
Chimney Climbing.
Chimney climbing is another occasion for too alluring rest positions and for tempting but over-close contacts. By a ‘chimney’ we usually mean a rift that will admit the body, as contrasted with a ‘crack’ which will not. The method of ascending between the vertical or steeply sloping walls of chimneys, wherein holds for ordinary foot and hand work are lacking, is usually called ‘back and knee’; more correctly it should be named ‘back and foot,’ as the knee need rarely be used. The position is with the back against one wall and the feet against the other, the legs bent or straight according to the width, and the thrust of the spine and shoulders providing the security. Here again the proper object is continuous movement, and such attitudes as may assist towards it. The temptation for the safety climber is to sit across the chimney, with the legs straight and almost at right angles to the body. The body is then wedged; it sinks slightly inside the clothes, which are fast to the rock by friction, and, while it is quite secure, presents also the utmost resistance to any upward impulse. The right position for the feet against the opposite wall is slightly below the body, as low as will allow of an easy upward impulse being given to the body without risk of the feet slipping. The hands and arms are stretched downward, past the body, with the arms bent and the palms flat against the rock behind. For movement upward, one foot is brought across from the opposite wall and thrust with the flat sole against the rock close under the body. The friction of the foot then allows the bent knee to be partially straightened, and the body raised. While it rises, and the shoulders thus come clear of the rock, the thrust of the arms and hands backward against the rock takes the place of the jam with the shoulders, and so keeps the foot against the opposite wall in its place. So soon as the lift is completed and the back is at rest against the rock again, the under foot that has been used is shot across to a higher position against the opposite wall, the hands move up, and the other leg comes across, to act as spring in its turn. The body is thus really ascending, poised, between the shifting pressures of the arms and feet, and is only taking instants of rest against the rock to allow them to take new positions. It is entirely wrong, but very usual, to walk up the opposite wall with the feet, and wriggle the shoulders up the near rock in accord. This is wasteful of clothes and of energy, and not so secure in its actual movement. For, on the right method, if the foot against the opposite wall shows an inclination to slip as the shoulders rise, the arms can thrust away from their wall and so apply extra pressure to keep the foot in place, even while they are still pushing the body upward; whereas, on the wrong method, the back has no such elastic margin; it cannot push across and downwards while it is itself moving up. In all such feats the more freedom that can be kept for movement, even at the cost of adopting more exposed positions and of bridging ourselves across intimidatingly wider angles, the greater in reality is the safety.
In narrow chimneys, too smooth for foot or hand hold and too narrow to allow of secure bridging with the back against the one wall, it is possible to move up with the feet pressed flat against the two walls, one on each side: one with the toe pointing up in front of us, the other with the toe down below us; the body is kept upright in the middle on the spring of the bent knees and supported by the pressure of the hands, placed like the feet one against each wall. In this fashion we can ‘rock’ up satisfactorily. But the method is only safe to practise with soft soles, and it is of course very strenuous.
Wherever possible we prefer to keep outside a chimney, or corner, altogether, and use our feet up the edges of its retaining walls. If we are forced inside, we adopt any sets of holds for our feet up the opposing walls, however wide a split they mean for the legs and however fearsome the depth may look between our feet, before we resort to the cramping, waterworn recess and the slower method of ‘back and foot.’ Balance climbers return, as it were, to the gully epoch only under protest and where footholds fail.
Rib Riding.
In clambering up sharp noses, flakes or ribs, where bodily contact with the rock is enforced, the same principle of keeping far out and aiming at continuous movement again holds good. To sit close astride, and claw up the rock by means of the thighs, elbows and hands, is customary, and seemingly safe; but the really safer method, because it admits of uninterrupted progress, is to keep the body away, and to grip with the sole and flexed ankle, or with the knees and sides of the feet, on either side of the rib, or to lock one leg diagonally across the edge so that the foot and knee press against its opposing facets. Meanwhile the hands, holding opposite ways, grip across the edge above. In such a position the body can sink at any instant, for rest, into contact with the rock, and can rise again from the feet, knees or shin without effort. It is useful to remember that when the friction of loosely clothed parts of the body is solely relied upon for hold (as when we are clinging close with thighs and body to a rib), the body always sinks slightly inside the clothes, and has so much the more difficulty in restarting a fresh movement.
Wet Rock.