Panic at the Disco

From September till June dozens of manoxeric body builders, skinny little tough guys, swarm the Sierra Foothills to tackle their climbing projects.  One spring season, a portable electronic barometer sat beneath Alcatraz, a popular 5.13b, to alert climbers of 62 degrees temps and 25% humidity- conditions that supposedly increased redpoint success rates by 7% according to locals.  One sport climber lugged a 20-pound car battery half an hour up the steep trail to plug in his portable vaporizer and fuel his use of hippie lettuce.  Other climbers wore i-Pods, their favorite curry-stained t-shirt, and their lucky pair of underwear. They did anything to bring themselves luck, an edge on their project.

Platinum Rob shows off his kneebar pants while Zack Romero listens to beta.

The blocky, overhanging rock of Jailhouse demands that the sport- climbing aficionado wear sticky rubber thigh pads, commonly known as Colorado etriers.  Rectangles of sticky rubber are adhered to neoprene pads to help press knees against the rock, rest tired forearms and ratchet to higher holds. While some of the climbers use adhesive spray to keep their pads in place, the majority wrap the top of the pad with duct tape.  After each attempt, the tape is peeled off the leg, wadded, and carried out of the crag at the end of the day.  With an average of seven pitches climbed during the day and a wrap for each leg on every pitch, the duct tape adds up quickly.

In an effort to learn how to sport climb, I sentenced myself to a minimum of 40 days at Jailhouse, which translated into a large amount of duct tape to carry out. 

I collected the trash and started to make myself a lucky ball.  Think Pee Wee Herman but instead of an 8 foot tall ball of tin foil, I had duct tape. My ability as a climber didn’t feel like it was growing but the duct tape ball was. Not only was it going from a grapefruit to a basketball but it was becoming less of a duct tape ball and more of a disco ball.

Donn Goodhew kneebars through Violated (5.13a)

We need to wrap it tighter,” Rob Miller said as he laid his strips on the basalt talus, then placed them over the ball, pulling the mass of tape into a spherical shape.  “We do not need fluff.  We need density.”

I nodded.  Rob was known as “The Dictionary”; he had definition.  The blonde muscle man belayed me half of the time I went to the crag.  As a good friend, and climbing mentor, he saw I was having fun bringing the ball together, and brought structure to the concept.

Rob wove a cradle for the ball out of the cut end from my climbing rope, and strapped more tape around the ball, suddenly turning the conglomeration of trash into a mace.  

With a cord now attached, we were able to attach the ball to our harnesses to climb Soap on a Rope, a popular 5.12d testpiece in the center of the cave. It was fun. Gathered at the base, we guessed at the weight of the ball.

 “Twenty pounds!” said Matt Pound.

“Maybe more like 10,” responded Steph Ko.

“It’s at least 15,” scoffed Rob.

The climbers passed the ball around the base, each person looking at it seriously, and imagining a scale.

Pete Chasse hefted the ball into the air.

“It is a little heavy,” he said.  “You both climbed Soap with the duct tape ball?”

Rob nodded. 

“Even I did it, Pete,” I gave a crooked smile. 

“Okay.  I’ll try it,” he clipped the ball onto his harness and started up Soap on a Rope.   The crowd giggled as the ball swung slideways below him. 

“Oh god!  It’s gonna hit someone,” said Matt. “Watch out, Lidija!”

Lidija, belaying Pete, carefully stepped out of the way.

“Oh my god!” she yelled, fearful that the ball would come unclipped and hit her or the half dozen other climbers below in the head. “Peeete!  Peeete! Be careful, Peeete!” 

 “It’ll stay on,” responded Rob. “I climbed it twice with the ball.”

Pete danced upwards, climbing the route for his fans below.  I thought of an urban legend I’d heard of a Rifle climber sending Pump-A-Rama with a watermelon attached to his testicles.  While Pete’s ascent wasn’t nearly as dramatic, the crag had a light hearted mood for a moment.  Everyone was laughing at the ridicoulsness of the situation.   

The duct tape ball in all it’s glory!

After failing on my project for the 138th time, I peeled the duct tape from my leg and placed it on the ball.  “At least the duct tape ball was growing.”  It was a pleasant distraction from fixating on the barometer, the move that I kept falling on, and the stress of trying my project again and again and again.

The ball gained historical value.  After Tommy Caldwell completed the second ascent of Tower of Power, the cliff’s hardest rock climb, he contributed to the duct tape ball.  Ethan Pringle added his tape after doing some crazy toe hooking bat hangs. I pranced around the crag showing off the enormity of the duct tape ball, swinging it over my head, and hoping that everyone was contributing.  When one local added her pink duct tape to the ball, I knew it was almost ready for the sequins and glitter. 

Steph Ko clips the extended draw at Jailhouse- Anthony Lapomardo photo

“We need to hang it,” Rob said, grabbing a bit of thin cord from the farm we stayed at in the nearby Chinese Camp.  Rob wanted to showcase the ball just above Alcatraz, where a small rivet from the crag’s first ascents still stuck out. 

“We should make it a disco ball,” I said.

 “Let’s hang it while we have the time.”  The veins in Rob’s forehead protruded.  “I’m not sure when I am coming back.”

For the duct tape ball to be more than a pile of trash hanging from the cliff, there would have to be a little more creativity. Sparkles, sequins, and glue needed to be brought to the crag and a small mess needed to be made and cleaned. For it to be truly worthy, it would require effort. I acquiesced though and gave up my project.

Rob climbed high onto the wall via Alcatraz, managing to fight his way through the series of difficult kneebars and technical climbing to the anchors.  He clipped into a bolt, then reached over and girth hitched the ball to a 3/8” stud between Alcatraz and Cell Block.  The ball dangled ominously in a small alcove of steep basalt. 

One of the many horses at Jailhouse

“It does look like a piece of trash,” Karl, a San Francisco climber and long time Jailhouse climber, said. “Are you sure it’s well placed?”  

“Well,” I said, “there’s a better chance of half a route falling off than the ball hitting someone.”  An enormous block on the start of Cellblock (5.13) had fallen off earlier that season. “Plus there’s history.”

“If the ball is well-attached and not just shoestring that’s cool.” Karl said.   “We want the basalt ballast ball to be solid if it’s going to keystone the wall together.”

I smiled and reiterated the diligence Rob had applied in fixing it to the wall.

“Okay,” Karl said.  “I guess I do like the idea of Rob climbing up there to hang his duct tape.”

The ball hung for a few days before a rare group of hikers came to the cliff.  Amongst the thousand of fixed draws dangling from the cliff, the one they noticed was the one with the enormous ball of duct tape attached.

“What’s that?” they asked. Jailhouse was on access sensitive private property and undue attention to the crag was not appreciated.  The ball was suddenly noticed in a different light.

 A few days later, Mikey Chaffin, a Bay area nurse, climbed to the upper reaches of the cave, swung over, and unclipped the ball.  I ran into him in the darkness of Camp 4 the weekend after he removed the ball.

 “I almost died!” he said.  “I swung around and clipped into the ball.  I almost took myself down with it.”  He had clipped himself into the ball, and gotten stuck trying to figure out how to unclip the ball, keep it from cratering into the climbers below, and keep himself from taking a massive fall.  “I hope you don’t mind that it was taken down, but some random hikers asked about it.”  I shrugged, slightly disappointed.  

The crew at Jailhouse

“It sure was nice when the ball was here,” Rob yelled across the crag after the ball was removed.  No one responded.  For the next few visits, he grumbled about the ball’s removal.  The ball was a symbol of Rob’s countless efforts on his projects, a tangible sign of his efforts at the crag.  For a few climbers, the ball was a serac, hanging over their heads ready to fall down and clobber them right before they sent their projects.  Just like my sport project, the duct tape ball was never quite finished.  It had stopped before reaching its full potential as a disco ball.  

 For a few days, as the herons fished the Tulloch Lake, as the swallows rushed out of the caves in the cliff, as the vultures lurked above the nearby jail,  the duct tape ball swung in that high corner. Whenever the light hit it, I saw a disco ball.

First published in Rock and Ice