A Skull-Splitting Weekend

We begin our story in an extremely non-adventurous setting, namely the Bloomberg Physics and Astronomy building on the campus of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. More specifically, outside in the courtyard on a gorgeous sunny friday afternoon/evening. The long work week has ended and the graduate students emerge from their holes to raise a glass and toast what passes around here for a weekend. Some are throwing frisbees around, others are attempting to set up the vollyball net for a quick game.
The volleyball net involves tensioning a pair of lines to keep the net up. Quite a lot of force goes into these lines and the set up is at best shakey. Unfortunately, while the tops of the poles were well anchored, the bottoms simply sat on the concrete floor. Through some accident, the bottom of one pole kicked out at just the wrong moment and whacked Dan Coe, a first-year astro grad, across the temple. As with all scalp wounds, what would have been a simple bruise were it backed by soft tissue turns into an inch-long gash spouting blood and looking very dramatic. Pressure was applied and Dan was rushed to the emergency room where, after two hours of waiting, he was given four stiches and a tetanus shot and released.

The relevance of this unhappy accident becomes clearer in a moment.

Saturday, at some ungodly hour Amy and I picked up Jonathan and headed north for Chickies Rock, a climbing area in Pennsylvania we had heard of, but never visitted. The weather was again gorgeous and we arrived at 9am, ready for some serious climbing. After two false starts in finding the place, we finally located the impressive cliff overlooking the railroad tracks and the Sesquahana River. Very picturesque with a nice picnic table and grassy bellay stance at the base. Plus some trees for shade.
The cliff itself is a good 50 meters tall and requires multi-pitch climbing to reach the top. However, a sizeable ledge half way up is reachable by a scramble, so it was here we set up a top rope. Other groups were setting similar top ropes to our right and left. First up was Library (5.5) up a nice open book (get it? Library?). No trouble. The rock is dark and hard and different from what I'm used to with lots of chunky holds and few actual protectable cracks. Some what like the South End at Seneca or at least peices of it. Next up, we swung the rope over and tried a much harder climb (5.8-5.9) on the western face near For Madmen Only (5.7ish). Amy and Jonathan struggled for what seemed like hours ascending this rugged climb. I managed to get through the hard parts with the help of an extra foot or two of reach, but still found some of the upper bits to be a bit dicey and grippy. The train rumbling by at high speed directly below us didn't help much either.
Swapping ropes with the trio to our right, we scampered up another climb which, from the ground looked equivalent to the one we had just finished, but which was, in fact, much easier (5.4ish?). Completely different holds; much friendlier, very pleasent. Meanwhile, the others were having a conciderable amount of difficulty on the climb we had just vacated. Glad to know it wasn't just us!
Finally, Amy and I decided to lead a climb on the left of the face (Witch's Brew 5.5R as it turns out). A long crack headed upward and it looked fairly easy. Since Amy has just started leading, I would lead the first pitch and she would take the second. I geared up and started climbing. At first the placements were reasonable, though not stellar. Lots of loose rock and more of these chunky holds. Still, there were enough cracks that placements were possible if you looked far enough for them. Farther up, however, the placements became marginal at best and I found myself desperately needing gear I had already placed elsewhere. By the time I was 30 meters up, I was in serious runout territory and not having a good time. Sure the climb itself was easy enough, but the thought of a long fall onto a positively sloped face and a couple more passing freight trains weren't filling me with any warm, cozy thoughts. Finally, I reached a very marginal belay stance and searched at great length for three placements from which to construct an anchor.
At long length, an anchor was constructed (not one of my best by any means, but certainly passable) and Amy arrived leaving one of my cams in the rock. Grrrr, but there was nothing to be done at that instant. It was decided that I would lead the remainder of the climb and we would rap down to get the stuck cam out. In fact, the second pitch was very short and very interesting. It started up a large chimney blocked on the top by a huge chock-stone. Going on beta from a local climber, I clipped a rusted piton high up in the chimney, did a dicey traverse out onto the face, dropped a large nut between the chock-boulder and the left face of the chimney, and then downclimbed to unclip the piton. Not too bad. Almost fun after the hellish last pitch. Two more moves and I was anchoring to a stout tree and bringing Amy up. We fetched Jonathan and his rope and did a full 50 meter double-rope rap down to free the stuck Friend. No trouble. After ten hours at the rock, we packed up and limped home.

Chickies Rock definitely has potential. It is near Baltimore (1.25 hours driving) and has some excellant climbs. The leads are less than awesome, but it definitely deserves future visits.

You're still wondering about that head injury, aren't you?

Early in the morning I headed out to the Martinsburg, WV, area to join fellow Baltimore Grotto members in an ongoing dig. For those of you just joining us (myself included), the backplot is this: Several years back, a cave entrance was uncovered while building a house in rural West Virginia. It was a hole full of large rocks with air flowing out. Since there are several other large (for the Panhandle, anyway) caves in the area, the owners called in Grotto members to investigate. The rocks were removed and digging commenced. After about a four-foot drop through a tight crack, the passage turned horizontal. Digging revealed a roughly two-foot wide stone passage almost entirely choked with mud. Teams dug to enlarge the tunnel enough so humans could pass.
Somewhere in there, they started finding bones. Fred Grady, Simthsonian paleontologist and caver, was called in and he happily excavated the bone fragments. Turns out it was the 40,000 to 60,000 year old remains of a "Beautiful Armadillo" which looks, smells and quacks like a normal armadillo but is about three feet tall and went extinct in the Pleistocene. They were covered in thousands of bony plates and some of these were turning up in the cave. Fred was very excited as this was the farthest east such an animal had ever been found. Eventually, all the bone fragments were removed and digging resumed in earnest. Personally, I have to wonder how such a large, armored animal could have fit inside a cave which we soft, limber humanoids have to tiger-crawl through, but I don't know all the details.
At this point, about fifty feet of passage had been excavated. It goes in about twenty feet, turns a sharp corner to the left and continues to the current digging face. The system that has been devised has Dave West with a small shovel up at the digging face digging out the hard, mucky clay and putting it in a rectangular plastic recycling bin. The bucket has a series of ropes attached to haul it back and forth. Karen was stationed at the left-hand bend and would guide the bucket around that obstacle. I was stationed at the bottom of the entrance hole and would do much of the pulling and guide the bucket out of the hole where Bob Hoke and Bob Gulden would haul from above and empty the bucket onto a growing pile of excavations and reverse the process. Each itteration takes quite a lot of time and but each bucket load of heavy wet clay extends the cave another few inches.
We intermediaries usually were just lying around while buckets were either filled or emptied. I had another shovel passed down and amused myself at enlarging the entrance a little bit to allow us larger folks a chance to turn around with out contortions. This gave me a good appreciation for how rugged the flooring material in this cave was and how hard it could be to work in the cramped confines of the tunnel. As I was sitting right in the entrance and the sun was streaming in, I didn't need my headlamp. Furthermore, since I wasn't moving around much, I wasn't likely to whack my head on the ceiling. Plus I needed a little more head room, so I removed my helmet placing it in easy reach. As luck would have it, soon thereafter, someone topside knocked loose a small avalanche of dirt and debris which came raining down upon me. I closed my eyes and mouth and waited for it to pass. Suddenly there was a tremendous whack as something struck my head. Damn! Rock! I remember being mostly surprised that it didn't hurt very much.
"I'm okay!" I called after the avalanche had stopped.
"No you're not!" yelled Bob Hoke from the top.
Indeed, my investigating hand was full of blood and wetness. With a yell, I levered my way out of the hole fountaining blood left and right. The blood running down my face obscured my vision and Bob Gulden guided me over to the vans and the hose. The water running off my head was a most disturbing burgundy and I quickly ran through a list of mental checks: my name, everyone else's name, where I was, why I was there, home telephone number, a bunch of useless statistics.... Nothing looked too strange either so presumably nothing really bad had happened. I got cleaned up and investigated the damage. Inch and a half ragged cut in my scalp just inside the (receeding) hairline. Bleeding had mostly stopped. I trimmed away the hair nearby and we attempted to install a butterfly bandage. Bob Hoke recommended getting it looked at, so I headed for the Martinsburg Hospital.
After an experience similar to the one from Friday night, though from a different perspective, I was back at the cave four stitches the richer. As I pulled in, everyone else was packing up. Turns out they started to find more bone fragments, probably from the same armadillo. Dave showed me the two fragments he had, each about the size of a dime. I am amazed he recognized them as anything other than rock fragments. Who knows how many armadillos I would have inadvertantly excavated had I been digging! All digging has stopped as we wait for Fred's professional analysis.
Despite my injuries, the experience was wonderfully fascinating and I'm excited to take part in future diggings (when I may perform a slightly more effective role than that of slapstick comic relief and plucky neophyte caver). In four hours of digging, the face was moved forward by about four feet. Who knows how much further this cave may extend and what interesting bits by wait in its depths?

...Or will it just be chock-full of mud and armadillos?

The Wilderness Journal

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