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In this Weekend Whipper, Andrew Leich is on his second redpoint attempt of Blockage Project (5.13+ R), a 40-foot gritstone trad route in Cheat Canyon, West Virginia. It’s an area Leich knows well—he’s the author of two guidebooks to Cheat Canyon.
About halfway up the route, Leich plugs a Black Metolius Master Cam—his third piece—into a .75-sized slot. He’s moving carefully up the sloping crimps, but his hands are beginning to sweat.
“I kind of let the nerves get to me, and I had lost some skin on my first attempt,” he tells Climbing. With the Black Metolius at his waist, Leich feels himself losing friction. He lets out a roar of effort, then slips off.
At first, it seems like Leich will take, at most, a three-foot fall. But Blockage Project is rated R for a reason.
Instead of catching him, the Black Metolius explodes out of its slot. Leich tumbles about 15 feet, swiping a tree branch and swinging into his belayer’s shoulders. He lands just three feet off the ground.
When he catches his spinning cam, he finds that his initial one-foot fall broke part of the Black Metolius. Specifically, it damaged part of the aluminum clasp, which holds the 13mm webbing that retracts the cam lobes, snapped off, leaving half the cam unable to retract.
“Unfortunately now, I can’t try it [again] until I buy a new cam,” says Leich, adding that the existing rock slot now has a broken edge, but will still fit gear.
Happy Friday, and be safe out there this weekend.