This Gothenburg place is cool. Here was my afternoon. Read the last bit only if you don't want random ramblings about climbing. We had a somewhat unorthodox abseil. Here goes:
1700 leave work with Kaspar, young motivated new-to-climbing climber and who has been studying wide-boyz videos the whole last week. Just wants to go crack climbing. Spotted a place called Lexby which has cracks. Arrive at crag 10 min drive from work.
1730. Kit up and decide on objective. Been flicking through the guide book endlessly to be sure abut the choice. Decide on some wicked looked crack up on the second tier of the crag. Rig up and scrabble up a sloping ledge to the base of the 2nd tier. Place is like a dream. Brilliant position and splitters and flakes as far as the eye can see. And lots of blank granite 30 meter above the deck and 30 meters above. A sea of rock.
1800. Weary about the chosen objective. Clearly the line of the crag and looks amazing. (See photo). Guide keeps going on about "crack just a centimer wider than a camelot 4" which the biggest piece of gear I have. The route is 30 meters long and already fairly exposed starting up from the ledge. So anyway, plenty other lines, same grades same problem. All mentions the gear needs to be "fairly large".
1700 leave work with Kaspar, young motivated new-to-climbing climber and who has been studying wide-boyz videos the whole last week. Just wants to go crack climbing. Spotted a place called Lexby which has cracks. Arrive at crag 10 min drive from work.
1730. Kit up and decide on objective. Been flicking through the guide book endlessly to be sure abut the choice. Decide on some wicked looked crack up on the second tier of the crag. Rig up and scrabble up a sloping ledge to the base of the 2nd tier. Place is like a dream. Brilliant position and splitters and flakes as far as the eye can see. And lots of blank granite 30 meter above the deck and 30 meters above. A sea of rock.
1800. Weary about the chosen objective. Clearly the line of the crag and looks amazing. (See photo). Guide keeps going on about "crack just a centimer wider than a camelot 4" which the biggest piece of gear I have. The route is 30 meters long and already fairly exposed starting up from the ledge. So anyway, plenty other lines, same grades same problem. All mentions the gear needs to be "fairly large".
1830. Decide to bail on the dream crack and find the easiest way out. It's also "need big gear" so spot a line that looks more like it'll take anything I have, but is graded a notch harder. Considering getting out of there, but then - the yoor is mustered and we go for the gear friendly looking line. Rack up, and off I go. Climb was as hard as ever for a completely incompetent crack climber like me, and I was glad to get up it despite a short fall and rest on a well placed 3 nut. Kaspar comes up in style (struggled getting my weighted 3 nut out), and we are topping out in - well fair urban darkness. The place is semi lit from a nearby football field, but the young swedish footballers are calling it in and we are in a hurry to get off the face.
2000. We find the guide book described abseils anchor and rig the 60 meter single rope in two. It flows beautifully down a completely blank granit face to the ledge below. Excellent rappel, and Kaspars first!
Second rappel is the interesting one: we are at the ledge and scrambling down in darkness isn't really what we fancy and we can see the deck below. It's quite a bit down but I am fairly certain it's not 30 meters above ground.I throw the rope out and start rappelling as Kaspar mentions "what if you can't reach the deck" scenario. I ignore this and start rappelling. This rappell is a out-from-a-ledge and then free-hanging type of job. Brilliant, and spectacular, although it's all pretty dark. I can sort of see the rope in the distance and it does look a bit tight. As I approach the lenght of the rope I can see that it doesn't actually reach the deck and that the last bit is on a blank wall type job. I judge the rope to be close enough to the ground figure something out then I get there. Turns out it's like 1.5m above the deck and thankfully I had measured the rope ends equally long, and I hadn't tied knots on the end. This allows me to elegantly abseil off the rope ends and drop the last distance in a nice jump to the ground! Wicked!
Problem is that now the two rope ends are floating 5 meters above me, now the rope stretch has gone. I tell Kaspar to start abseiling as I expected the rope ends to just reach me once he puts weight on the length of the rope. About 2/3 way down I can now reach the end and I quickly tie a figure 8 knot on the on rope end and let the other loose. This way when Kaspar arrives he should be pulling one end down with him. He arrives and is just short a safe "abseil off the rope end" distance and I let him drop onto my shoulders as the rope snaps away from him and whisttles up. The one end remains stuck to his belay device and we can safely pull the rope down and all is good. Fairly unorthodox abseil I suppose. But what en evening!
The place need some jamming masters. Well worth a visit!
Oh, and yeah! We got properly benighted, and made the pub. A perfect evening climb.