If Icarus Had a Rope
NOTES FROM AN ONTARIO TRAD APPRENTICESHIP
In the 1980s, Steve De Maio joined Jeff Marshall and Brian Wallace to make some of the hardest and boldest rock climbs in the Canadian Rockies. Before that, however, he became a local legend learning his craft on the humble rock of southern Ontario, where, more than once, he just barely lived to climb another day.
I was back in southern Ontario a couple of years and had a gym session with long-time local friends and activists John Kaandorp and Reg Smart. Reg joked that “Steve had to move out west to the Rockies because he was taking 80-foot falls on 60-foot cliffs.” I gotta say that did make me laugh.
The best humour always has more than just a grain of truth to it. Dave, Reg’s brother, was more accurate in his book A Youth Wasted Climbing, when he said I was used to “ground grazing falls at Mount Nemo.” While I didn’t believe I was reckless, when I look back, there were more than a few close calls and some were ground grazing. Alas, on several occasions, I actually did hit the ground on one-pitch routes.
Later, on Rockies limestone, I did fell past belay anchors on big crags a few times. I recall being driven by a passion to attempt bold climbs. I wanted to see if I could handle it. I grew up with the legends of Joe Brown, Don Whillans, Layton Kor and John Turner. I wanted to see if I could follow their lead. It seemed like a form of art work to me—and I wanted to see if I could muster the same courage and mastery. There are some engaging anecdotes for sure, and some good lessons too. I took a few big dumps on the limestone of the Rockies, many of which I have written about elsewhere, but these, predominantly on the Niagara Escarpment, were the formative years, the close calls that taught me lessons about how to approach onsight, ground-up efforts on loose and run-out limestone at or beyond my climbing capacity. I suppose many of these were easy lessons. The hard lessons came later.
BOULDER COMES FREE, FIRST ASCENT, BOULDER DASH, MOUNT NEMO, 1982
My very first new route of my climbing career was Boulder Dash at Nemo. I was leading about 5.6 at the time—when I saw the Toronto Section of the Alpine Club’s newsletter with a page on new routes by John Kaandorp, my mentor. One of them was a 5.5 route at Nemo Quarry. I stared in disbelief, ‘5.5,’ I thought, ‘I can lead 5.5.’ I was quickly filled with a passion for new route adventure that I had never felt before. First ascents had seemed a long way off, but suddenly they seemed possible for me. Within a week, I spied the line that became Boulder Dash. As I was pulling through the small overhang, a block wedged in a chimney pulled away and I took a 20-foot fall. “I tested it, but it didn’t sound hollow,” I told my belayer. Undeterred, I went back up and finished the route. Dizzy with the new drug called “First Ascents,” I wanted more.
My first lesson: to the extent that you can while climbing on loose ground, keep the ropes and your partner out of the fall line. Protect early and often. Expect a hold to break or a boulder to be loose. Study the rock geometry below you to examine what you might hit if the hold you are on breaks.
HOLD BREAKS, BUT I MISS THE GROUND, JEOPARDY, 5.10D, RATTLESNAKE POINT, 1983
I started up Jeopardy, a pumpy 5.10 at Rattlesnake Point. The first fixed pin was a long way up. Despite the pump, I stopped and placed a wired nut, curved side down, in a parallel-sided solution hole about three metres up. I continued up to a chalked undercling slightly bigger than a softball. I had to use it to reach the next horizontal and then clip the piton. I brought my feet up and stretched for the next hold from the undercling. To my astonishment, the softball sized hold snapped and I flew off the wall as though launched from a catapult. I fell and my feet hit the ground as the rope came tight. My tailbone stopped inches from the rocks at the base as I took the stretch from the rope. Wow. That was almost a bad one.
I could hear the voice of my early mentor, Jim Fothergill, saying, “Put the piece in early Steve, if you come off, even if you hit the ground, it might stop you from falling backward and hitting your head.” Also, I learned that a thick layer of chalk is not a guarantee that a handhold is solid.
PITON RIPS, FIRST ASCENT, IRON MAIDEN 5.10, DEVIL’S GLEN, 1984
I had spied this line for many weeks. It looked thin for gear, but I thought I would try it anyway. About ten feet up, I placed a wire in a solution hole. It wasn’t great, but it was all there was. A few moves higher, I banged in a long knifeblade behind an expanding flake. It seemed like it would hold a short fall. Two moves up and right, horizontal holds were slightly wet and covered with moss. My rock shoes got mud on the toes, my hands got wet, and my feet began to slip. I started downclimbing when I slipped. My weight came onto the piton, it pulled, and I fell further. My feet hit the ground as the rope came tight. My tailbone stopped a few inches from rocks as the fall took the stretch out of the rope. I was happy I had protected myself low on the route.
I only rapped three of about a hundred new routes I did in Ontario back then, and this was one of them. Hanging from the rope, I cleaned the mud and moss off the holds. On my next effort, I placed the tip of a Lost Arrow piton in the crack. It was thicker than the knifeblade that had pulled. I welded it in the crack with my hammer as best I could and then tied it off. I clipped the rope in, downclimbed to the ground and did a series of jump-tests to see if the piton would hold. It held.
These aggressive tests are more akin to aid climbing than free climbing, but on loose, rotten limestone, they became a bit of a cornerstone for managing risk. A few years later, in the Rockies, when I was drilling a bolt off a sky-hook, I would do a set of aggressive tests using a sling before finally trusting the hook. Sometimes I had to perform the test twenty or thirty feet above my last piece of gear. I also used this tactic on alpine terrain if we ever had to rappel off a single piece of gear. The aggressive test was made with a backup anchor or two. This provided a margin of safety, as the test provided a force many times a climber’s body weight. It is not foolproof, however. If you have the gear, back it up with a second anchor.
GROUNDFALL, FIRST ASCENT, ANATHEMA, 5.10, MOUNT NEMO, 1984
One fine Sunday in 1984, I made the FA of Anathema, a hard 5.10 roof crack problem at the north end of Mount Nemo. I clipped the rope to a tree at the top of the route with a sling and my partner lowered me so he could climb it on a top-rope. I had taken a hang at the roof, so I returned the following weekend to go for the clean lead. I clipped the rope into a sling on the same tree at the top and yelled down, “OK, descending!”
Unbeknownst to me, my partner had taken me off belay. I stepped off the cliff and the rope, no longer clipped to my partner’s harness, ripped out of his hands. I still recall the feeling of acceleration as I hurtled down the crag. The rock blurred with the speed of my plummet.
Fortunately, the route was overhanging and there was a tree growing near the base that had a four-inch diameter branch that reached under the overhang. I hit this branch with my back—it bent—then snapped—absorbing much of the energy of the fall. I landed flat on my back on the only level spot without jagged rocks in the vicinity, behind my belayer.
I lay there on my back, staring up at my astonished partner. He yelled “Don’t move! Don’t move!” I looked back at him from the ground and asked, “What the fuck are you doing?” I had not hit my head on the ground, I had no broken bones, I wasn’t in any pain. After checking everything, I found that almost miraculously, I was unhurt, save for a few scratches from the tree branch.
The rope running through the gear, friction on rope around the overhang, the biners for the top-rope and the tree branch bending and the breaking must have slowed me down enough to prevent injury—and, well, death. The flat spot helped too. I told my partner “I will probably start shaking in a minute so let’s have lunch and see what happens.”
After lunch, I led the FFA of Incarceration and another route we had climbed with hangs the week before. My partner led the first ascent of Trajection further south on Nemo.
“Horseshit luck!” my dad exclaimed when I got home with that story later that evening. When I told Pete Zabrok the story, I blamed my partner for the very near miss. He corrected me.
“Steve, you stepped off the cliff without confirming you were still on belay—i would say it was at least 50 per cent your fault.” He was right. …Daedalus was silent as he shook his head slowly back and forth with disappointment, crossed his arms over his chest and frowned at me sternly...
PITON RIPS, MONSTER WHIPPERS, FIRST ASCENT, PARENTAL GUIDANCE, 5.10, MOUNT NEMO, NIAGARA ESCARPMENT, 1985
Parental Guidance climbed the prominent unclimbed piece of blank rock at the top of the cliff near the instantly popular, and bolted, High Society wall on Mount Nemo. John Kaandorp and I had done the first ascent of Parental Guidance but had hung at the crux so it required a clean lead. On this attempt I returned with Pete Zabrok. The crux was about half way up the cliff, but there was no protection on the headwall above—and the climbing remained sustained. It was steep: I figured I could safely take a long fall here, so long as my gear held.
I had a main piton in, and then I placed four other pieces in the same horizontal crack and clipped long slings to them—so I was “five anchors off the deck.” Surely, I thought, one of them will hold. One of my old sayings in those day was “build a belay station, clip all the anchors into the rope and keep climbing.”
This reduced the physical chance of gear failing and taking a longer fall. When you are run out 10 or more metres wondering if your gear is going to hold will make you timid and can affect your climbing capacity.
I went up and came off; 15-foot fall. I went up again and peeled a bit higher; 25-foot fall.
I went up higher yet again before taking a 35-foot fall. I was starting to get mad at myself.
Every time I fell off, the main piton kept pulling halfway out, so I just banged it back in after every fall. I rested up for a few minutes.
“OK Pete, I am going to go up for another look.”
This time, I was determined to power on through. I got through the crux sequence and continued on the steep wall, a long way above my previous highpoint. I was pumping out, but I kept going. I had one more strenuous move to make to get to some huge holds and then only a few more feet to the top of the cliff. I had lost body tension and my feet churned like a paddle-wheel on the rock uselessly. My fingers were so fatigued, they began to open on the holds. I could not make this last move. I knew I was going to fall off again, but I was now a little worried that I might hit the ground if I fell from here. I yelled down to Pete, “Take it in man! Take it right fuk’n in! Pull me off!” I wanted him to remove all possible slack. Pete instinctively knew exactly what I was doing. The rope came tight on my harness—then I felt the force of the rope pulling down on my harness. Finally, I then stepped off the wall in an attempt to try to fall upright and arced off the wall—pushing myself out and away from the rock—leaning back with bent legs getting ready for the impact my legs would feel when I slammed back into the wall at the end of rope.
“That’s the longest fall I have ever seen!” said Pete.
“I’m such a wanker,” I said.
“A wanker,” said Pete, “would not have attempted that route.”
When I calmed down, I noticed an L-shaped tear on my left rock shoe at my ankle where I also had an abrasion about the size of a dime, my only injury from the fall. For years, I figured I must have tagged it on the way down. A few years ago, an engineering friend said that when I slammed into the wall with my feet, my feet likely expanded under the load and burst the canvas. I think now that that must be right. If I had tagged my ankle, I would likely have gone upside down.
Yeah, I know, what was I thinking, right? Perhaps my mistakes are obvious, but what did I do right in this scenario? I had preinspected the terrain and made a conscious decision in advance that I could afford to go for it and risk or take some long falls. I had five anchors close together, so the likelihood of them all failing was very low. Before I stepped off, I told Pete to get ready and remove any excess slack in the system. I stepped off the cliff in control and maintained a proper body position for this fall. I was somewhat myopic in those days and could have traversed left over to the trees rather than risking such long falls. The key element here is that I pre-inspected the terrain, and decided in advance that it was within reason, if not reasonable, to take falls on this terrain. These, of course, were not without risk. Icarus, my friend, I flew high here…was I just lucky?
MELTED PRUSSIK, ROPE SOLO FALL, FIRST ASCENT, FLESH EATING JUJI GATAME, 5.11, TANK ROCK, 1985
This route holds a special place in my own personal history of rope-soloing and had a huge impact on my approach going forward. At that time, I was using the “Steve Barnett” ropesolo technique outlined in Royal Robbins’s book, Advanced Rockcraft. It featured a Prusik knot attached to the harness—tied with a piece of maybe 6 mm perlon—and a chest harness with a pulley. When leading, the pulley compressed the Prusik so the rope could slide through. In a fall, the pulley would lift, and the Prusik would grip the lead rope. The Prusik was backed up with overhand knots clipped directly to my harness. I had done all my rope soloing up to this point using this system, but I had never fallen on it.
On this occasion, I decided to try to free a six foot horizontal roof, rope-solo. Often on such terrain when I was rope-solo, I would just aid it and come back to free it later with a partner. The gear was bomber—four solid anchors in the roof, one right at the lip. It was all air below—the fall would be short, I surmised, if I did come off: so I decided to go for it.
I got out to the lip, got the hand-jam over the lip with the back of my hand against a sharp piece of limestone “popcorn” and my feet cut loose. I hung for a second on the jam before the popcorn broke off and I fell. Even with the gear at my waist, I fell about fifteen feet with rope stretch and by the time the Prusik tightened up, I was hanging in space. Unhurt. The system worked. The Prusik had held.
I swung in and got back on the rock. I was astonished to find that the Prusik cord had melted and stuck to the lead rope like a dried piece of spaghetti. I was able to peel it off. The rope mantle looked scorched, but it was OK.
Jesus, I thought. That was almost a top rope fall and the Prusik melted.
After that, I dispensed with the Prusik and used a system of four or five overhand knots clipped to my harness and fed the rope out manually by untying and retying the knots as I went. It was cumbersome, but I had confidence it would hold without damaging the lead rope. That was the system I used in later in the Rockies on Mount Yamnuska and Mount Fable.
I returned with John Kaandorp to attempt a free ascent. A year or two ago, he and I were discussing the route. We had both forgotten what we had called it, but we did remember that he had a close call at the lip. I had made a clean lead and was belaying from a tree at the top of the cliff, perhaps ten feet above the roof. he had forgotten that when he was clearing the lip, his feet had cut loose, but his arm was in a small alcove above the lip and it jammed stuck with all his weight on it.
“How bad was my arm stuck?” he asked me. “It was quite bad. I don’t ever recall seeing such a look of desperation on your face, before, or since. Your feet cut loose, and your arm was in a hand jam at an angle like a Jiu Jitsu arm bar. You could not get it out. For an instant, we both feared you were going to break your arm.”
Now you may know that John was one of the most composed, calm and focused guys I ever climbed with. I never saw him rattled. I will never forget the look on his face, however, as he glanced up at me only a few feet above him and said, “Fuck, my arm is stuck. After the initial shock, his countenance returned to one of determination. I executed a deep knee bend squat while taking in the slack, then locked the rope off, and using my legs—stood up. With John helping as much as he was able, I repeated this maneuver two or three times to lift him about a foot, so he could get his arm out. We both breathed a sigh of relief and John climbed the last few metres to the top. A good reminder for all of us to pay attention to rock geometry and where we put our fingers, hands and arms. It could have been a lot worse.
We could not remember what we had called this route, so, 36 years later, we named it Flesh Eating Juji Gatame, Japanese for “arm bar” in Jiu Jitsu and Judo.
OOOOEEEEE BABY, 5.10A X, WHITE BLUFF, 1985
The first ascent of OOOOEEEEE Baby at White Bluff was the only time I considered untying from the climbing rope 60 feet off the deck and 20 feet from the top and dropping it—so that my belayer could run a half-mile to the top and rescue me. I had made a series of difficult moves, the last of which featured a 20or 25-foot run-out to a small stance, which was really just some good footholds and handholds. There was no gear. Eventually, I found a small seam that took three-quarters of an inch of a knifeblade piton. I tied it off and clipped it into the rope.
The next 15 feet of climbing were the most difficult on the route yet. I must have spent over an hour climbing up and down, searching for a handhold that would make the difference in the sequence. I found nothing and began considering my options: Downclimb? Hard ground. I did not think I could do it without falling off, and if I did try, should I leave the knifeblade clipped? Surely it would never hold, and I would have all that extra slack in the system; enough for a ground fall. Down-leading and having John take the rope in was also frightening. Should I untie, drop the rope and stand on these holds for an hour or so with no gear while John runs around and lowers me the rope? Jesus, that was even more frightening. I stared back up at the blank section above me. I moved up and felt the rock with my fingers, searching for a hidden edge. I stretched a bit further and the tips of two fingers found a quarter-inch edge, my feet come up tentatively and my other hand continued reading the rock and I found another edge. I was committed. I found more edges and a few moves higher, handholds. Fifteen feet higher, I got a crack to place a #2 cam, five feet from the top. “OOOOOEEEEE Baby!”
John seconded, arrived the belay and didn’t say anything.
OK, so it’s 2022. I’m 58 years old and well into my climbing retirement. You know what I think now? This was really fucking dangerous. I was basically soloing on new ground on limestone. I’m shuddering right now thinking about what would have happened if I came off at the top. In those days, I was living for climbing. I was driven by some internal beast to try to master these bold pitches. In such scenarios, the climber’s training and psychological and physical capacity is all they have. I was lucky. This was an acute no fall situation. I rolled the dice and was lucky to find handholds. If I hadn’t found that hidden incut edge, would I, could I, have downclimbed from there? I don’t know. Would I have left the crappy pin clipped? I don’t know. (Climbing on double ropes would have been an elegant solution
here—i could clip one rope and down climb: John would give slack on one rope, and take it slack on the other—but that was a few years out for me.) We didn’t own a bolt kit. Bolts on lead were a couple of years away for me also. Could I have untied and dropped the rope, and waited? Possibly. Well, Reg Smart, your sarcasm was apropos for this situation. I needed a bigger crag to survive a fall from the top of this route.
Icarus, my brother, we were foolish… Thank god the wax didn’t melt for me on this one…
In the summer of 1985, John Kaandorp and I did a trip to the Rockies. It was that summer that I first came to be acquainted with the vertical miles and hectares of unclimbed limestone in the Bow Valley. I did my first climb on Mount Yamnuska, and said “We would kill for unclimbed rock like this back in Ontario.”
I moved to the Rockies in 1986. I wanted to treat the Bow Valley like I had treated the Niagara Escarpment. My passion for that stone was immense. I believed my Niagara Escarpment experiences had been the perfect apprenticeship. Yes, there were falls there too—big ones. And, yes, a few of us fell past the belay station high on a mountain wall. I have written about many of those experiences. Some were memorable, others, legendary. Sadly, one was lethal.
High on the North Face of Mount Lougheed, Brian Wallace was climbing high over the belay, above a ramp, when a hold snapped, and he fell. His protection ripped out of the rotten limestone and he took a factor-two fall onto the station. He died of his injuries shortly afterward. The wall went dark earlier than it should have. Jeff Marshall and I cried out into the blackness and freezing rain and the snow that followed it in our despair.
Over the next few years, the passion for dangerous leads leached out of me. My shirt and hands were stained as my desire for such projects bled out. It stopped being a game after that. I never recovered from Brian’s fall. By the end of the season in 1990, the price of the “artwork” did not feel worth it. I never flew close to the sun again after that.