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Funny thing happened on the way down the rope ... 3-Aug-2015 At 12:43:16 AM Macciza

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So ended up rapping down a prospective line today, and needed to drop down 10m to a lower ledge to to find the line and set a re-belay and hope the rope was long enough, but more on that later . . .
Anyway, need to move several metres to the side and maximise everything but looked like it got to the bottom or at least pretty close, but more later . ..
So heading down just a bit out from a slightly vegetated corner that I was trying to pull over to have a look at when 'whoops', a bit of a slip and next thing you know I'm kinda stuck . . .

Or Reasons to trim my beard: Part 1.
So where was I? Oh yeah, stuck half way down the abseil with a rather large chunk of beard caught in my device . . . Bugger! Yeah sure, it has been happening a bit more often of late but mostly with the ATC and usually only a little bit that gets ripped out, from one end or the other, and its all good . .. But this time, no, its my grigri, (an old, death-modded device, with a well developed dynamic ability and slow release function); and a rather sizeable chunk of beard hair with definite bondage tendencies . . .

Now most of you probably know me from my classic 0.75 Purple camelot beard days but these days I'm more a tipped out #4, and this wayward chunk of hair is well set. In fact it was pretty bomber, handled a decent bounce test and probably could have rapped off it (if it want actually stuck in my rap device, but anyway . . .)
Yep, need to get weight off it, hmm, foot rap won't work here, shit, aah, fortunately in anticipation of a possible rebelay I had a biner with a sling and a prusik on it, cool. Hmm, limited vision, hunched over with my face in my grigri, I manage to find it and extricate it, and put the prusik to work, feeling somewhat Simpson-esque as I set the prusik unseen above my head, attached the sling for a footloop, and went to stand up.
Ouch, what the?, are you serious?. Somehow Ive manage to now hook up a bunch of my hair in the prusik which has tightened down near my head. Adding to the hilarity of the situation is that of mission creep, the slow release function had kicked in and has now swallowed most of the chunk of my beard. Now this has definitely become one of the weirder, out there type of situations to find one self in; and a quick scan of my memory of rescue scenarios etc reveals not much specific to this situation so it looked like I was on my own . . .
A quick sit back on the bearded grigri and I could sort my hair/prusik combo out allowing me to stand up and release a bit of the tension on the grigri and extricate a good portion on now recalcitrant beard, before ripping of a reasonable amount of the stragglers just to show it who's the boss around here. Remove the prusik, pocket the chunk of beard as a souvenir and continue down . . .

Hmm, ok, well thats enough drama for today I thought as I headed down to the bottom. Only to discover I was correct, the rope didn't quite reach the bottom, but it did at least end near a decent enough tree ending about 4-5 m off the ground. Although a down climb would be possible the seconder may not be too impressed so I set a quick belay in the tree, call off rope, and start to pull the climbing rope out of my pack before dropout to the ground. The pack that is, not the rope; that I only drop most of, before slinging the end of a main branch notch of the tree and lowering the end to the ground so we could just do a short rap. All good, seconder arrives and although somewhat bemused accepts it as it was pretty much the only solution on offer . . .

Good fun outing for all concerned (except the bit of beard, but we won't mention that).

PS. Oh yeah the route looks like it will go. Bit of jiggery to get past the somewhat wet, somewhat holdless, start but once established its a interesting upward rising, weird, slightly overhanging corner thin inverted crackish thing that heads out to a lip and better gear before heading up a classic, thin corner crack, slightly vegetated in small fern and the occasional very small shrubbery. Should clean up on lead ok. (And repeat ascent will only clean it up further . . .)