On a lighter note...the boys are going well. I watched them both climb the El Portel (28) pitch yesterday on the edge of my seat...you know that everytime they fall they will have to come all the way back to the belay and climb the pitch again, with 5-6 days of climbing and 20+ pitches to climb you can almost feel the skin wearing off their finger tips, the foot pain from that many hours scrunched in climbing shoes, the rbain fatigue from fucosing for so long, the nose pain from lee and ben combined foot and rear odour...By the end of yesterday they were a pitch ahead of schedule having climbing the El Portel picth.

 

The Nose was providing quite hilarious entertainment yesterday with the help of Tom's commentry. his telescope and camera/ telescope set up mean that he can almost make out the facial expressions of the climbers on El Cap. there was a team attempting the 30m King Swing on the nose (for anyone who doesn't know...there is a feature on El Cap that looks like a boot, so its called boot flake...the leader climbs to the top, clips a bolt, lowers down to a grey band feature in the rock then starts running across the wall to create a pendulumn swing so they can catch a flake way to the left of boot flake, where they can then satrt climbing up again). the leader didn't lower down enough and started running like mad back and forth...there were about 10 back seat drivers on the bridge all yelling advice that of course could not be heard from the nose..."go lower"..."oh man this guy is going to cheese grater"..."3,2,1,...there you go...." and the person would swing and bounce and bump wildly back across the wall. the poor climber took 4 trys before finally working out they needed to lower down a little, then they got it!

 

So today ben and Lee both climbed the Flying Butress (29) pitch first shot...the sun hit them just as Lee reached the belay so they aided up, set up the ledge and chilled out for a few hours until the shade hit...at about 3pm they lowered down to the start of the Open Book (30) desperately slick, holdless, urine covered, hard, hard, hard picth and Ben was working it. He seemed to have it pretty sorted and as far as I know the plan is to try it tomorrow first thing then go for the crux Nipple pitch....I will be up at 6 again to get down and see how they are going...they are going great guns so far but tomorrow will be telling....

 

I am relaxing, writing and generally hanging out...eager to get climbing again when Lee is off the wall..in the mean time I am the blogger!