Aaron Harvey is an engineer who loves to ski, rock climb, and generally do anything outside.

I started rock climbing three years ago, in my last year of college. Two of my roommates and I got pretty into it. When we finished college, we all moved our separate ways, but all kept up with it. Fast forward about a year and a half, all three of us planned a climbing trip to Yosemite. I had learned how to climb multi-pitch routes, but I was still pretty new to it. One of my roommates had never done any before so he was getting pulled along. Not that he wasn’t a willing participant, it probably felt like more of an adventure for him. The other had done one multi-pitch climb with me a month before. Being overconfident young people, we decided to do one of the easier climbs.

We woke up super early. We were the only ones in the parking lot, so we had the whole climb to ourselves. It was supposed to rain in the afternoon. We figure we’d probably finish before then. It’s a six pitch climb, so it takes a decent amount of time. On the way up, the mood’s really high. It’s Yosemite granite, it’s legendary for a reason. The first pitch was definitely the hardest, but manageable. Just really fun crack climbing for the grade. I was leading all the pitches, my two buddies were following, and I would belay them up. So we start chugging away. By the afternoon, we reach the top of it and the rain starts coming down.

We had two options. We could hike down, but the guidebook didn’t have a ton of details on the walk off. Or we could just rappel. That would be faster and maybe more convenient in the rain. We were worried about sliding off the walk off. We weren’t really prepared for the rain. I had a raincoat, hiking boots, and long pants. Both my buddies were in cotton hoodies. 30 minutes of rain, they're totally soaked through, miserable. 

So we start trying to rappel off. It's raining, the ropes were getting wet and getting stuck a lot easier. Every pitch was becoming harder and harder to get off. Finally, we get to the top of the second to last pitch, and my rope gets stuck.

I’d looped the rope behind some rock anchors so I wouldn’t have to leave any gear behind. I thought it’d be pretty easy to pull, but wet rope tends to compress more. It’s getting more and more wedged and stuck as each of us rappels down it. The third person gets to the bottom. We go to pull the rope and this thing isn’t moving at all. We tried for 30 minutes to get it free, grabbing it, jumping, whatever we could do. It was just too wet, too wedged in the rock, so we had to leave it. If we had reclimbed to try to free the stuck rope and got our second one stuck, we’d be in a pickle. 

At this point, it’s dark. We only had one 60 meter rope left. We’re at the top of pitch one which was over 35 meters. We couldn’t do it in a single rappel since you need to double up the rope. I went down first. Now I’m stuck at a crack system 6 meters off the ground. We could have just come off rappel and then scrambled to the ground, but it was high enough and wet enough where you wouldn’t want to do that and break an ankle.

An older couple was watching our comedy of errors as we’re coming down. They were van lifeing in the parking lot by the wall. Super friendly people, pretty experienced climbers. They were talking us through better bail techniques. I’d never bailed off a route before, so I had no idea what I was doing. My friends certainly didn’t. He gave us some advice, how to tie the rope so you don’t have to leave any anchor material except for one stopper nut. So I built an anchor, we all rappelled down. Once we were on the ground, we reclimbed to that crack to clean the anchor, and then bailed off the nut.

It was still drizzling when we got down. We were so soaking wet, we didn’t notice a little rain. We were freezing. Our hands had been handling wet, cold rope for seven hours and touching cold rock. Everything was numb. The nice couple offered us tea from their van. It was probably the best tea I ever had in my life. The older guy said that he was going to climb our route the following morning. He was able to go up, retrieve my rope, and mail it to me.

My buddy and I climbed the full Exum in the Grand Tetons on the rope that got stuck. No snafus there. That rope did recently break, though. I was doing a climb with a buddy and he was trying to lead the first pitch. On his way down, he kicked a huge rock. I jumped out of the way, but the rock hit the rope.

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