Specks of debris scuttle out of its hairline crack abode. With my hands carefully poised over my head, I use the picks of my tools to find their comfortable placement. I search not as a cat clawing at the insides of a mousehole but rather with respect to the fact that any mistake even in this practice ground could get a hardened steel pick in my flesh. My first drytooling practice.
50 ft walls of concrete erect themselves in parallel lines some distance south of chicago. These walls, overgrown and worn with age are remnants of the steel industries that once employed the populace of the chicagoland area during the early 1900's. It's typically quiet, seldom visited, and yet its most distinctive feature to me is the climbing wall that adorns one of the walls. With an 85° slab and bright colored holds that I doubt have been changed since its installation, it leaves much to be desired. However one feature within this wall left me with an interest and challenge. A vertical crack that runs along the entire height of the wall with footholds to its left and right. A perfect place for practice. The goal, ascend with ice tools for all handholds, and a single color for all footholds on rock shoes. Here's a few thoughts on it
Your pick placements rely heavily on weighting it. More often than not if you're not confident in your placement you will feel like shit until your next clip. I understand why cracks are advantageous for alpine climbing, the reason is that cracks leave little room for your pick to walk horizontally, ledges felt to me as the equivalent to slopers do. Andy Kirkpatrick had a podcast about skyhook placements and confidence in such placements and always decreed that you should bounce test every piece of core gear placements, Ice tool placements felt equivalent to me. When finding pick placements I gave each one a quick tug to see that the old concrete wouldn't blow, I would then keep a mental note of the constant need of weighting the picks downwards in certain ways. Depending on the angle it becomes hazardous to change hand placements on your tool shaft then in turn having your pick walk out of the crack completely.
Dry tooling to me felt like an ebb and flow of careful movement, always cautious and always thinking. I often approach rock climbing in a transgressive nature, my long lost sense of masculinity rose from its ashes in the act of man vs nature or at times the means of survival. However drytooling differed itself from rock climbing and even ice climbing with its barrage of micromanaging the information you're given from what you know and what you feel. You feel great respect for the line of which you ascend and pray for it to not smite you down like the human you are. Winter is approaching, so I should look for mixed routes.