This past weekend was one of those weekends that I had been dreading (but looking forward to at the same time) for the last couple of weeks. Are we crazy to go out and do a 825' rappel? I decided ahead of time that this was going to be the only year that I would rappel the bridge. (My last trip to Whitesides Mountain (670') absolutely scared the crap out of me.) On Friday afternoon Rich, Jason and I drove down to Fayetteville. We drove down to the Fayette Station Bridge and they showed me some climbing spots along the way. After talking to them on the way down I started to not feel as nervous about the next day.

On Friday evening we had a mandatory safety meeting that we had to attend. They discussed the time line for the next day along with the details such as where (and when) to park and how the rigging should be done. They made it very clear that they wanted every rope to be rigged exactly the same way. This made it easy for the safety personnel to double check the rigging of all of the ropes. 

On Saturday morning everyone in the group was up about 5:00am. Passages to Adventure started serving a greasy breakfast about quarter after 5. Surprisingly, there was already a long line this early in the morning. We was at the bridge about 6:30am and the bridge was closed to traffic at 7:00am. The first thing that I noticed was the amount of security at the bridge. They had uniformed (and plain clothed) law enforcement personnel everywhere. The plain clothed ones were easy to spot this early in the morning by the vehicles that they were driving. It also appeared that they had some devices at each end of the bridge that were collecting air samples.

Anyway, at this point three people from the team were allowed to go out on the catwalk and rig the drop. This was done by Don F., Dave B. and Sean ??. We also had two people at the bottom of the drop (sorry, can't remember their names) that cleared some brush and made sure that our rope was touching the bottom.

About 8:00am you could see someone ascending up one of the ropes with a US and WV flag. The night before at the safety meeting is was explained that this year's Bridge Day was dedicated to Jon Dragan, who passed away this past February. He started the first rafting company in the Fayetteville area back in 1968. His family rafted down the river with his ashes. They were then handed off to someone who ascended up the rope and then they were given to the first BASE jumper who spread them in the air while he was falling.

Our team drew numbers from a hat to figure out the order that we would rappel. I was the 5th person to rappel on our rope and I was really nervous all morning. I was also nervous about the walk out on the catwalk. I heard stories about there being big holes in the walkway that you had to step over. I also envisioned it having a really flimsy railing. It ended up that the catwalk was solid all the way out. There were some doors that opened up to some ladders but all of the doors were closed. As I walked out there I remembered an old saying from mountain biking: If you don't want to go there, then don't look there. So as I walked I was looking straight ahead. I would occasionally stop to look down at the river. It was a very impressive view of the valley from the catwalk. The catwalk itself was pretty impressive. I will say that the longer I was on the catwalk, the more comfortable I felt on it. The calk walk was only designed for the width of one person. So when you got to the ropes, you had to turn sideways to pass all of the other people. Luckily we were fairly close to the middle and we didn't have too many people walking by our rope.

Every rope was assigned their own safety officer that would double check everyone's gear and make sure that everyone was getting on and off rope properly. To get on rope, you had to clip your upper ascender into the rope and stand on the other side of the catwalk on this big W beam. Someone would pull the rope up (~60 lbs) and you could rig your rack. When you were done, they would slowly give you the rope and you were ready to rappel. The only rub point was the W beam at the very top of the drop (and it didn't rub that much). You had to rappel through the super-structure of the bridge (you couldn't touch it) and then you were hanging out in space. You could see a really good ways down the valley. You were so high up that you didn't have a perspective as to how fast you were rappeling. Every now and then you would hear a loud BOOM! Some of the BASE jumpers wanted a long free fall and they would pack their chute so that it would open really fast. Luckily though none of the BASE jumpers got close to the ropes. 

The first time down the rope it probably took me about 20-25 minutes to complete the rappel. I used 5 of the 6 bars the whole way down. The bars on my rack kept getting pushed towards the top. I could only pull the bottom two bars down and I was still moving very slowly. I ended up feeding the rope through my rack the first half of the drop. At the end of the drop I noticed that I had worn some bigger grooves in my rack. This helped me on my second rappel. Before I did my second rappel I asked our safety officer if he had any suggestions. He told me if I couldn't move on 5 bars, then drop down to 4 bars. There was no way that I was going to do that, even though I was using the Freedom Wrap. I decided that I would continue to feed the rope through the rack. Well the second time down I did it in 12 minutes. That still wasn't good but it was much better than my first rappel. There was one guy on another team that did it in a little over a minute. There was also some crazy guy on another team that went down Aussie style (I have some pictures of this.) Everyone on our team that wanted to get in two rappels managed to get them in. Don was also lucky enough to get a third one in (way to go!)

Anyway, about 3:30PM we had to start derigging the rope. Everyone had to leave on the north side of the bridge so we had to wait for all of the other teams to get derigged before we could leave. We were probably off the bridge about 5:00PM. All in all, this was a really good experience that I would like to do again. I'm planning on trying to get a team together next year. This drop definitely isn't as scary as Whitesides Mountain (670').