Entering Betsy

A few weeks ago, just before going down to Hueco Tanks, I went back up Middle Elden with Danny Mauz and Matt Laessig to climb on some sharp crimps, to try Entering Betsy, its stand start The Hole Show, and the canyon’s project, Broken Symmetry.

            It’d been just long enough since I’d been in climbing at The Buttermilks that all the callous’ on my fingertips was peeling off in great sheets thick as a couple pieces of paper. We warmed up at the mouth of the canyon and with my fingers oozing sweat, walked up to The Hole Show.

The Hole Show, and its dynamic low start, Entering Betsy are easily the finest established problems in the canyon, and among the best of their style in Flagstaff.  Middle Elden is, despite constant bouldering traffic over the years, a relatively obscure, seldom visited area. The rock is not as consistent as it is over at the more popular Glorias, but when it’s good, as in The Hole Show’s case, it can make for some very good climbing.

The problem starts is an anomaly of a hold for Elden, a large, perfectly smooth Hueco, (most holds are jagged and sharp) and moves left to a small crimp. Both Danny and Matt weren’t sure what happened next, but it was definitely hard.  Danny, a few weeks before, had scoped out the holds on the top of the boulder and found a small, sloping crimp on the lip he’d missed before. I fooled around with a bad sloper on the face and some variations in footwork, and then realized that I could just swing up to the crimp on the lip with a high heel hook in the starting hueco. I climbed The Hole Show a couple tries later and while my fingers were starting to throb, decided to try Entering Betsy next.

This problem starts on small sidepulls below and to the right of The Hole Show. While it only adds one strange all-points-off move to the stand start, I think it improves and adds some difficulty. It isn’t so much of a pull and jump, as most dynos are, but just a jump. It’s all in the ankles and man, that move feels cool to do. It seems impossible and bizarre until your hand is in the hueco and your feet are swinging out.

Daylight was starting to ebb and the already rust-colored rock was turning orange. I put my climbing shoes back on, tried the dyno, fell, tried again and surprised myself by doing the move. I wasn’t really prepared, at least mentally, to climb the rest of the problem and left my heel too low in the hueco and fell back to the pads. I rested a couple minutes, put my heel in the right place and did Entering Betsy in its entirety. I’d been thinking of this problem since Matt first showed it to me about a month before. Standing on top, looking out over east Flagstaff swallowed by dusk I felt like I was starting to get stronger.

Since then, Matt has been able to do The Hole Show and both Danny and a guy I know as Noah-who-broke-Broken-Symmetry have climbed Entering Betsy.

 Now I’m working on Broken Symmetry, which never saw a second accent before the break and none since.  It reminds me in many ways of a problem California called Bang On. They share a very similar crux move, but I think Broken Symmetry is harder, especially after Noah broke it. I’m sure that after a few weeks of work muscle memory will start to pick up and with a bit of luck, I’ll cross that one off my list as well.

Going West

             When I think of westerns a few things come to mind. Vast landscapes dotted with dwarfed trees or surreal cactuses, dusty streets lonely of people but not tumbleweeds, Buffalo, a sky so blue and wide there seems to be almost nothing else, Indians, and of course, the hero, whose energy conserving laziness, whose smooth slouch, has permeated almost every pore of globalized society.  But there is also a dream to the version of West we’ve all learned about while watching Clint Eastwood’s cigar roam from one corner of his mouth to the other. A dream of possibility, of unlimited potential for success, and of untouched wilderness whose fruits could be anything.

Hueco Tanks’ West Mountain can be kind of a hike, depending on what boulder problems you want to climb on. After climbing Diaphanous Sea my fingers were raw and bruised; I needed to rest them for at least a couple of days. So when Matt, Cory and Ryan all decided to pack light and climb The Round Room, 1969, Best of the West, Crash Dummy, and Star Power in a day, I left my extra shoes and pad behind and followed. All I really wanted to do was climb The Round Room, whose easy traverse circles a room with hueco’d walls and a damp dirt floor that always smells of water. The Round Room is a quintessential Hueco Tanks feature, and even though I’ve been climbing there for six years, it took until now to make it all the way out to the remote end of West Mountain.

We dropped our pads under a big oak at the beginning of a stone ramp  and scrambled up with chalk and water. Going to The Round Room can feel like time travel, if you want it to. That little compartment in the earth with nothing but a small patch of sky for ceiling seems unchanged. It could be 1880, and the great mythic westerner could be lazily riding by. The only time in a place like The Round Room is in the hands of your watch and in the number of times you’ve traversed its entirety.

The Round Room

After a few laps and a posed picture of all of us clinging to the wall and smiling awkwardly, we slid back down the ramp to our pads in the shade and ate candy bars and trail mix. The sun shined with the precision of a flashlight through the bare branches and I could feel its warmth on my skin.

“Here are some pottery shards,” Cory said as he picked up a small, broken piece of clay. He turned it over and over in his chalky fingers. I could see its jagged broken edges, the gentle curve of its former shape back when it was something more than an ancient piece of discarded waste slowly chipping away from all our footsteps and becoming nothing but dirt. “These things are everywhere,” he said and put it back down where it came from.

In Matt Wilder’s guidebook to Hueco Tanks there’s a picture of himself hanging open-handed on some cool looking slopers. 1969 gets just two stars but it’s one of those problems that people always talk about. “We’re going there tomorrow, they say at the fire,” as if the approach is like walking to the corner for a cup of coffee. Anyone who knows any better rolls their eyes and asks who their guide is.

It’s impossible to actually walk to 1969. The approach is one that involves technical face climbing, even some chimneying. Going to 1969 isn’t like walking downtown, it’s like discovering an entirely different world hidden in a dangerous maze, it’s like that scene in The Last Crusade, where Indiana has to figure out a bunch of booby traps to get to the Holy Grail as an army of cold eyed Nazis hold his friends at gunpoint.

1969 is not the Holy Grail, It’s a lowball on good rock way the fuck back in the heart of West. Unless you’re spending a great deal of time in Hueco and have run out of other things to climb, don’t haul your crash pads back there.  

We decided to leave our pads with Ryan, whose climbing skills weren’t high enough for the you-fall-you-die approach, and scrambled up the gully leading, eventually to that problem so romantically pictured in the guide. Past a vertical face and through a narrow gap between walls the gully opened up. Walls of bulging stone overhung a few tall, jagged boulders like suddenly frozen waves. Two or three small oaks, their branches just starting to bud green, clung to life, thrived. The path led us under giant roofs and boulders, their bellies stained that flaming white, to red to deep, rotten wood brown by the often present but rarely seen flow of water. Its swirling fingerprint is everywhere in the cosmic shapes the rock in Hueco has taken after so many centuries of persistent effort. Water has drawn so much to Hueco, it’s even responsible for all those climbers living in tents and examining their fingertips too closely on their rest days.

After half an hour of crawling under rocks big as train cars, we find 1969. My fingers are still sore from climbing the day before, and the sloping pockets of the boulder problem feel threatening.  We talk about coming back on our last day, but West Mountain isn’t the kind of place you go to get a lot of climbing in, it’s a place you go to walk around, peek into dark holes and narrow gullies because West continues to give. Every corner has probably been explored. Someone has stuck their head in every dark hole and let their eyes adjust, but finding lines, cleaning and climbing them takes a kind of creativity and motivation many don’t have. Still, problems like the 130 foot long NRA, only climbed last year, are still lurking deep in the mountain.

Cory on Best of the West

Once we’d retrieved our pads and Ryan, we staggered and sweated our way up to The Best of West, a problem that ironically doesn’t ever really top out. Still, this was the highest up West Mountain I’d ever been. We went over to look at The Feather, a problem I’d wanted to try since I first saw a picture of it. Every other mountain seemed like it was just a few hundred yards away. We could see people carrying pads and we could hear the grunts and yells of unnecessarily loud climbers over on North Mountain. I’ve always felt that West, from those more popular places, seemed like it was miles away, foreign and unknown. And from its top everything else seemed tame and boring, picked over like a market after the 6 PM rush. But the top of West, or the near top, felt like a place I could just sit and watch the clouds rush by without some enormous group coming by with thirty pads and screams to wake the dead.

The Feather

After climbing Best of the West and trying The Feather, (I was able to do it from a stand start) we hike back down the side of West and over to Star Power, A long roof of giant huecos and jugs. Star Power is one of my favorite climbs in Hueco, it’s like the famous Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive on North Mountain, but three times as long and a bit harder. We all run a quick lap, then move over to Crash Dummy, another favorite.

Matt on Crash Test Dummy

             Coyotes start to yip and howl across the field at the base of North Mountain. They scream and cry and as we all look, trying to pick them out against the brown rock, suddenly stop. We never saw them.

            As we walked back to the car I thought about the day. I thought of The Round Room, time, the smell of damp soil, and pottery shards I thought of the gully to 1969 and the feeling of possibility around every next corner. I thought of the near top of West, The Feather, and the distance I felt between the rest of the world and myself. As the coyotes found something else to get excited about and as I unlocked my truck, I thought of the great mythic West and that there was no other name better for where we’d just been than West Mountain. 

The Cast of Hueco

After a three-year hiatus, I’ve finally gotten to spend some time down in the miserable city of El Paso where my trash was eaten by feral dogs, where I woke after a windy night to a glossy patina of ice on everything, and where a great metropolis of winding chasms and toppled brown boulders rises from the flat desert floor to be populated by an unlikely crowd living in trailers, tents, even a teepee.

I returned home to Flagstaff from Hueco Tanks after a week-long trip with bruised fingertips a few problems checked off my tick-list and many more added. I’ve been on trips to Hueco as long as a month, but this short week was more productive than any other pilgrimage. I managed to climb Diaphenous Sea in about ten tries, flashed Taxing The Pipe, Javalina, and Something Different. But climbing was only part of the fun of Hueco, as is usually the case, and it’s giving me plenty to write about.

Flashing Javalina

The cast of Hueco is as variable as the curving, curling features of the rock itself. Every year, there’s a different set of guides, a different crew of tent dwelling dirt bags asking for cigarettes or other things smoke-able. This trip I managed, through one of the truly seasoned Huecoers, GP, to camp for a dollar a night on some obscure land where with each step I sank an inch into the un-trodden dust. I camped, climbed and rested with my friend Matt and his brother Ryan. Both are from Wisconsin, tattooed and hilarious. Ryan is an Alt photographer and set up a photo shoot in a windstorm with a liberally pierced woman from El Paso who got a ride to the Rock Ranch from her parents. He told me once that I was “flashing shit like a chick on Mardi Gras.”

The Round Room

Other friends were down there too. Our guide the first day climbing was my old friend Kate, who was one of my climbing coaches when I was 16 and first started climbing. Kate lives at the Wagon Wheel Co-opt in a Teepee and is spending the season guiding. On that same day we ran into another old friend of mine, A stocky Israeli from Los Angeles named Yair. Yair was the person who, in the climbing gym, showed me the possibilities of bouldering and got me hooked on the sport. We climbed only once on this trip, but he gave me the beta I needed to climb Diaphanous Sea. Of course, there’s GP too. I met GP a few years ago in Groom Creek and climbed with him quite a bit just before we both migrated away from Prescott. Of course, there were new people as well. Corey is a friend of Matt’s and climbed with us every day but one. He helped us navigate through all the various mazes of regulation and we rewarded him with food. Corey led us on one of the more entertaining tours I’ve ever been on. We penetrated deep into West Mountain where the extra-terrestrials of Hueco live, at least according to folklore.

On West Mountain

                                                                                  Our Campsite from West Mountain

On our last day, we woke to freezing rain and tremendous winds. Matt and I had to take Ryan to the Greyhound station so he could catch a bus to San Antonio. As we drove west, the weather worsened and it looked like climbing wasn’t going to be possible. We got a big breakfast and relaxed a while before we went back to pack up camp and leave.  As it happens in the desert, the clouds parted, the sun melted the ice and dried the rock. We would be able to climb after all. After picking up Corey, we went to North Mountain and warmed up. I tried Dark Age a few times. This is one of the problems that has been on my mind for years now. The rock is perfect, the top out scary, and the movement some of the best in the world. Matt and Corey both did See Spot Run, the classic V6 that Dark Age feeds into. As is always the case with the last day in Hueco, I couldn’t climb what I really wanted to, I fell off Dark Age twice in a row on the same easy move just before the top hold of See Spot Run. But leaving Hueco with an almost send like mine on Dark Age, or a few years ago on Barefoot on Sacred Ground, makes the return even better. It gives me something to train for and something to dream about.

Black clouds came from the east just as we turned right onto Montana. Big raindrops fell and splattered on the windshield and the smell of rain came off the pavement. We had a long drive ahead of us, nine hours of sitting, eating fast food, drinking coffee. Always though, with a presence like that of the storm to the east, the return to Hueco, it’s boulders, and all who call it home, will gently build in my mind.

Hueco Moonrise

100,000 Miles: Part Two

Until last week, it had been years since I’d climbed with, or even seen Jarod. After leaving the porn industry behind a couple years ago, Jarod moved to Mammoth, California and quickly joined the fearless ranks of people who hurtle down the mountain and huck themselves off jumps with drops like four-story buildings. I drove out from Flagstaff, spent a day at The Buttermilks, and then went up to Mammoth for the weekend. There was hardly any snow and Jarod had to work most nights. We got a couple beers and sooner then I’d expected it was time to go back down to Bishop where I planned to climb for another couple days. I told Jarod I’d see him later in the spring when the snow was better.

            Normally at any major bouldering area I run into some group of climbers I know and end up climbing and camping with them. This time however, those groups seemed to be elsewhere and I was left to enjoy quiet solitude in the back of my truck with a couple novels for company. I wandered The Buttermilks all day, climbed some old projects, found some new ones and felt like I was home. Sagebrush grew with twisted branches from the sandy soil and I wondered where all the rattlesnakes were this time of year.

            I woke as the sun turned the sky amber and reflected off the glassy boulders across the way. It had been cold; my water was all frozen and it had been hard to read the night before without gloves. I decided to get a hotel room for my rest day.

In the afternoon, Jarod called. He was getting a ride down to Bishop for the day; did I want to get some food or something? By eight we were both back in my hotel room, talking about our first trips to Bishop, The time we found a baggie of meth in New Mexico, all that Red Bull, my broken ankle, and my truck. We agreed, Good Times that should absolutely keep on going. I told Jarod that after all these years and miles I wanted to sell my truck. “How much do you want for it?” he asked. We started talking numbers.

Driving up Buttermilk road Jarod patted the dash, “I love this truck man, I can’t wait!” Jarod only speaks with extreme punctuation and when he writes he tends towards the use of multiple exclamation points.

We parked at The Birthday Boulders, where we used to camp when we didn’t know any better. The sun was strong and warm and the shade cold. The rock was chilled to the core so we decided to go to that quintessential Buttermilks problem, Ironman, to warm up. After a couple laps we wandered the web of trails talking about the time we got really drunk shot-gunning beers in the campsite I’d camped in two nights before. The night had ended when a bunch of other climbers all wearing nothing but kilts stumbled out of the darkness and crashed the party with a well-placed head-butt and a bloody nose.

I made progress on my project, I felt stronger with Jarod spotting and his encouragement always gets me higher. The next hold always seemed closer. Soon though, the sun rounded the corner and the crux holds were too warm. We wandered on, talking little, but feeling good. Even after so many years, climbing with Jarod had barely changed. We didn’t feel like we needed to catch up, the blank spaces filled themselves in. We just bouldered, fell, and laughed. Nothing else mattered.

 I’d been planning on leaving early; Flagstaff is a long nine hours away, but early snuck past us both and the shadows off the mountains grew longer and longer. We were bumping back down the road to Bishop by 3:30, two hours after I had planned on leaving.

Jarod had some paperwork to do at the DMV, he was in the process of purchasing a rifle, and so I dropped him there.

“I’m gonna come out to AZ this spring, man,” Jarod said, “I have a friend with some Harleys, were gonna ride to the Grand Canyon!” I pictured Jarod on some monstrous bike riding through that same stretch of desert.

“Awesome,” I said, “just let me know when.” I hope he does. He’s always welcome on my floor.

Jarod got his bag out of the back of my truck and closed it back up. The latches are finicky and I noticed that he worked them skillfully. A car horn honked from 395 and the branches of the cottonwoods were all naked.

“So good to climb with you again man, I really miss it,” I said.

“Yeah dude! Come back out soon! I love this, just like Old Times,” he said, and I knew I would make the long drive back there from Flagstaff soon. We hugged, fist bumped, and then did that awkward handshake-hug combination thing.

“See you later dude,” I said. I got back in my truck and rolled down the window.

“Later Bro!” Jarod said, smiled and went inside.

I rolled my window back up and drove east into that primordial space where places aren’t advertised, but still wait to be discovered by people like me or Jarod, people who find the solitude of bumping along some cracked highway more soothing than a warm bath. I drove through a forest whose trees are old as stone and back into a desert where time moves differently, where all the lizards, tortoises and kangaroo rats go about their crepuscular business without anyone noticing and every roadside stand sells the world best beef jerky.

100,000 Miles: Part One

Always, like waves crumbling white on the coast, I wake with sunrise or just before, during the coldest part of the night. Sleeping in my truck, a Tacoma with 190,000 miles, a broken passenger door handle, and a camper shell sheltering a futon, is something I’ve done a lot of. I think of it as my second home and while I watched the sky turn the color of springtime honey, I felt a twinge of regret at the decision to sell. I’ve had my truck since I was 17 and we share almost all those 190,000 miles. And in those miles the only other person to come close is Jarod. 

            I’ve know Jarod since I was 16, he’s lived with me, he was once arrested right out of the drivers seat of my truck, and got back in the passengers seat a few days later looking grim, pale, and nearly dead. Jarod was in my truck with me when the odometer rolled over to 100,000 just outside Quartzite AZ, a desert town whose wintertime population swells with snowbirds and crystal hunting hippies living in converted school buses. On all our fledgling trips to Bishop somehow we always seemed to arrive with a full moon to light the inevitable midnight wander through the chalky candyland of The Buttermilks.

            Jarod is almost certainly the most excited person I’ve ever met; his thrill at living is like that of a Golden Retriever, or like a Labrador puppy. And I mean that in the best way possible. To climb with someone like Jarod, for me, is a great pleasure. I’m about as relaxed as you can be and still have a pulse. The unfathomable excitement of someone like Jarod gets me higher off the ground and I’d like to think that I’ve kept Jarod from spinning out of orbit. There are a few times that he’s gotten pretty far out there anyway, like his goal this winter at a triple back flip on his snowboard, or that time a few years ago when I went back to California for the summer and found out that Jarod had become a pornstar. Every time he came over he insisted on showing me his latest scene and searched the Internet on my computer with a look of concentration like someone cramming for a history test third period tomorrow. But Jarod is much more than a pornstar or a snowboarder or a great climbing partner. He’s a friend, a great one.

            My parents separated and divorced at the beginning of June, just when I finished my junior year and clumsily fell and badly broke my ankle on an approach to a climbing area. I couldn’t drive and home wasn’t that anymore, but a toxic place of loathing. My dad, living in the guest room, wandered around looking like Jarod did when I picked him up after his brief stay in the correctional system. My mom was as distant and mysterious as some planet outside the asteroid belt. My sister slammed her door at all of it. I was sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire when Jarod asked me if I wanted to drive with him to Albuquerque for a climbing competition. I’d only known him for a couple months, but anything to get away from home, anything to find a new one, was worth it to me.

            My truck was the vehicle of choice and Jarod, the only driver. Summer heat rose off the pavement of I-40 like the fumes of spilled fuel. My truck’s speakers struggled to keep up with the roar of open windows. We drank way too many Red Bulls. As the desert rushed by and all the creosote and desert pavement blurred together into a dream, I felt happy for the first time in months.

            “So how are your parents?” Jarod eventually asked. I had only told a couple of friends and a therapist about what had happened. It seemed to me that almost everyone had divorced parents, and that there was nothing special about it. I was almost an adult, I thought. I could deal with it on my own. But the emptiness surrounding I-40 pressed down and I decided to tell Jarod anyway.

            “Actually,” I said, “terrible,” and I told Jarod everything. I told him about the night they went out on an errand and came back, my Dad crying and mad and going upstairs to pack. I told him about the red lights he ran without noticing and my Moms icy distance. Jarod did something no one else had: He adjusted his seat, sat up straight and responded with true human to human compassion.
            “Oh man,” he said, “I’m so sorry dude, that’s awful,” And he was. Jarod listened to everything I said, and he was as shocked as I had been. His eyes were wide and he kept shaking his head. “I can’t believe it,” he kept saying. I looked out the window at the hurried desert, fossilized in a different time but somehow also always in present tense.

            “Yeah,” I said, and felt just slightly better. “Crazy stuff man, I’m glad to get away from it.” I scratched an itch inside my cast. By the time we got back to California my depression would be nearly done and Jarod would be one of my best friends.

            Desert gave way to Pinyons and Junipers, and they surrendered to the girthed Ponderosas growing around The San Francisco Peaks and Flagstaff, AZ, the town I now call home.