The Breeching Whale

The famous photo. Bryce on The Breeching Whale Project

Long have rumors of a steep granite boulder in Northern Arizona circulated the web. The handful of pictures of its overhanging prow gained likes and shares and comments.

I’ve been seeing pictures of this one boulder for five years, since the original was posted to 0friction and even though I spent much of my free time wandering Prescott National Forest, I never found it. Not until yesterday.

When we all began building Beta, Chris Hahn and the owner of the gym, Bryce Snyder started to talk up The Breeching Whale. “It’s hard,” they said, and featured uniquely for granite, especially of the kind found around Prescott.

Matt Gentile and I wanted to go, but with winter in full swing and a probably wet top out, we couldn’t get anyone to draw up a map. Not until last week, when I brought my computer into work and got Bryce to point out the area. He wasn’t sure where The Breeching Whale was though. Matt and I were already planning on driving down on Wednesday and as soon as I mentioned the trip to Ethan Gia, he and Andrew Rothner were on board. Soon there were five of us planning to drive for two hours for a single problem whose exact location was still somewhat of a mystery.

Ethan scoping out the line

Then on Tuesday night, Andrew Sweeney came into Beta. Sweeney had the previous highpoint on The Breeching Whale and knew the road there a little better. I got out my phone, and pulled up the boulders. He pointed right to it. Bryce agreed and I dropped a pin.

Matt on the right hand crimp

The next day, phone in hand, I wandered through dense forest, stepping over fallen oaks and ponderosas. I walked right up to The Breeching Whale. The pin I’d dropped was right on it.

Matt setting up to hit the crimp

I threw a rope and cleaned and chalked the upper holds. It looked like it climbed immediately out to the angular arête where a few hard compression moves led to a good edge and a high but causal top out. It looked good. The rock was incredibly tacky. We all wanted to try.

High heel hooking
Photo: Danny Mauz

Soon the pads were organized and Andrew, Ethan, Matt and I all had out shoes on. The problem starts high on a right hand pinch and a crimp undercling and makes a couple of fun, technical moves up to a right hand crimp before moving out to the arête, up to a good crimp, a fin, and finally a jug and the top.

The crux of this problem is to hand-heel match and bump over to the good crimp below the fin. I took the fall with my heel up a few times, which at about 10 or 12 feet, was pretty scary. It’s not often that you fall flat on your back from that height.

Andrew, fresh off a season in Hueco, sent The Breeching Whale quickly. He named it Dose of Thunder and gave it a solid 10 points on the V-scale.

Andrew on The FA

Matt, Ethan, and I spent the rest of the day working on the problem but none of us managed the second ascent. With trips planned for Joe’s Valley in the next couple weeks and a nice fresh foot of snow on the ground, it looks like the second ascent won’t be for some time. Considering though, that this one, classic problem has stood unclimbed out there for so many years only to be taken down in a handful of tries is testimony to a new growing community of motivated climbers here in Northern Arizona. The rest of us will be back to Dose of Thunder sooner or later and are all more than willing to share. 

Hueco Tanks and Bangland

A week ago I was sleeping in my car, the windows fogged and dripping, the crashpads outside gathering frost as the sun slowly crept over West Mountain. I made eggs and coffee, ate the eggs quickly and drank the coffee while I packed up. I had camped on a small plot of land, whose caretaker-Gp-had allowed me to park my car for free. He called it Bangland, after its owner. Bangland is a place to remind you of the deserts strangeness, of Hueco’s sketchiness. Night after night, one neighbor or another—all like a mile away—had vicious techno parties with toothy beats bumping all night through the still air like the daily automatic gunfire echoing over from Fort Bliss.

            I packed lunch, bled the line for my stove and hurried over to the office to meet Gp for a volunteer tour. It was as, Gp kept saying, my tour. I could go anywhere I wanted. With all the backcountry boulders available to choose from, this was not an easy decision. Acme Roof? The Feather? or some other obscurity lost in West Mountain? I’ve never had to make the decision before; it’s usually made collectively. Democracy on tour in the Hueco Backcountry.

            Of all the places to go, of all the great climbs out there, I decided to go to Full Service. This problems name fits perfectly and is as good as people say as long as you can climb it. Full Service is almost endlessly frustrating. Its moves aren’t the hardest, but there are a lot of them, and it routinely spits climbers off the top, a difficult thing to recover from, both mentally and physically. This had happened to me last year, so I wanted to finish the thing off.

            I fell from the top twice, once taking a scary trajectory. But I waited around, talked to Gp. Rested. Then, once I had relearned all the moves and remembered all the beta, I cruised to the top, smooth as glass.

Then I decided to try another power endurance testpiece—Crouching on the Mahogany, only to pump out at the crux time after time. You always need something to return to.

I left Hueco at about Three PM to make the eight-hour drive home to Flagstaff. I stopped at El Pasito and bought some burritos for the road. Driving north, eating carnitas, the sun setting in that brilliant desert way, I thought about my trip.

I’ve never had such a successful trip in my life. I climbed four days and finished a classic double digit problem a day. I wanted to climb The Full Monty the most out of everything I’d drawn onto my ticklist and on my first day I did it in less than an hour with no spectators and one pad—my favorite time to climb hard. That same day I also flashed Bush League, a newer 8 on a boulder facing Windy Ass, and climbed Sex After Death first try.

On day two it started drizzling as soon as I got into the park so I took shelter under The Martini Cave. I worked on Left Martini and then crawled through the hole and worked out the moves on Tequila Sunrise, a newer problem that is surprising good with a sweet drive-by and a cool slam dunk jump. I was immediately more excited to climb Tequila Sunrise than Left Martini. I finished my second day working out the moves on Alma Blanca with Max Moore. This problem invaded my mind like a fever. All I could think of the next day, my only rest day, was Alma Blanca.

I woke at 5:45 on Sunday to get in line for north and waited until 10 to get in the park. As soon as I parked it started to drizzle, but no matter. I went up to Alma Blanca and the clouds parted and the rain stopped. I chased the shadows of the clouds to give send attempts without the sun glaring me in the eyes. After about an hour I sent Alma Blanca, packed up and went down to Tequila Sunrise, which took me about five tries. I was done. I’d climbed well, so I packed up and went back to Bangland where decided what to try the next day with Gp: Full Service.

It’s unusual for me to go someplace like Hueco with as much focus as I did on this trip. Normally I just climb whatever and I leave without any good new sends. This time around though, I was conservative, I knew what I wanted and I listed to my body. As soon as my fingers felt bruised, I packed my pad and went somewhere else. Before I even left Flagstaff I made extra effort to climb on some sharp rock to grow callous’s and climbed crimpy problems at Beta. But most of all, I thought of the problems I wanted to try knowing that all those hours daydreaming would pay off.

As I drove West on I-40 the snow began to fall in flurries. I ate another burrito and sat up in my seat imagining home, a hot shower, and bed through all that snow. There are projects to finish there too, up on Elden, and at The Draw and all over Flagstaff, for that matter. But I only thought of Home and the warm bed and Christina’s smooth skin as I turned on the wipers and slowed down to a safer speed.

Antimatter

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been projecting a problem at Priest Draw called Antimatter. I first started trying Antimatter last April but abandoned it once it got too warm and I began work at CREC. It’s been cold everywhere for the last couple of weeks. Here in Flagstaff temperatures didn’t even break freezing until yesterday.

On my first 2013 session on Antimatter I refined all of my beta, of which there is much. It took me about two hours to finally make up my mind on the crux section, which involves some strange pinches, a dropknee/toecam, a cross-under, and a bad gaston. The Draw is a wonderful place this time of year, if you were wondering. The parking lot is void of cars and covered in deep snow. Only the true die-hards make it out, so the whole place glistens with winter solitude. It’s quiet. Only the birds make noise, and during that cold snap they were elsewhere. Probably Sedona. Anyway, I climbed at The Beta every other day and once last week headed out to Antimatter with Danny and Matt. It was snowing and about 20 degrees. As soon as I booted up my feet lost all feeling and I made absolutely no progress on the probelm. It was beginning to seem as if Antimatter was impossible for me, that I’d never see it through to the end and hang from the double toe hooks on the lip where I finally, after like 15 moves, would get to relax my core.

            I made a point of not thinking about Antimatter for a couple of days and climbed up on Elden, where I found myself excited on a couple of other projects. I had to get Antimatter out of the way so I could move on. Climbers are often in a perpetual state of progression, and the feeling of stagnancy is disheartening. That was exactly where I was. I felt like the next level was just out of reach. I was getting frustrated.

             Yesterday I got off from work at four and took advantage of working in a bouldering gym and warmed up there. I drove quickly out to The Draw and raced the setting sun to Antimatter. The light was coppery while I set up the pads and camera. Conditions couldn’t have felt better. I did the crux once to remember the body positioning and cooled my hands off on a nearby rock. Hot hands and freezing rock equal condensation like on a cold drink during a hot summer day. I pulled onto Antimatter and walked it first try of the day. My feet even cut, which was the issue that had been keeping me from the top, but I held on and summoned energy I didn’t know I had and was soon topping out. My mouth tasted of metal and no matter how much I spit, there was more. It took me half an hour to catch my breath.

            Now though, I feel as if a weight has been lifted. I’m going to Hueco next week and I know that if I hadn’t done Antimatter it would loom over those desert rocks I hold so dear like a bulging thunderhead. But it’s not. I will go to Hueco with a clear mind and I will hopefully come back proud. There is always a feeling of change, of anticipation, and of fear on top of every project. With growth comes the great unknown, a place we generally avoid. The road to satisfaction is limitless and, for me at least, paved in crimps, slopers, pinches and pockets.

Oh, and here is a link to Antimatter.

New Year

I’ve tiptoed my way into the New Year, 2013 and it’s looking to be a good one. 2012 was an eventful year, for both climbing, and general life type things.  Christina and I bought a house in Flagstaff, AZ, a place I couldn’t be more pleased with. With a little more focus on climbing I managed to climb a few things I never imagined myself standing on top of. Both Bang On and The Mandala were problems I first saw in my fledgling months as a rock climber. They looked amazing then, but were veiled in a film of grandeur. Only really good climbers could climb those things. Climbers like Chris Sharma, Dave Graham, or Ben Moon. Eventually though, and faster since I started using boar’s hair brushes, that film has cleaned away leaving solid, climbable rock. And that’s what I’ve been busy doing.

A few weeks ago a true winter storm rolled through Northern Arizona. I took advantage of the falling snow and convinced Christina to walk part-way up Middle Elden with me. I packed champagne. At the warm-up boulders I uncovered a small box and got on one knee and asked Christina to marry me. She said yes, and we drank the champagne in a cave and watched snow fall for a while before the slog home. Christina and I have been together for five years. We met on a bouldering trip in Bishop in a “more dudes” kind of situation. It was her, the only one old enough to buy like 12 underage boys alcohol, and I, the only underage boy not drinking and able to carry in-depth discussions about Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We hit it off and now we are set to be married at the beginning of the summer. So it’s looking as if 2013, like its predecessor, will also be a year of good new things.

Cherry Canyon

Obviously fall has arrived and for a while at least, I have joined the ranks of the unemployed.  This is good though, at least for now. I have time to work on this house, to write, to climb. Working at CREC was a great experience, but the schedule of eight days on-six days off, didn’t work for me. I couldn’t even come close to balancing all those top-heavy aspects of life. Who ever does?

            Fall--apples, carved pumpkins, changing leaves. It’s time to get out last years leftover candy corn and put it in a bowl in the kitchen, time to start drinking tea instead of ice water, and time to boulder as much as possible while the conditions are good and the forest roads are open.

            Two Sundays in a row I’ve gone to Cherry canyon with Matt, Brian, and Spence. No one outside of Flagstaff seems to know the brilliance of this place. Even though Cherry Canyon houses what is arguably some of the best limestone bouldering in the country, I’ve never seen another group of people there. Right now it seems most are drawn to the various super-sized roofs to the west and Cherry has fallen to the wayside. Even though I have lived in Flagstaff for a year now, I still haven’t figured out how to climb those roofs. I’m getting better, but I feel at home at places like The Glorias, Middle Elden, West Elden, and of course on the towering bulges of Cherry.

            Since the first time I went to Cherry last spring and set eyes on The Bulge Wall, I have wanted to try Uptown Vandal. This is a boulder problem that could only happen here. A couple easy roof moves lead to a sloping pocket, heelhook, and a strenuous move to a flat, half-pad undercling. A bump off a bad crimp leads to a better one and the beginning of a highball V7.

            I’ve tried Uptown Vandal maybe a dozen times now. Yesterday was the first time I’d tried it early in the day and on my first solid effort from the bottom I got into the crux of the stand start. I surprised myself. I gave one more try, but the first try had drained most of my strength and I got to the same place. Still, I will climb Uptown Vandal the next time I try it. Until then it’s clouding my thoughts, as boulders often do.

The Mandala

It’s been a while and since I last wrote, and much has happened. Three weeks ago I packed up my Subaru and sped northwest through the infinite and wonderful desert to Bishop, CA. My trip to The Buttermilks would be a short one—only three climbing days—but what it lacked in time was made up with incredible intention. Never do I go someplace to climb with one problem in mind. Never, until recently have I driven eight hours to essentially climb one thing. All these big destinations are too overwhelming, daunting in the sheer number of brilliant problems to try. It’s easy to forget the project, leave it neglected in the dust of a bunch of fun V7’s.

This trip had been seeded the last time I was in Bishop, over the winter and finally bloomed in spring. The Mandala, whose crux section I had figured out that last trip, was looming larger and larger, its rounded prow like a ships bow in the fog.

            The Mandala, I think, is one of the most famous boulders in the world and most definitely the U.S. Dreamtime, Midnight Lightning, Esperenza, The Mandala, problems that everyone knows, that over the years from their desperate inceptions have, in some way defined what it is to climb a good, hard boulder problem, are a true accomplishment to finish. I remember watching young Chris Sharma climbing The Mandala in Dosage 1 and famously joking about its grade. Soon after I went to The Buttermilks for the first time and saw that same boulder shining in the light of a full moon. I thought it looked impossible, or at least like something I’d never be able to climb. I’ve tried The Mandala half-heartedly almost every time I’ve been near it, but never been able to make anything work. It’s sharp, sharp enough that after five or six tries my fingers would be too bruised to climb anymore, and it’s massively dependant on weather conditions. I never got very far and usually spent the rest of my time climbing easier things and dreaming of the day that everything would align for those few seconds to let me stand atop that one boulder. God, bouldering is silly.

            Considering the fame of The Mandala, the rock is really not the best in Bishop. Something like A Maze of Death or Evilution have far more brilliant patina. This year alone The Mandala has broken twice. Once right before my winter trip and once right before my spring trip. The second break was more significant; a fingerjug large enough to match and rest on evolved to nothing more than another crimp. I heard of this break two days before I left and was sure that I’d leave defeated once again. All winter I’d been saying, “The Mandala is not going anywhere,” but its permanence seemed suddenly less than geologic.

            My first day in Bishop I only looked at The Mandala.  The broken hold didn’t look as bad as I’d heard—I was expecting it to be almost entirely gone. I wanted to give the problem a try, but instead wandered the Buttermilks, climbed easier things in hopes of some callous growth for those sharp holds. After a day off I went straight to The Mandala after my warm up, where I met a guy named Jon who asked to film me. On my first burn I climbed through my old highpoint to a new one three moves below the final jug and mantle. It felt like I could climb the entirety of the boulder on any go. However, as it happens, I had to figure out how to do the top section with the smaller, broken hold and after six or seven tries I was tired, the wind picked up to a gale and I couldn’t do the first move any more.

            Jon, living alone in his truck, invited me over to drink wine. By nine my cheeks were warm, we’d each had a whole bottle and a hilariously philosophic conversation about how living a nomadic lifestyle encourages the same deep-rooted comfort as staring at a campfire.

            The next night Jon made me a delicious dinner of pork tenderloin and assorted vegetables. “ You need sending fuel,” he kept saying. We were just two lonely climbers living in dirt and passing time with each other’s fine company.

            That night, just as I was settling into my sleeping bag, it began to snow. I imagined The Mandala, not far away, slowly vanishing beneath a thin layer of ice. I wondered if I’d be able to climb the next day, the last day of the trip, or if I’d have to leave Bishop again with only the satisfaction of progress and worries of erosion.

            It only dusted that night and maybe half an inch of snow clung to the sage and pea gravel in the morning. By ten the snow was gone and the stone dry. I warmed up and went over to The Mandala, which I cleaned tediously and took care to chalk every hold.

            The Mandala is of the breed of problems that draw spectators. People walking by stop and watch for a few minutes. It’s disconcerting though, having a crowd of unknown onlookers, pure judgment in their eyes, see you struggle on the first move. On this day though, it was only Jon and I, a clear sky, and ice-cold rock.

            I sent The Mandala first try that morning and though standing atop that boulder was as fantastic as Beethoven’s 9^th, and the drive home filled with desert mountains capped with snow like I’d never seen before, my return seems imminent.  There are too many blocks of stone to climb and too many to find.

            As I drove home to Flagstaff that afternoon I thought about what to project next, what odd wall would consume me and leave my fingers sore after every session. Uptown Vandal, a powerful bulge in Cherry Canyon came to mind, so did Black Mountain’s classic oddity, Bang-On. None came close to The Mandala, though. Their draw is strong but not magnetic. When I do find it, that coveted next project that is always just over the next hill, on the other side of the boulder, or hiding deep in the blocks of a jumbled talus field, I’ll have something new to work towards whose achievement will feel just like watching another sunrise. 

Here is Jon's Video:

http://www.dpmclimbing.com/climbing-videos/watch/luminance-ground-updowngrade-post-breakage-ascent-mandala

Ice-9

Well, I had been planning on driving to Bishop yesterday to get my hard boulder on, but instead Christina and I made an offer on a house here in Flagstaff. All that planning, all that dreaming of the sharp crimps I love, oh well. It’s not like the rocks are going anywhere. I left all my things packed just in case the opportunity arises to race across the sand and dust. My fingers are crossed.

            Buying a house, like a long-planned trip to a fantastic climbing area, is enormously exciting. Christina and I stay up late deciding what to do with each room and what color to paint the trim. The house has four bedrooms, so there’s plenty of space for the traveling whatever, and it’s about as far away from Middle Elden as the usual parking area.

            Elden, as in the entire mountain, might not be the finest rock in Flagstaff, but I like it. It is still a fucking mountain strewn with boulders, even though 99 percent is vicious choss. There’s always something else to clean and climb and because I am from Southern California, land of even worse rock, I’m thrilled to hike all over that mountain.

            Instead of driving to Bishop yesterday, I went bouldering here. I started out at Buffalo Park, a nice little cluster of basalt blocks like three minutes from downtown. I warmed up and then quickly climbed The Madsen Problem, which is the area’s classic testpiece. As I was trying The Madsen Problem, Danny Mauz called. He wanted to climb a project at Middle Elden. I told him I’d meet him in a while.

            I had actually looked at the problem Danny had cleaned up the first time I went to Elden and put it on my list of things to clean up. It climbs a tall, slightly overhanging line of thin edges from a sit start. Danny did it from a stand start and I was able to do the sit. While it’s not quite on par with some of the other classics up the canyon, I thought it was close.

            We wondered what to climb next. I suggested Broken Symmetry, since it’s forming a shadow in my mind. Danny told me about an undone problem on the way out called Ice-9. I had heard of it before and after Danny described it, we both decided to go try it.

            Ice-9 climbs a sloping rail to a hard deadpoint to a sloping but good crimp, which is followed by another heartbreakingly accurate deadpoint. This line, and I’m sure of this, would be sought after in any climbing area.

We worked out all the moves, which find themselves in a comfortable medium between power and technique. After a couple more tries I was able to climb Ice-9.

            So, instead of driving really far to climb good boulders, I crossed town and checked of one Flag classic, put up another, and got excited about that house on Bern Street.

Four Hours From Flag

Before it’s too hot, before I start working, before the summer, I’m making one more trip to Bishop. I leave on Sunday but my mind runs electric before I fall asleep, rehearsing beta, searching the vast database of other problems to try. It’s convenient that the guidebook is so thick.

Yesterday I went out to Priest Draw with Matt and today we go to The Glorias to try an undone sit start to a treacherous highball put up by Danny Mauz a few years ago. Soon the forest road will be opened and a whole new galaxy of bouldering I’ve never seen will be available to try.

The longer I live here in Flag, the more local areas I visit, the happier I am that I moved here and didn’t go with one of the other, pricier alternatives. When I lived in California the nearest climbing areas were a thirty-minute drive and over the summer I regularly day-tripped the four hours to Black Mountain or The Tramway. In the thirty-minute radius around Flagstaff there are dozens of areas on limestone, sandstone, basalt and dacite. I can climb on thirty-foot roofs one day and 100-foot hand-cracks the next. Las Vegas and Moe’s Valley are both right at the four-hour mark.

There isn’t any true kind of guide here. There are no glossy pages to sweat over, and while the Internet is a good resource, it isn’t all-inclusive. I used to be annoyed by this. It’s a long drive up here from Prescott and without someone to show you around, Flagstaff is a daunting place. Now that I live here, now that I’ve been introduced to just a fraction of the climbing I don’t feel the same.

Flag is famous for its secretive locals and I can’t blame them. The climbing is good; maybe not as good as Hueco or Bishop or the various crags and boulder fields of Yosemite or Colorado, but occasionally it gets quite close. There are no crowds here in the Fall, and Spring when conditions are best. Climbing here is an experience now rare in the West. It’s possible to walk up on breathtaking lines without ever having seen a picture in a magazine or a video on YouTube. This, I think, is what should be preserved.

Last week at The Glorias I decided to try a problem called Rotator Cuff. It’s notoriously strange and while it’s not all that hard it took me longer to figure out than any other problem I’ve climbed there. I had a tremendous amount of fun, though. Sometimes I think we forget that a big part of the fun in climbing is figuring out how to do something. Video beta is surely helping climbers flash harder and harder climbs while the onsight is starting to feel neglected. Flagstaff does its part with its obscure boulders and walls to keep the tradition alive. I like that.

What's Underneath

The San Francisco Peaks smile down on all of Northern Arizona, a reminder of the bubbling, molten stone underneath. I could see these mountains from the picture window in my old house just seventy miles away in Prescott. After big snow storms The Peaks seemed florescent, like something out of a dream. It’s no wonder they’re so sacred among the various cultures that came long before the railroad. 

            I spent quite a bit of time in the last two years sitting at the kitchen table with my back to that picture window, my fingers sweating onto the keys of my computer as I wrote countless stories and essays now strewn across my hard drive like laundry on a teenagers bedroom floor. I always wrote stories about people in far-away places. Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Bishop, El Paso, Colorado, Utah—all the states surrounding the one in which I lived. I wanted real mountains, and I thought I wanted a real city, one with traffic and freeways, anonymity in numbers. I wrote so much I wore a small dirty patch into the beige carpet under the table with my toes. I was proud of it, still am. My mind was my world and looking out the window at the distant mountains or at the Ponderosa in our yard was the closest thing I got to going outside.

            I was too busy to go climbing with any kind of frequency and sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I’d wonder if I would ever get to start again. I always marveled at the people who breathed climbing and day-tripped to Joshua Tree and then somehow, almost overnight, lost interest and tossed their rock shoes into the back of the closet. I worried this was happening to me, and I lost sleep over it. Climbing is something I need. It’s not just the movement of body over stone, it’s not the long drives through the desert with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ry Cooder, and Bill Frisell blowing and plucking their way though the speakers and into my ears. It’s all of it. The climbing movies, the constant trouble of raw or peeling skin on my fingertips, the strange shape my toes have taken, the fractured vertebra and all the other injuries, I love it all, and it has shaped who I’ve become as much as anything else.

            Last May, Christina and I packed away all our possessions into a storage unit. We had plans to travel for a few months. All that was left of us in our home of two years were the various stains and traffic patterns worn into the carpet and a man was coming to erase those as well. I studied the dark spot on the carpet under the picture window one last time. It was all that was left in the house of months of effort on one project. I had obsessed, so much that I wasn’t myself anymore. I hardly climbed, and I had been a bad partner, a bad friend. When I went to the bar people were surprised to see me still in Prescott. “I thought you graduated,” I sometimes heard. All I did was write, read, and watch bad movies to calm my mind. I felt like something had started to trim the fat of my personality, but I liked all that fat, it was still part of me and I never agreed to give it up.

            I watched the carpet cleaner as he shampooed under that picture window framing the San Francisco Peaks. He dragged his heavy machine over the spot once, twice, slowly the third time and it was gone. All those months of over-caffeinated work, the labyrinth in which I’d become so lost was wiped clean with mechanical indifference. 

            I don’t have a direct view of the Peaks anymore but whenever I leave my apartment I see them bright with snow and bigger than I remember.  They’re much closer to me now and those old mountains always surprise me as if I forget they’re there, smiling back, reminding.

Google Nowhere

I dream of a place where the border between earth and sky is sharp and always overexposed, where cottonwoods exhale soft white fluff and their leaves flutter in the persistent sandy winds like hands clapping. This place, whether it be a canyon whose rock walls have toppled in like the forgotten stacks in some goliath library of geologic time, or just the end of a dusty road to an infinite nowhere but always limited nothing, is what I imagine when I start to feel claustrophobic.

            The mountains, with their savagely formed peaks all torn and pushed from below, the galaxy of trees and summer flowers whose names I’ll never know, are still home. Here at the base of the San Francisco Peaks all those cottonwoods and that library of stone are just over the horizon. I can drive east to the moon and north to that often visited but seldom entered canyon of the Colorado River. All those places I’ve imagined, all the sandstone labyrinths and water polished granite blocks shining white as light, they’re out there somewhere and Philip Glass wrote the score.

            It takes a certain kind of person to devote so many lonely hours to the dull buzz of washboard. They’re out there though, crawling across the wintery desert in search of the best weather and hard rock. But as gas approaches the pinnacle of five dollars a gallon driving aimlessly, flipping coins at intersections, (heads left, tails right) makes less and less sense. So I’ve taken to that thing considerably vast and headache inducing, the Internet.

            Like I am to the desert Southwest, I’m addicted to the Internet. It's a portal of glass and light, keys and chips, electricity and people, to those places where the road ends and the trail starts. Someone’s always been wherever the curser lands and taken photos to prove it. Those blurry satellite images are like heroin and like a drug, always seem to disappoint. After hours in the car whatever neglected scattering of boulders I finally pull up to is head high, the worst rock in the West, or balanced precariously in the angle of repose. But I don’t stop, I can’t stop, the desire to discover must be fed and kept alive because sometimes there are those rare moments where bags can be packed and a trip can be taken with no expectations. 

 I need wilderness and I need, at least sometimes to feel like a part of it. That’s one reason why I like to climb, and because it’s there, crouching in a cave or at the bottom of a murky pool, the wild that has shaped us all. I can’t find it, don’t know what it looks like or feels like, but looking seems like the right thing to do. After every trip, every new place, and every new climb, that wild feels closer but I know I’ll never find it, which is good. So I pack extra water and snacks and head to the moon.

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.