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.

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.

Tree Lobster In Middle Elden

Last week, before this sudden winter storm rolled through Flagstaff and left almost two feet of snow behind, I went up to Middle Elden with Spencer Church to see how my finger was doing and possibly try Broken Symmetry. The canyon was warm, the sun strong and as I warmed up my desire to give the old Proj a try was quickly dashed. My finger was still not totally better, it was too hot, blah, blah, blah. Boulderers are perhaps the best of all athletes at making excuses.

            Spence’s wrist has been in a cast since the first day of 2012 when he peeled off a wet hold on a problem in Priest Draw. Rocks: don’t even try to climb them if there’s water seeping down the face, bad things tend to happen. So, with that days dream as no more, I decided we would trudge up-canyon to a problem I’d found in my wanderings about three weeks ago. Spence, happy to be away from the couch and cable, agreed to walk up there and take pictures.

Gaston

            This problem is about 15 minutes past Entering Betsy way up on the west side of the canyon. It climbs a tall, orange face on some of the best rock I’ve seen anywhere on Elden. Days ago I walked up there with a few tools and cleared the landing. I’ve been thinking of climbing it since.

The First Move

High Step

            After pushing our way through the Gambel Oak and Mountain Mahogany Spence set up on a boulder over-looking the problem, the canyon, and all of Flagstaff. He opened a beer and got out his camera and I opened up my crashpad and put on my shoes.  The first move, a long throw to a good pinch, is the hardest move on the problem, so after I’d tried it a couple of times I started working the problem from the good pinch. After trying a few different variations, I found a double gaston and balanced high-step to work the best. After maybe ten or twelve more tries on the hard first move I sent the problem in it’s entirety on what I’d just told Spence would be my last try.

            The only other people we saw in the canyon that day were almost certainly looking for Bigfoot. We heard one of them say, “this is great Squatch country,” and they were howling like animals, which is not really peculiar behavior for Middle Elden at all. But it’s a small world, I guess, and everyone wants to find Bigfoot.

 With Cryptozoology in mind, I named the problem I climbed that day Tree Lobster, after this crazy hand-sized insect thought to be extinct for something like 80 years that was recently found on a remote island off the coast of Australia that looks like an illustration from a Hardy Boys book. After going to The Glorias and climbing Cross-Eyed Nurse, Flyswatter, and Tombstone, I think Tree Lobster is somewhere in the V8 range, but who knows. Once all this snow melts I’m going to take Matt and Danny up there to see what they think.

            The snow is falling again, and now with that quiet urgency of a true storm. I think I might go blow up the tube, or at least make something hot to drink.

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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.