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.

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.

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.