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.

Test Driving

Going to test-drive a car, I realized over the weekend, is a lot like going to an animal shelter with only a vague desire to leave with a new pet. Christina and I left home at 11 AM to look at new Subarus and go to the grocery store but didn’t leave the dealership until five. We left behind my old Tacoma, my first car and mobile bedroom of seven years.

            I traded in the OG Tacoma for the other car most reliably found at the crag trailhead. And damn, all of you still driving trucks really ought to thing about the change. There were things about my truck that I loved, but when I really think about it, I just liked having a bed in the back. The bed though, it wasn’t very comfortable and I couldn’t sit up without my head being cocked drastically to the side. Sounds trivial, but as the weeks back there piled on all I wanted to do was sit up straight. Packing two people in the back of the truck made things even worse.

            I was just slightly too tall to sleep parallel in the truck. My feet pushed against the back window and even on warm nights turned to blocks of ice by morning. And added condensation of another’s breath, even with windows open, turned the bed to a swamp.

            These are tiny problems. There is a reason why some absurd percentage of rock climbers own Toyotas, but with gas at nearly four dollars nationally, I’m glad to trade 19 mpg for nearly 30.  And here’s my plan as far as cragside luxury:

An example of a teardrop trailer

            I’ve been scouring Craigslist for months to find a good trailer and I’m pretty sure I’ve found the most ideal. Since the Big Bang of travel trailers, insect-sized teardrops have been towed behind small cars and crouched in the forests and deserts of America without attracting great attention. These trailers, at a weight of around 800 pounds, don’t affect gas mileage by all that much and can be as posh or minimal as you want. Kitchen, cabinetry, heat, some of these things even come with flip-down TVs. And generally running at prices from 2000 to 4000 dollars, these trailers are pretty cheap as far as the market goes.

            Now, If you were actually living in one of these trailers, you might hate your life by month two. The kitchen is located outside where those unbelievable desert winds can steal so much heat it takes an hour to boil water. And these trailers lack many of the things you come to depend on in daily life, like tables and chairs or a place unexposed to the elements to stand up. These trailers though, and I’m convinced of this even though I’ve never even been in one, are perfect for someone who goes on several shorter climbing trips every year.

            So that’s my plan. Find a good, inexpensive teardrop trailer and keep it ready to go at a moments notice so when the impulse strikes, all I have to do is hook it up and drive off into the desert or mountains and recline in comfort. 

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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