This is part 2 and the conclusion of the last story published on this site…
We slowly pulled ourselves from our bags with the first glimmer of dawn in the east. A hasty breakfast was eaten as we organised the gear and supplies for the day. The climbing plan was that I would lead all of the technical pitches and that DM would follow carrying a summit pack with the rappel gear, and a small amount of food and clothing, and maybe three of the ten essentials. A brief thirty or forty minute uphill section warmed us up and brought us to the weakness in the peaks armor that we were looking for. There was a steep headwall that headed up from a broad grassy ramp that was directly above our bivi site. This headwall leads to a notch between the peak and a slightly lower summit to the east. Also in the notch is a leaning pinnacle and the stunning blade shaped lower ridge of the east peak. We roped up at the base of the headwall and I headed off without much ado. This is when the meter started running. Now was our first real opportunity to suss out the actual rock. I was not impressed, not one little bit. While not total choss, it really wasn’t far from it. I made an abortive foray up one section, placing a couple of very questionable pieces of gear in my wake. It was total garbage and I ended up down climbing that bit and traversed off to the left to investigate a line that DM suggested may hold more promise. His suggestion worked and our upward progress continued. The rock was rough, but of very poor quality, and mostly lacking cracks or flakes to use for placing pro. There were many tiny shallow pockets, but I didn’t have a lot of gear that would work on such features, other than the odd small tri-cam. This section of the route as with most of the climb was surprisingly vegetated. Much more so than I was expecting based on the photo’s we had. This fact was a mixed blessing as it afforded some chances of barely adequate protection, especially at belays, but it also caused major grief as there are constant opportunities for the rope to snag and for our bodies to get impaled on sharp branches and various cacti. You will of course have heard of chossineering, and most likely jungleneering, but this was a marriage of those two styles… perhaps chossungleering?
I climbed a short first pitch. I was really trying hard to rationalise in my mind why I am here climbing this crap. I tried to formalize the words to tell myself and DM that this is insane bullshit and that we should back-off here and now, before we get into some serious trouble higher up. But somehow the words couldn’t or wouldn’t crystallize properly by the time I brought DM up to the belay. I think I maybe actually spoke the words, but without any real conviction or meaning, because DM handed over the gear without a word and I dumbly cast off on the second pitch. Another cockamamie scheme that I got sucked into by the crafty ol’ DM. That pitch however turned out to be almost spectacular, and the best on the entire climb. I was able to run out the full rope length virtually straight up, over mostly brush free rock with awesome holds.
The climbing was never harder than 5.6 but I could only get in six or so marginal pieces of pro in 60M. By the end of the pitch I had quelled my distaste and fears somewhat. The third pitch was also very long, and had me pulling past numerous small caves in the rock that could house who knows what. Possibly the homes of the mysterious supernatural sounds from the previous night? The pitch was easy though, and I cruised it, placing only two or three pieces of gear in its entire length. The next pitch; the fourth, was a short zigzag horizontal scrambling pitch that brought us up through a series of ledges and the blocky terrain of the notch. The sharp edge of the east peaks west ridge soared starkly above us like some kind of prehistoric knife.
The first pitch of the upper ridge was also short. Again I had a false start. I got to a section that I didn’t think I could climb and I yelled this down to DM. He related later that his heart sank when I said this. This climb was integral to this project of his and completing it was very important to him. I down climbed a portion and started again to the left finishing off a short bit later. The rock seemed to be different on the upper portion of the climb. It was much more granitic in nature; in effect solid. It was actually rather reassuring and pleasant to climb on. We lost a large portion of time here as the excess rope has contorted itself into a seething mass of tangles that took a very long time to sort out. After what seemed an eternity DM got the mess sorted out and I finished the pitch and belayed him up. The next pitch also had a false start leading me to an overhang that I probably shouldn’t try, so I quickly recovered by an elegant stemming move to the left at 5.6 or maybe 5.7. That pitch was long but well protected; although I led it like a rookie idiot. Too much gear and not enough extensions. I had incurred so much rope drag that it took all of my effort to literally drag myself the last few meters to the belay. It was torture trying to bring in the rope as I belayed DM upward. I was completely shagged out but I had a feeling that the final summit ridge couldn’t be too far off. Once more we did a gear handover and I headed up. Both the rock and protection were good and the pitch was dispatched in quick order. And even better was that I was then only a few meters walk away from the summit. I quickly brought DM up and let him know the good news….
The bad news, of course is that we had spent a huge amount of our daylight hours just to get here. We took very little time on top. DM left a small summit register as is his norm, while I prepared the first rappel. Although we had rope enough for 60 meter rappels we opted for using the static line doubled and doing half rappels. I knew that this would slow us down and eat up slings in a hurry, but one fear that was been nagging me since pitch one, is the amount of brush and loose rock on the climb. In my opinion tying the two ropes together would have been a recipe for disaster as the knot would surely catch on the retrieves and could really put us in a tight situation.
So we started the first of many rappels. It was a bit funky rapping on 7mm line, but an extra loop of cord around the leg and a prussic safety knot made it doable. It was virtually impossible to throw the rope so I had to rap and pay out the rope as I went. The line was thin like dental floss and got tangled just looking at it. I always went first to test the anchor, straighten the line, and quickly set the next anchor but it was a slow and frustrating business. DM had a straight shot down the rope, but in return had the nasty, unwelcome burden of wrestling with the pack. The first retrieve: The ultra skinny rope pulled well at first, then snagged. It was stuck solid in both directions. Another omen? We gave it a mighty two man heave-ho tug and it came free. Unfortunately also coming free is the breadbox sized rock we dislodged. DM yelled ‘Rock!’ I instinctively flattened myself to the wall. The rock grazed my brain bucket, glanced off of my hip, and continued crashing earthward, obeying only Newton. Stunned silence! I asked DM if he was okay. He was, and he simultaneously asked the same of me. Surprisingly even though the block actually made contact with me twice, I was totally unscathed. That was too fucking close! We really dodged the proverbial bullet on that one. The rap line also amazingly appeared undamaged. Five more messy rappels brought us to the notch. We sent a huge tree trunk crashing down on one of them, but it was somewhat controlled, and we avoided a second disaster. We were also reunited with two missing sewn slings that we had left at this belay.
The notch was a relative safe haven of horizontal terrain. The only concern was the fact that nightfall was less than an hour away. Again like some sort of rookie I was fixated on the ground. DM brought a calmer head to the situation and very quickly pointed out that there is no way possible for us to get down this thing before dark, or in the dark. We had no choice but to settle in for the long night. I have only a small handful of regular climbing partners and they all have their various attributes and idiosyncrasies. But two things they all share in common is level-headedness and a stoic sense of humour that makes things like unplanned bivi’s go smoothly. This situation was no exception. We had some liquids, but not in abundance. Likewise with food. We had enough to make it through the night. No one ever died of starvation in a day. The thing we lacked was clothing. DM had a long sleeved lightweight emergency jacket. I had a micro-fibre wind vest. It was going to be a long night. Another feature of the desert, especially in winter, that many people don’t know or appreciate, is just how cold it can get at night. I posed the question, suspecting the answer to be no, given our cavalier attitude towards the so-called ten essentials. Hell we can’t even remember what they all are, but I do know that matches are one of them. The answer from DM was a tentative maybe, and a thorough search of the minimalist first aid kit revealed a small plastic container of them. Again he came through. The other valuable resource of our little oasis besides horizontality was a rather large amount of dry dead wood that had fallen from higher ledges. DM foraged a good supply of sticks. I busied myself with building a fire pit that was within a little alcove under a boulder. I took great care in building the best containment structure I could, and we planned to keep the fire as small as possible. We had the wood, we had the fireplace, we had the matches; but would they work? The first match lighted then immediately fizzled out! The second one took and soon the little pile of sticks was ablaze. We whiled away the next twelve hours or so with me tending the small fire, DM supplying the fuel from his pile of wood, and us playing various word games. The fire itself, providing equal amounts of physical and emotional warmth. We sat on the ropes and I wore the pack for some warmth on my back. Although we appeared to be hemmed in by rock walls and boulders there were open ends and even holes in our floor that looked out onto space and through which the chilly wind constantly dogged us. So we spent the night huddled around our small blaze, contorted into awkward positions. DM had been a trooper and had resisted in asking me the time all night long. Occasionally I sneaked a glance at my watch. Eventually I was able to tell him that we needed no more wood. Dawn arrived to find us both, tired, cold and very cramped. We carefully extinguished the embers by a combination of crushing them, peeing on them, and then covering them with flat rocks.
I had thought we might have to down climb some of the pitches to avoid difficult and convoluted rappels but the skinny cord actually worked well, and we evolved a good system in working the mechanics of the rigging. By this time I was pretty brain dead however and couldn’t recognise the terrain we had come up. I was more than a bit concerned that we would end up rapping into a cul de sac, where there would be no anchor points. I had lots of gear, but the whole lower section of the climb was not gear friendly. An emotional high point was when I looked down and found a partial stick of uneaten chewing gum that must have fallen out of DM’s pocket on the ascent. We were on route at least. It may seem insane, but it took over five hours to make seven rappels, but we finally made the last one to the base, with only several dozen bouts of intense swearing at the brush and cactus. I am sure that we looked like lepers at this point. My hands, arms and lower legs were tattooed with cuts, scabs, scratches, scrapes and dried blood.
We had original thought about also climbing the east peak on this trip, but it would have to wait for another day. We had used up virtually all of our sling material in the many rappel anchors we rigged, so there was probably no safe way for us to climb and descend. That coupled with the fact that I was not really interested in thrashing up another vertical bushwhack for a long time led us on our way back to the truck in a quick and uneventful hike out.
While the technical level of the climbing was not very high or sustained, this had been a serious endeavor. The climbing was reasonably steep and over extremely complicated and loose terrain in a very remote setting. Certainly not a casual outing, nor one for those without character.
The trend in wilderness climbing today has followed that of rock climbing in general, in that quirky or emotionally descriptive names are given to routes as opposed to the staid old school tradition of: the East Ridge, or North Face of such and such. In keeping with this I suggest (without consulting DM) ‘Ghostly Action at a Distance’ (As a final nod to the stewards of the land I would ask DM to see if this can be adequately translated into the Tohono O’odham language.)
The reason for the name is threefold. First, that the planning stages of the climb took place via e-mail over long distances. Second, to honour the ghosts and ancestors of the original peoples of this fantastic area. The third, because of Einstein’s comment on quantum paradoxes… …two particles form an irreducible quantum system with one wave function which incorporates both particles…Two climbers, one climb.
Soundtrack Music provided by the following artists:
Johnny Cash – The Man Comes Around
The Doors – Waiting for the Sun
Hot Tuna – Killing Time in the Crystal City
Pink Floyd – Astronomy Domine
Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb