Bruce Willey

Stop the Car

Pine Creek, a High Sierra sleeper crag a stone’s throw from Bishop

It was summer 1968, and the Yosemite legend Chuck Pratt was on a Sunday drive, airing out his hangover with his boss Bob Swift, the owner of the Palisade School of Mountaineering. Also crammed into the VW Bus were two Sierra mountaineering legends, Norman Clyde, and at the wheel, Smoke Blanchard. As they motored up a mining road through Pine Creek Canyon, 15-odd miles north of Bishop, California, suddenly, Pratt, with his trademark understated urgency, said, “Stop the car.” Blanchard hit the brakes, bringing them alongside the crack to end all cracks: a rule-straight, 200-foot offwidth splitting a geometrically perfect granite dihedral. 

     Pratt then had more Yosemite Valley FAs under his swami than any other climber, including Royal Robbins. (Swift, too, had been a Valley regular since the 1950s, putting up the East Buttress route on Middle Cathedral with Warren Harding.) His hangover forgotten, Pratt laced his stiff-soled Pivetta Cortina hikers and walked the few minutes to the dihedral, never guessing that the 5.9 he and Swift were about to onsight would one day bear his name. Yes, the climb was <I>Pratt’s Crack,<P> one of our world’s most famous offwidths.

    But the future of Pine Creek, today one of the Eastern Sierra’s finest crags, was likely the farthest thing from Pratt’ mind as, nearly 80 feet off the deck, he contemplated his sole protection: a slung chockstone 40 feet below.

                                                         ****

What Pratt and Swift had stumbled across is now a dream crag, but also a somewhat-guarded Bishop secret, in the tradition of the hush-hush East Side. There are a lifetime of other stop-the-car crags and mountains along Highway 395, below the Sierra Nevada Crest -- spots like the Buttermilk, Alabama Hills, Whitney Portal, and the sporty Owens River Gorge. But in the last few years, Pine Creek Canyon has flourished, with a whole lot of climbers reenacting Pratt and Swift’s 1968 discovery, hitting the brakes as yet another buttress of clean, white granite flies up in the windshield.

     It’s 2009, and Pine Creek boasts more than 200 documented climbs, ranging from 100-foot clip-ups to multi-pitch trad; conveniently, the approaches are usually short and sweet: five to 20 minutes. The cliffs riot from the canyon floor to the Wheeler Crest (13,000 feet) in an elaborate maze of buttresses, faces, and blocky arêtes. Sagebrush, the occasional cactus, pines and aspens fill the canyon. Fanning out to frame the Pratt’s Crack Gully are a collection of crags and sub-crags: Sheelite Wall, Elderberry Buttress, and PSOM Slab to the south; Cyanide Cliff, Barbershop Buttress, Addiction Gully, Cyanide Gully, and Mungie Wall to the north. The cliffs all seem improbably chossy from afar, but come into tight-grained focus at their base. 

     “It’s definitely the new summer crag,” says Tony Puppo, rock-shoe cobbler and owner of the Rubber Room, in downtown Bishop. Puppo did many first accents with Alan Bartlett in Pine Creek in the 1970s and, like a lot of Bishop climbers, often heads there for after-work cragging. You see, while the rest of Owens Valley bakes at triple digits, the temperature at 7,000-foot Pine Creek is often only 70 F. Still, with so much world-class climbing on the East Side, and with Tuolumne Meadows a mere two-hour drive, some days you’ll have the whole place to yourself.

    Pine Creek also has stayed under wraps because Bartlett and Errett Allen’s old guidebook has been out of print for decades. Until recently, traveling climbers who wandered into Wilson’s Eastside Sports could only get Beta from the local Tai Devore, who’d draw a topo if asked politely. Now, Peter Croft and Marty Lewis’ new comprehensive "Bishop Area Rock Climbs: the Climbing Guide to the Eastern Sierra -- South" (maximuspress.com) has re-opened the treasure trove.

    Of course, one man’s paradise is another’s purgatory. Unlike Rock Creek Canyon, on the other side of Wheeler Crest, and Bishop Canyon on the other side of Mount Tom, Pine Creek has no lakes, campgrounds, cabins, or tourists. It’s barren and forgotten…unless you fall into one of three categories: miner, bighorn sheep, or climber.

 Tungsten miners first colonized Pine Creek in 1912, excavating the metal for use in everything from light-bulb filaments to the hard tips of bombs.) Just before America entered World War II, the Pine Creek mine began production in earnest, becoming the largest tungsten mine in the country. The aftermath is still visible: gigantic tailing ponds, rusted bolts, broken whiskey bottles, and a lone stone chimney, the sole marker of the Scheelite mining settlement, wiped out in 1951) by an avalanche.

     The “Mordorian land wreckage,” says Croft, Bishop’s indisputable climbing luminary, “is limited to the upper end of the canyon. The glaciers of the next ice age should wipe things clean.” 

    As for the bighorns, 100-odd sheep make their home on the Wheeler Crest, lambing down low April through June and heading high in the summer months, 3,000 to 4,000 feet above the climbing area. Their numbers are slowly rising after years on the wane. Still, biologists are concerned and encourage people to keep a wide berth (BW: add) particularly during the lambing season.

    And the climbers? Well, that’s the rest of our story.

                              ****

“I’m going to say Pine Creek -- in comparison to the climbing in the rest of the guidebook -- has the best and most diverse rock,” says Lewis, who has also penned guides to the Mammoth area and the Owens River Gorge.

     While an afternoon thunderstorm thumps through the canyon, I meet Lewis at the Pratt’s Crack Gully, to pick his brain for Pine Creek history. That, and to find out exactly what routes my wife and I have been climbing here for the last three years -- pre-new guidebook -- with pious regularity.

     Basketball player-tall, with short-cropped, graying hair, Lewis cinches his parka around his head, leaving his rain-splattered glasses exposed as we begin the short walk into the gully. The rain has turned the granite a dark sheen of brown.

 I tell Lewis that aside from some hand-drawn topos, my wife, Caroline, and I rarely knew precisely what we were climbing. We’d see what looked like a good line or a row of bolts and jump on it. Many times we were spanked back down to the ground, our leaver-biner collection dwindling. One late afternoon while the shadow of the Wheeler Crest crept up the flanks of Mount Tom across the canyon, we launched up a grainy slab: Serious but Not Desperate (5.10a), on the PSOM Pinnacle. On the second pitch, 25 feet above the belay and only five feet from clipping the first bolt of the pitch, my foot snorted on a nickel-sized edge.

     The first 10 feet of the slide, my reckless indifference toward runout slab remained fairly intact. By the time I slid past the belay -- while being skinned alive by the flaky granite -- and registered my wife’s sweet hands clenching the rope, I’d lost most of my enthusiasm for climbing in shorts. Twenty feet more, and slab-mongering had lost most all remaining luster.

     Lewis laughs at my tale and says that many of the low-traffic routes here are grainy nightmares. Pointing high up on the Mustache Wall, where he and a partner, Kevin Calder, authored a dozen-plus sport routes, Lewis says he used a crowbar to literally peel off the choss.

     “These routes took a lot of time,” Lewis says. “It’s more like construction than rock climbing. But to me, the Eastside has a lot of chossy volcanic rock and a lot of grainy granite, and both of those things, when they get climbed on get super-good.”

 “It’s not sport climbing exactly,” says Sean Jones who, along with his half-brother Blair Dixson (both lived just down the road in Rovana at the time -- 2000), put up Heavy Metal Left (5.12b) and Heavy Metal Right (5.11c). “It’s the new wave of the Eastside. It’s a place where the mountains and sport climbing collide. You’re right in the desert, then -- bang -- it’s the alpine world.

****

The storm has exhausted itself, and Lewis and I head down the trail. As we round a bend in the sagebrush, a wiry scruff of a man with a rope over his shoulder approaches, grinning.

     “Which one of you is Marty?” he says.

     “Maybe me,” Lewis replies.

     “My name’s Phil. Alan’s down there f--king around.”

     “Phil, as in Bircheff?” asks Lewis. “Oh, you’re another famous old climber.”

     “Oh, right. Exactly -- I’m old,” Bircheff says. “Anyway, I was about two f--king sheets to the wind when Al comes by and says, ‘Let’s go climbing.’ So here we are.”

     Alan Bartlett totters up leaning over his trekking poles. Despite the recent storm, Bartlett wears tattered shorts and a T-shirt that strains against his rotund frame. Having authored countless first accents throughout the West, including Pine Creek, Bartlett now lives in Joshua Tree. Bircheff, meanwhile, is straight out of Yosemite’s Golden Age, having established one of the all-time classic lines on Middle Cathedral, Bircheff/Williams, in 1969. As Lewis puts it later, he’s one of “the legendary badass dudes.”

    Lewis offers them some draft pages from his guidebook, with a suggestion to do Becky Route (5.10a) on the Mustache Wall, named after Kevin Calder’s wife and no doubt a pun on all the Fred Beckey routes in the Sierra. We part ways, leaving Bartlett and Bircheff to their climbing. Next, Lewis and I drive a half-mile up-canyon to the Silverback and Mungie walls.

     The centerpiece of the two crags is a bolted 5.12 called Silverback. Lewis and Calder equipped it ground up and received some criticism -- the bolts follow a tippy layback crack. It would be a horrorshow on gear, Lewis says, probably 5.13a X trying to stuff in pro. “I’m looking for a true traditional lead,” he says. “Still, to find this in my backyard is amazing. There’s going to be stuff going on here for years to come.”

 Lewis heads home to Round Valley, 10 minutes away, and I return to the Pratt’s Crack area to check in on Bircheff and Bartlett. The former is putting on an ancient harness, the latter drinking a Milwaukee’s Best.

     “When I moved here in 1976, someone told me Pine Creek and Wheeler Crest have more climbable rock than Yosemite,” Bartlett says, as Bircheff starts up the Becky Route. No matter how many sheets may be dangling off Bircheff, he climbs the route with exceptional grace and authority.

     Bartlett put up more than 50 routes along the Wheeler Crest and Pine Creek with brother Bob, Rick Wheeler, Jim Wilson, Bob Harrington, Puppo, and others. Sitting in the granite dust with a few beer cans encircling his large frame, Bartlett has the air of a dirtbag king.

“Well, that was a rough day.” Bartlett says to Bircheff once he's on the ground, smiling broadly. “I didn’t think I was going to get a route today. At least I got one.”

  ****

The person who told Bartlett about the abundance of rock in Pine Creek and the Wheeler Crest was Doug Robinson. Robinson’s, now living in Santa Cruz, has been known to say such things with a certain understated yet sly embroidery. Robinson used to live in Round Valley, below the numerous Middle Cathedral-sized rocks perched along the Crest.  In winter 1970, he and Galen Rowell put up the eight-pitch Smokestack (5.10) on the Rabbit Ears, naming it in Smoke Blanchard’s honor.

        “Oh man, the Eastside,” Robinson says, getting out of his aging Toyota Prius and raising his arms. It’s well past midnight, and we’ve met at Pine Creek aiming to do his route on the Elderberry Buttress. We sit under the pines, downing wheat beer refrigerated in the creek.

        Robinson has been called a lot of things, including the Father of Clean Climbing, a mountain sage, and a modern-day John Muir, but really he’s every climber’s wise uncle. White bearded and elfin tall, he often philosophizes on what happens to our brains when we climb, using terms like “alchemy of action.” We talk well into the early morning, breathing in the sage (and some herb) scented air.

    Late morning, after coffee, we amble over to the Elderberry Buttress. We’re already paying dearly for our “night of streaks and halos,” as Robinson (quoting the writer Thomas McGuane) refers to it. The Regular Route (5.9) begins after four pitches of easy fifth class, which we solo. But then we get lost despite Robinson’s having authored the route in 1970. Reaching a headwall, we rope up for a 5.9 section, a hopeful shortcut to reach the route. Robinson leads with cautious persistence, fiddling in gear that could hold a mule’s fall. Here at the buttress, our hangovers bake in full sun. We look up at the route, then down to some slings tied around a tree.

 “Probably don’t have enough water to finish it anyway,” I say. “But Pratt’s Crack is in the shade by now.”

 And indeed it is. Robinson has brought his mother’s Cortinas, a la Pratt’s FA. (Well, almost. Dangling from his harness is an eight-inch cam.) He wiggles up Pratt’s Crack, using the slight advantage of the old boot’s heel and toe. Still, Robinson makes it look easy. When I give it a go, my experience is nothing short of beastly -- climbing the fissure is like kick-starting a stubborn Harley.

 “This place is serious, and there’s a bit of mountaineering in the climbs,” says Robinson, as he coils the rope and I collect the gear. Back at the cars, we sit in the dirt to eat, watching the waning sun splay through Pratt’s Crack Gully and up the side of Mount Tom. I can’t help but wonder what Robinson’s good friend Chuck Pratt would think of the place now. “Chuck would love it up here today,” Robinson says, finishing off the last of his sandwich. “He’d do a couple of sport climbs, have a beer with Bartlett, and go on about seeing two bighorn sheep -- then get totally sidetracked by the two girls leading thin runouts over on PSOM slab.”

 Robinson laughs heartily, throwing his head back. Then he goes silent, no doubt thinking of his friend Pratt, who passed away nearly a decade ago in his wintering grounds of Thailand. Or perhaps he’s ruminating on his 92-year-old mother and the Cortinas she loaned him, a link to Pratt he wears on his feet. With the way Robinsons’ mind wanders, it’s hard to know.

Whatever the case, we gather ourselves up out of the dirt, bidding farewell with a promise to get back on the Elderberry Buttress next summer. And with that, Robinson starts his car.

PINE CREEK 411

Getting There: From Bishop, head north on Highway 395 for nine miles, turning left on Pine Creek Road. Continue up Round Valley, passing Rovana, and up into the canyon for seven miles. At a stand of aspens and pines, take a hard right onto a rough dirt road (low-clearance vehicles can park lower down) and continue to a small parking area.

Airports: Reno is about a three-hour drive; Los Angeles, seven hours; San Francisco, nine. 

Guidebook: "Bishop Area Rock Climbs: the Climbing Guide to the Eastern Sierra -- South," by Peter Croft and Marty Lewis ($35, maximuspress.com)

 Season: Summer and fall, but year-round climbing is possible depending on snow cover and your alpine aptitude. April through June (BW: Changed from May to April) are prime lambing months for the bighorn sheep -- give them a wide berth, so they can breed and flourish. 

Camping: Horton Creek Campground, open May through October. Fee: $5. Picnic tables, no potable water, pit toilets. (760) 872-4881.

Supplies: Bishop is your best bet for food, drink, and sundries -- everything from fast food to stop-the-car Mexican dining (try Taqueria las Palmas, on East Line Street). On the main strip, Wilson’s Eastside Sports is the go-to place for gear and information; meanwhile, the Rubber Room will cobble your rock shoes new again.

Gear A full rack and a 60-meter for the trad classics; if gunning for Pratt’s Crack, bring super-wide gear and a 70-meter rope. A full set: (10-12) of draws for sport routes.

 

Recommended routes: 

Sierra Jam (5.9), Mungie Wall (trad) Long, mellow hand crack.

Sheila (5.10a), Dihedrals (trad) So-named for beautiful women, a stout crack leads to lieback crux and tricky exit moves to the anchors.

Rites of Spring (5.10c), Rites Buttress (trad) Four varied pitches of crack climbing that get progressively harder (and exposed) the higher you go.

Our Little Secret (5.11b), Cyanide Cliff (mixed) Tricked out corner leads to a sporty roof.

The Megaplex (5.11c), Mustache Wall (sport) Three pitches of full-on, full-tilt face, flake, flares, and arêtes. 

Silverback (5.12a), Silverback Wall (sport) Bouldery move leads to tippy lieback dihedral.

Heavy Metal (5.12a), Cyanide Cliffs (sport) Two pitches with a jug hauling finale.

Ecstasy (5.13a), Dihedrals (sport) Razor thin arête crimpfest.  

PINE CREEK CLIMBING, THEN AND NOW

Pine Creek history divides cleanly into four epochs: pre-history, the golden age, the sport era, and the present-day mix of sport and trad routes rapidly going up.

 

Pre-History (1950-1965)

Smoke Blanchard, a gentleman mountaineer and Buddhist truck driver, was the first to recognize the potential of the Buttermilk and other lowland Sierra crags. He’d often head up to Pine Creek for a solo morning run (in clunky mountain boots) on “Smokes Little Pinnacle,” a 1,000-foot buttress that towers above the Pratt’s Crack area. (He rated it something like “hard 4.9”.) Blanchard told Swift about the area, who in turn told Pratt, who in turn stopped the car.

 

The Golden Age (1965-1985)

The sum total of people who climbed in Bishop could fit in Smoke Blanchard’s small living room, where they met on a regular basis. (Back then, climbers kept a low profile in Bishop, to avoid the wrath of the rednecks, says longtime local John Fischer.) Fischer and Jay Jensen FA’dSheila (5.10a), around the corner from Pratt’s Crack, in 1970. It was a bold lead with a wide crux section that still gives solid-5.10 climbers pause.

This being the tail end of the 1960s, Fischer, Jay Jensen, and Gordon Wiltsie did Sheila on LSD. “I offered to lead it,” Fischer says. “But I wanted two belayers. So Gordon and Jay both belayed me on two ropes. I remember rapping off into the dark and being so scared.

By the late 1970s, Bishop had become home to a host of transplanted climbers who, over the next decade, picked dozens of plum lines high and low, gorging themselves on all the virgin rock -- usually ground up, on either clean gear or the occasional hand-drilled bolt. Standouts include Errett Allen, Alan Bartlett, Bob Harrington, Dean Hobbs, Tony Puppo, Dennis Jensen (now the Fish and Game bighorn sheep biologist), Gary Slate, and James Wilson.        

To Bolt or Not to Be (1985-1995)

Louie Anderson, a prolific Southern California climber, chanced upon a Pine Creek segment in Moving Over Stone. Footage of a brown diorite section left of Pratt’s Crack caught Anderson’s attention, so in 1994, he drove up from Southern California to Pine Creek every other weekend. 

“That was really the start of sport climbing in the canyon,” Lewis says. “It took two things: for rap bolting to be OK and for lots of bolts to be OK. Few climbers took issue with the bolts, and it was only a matter of time before people realized the sport potential on all those virgin faces.

 

The Modern Era (1995-present)

In the last five or so years, Pine Creek has experienced a new renaissance, with Bishop locals quietly putting in routes in overlooked areas. Tai Devore and his wife, Mary, are two such climbers -- they’ve spread out on the walls and gullies south of Pratt’s Crack area. In fact, Devore spends so much time in one auspicious area, he named it the Addiction Gully, with its Moments of Clarity (5.11d), at the gully mouth, as a warm-up.

Despite the new guidebook, locals are protective of Pine Creek. One day, while climbing at the Mungie Wall up-canyon, I shared a belay ledge with a local climber who was rope-soloing his route. We exchanged pleasantries and I told him I was doing a story on Pine Creek. “See ya,” he said, and then rapped off his line in haste. It’s understandable -- look what happened to the Buttermilk.  

Born Again Rock Stars

Originally appeared in the July/Aug 09 issue of Adventure Sports Journal

Bishop’s world famous Rubber Room saves one sole at a time 

Years ago, when I was a young, naive lad, I brought a pair old Boreal rock shoes to be resoled at the Rubber Room in Bishop. The resoling shop’s logo—a cartoonish scantily clad, rubber-wearing dominatrix found in climbing magazines—shared a certain salacious fervor more likely to be found in the back of a big-city weekly where the term “massage” is thrown around rather loosely. So with this image planted firmly in mind with the spike of a six-inch heel, I hesitated at the door half expecting to be whipped and spanked. And I would have deserved it given the sorry state of my worn shoes. 

Instead I was greeted by a man who called himself Tony, who, as I recall was indeed not wearing a rubber mask and chaps. Indeed, loud metal music did not play through a stream of red lights and smoke, and I was not led into a room in the back to be humbled by the torrid-haired dominatrix. In the main, it was a rather benign experience.

I placed the shoes on the counter, Tony picked them up and looked at the soles while I signed my name and address, then told me the shoes would be ready in about two weeks. They were and my shoes felt and climbed better than the day I bought them.  I’ve been going back ever since.

Tucked behind a beauty shop, a bar, and across from a local grocery store in downtown Bishop, the Rubber Room has been recycling worn-out climbing shoes and making them new again for 10 years in its current location and nearly 30 years altogether. And lest the sexy advertising ploy be lost in the semantics of feminism, or rock climbing for that matter, let it be known it was conjured up by a woman; none other than Nan, Tony Puppo’s wife. Betty Page was the inspiration and her image still hangs—whip in hand—in homage to the shop’s motto: …where discipline, training, and integrity fill all your rock shoe resole needs.

After countless resoles on my granite and sandstone scrappers, done up to perfection by the Rubber Room, I decided to go to the source of all that good rubber in search of its soul—without putting to fine a point on it.

It should not come as a surprise that the Rubber Room faces straight up to the Sierra Crest (Mt. Tom, Basin Mountain, Mt. Humphreys) and the Buttermilk country, scene after scene of so much lost rubber. And secondly the place smells like a rubber plantation. Tacked to the wall are climbing pictures, faded by the Sierra light that streams in the door most afternoons, and several trees of shoes in various stages of repair make for a small forest amongst shoe horns, sanders, and other industrial cobbler machinery. NPR News plays on the radio. So much for the dominatrix image.

Simon Vickers, sporting a handlebar mustache and close cropped hair, sits at the computer taking care of the in-and-out box. About 50 percent of the shoes come from California. The rest come from the U.S. and beyond. The Rubber Room has received shoes from as far away as Australia, South Africa, even Israel. In the last decade they have resoled as many as 25,000 pairs, averaging a little less than 300 pairs a month.

Master cobbler and Rubber Room owner Tony Puppo is working on a shoe, the old sole ground away to make for the new. He trims around the edges of fresh rubber with a pair of scissors, then bangs on the rand with a hammer. Wearing a white untucked shirt, jeans, and sandals, he’s as unpretentious a man as they come with a quick smile and an easy laugh. As he works I ask him about the history of the Rubber Room. 

                                 The Coefficient of Friction

Puppo came to Bishop in 1976 for the climbing and skiing. For a year he flipped eggs, falling in with the small climbing scene at the time including Rick Wheeler, James Wilson, and Bob Harrington. Bishop wasn’t the climbing Mecca it is now and if you didn’t own a mule you were considered an outsider. Puppo isn’t one to spray about his achievements, but a look in any Bishop guidebook reveals many a classic climb that he authored.

Wheeler and Wilson, who had opened a climbing and backpacking store selling Patagonia seconds and sleeping bags on Main Street (now Wilson’s Eastside Sports), asked Puppo if he wanted a job. At the time they were fixing cowboy boots, women’s heels, mountaineering boots, and rock shoes. Puppo joined the team in 1981 and learned the cobbler craft pretty much by doing it under the watchful eye of his mentors, including Dan Asay who still shares the Rubber Room space with his own shoe-making business. Asay began cobbling when he was a hippie in Berkeley and now makes custom boots for those with “buggered up feet” as Tony puts it, and those who have had the misfortune of losing their toes—one man, his whole foot—to frostbite. 

Puppo hired Nan who later turned out to be his wife and the couple bought out the business from Wilson. In 1999 they moved to their present location.  Unfortunately, Nan took a fall while bouldering, breaking her back. She is still suffering from nerve pain and no longer works behind the cobbler’s bench.  

“I’ve always tried to figure out how they (the climbing shoe manufacturer) put it together without having been in the factory,” Puppo says. “Nobody has the lasts from say 5.10 or La Sportiva because they’re locked in a vault and are worth millions of dollars. They’re untouchable,” he continues. “If you get the pattern for a last and go away with it that’s certainly considered industrial espionage.”

Puppo gives me a short lesson on rock shoe anatomy, explaining that a shoe’s fit is determined by its last—think “foundation” of the shoe. “If you look at a shoe they are very complicated as far as the pieces of leather that go together to build a shoe,” he says. “And the simpler the shoe the more simply they fall apart. They also don’t hold their shape as well. Whereas the more technical shoe hold their shape and work for you because of the way they are constructed.”

As far as the best rock climbing shoe, Puppo hesitates, not willing to step on anyone’s toes, so-to-speak. But he does say, “Everyone’s top of the line model is more of a joy to work on than their price-point shoe. A beginner shoe is usually on a beginner foot who destroys it. We have a mountain of shoes with gaping wounds in the toes. Had they stopped a week before they might have been saved.”

“May I express my pet peeve about toe draggers?” Simon says from behind a large metal shelf of shoes ready for shipment to their owners. Simon hails from Santa Cruz and enjoys working with his hands. Prior to his gig as a cobbler he used to work for Rock Lobster, building bike frames.

“You bet,” Puppo says.  

“I just wish people knew what the rand is. Take care of your rand ‘cause your rand is what supports your climbing edge. There’s no integrity to the shoe once you’ve wrecked your rand."

“It’s like coming into a auto repair shop with a flat tire and saying, ‘my car doesn’t run anymore. Can you fix it?’” adds Puppo. “People don’t do that to their cars but they do it to their shoes.”

With this kind of talk, I sense the cobblers may soon be getting out their whips and donning rubber suits. And since they have just resoled a pair of my shoes, a pair that I continued climbing on past the sole and into the rand, I think it best to go. Best to go out on the granite and feel the beautiful friction of new soles, of rubber meeting rock. To sense the discipline, the training, the integrity. And because of all this, I’ll no doubt be back.

The Rubber Room can be reached at 175B North Main Street, Bishop, CA 93514, (760) 872-1363 (toll free at 888-395-ROCK) or email them at resole@rubberroomresoles.com. See their Website: www.rubberroomresoles.com. Dan Asay’s custom boots can be reached at (760) 872-2688. 

EASTSIDE LOWDOWN Front country cragging under the shadow of the High Sierra Crest

This originally appeared as a cover story in Adventure Sports Journal, issue 45 Sept/Oct. 2008. All pictures seen below were also published and were taken by the author.  

 

To be frank, I thought about starting this story with an epic. Some hanging on the thin edge thing: frozen fingers grasping for a nub, a hair-raiser of a lightning storm scrubbing the inside of your helmet, being skinned alive by a fall on run-out slab. It sells magazines and stokes campfires, not to mention touches the void that is ego.

But I’m happy to report that climbing is more fun when you manage to avoid these stories in the first place. When fear is replaced by experience (see above), or when you find heightened conviction with vigorous hands and feet, and the common assurance of such things as a rope attached to a good, maybe even loving partner.

And my epics have left me with more laugh lines than grey hairs and are pedestrian anyway. Stories that come screaming down out of the Andes, Alaska, or prodigiously out of the Himalayas, are best experienced from the comfort and privacy of a water closet accompanied by a long Mahleresque movement.

Thanks to the Sierra Nevada, where the weather vacillates most often between perfectly fair to even more fair, and the rock is, for the most part, constitutionally solid, California stories scuff the edges of the pastoral. No wonder Muir went up a pine tree in the midst of a windstorm or soloed Mt. Ritter in shepherd boots. It sold stories and fueled lowland awareness to preserve something that made it difficult for Muir to keep his feet on the ground. 

This is not to say Sierra climbers are, as a bunch, cowards. It’s just that they operate in a medium that is a perfect mixture between a Mediterranean and desert clime. Try finding a book titled Minus 148 Degrees or The Savage Mountain regarding the Sierra. Won’t happen. Instead, one is more apt to find something more akin to John Tyndall’s Hours of Exercise in the Alps. Doug Robinson’s apt title, A Night on the Ground, A Day in the Open comes to mind as does Smoke Blanchard’s Going Up and Down in the World, both of which are actually about the Sierra, both low and high. After all, the Sierra forgives most of the time and even loves you back with all the loyalty of a good dog.

But in the interest of keeping your attention (and to show how swashbuckling I become under stress), I would like to get one story out of my system. Plus, it begins at the south end of the front country Eastern Sierra climbing continuum—where this story begins.

                                                     ******************************

My wife and I were climbing in the Alabama Hills, as we do many an evening after we finish our work. It’s cooler then as the long shadows from Mt. Whitney and Williamson splay across the monzonite domes, slowly chilling the rock that has been baking in the summer sun. Topping out on a dome, sometimes it’s very possible to feel as though you’ve landed in Joshua Tree minus the rangers, the picnic tables, the expensive camping, and, well, the Joshua trees. Some have gone so far as to call the Alabama Hills the “poorman’s Joshua Tree” which is sort of true considering the general lack of good crack climbing and the non-existent entry fees. But after climbing here a few years, we’ve begun to question the wisdom of the maxim, not to mention question whether we want to ever go back to Joshua Tree when the Alabama Hills is, for lack of a better term, so much a wonderland of rocks. 

Mostly comprised of sport climbs on cinematically beautiful domes (enough westerns, car commercials, and music videos have been filmed here to cross the Sierra Crest several times over), the Alabama Hills is slab climbing at its near best. Some call it crumbly choss. And yes there is a bit of that. Nevertheless, we find ourselves continually drawn back to the sharp edges of granite plates exfoliating into the desert scrub.

So here we are in the Loaf area, so-called because Meatloaf filmed a music video while at the height of his fame and limitless passion to rock! with sweaty abandon. I unpack the rope bag and leave it on the ground underneath the climb when I realize I’ve forgotten the water. No big deal: sometimes it’s more than practical to belay on the tailgate of your truck with a cold drink in the other hand. While I fetch water, my wife Caroline explores the base of the domes, ticking off climbs she intends to do.

When I get back, she picks up the rope bag and carries it from one dome to the next, to a climb that looks good to her. She ties in, chalkes her hands, and begins climbing. After clipping three or four bolts, I look down at my feet—clad in my usual summer attire of snake-proof sandals, mind you—and see a western diamondback slither out of the rope bag.

I yell up at Caroline: “Clappeschlonge, Clappeschlonge,” a word I recently acquired in her quest to teach me her native language. Stepping backwards a few feet, I count seven rattles on its tail. But the “clapping snake” (rough translation) is well behaved, crawling casually away into a stand of bushes. He’d gotten a free ride in the rope bag, carried by Caroline next to her chest. Without plunging too far into anthropomorphic serpent behavior, the snake probably thought the rope was a skinny 10.5mm cousin of his and crawled in to say hi. As with most things, climbing’s most horrendous moments are experienced in hindsight.

The Alabama Hills are like that; the good and bad sink in later. It’s a wild paradise despite its John Wayne reputation of shattered beer bottles, ATVers dusting up the roads, and above, F-16 fighter jets that dogfight in and around the clouds. On one climb in the Ghosts area called Elephant Hunting (5.10b) you smear and pinch on small craters produced by men pretending to be movie stars pretending to be cowboys shooting at the wall with rifles.

Late evening, as usual, finds us squeezing one more climb out of the dusky light. Bats swoop by in the utterly quiet air and always a great horned owl can be heard asking the question of who we are. By then we know it’s time to shed our harnesses and grab a beer out of the cooler before heading home to Big Pine for homemade burritos.

Or not. The other night, post snake encounter and under a full moon, we kept climbing. I’ll venture going up the Shark Fin Arête (5.7) to peer at Mt. Whitney lit up in lunar light is one of the best things one can do on the Eastside. From here the Owens Valley, flanked by the White Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, stretches for as far as the eye can see by the moonlight. And time, finally, for that midnight burrito.

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For the last three summers, my wife and I have made our home in Big Pine, thirteen miles south of Bishop. We’re climbers by trade, writers and teachers by profession. The latter leaves us a lot of freedom, the former not a lot of money. But from the moment we met each other in Joshua Tree (of all places to meet another climber) we were already planning on living large and deep in the Owens Valley. Somehow we’ve managed to pull it off and will continue to idly dig deeper roots until we are, without sentiment, buried here in the warm ground.

When we first moved here we focused on classic peaks and climbs in the backcountry. Having both climbed in the Sierra for at least one collective lifetime before meeting, we brought together a long list of have and have-nots. Yet beginning the first month of our first summer in the Sierra, we began to see that elevation and proportion is single-minded.

That certainly is the case with the High Sierra, where the eye draws upwards whether you’re a peak-bagger, rock climber, or mountaineer. It’s fair to say more people have summitted Mt. Whitney than have climbed in the Alabama Hills or the sweeping aprons of white granite of the Whitney Portal in plain view on the way up. It’s understandable. The “eye on the prize” blinds our vision.

Aside from the occasional bouldering session in the Buttermilk, I too neglected to see the front country climbing possibilities. I came to the Sierra with only two or three days off from work and I wanted something big, something that would stick to my lowland memory. Or more truthfully, something that would justify driving through Los Banos in the Central Valley on the way back to Santa Cruz, gas station coffee rattling my tired bones at three in the morning. Begging St. Christopher for a shower, a bed, shut-eyes, real food—never sure which should come first.

So why not just live here? A twenty-minute drive to the trailhead into the Palisades was all it took to sign a lease on a one-bedroom cottage, a cottage so close to Highway 395 it would be quieter if you slept in the sleeper of a semi—and sometimes it feels as though you are.

“Never mind,” says my German mother-in-law, her favorite expression, one that she uses to mean your priorities are in order.

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With afternoons free for climbing we began seeking things that wouldn’t take all day to approach, or climbs we could do when the proverbial July thunderstorms threatened to thump the high country. Peter Croft’s The Good, the Great, and the Awesome dipped occasionally into front country climbing and for us, gave the inspiration to start exploring. Cardinal Pinnacle seemed a good climb to start.

Croft’s description is apt: “A half hour drive from downtown (Bishop), a twenty minute hike to the base and you’re there: 500 feet of fine grained granite perched at over 9,000 feet, offering the highest quality multi-pitch climbing in the Bishop area.”

We’ve ended up climbing it more than half a dozen times since, and it’s the first place we take visiting friends on the wonders of the Eastside tour. The West Face, in particular, is, for its grade, one of the best 5.10’s anywhere. Perfect crack climbing goes up four pitches of blindingly white granite that gets nothing short of the “awesome” rating in Croft’s book.

The West Face is tacked together from a few routes, joining the last two pitches of Cucumbers (5.10a) midway. So last July, when a friend of Caroline’s came up from Las Vegas we took her up it. And since I’d promised Mike Gable, a local physical therapist that I would also take him up Cardinal as he slowly tortured my frozen shoulder (a side-effect of climbing without rest, he tells me) into submission, we made a party of two rope teams. 

Elizabeth Tai is an accomplished and determined climber who is comfortably at home in Red Rocks, Nevada. Gable has recently just picked up climbing since he moved here through Bishopian osmosis. He treats a lot of climbers, and already is climbing hard 5.10’s. But little trad experience. So I gladly accepted the sharp end. 

We lazily made our way up the route, stopping to take pictures and hang out at the belays made more beautiful by Evolution Range on one side and Owens Valley on the other. Caroline and I had spent many a fine day on this rock and it was good to be showing it off. Most climbers, when they reach the top, rappel off the Prow. In four raps (with two 60m ropes) you can reunite with your proper shoes and snacks that you left at the base.

But Mike had failed to mention that he’d only rappelled maybe thirty feet in his life, and now he stood at the exposed tip of the prow, fingers shaking, and scared silly of the sudden exposure. I coaxed him with about the same voice he’d used on my arm. And off he went, spinning in mid-air. I could nearly hear his heart beating over the wind. Coiling rope at the bottom his smile returned and didn’t stop until I dropped him off at his small home on a leafy downtown street in Bishop.

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It’s been said that Sierra gentleman mountaineer, Smoke Blanchard, was the first to discover some of the front country secrets. Though no stranger to alpine climbing in the Sierra and elsewhere, including Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and the Himalaya, Smoke took special interest in the Buttermilk and Pine Creek a tad bit above Bishop.

One the few Buddhist truck drivers to grace 395 (hence the nickname), Smoke saw new possibilities in the boulders and crags like no one before him. Maybe it was a Zen thing, but soon Smoke had created a grade III or IV climb in the Buttermilk that roamed over boulders and small peaks. Now part of Bishop lore because only a few people are alive to remember it, the route is simply called Smoke’s Rock Course.

Doug Robinson knew Smoke back in the day and he offered to show me the course, or what’s left of it as committed to memory. The sixties were good to Doug, and he actively took part in the Golden Age of Yosemite including the honor of being considered the father of clean climbing in America. But his experience is finely misted by so many other climbs, not-to-mention all the late night imbibes around a campfire, that his own history sometimes fails him.

Nevertheless we set off for what he believed was the start of the route (or maybe the middle) and soon found ourselves in a dirty chimney on the Skindiver, a prominent rock that stands sentinel as you drive into the Buttermilk. Topping out on the raven guano summit, we looked over at the Peabodies that Doug had discovered to be an excellent source of fun three decades before Bishop became the bouldering Mecca of the West. “Back then bouldering was one of the laziest things you could do and still be climbing,” I remember Doug saying, accompanied by a laugh that tilts his whole trunk dangerously to the side, especially on sharp summits.

For most of the morning and afternoon we meandered up and down the rocks until we came to a place where both of us couldn’t remember the time of day or the rest of the route. It didn’t matter. Smoke called our activity “Buttermilking” and would lead large groups of people on the course while the more gentrified members of the Bishop community had a picnic in the granite sands below. Forty, even 50 or so years later, climbers are still “Buttermilking” and Smoke would no doubt been both perplexed and positive about all the crashpads, sticky rubber, and chalk. He climbed in leathery mountain boots and a cane, after all.

“There is no way that I know of to pass on by paper the feeling that permeates the person who steps out of the shower with epidermis cleaned and tingling from crystal scrapes, muscles pleasantly tired, joints well-oiled, and mind and spirit glowing from a full day of Buttermilking,”

Walking back to the car, this quote from Smoke was fully recounted verbatim from Doug’s memory. And that a shower was every bit as good as Smoke had described.

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Bishop wasn’t always that world-class climbing destination that it is now. Back in the sixties, John Fischer, local longtime guide and owner of the now defunct Palisade School of Mountaineering, remembers that “most, if not all of the climbers in Bishop could fit inside Smoke’s small living room.” Not so much anymore, though there’s still probably more people that own mules (or want to, like me) than there are climbers here.

Much of the climbing back then was done in a humble, quiet manner much as it is done today. Locals climbers like Robinson, Fischer, Gordon Wiltsie, Jay Jensen, Dave Sharp, Tony Puppo, Dale Bard, Marty Hornick, Marty Lewis, John Moynier, James Wilson, Alan Bartlett (who along with Erret Allen, wrote the first guidebook to the area, now out of print) and many others too important not to mention, immediately saw the potential in their backyard. They pushed all the obvious lines, and then some.

Later, as sport climbing came into fashion (and what a fashion statement that was), the Owens River Gorge got worked over with over 700 routes going into the volcanic tuff. Lycra gave way to crashpads in the early 90’s with Chris Sharma coming over the hill to put up some of the most iconic and sought-after bouldering problems in the world.

Indeed, this very brief, glossed-over history does no justice to the Bishop climbers who were bold and visionary. But even now, there is a flurry of new route development, taking guidance and inspiration from those who came before. And with the new guidebook, Bishop Area Rock Climbs: The Climbing Guide to the Eastern Sierra—South by Lewis and Croft, climbers are, once again, about to have their focus wholly rearranged. 

Nowhere is this new route activity more apparent than Pine Creek Canyon. Up a road nine miles north of Bishop, Pine Creek is the de facto local destination for Bishop climbers whether it’s a quick climbing session after work or a weekend’s worth of granite and scrub leisure. Kept cool by the 6,500- foot elevation and the sun that hides itself behind the massive Wheeler Crest in the afternoon, Pine Creek is a perfect summertime crag.

“To find this in my backyard ten minutes away—obviously it was always here—but to rediscover it and start fiddling around and I said ‘holy shit this is another gold mine as far as possibilities,’” says Lewis, while he stands in his yard in Round Valley. His dogs sniff around his legs, and Peewee, Peter Croft’s dog lounges on the porch. “All these slot canyons have interesting things. There’s going to be stuff going on up here for years to come.”

The main attraction is the Pratt’s Crack area, so named after Chuck Pratt, who spied and climbed the perfect offwidth splitter. It’s one of the first things to catch a newcomer’s eye when coming into the canyon aside from the vestiges of what used to be one of the largest tungsten mines in the world. A five-minute walk from the car and you’re passing the Mustache Wall (“It was right under our noses the whole time,” Lewis says) with enough sport climbs to fill several enjoyable days, or in my case, summers. Further around the corner, up canyon, the black diorite is broken by Pratt’s Crack and the stirring yet unattainable (for most) Ecstacy (5.13a), Tommy Herbert’s rap-bolted vision. Around another corner is John Fischer’s masterpiece, Sheila, climbed in 1975 or thereabouts, and probably the first 5.10 on the Eastside.

“I remember putting an old Chouinard hexcentric in there at the crux and working a long time to make it acceptable,” Fischer says. “Jay (Jensen) was amazed. I found the one place in that flared flake where I could cam it. It would probably hold a fall.”

The crux still gives even solid 5.10 climbers a moment of pause before reaching around the corner and liebacking into the tight squeeze chimney.

And Pine Creek keeps going on either side—and up! Robinson once quipped that Pine Creek and the Wheeler Crest has more climbable rock than Yosemite Valley. One day his statement may prove correct. But even now it’s one of the reasons when my wife and I draw straws to decide where to climb, Pine Creek always seems to be the last straw. Often we meet our friends Tai and Mary Devore who own Bishop Yoga and Massage. (Tai is also a manager at Wilson’s Eastside Sports.) It’s always a non-alpine start, but the days are full. We often climb until the sun’s shadows climb up the backside of Mt. Tom, climb until we are satisfyingly bushed.

Tai and Mary are rapidly pushing new lines to the left of the Pratt’s Crack area. Tai spends so much time in one narrow little slot canyon that he’s made a fine talus couch that would make a stone mason proud to belay from. So much time, in fact, he’s given over to calling it the Addiction Gully. This is your brain on granite.

“Out of the Eastern Sierra lowland crags, Pine Creek is the most friendly. The friendliest approach, the good stone,” says Tai as he ropes up to do Gala Tumble (5.10d) that his wife put up last year. “Pine Creek is cool because you can have an adventure even on a sport climb. Battling it out and getting over those fears. We started coming up here enough that I started to want to put up my own routes. So it’s really about choosing your own adventure.”

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Five in the morning and the crust of the Palisade Glacier feels good under the meager four prongs of my instep crampons. The Palisade Crest is the first to receive the day’s light, and reveling in the alpine glow, my wife and I climb towards what the Piute Indians called the “Guardian of the Valley,” Ninamishi, AKA Mt. Sill. This 14,000 peak watches over us at night as we sleep in Big Pine. It would be a shame to let a summer go by without climbing it.

Tramping past erratic boulders teetering on the ice, I let my mind wander over the summer. Always, when we move here in the spring, we think we have so much time. But then it passes and all of the climbs, whether in the high country or front country, meld into one long memory that seems too charitable to remember properly. The only evidence we have to show for it is our sun-rinsed skin, scabbed hands, and the annual trip to the Rubber Room where Tony Puppo will tear off the soles of our rock shoes and cobble them new again.

We solo up the first two pitches on the Swiss Arete (5.7) enjoying the early morning sun that warms us after the glacier crossing. At the headwall we rope up and simul-climb the rest of the route in an hour. We notice that we are faster and more sure. All the front country climbing has translated unequivocally into the backcountry. 

By early evening we’ll be home, making burritos. This is how it’s meant to be. And the next day, still feeling the long approach to Mt. Sill in our legs, we’ll be back, back to cragging in the front country. The only problem is deciding what to climb next. Caroline will probably want to go to Pine Creek again, and I’ll push for Alabama Hills if it’s not too hot or Whitney Portal if it is. Either way, it will be good.

Miguel Ventura - Pizza maker, artist, family man, social servant; Red River Gorge, Kentucky

Originally appeared in Climbing, August, 2008

Climbers will find a welcome bit of reverse discrimination at Miguel’s Pizza, in the heart of the Red River Gorge, in Slade, Kentucky. A pizza box tacked to a tree out front reads “Climbers Only.” The man behind the sign is Portuguese émigré Miguel Ventura, 56, the owner of perhaps the most climber-friendly joint in the country. Miguel bought himself a slice of backwoods real estate in 1984, and the next year opened the Rainbow Door, an ice-cream shop catering to the handful of trad climbers at the RRG then. Now, 24 years later he slings pizza and climbing gear instead, and on a busy spring or fall weekend you’ll find upwards of 80 tents in his campground out back. (Miguel’s wife, Susan, and three kids, Dario, Sarah, and Mark, help run the bustling business.) Miguel makes large woodcarvings, too, and if you’ve eaten his pizza, you’ve eaten from his garden.

We hooked up wireless Internet service …[But] we’ve heard some people complaining that they liked the old times. People interacted more — now they’re all stuck on their computers. It’s not like the old days. Everybody sat around and chatted, and it’d be more personal. Now, anything that goes on here at Miguel’s is broadcast on the Internet.

We go through people here every four years, basically — they start as they go through college, and then leave when they graduate. So we’ve gone through four generations already. It’s a cycle, like life.

We all try to make sense of our own lives. I did the same thing [the climbers here] are doing — I traveled for eight years and was an artist. Then I decided I wanted to settle down and make sense of my life. You just have to fit somewhere.

I think now, the biggest thing is the globalization — kids are traveling the globe now and trying to make a niche with that. One guy came in trying to sell me chalk bags made in India.

We’re here as long as we’re supposed to be. That’s always how it’s been.

I leave here, and the climbers take over, so I don’t know what goes on at night. I think the scariest thing that ever happened was when a tree fell on this young lady’s tent. The power line caught it and kept it from crushing her and her little dog… they used a knife to cut her out. 

I start at 5 in the morning and have two guys who help me prep, and I cook up the crusts and get ready for the day.

Art has always been a way out of boredom. I’ve always done it. I came from Portugal and ended up in Connecticut in a ghetto, so art was kind of an escape for me. So, I kept it up. I used to do paper stuff, lithographs and etchings in the 1970s, running around playing the art world. When I came to Kentucky, there was so much timber here that it became my “paper.” I enjoy carving wood — I’m not very good at it but it looks good enough.

I get along with climbers. There’s a few we’ve had to straighten out, but climbers are pretty easy to deal with. I like their creativity. It’s neat to go down in the basement and see them drawing, creating things. It’s really good. I couldn’t do this for the tourists. I just couldn’t. It would be boring.

I think the biggest thing a climber can do is to continue humbling himself. Climbing teaches that, and you should stick with that.

I never really got into sport climbing. So it’s Fortress Wall, Tower Rock, and the Long Wall for me. Trad — that’s what these guys taught me how to do first. Sport climbing — well, I’ve gotten up a few 5.9s and 5.10s, but that’s about it. I really don’t train enough for anything harder. The thing I would like to do is have someone guide me up something big in Yosemite, something tall. I think [big-wall] climbers are really like astronauts. They should make money being astronauts instead of hanging out on cliffs. Because they’ve got it.

Occasionally I go out and climb, but I never became overwhelmed. Climbing is a good recreational sport. You get to meet a lot of people. My children are all into it — my son is too much into it right now. I wish he’d run the business more.

I’m a janitor, I’m a pizza man, and I’m a social servant. I’m a gardener, carver, husband, and father. I mean, you just do it all. That’s really life. You don’t have a title — you just exist. Some days you have good days; some days your back hurts.

Sard in a Can

Dispatches from the Island of Sardinia
Originally appeared on Climbing.com as a four-part series in March, 2008

Overlooking the orange groves and pastures just outside Quirra it becomes clear: we sound like sheep. The quick draws tinkle like the sheep bells, and after a week of climbing we begin to feel as though we are blending into the Mediterranean landscape. Each day has brought a new crag of limestone to explore. And here on the island of Sardinia, or Sarda as it’s called, the days pass gently into the next, making time answer to a sublime old-world version itself.

Yet despite my wistful slide into the pastoral when I manage to find a good stance and look around, I have to admit this climb, Spit’s Family in the Sárrabus region of southern Sardegna, has me plenty gripped. And what exactly is a 6a/b anyway? The ratings here are often lost in translation. Furthermore, just as I’m about to clip the last bolt before the anchor and reel up some rope, a large white owl flies out of its nesting hole at my head, glances my shoulder and neck with a wing and shits on my pants. I nearly do the same.

In a split second before the owl had made its escape, I’d registered two large yellow eyes peering at me. It just didn’t seem possible that I’d be sharing the crux with a large bird. So I must have written that possibility off. In Sardegna it’s easy to fall into bucolic complacency. On the one hand Sardegna seems tamed by the thousands of years of civilization. In fact, above this one crag there’s a Neolithic tower and at the base an archeological dig in progress. Moving further out in the historical continuum, the Carthagians, Romans, Egyptians, Spaniards, Moors all settled, pillaged, or occupied the place.

And then there are the plants and trees that make it entirely too easy to draw comparisons to California from where I hail. Palm, olive, eucalyptus, fig, and oak trees cloak the landscape or take it over all together. The weeds look the same too. And the plants that Californians buy in the nursery grow wild—rosemary, eccium, narcissus. Prickly pear cactus grows in the lower elevations of the coast, and in the fields and orchards the farmers grow lettuce, artichokes, strawberries, and oranges. It’s California before urban sprawl, before the population boom, before freeways. A California that I only got a brief glimpse of when I was a child growing up in San Bernardino before developers chopped all the orange trees down to make homes and large box stores.

But on the other hand, as my encounter with the owls attests, Sardegna feels very much wild. In four days of climbing we have not run into a single climber. We have seen far more sheep than people. And the crags are usually a long dirt road away from small towns perched on steep mountainsides. Narrow towns where pious old women in black make their way to daily Mass and old men sit on the side of street, smoking and talking for a thousand years.

We had come to Sardegna in late February to escape what seemed like a perpetual winter in Berlin. We still climbed in Berlin—on old World War II bunkers or at the overly expensive gym—but the cement began to eat at our skin, the cold shriveled our desire, the plastic pulls just a workout. So, for an 18 Euro fare on Easy Jet, we flew south for a week. While sipping a mid-day cappuccino in the sun on our first day here after a hard morning of climbing in Jerzu we knew it would be difficult to leave. By the third day we knew we would be back.

Originally, the plan was to leave Europe after Sardinia and live in Moab, Utah for a month before settling down for a long spring and summer in Bishop, California where we rent a small cottage each summer. But going over the logistics we realized it would be almost cheaper to trade Utah for Sarda.

All of which warrants an apology for those with real 9-5 jobs. In spite of the appearance of being jet set dirt-bags, we are neither. Thanks to my wife’s academic position in Atlanta at the same school “Alexander Supertramp” of Into the Wild fame attended we’ve managed to eke out a living mostly where there is good climbing during her sabbaticals. My freelance writing career is so unprofitable that it doesn’t matter where we live.

Aside from two semesters spent in the shallow end of the Deep South we have nearly complete freedom to go anywhere as long as we can still get some work done. Of course the flat cornfields of Kansas would be ideal for such concentration. But Caroline swears she gets more done if she can climb nearly every day. And I’m certainly not going to argue with her.

And so two years later we’re in the Ogliastra region of Sardegna, renting a small flat from some British ex-pats whom we’ve yet to meet. Sometimes life can become a stretch of the imagination even when you’re living it. Today drove that point home. We were climbing the Ìsola del Tesoro outside of Jerzu. The crags look almost as if they plopped down from Indian Creek—if Utah were so green. We started to the right with some 5b/c warm-ups (Stregatto and Topo Gigio) before Caroline redpointed and nice little 6a+ (Tempo Da Lupi). The sun was an hour from going down and we were trying to put in a few more routes before dark. A gaggle of teenagers came up through the bushes, their Italian sounding to my mono-lingual ears like little songs. They stopped just as I was grunting over a roofy move and said Buóna séra.

They hung out for a while watching us and laughing. When I got down they asked in what little English they knew where we were from, where we were staying. They were kind and gentle, almost like one would imagine teenagers from the 50’s. Slightly dorky, but cool nonetheless, and without an ounce of pretense or angst. We hung out for a while and I tried to tell them how beautiful their country was to no avail. They just shrugged, and the girl in the group started singing the words to a pop song in English.

In the guidebook to Sardegna (Pietra di Luna) by Maurizio Oviglia, he describes the Lìsola as “the best wall in the world.” As we climb more and more areas this week we have begun to see a pattern in the guidebook. Nearly every area that Oviglia describes in rich, enthusiastic detail, he most always concludes that each crag or climbing area is “the best in the world.” But who can complain. He’s probably right. But for Lìsola he does manage to qualify it with, “Best wall in the world especially when at sunset the rocks become golden…one never wants to leave it.”

Indeed: the only way we could think of leaving was to remind ourselves of the prospect of a warm pizza and a bottle of Cannonau wine, (more wine and more on this later, but Cannonau is the mother of all wines), back at the apartment. That, and of course the assurance that we will be back.

Sard in a Can: Part II

Every time I turn around I catch the missus reading the Sardegna guidebook. Later in bed, she marks off climbs we have done today, highlighting climbs we are going to do tomorrow, and climbs we will never get around to doing. There’s simply too much rock in the world. But she tries. I suppose if you hang around on million year-old rocks long enough it’s easy to forget that a human life is so short in comparison to geologic time as to barely register at all.

Yet climbing in a foreign country is travel with a purpose. You miss out on a lot of museums, churches, cafes, shopping, sightseeing trips, and luxurious hotels when you climb—just like the locals. But having a purpose lets you experience the country more closely. And a purpose gets you off the beaten track, far and away from the tourist traps in the first place. You begin to see the world around you with renewed freshness. Grocery stores are a great place to start.

Same goes for driving. Now into our second week here, I’m starting to finally get the hang of being an Italian driver. Which is to say I drive about as well as an old lady in a scarf puttering along in a Panda Fiat. Aside from a few good unfinished two-lane “freeways” crisscrossing the island, the roads are nothing short of curvaceous. All of this is due of course to the utter sexiness of the landscape. Or put another way, Sardegna is rather mountainous. It is not uncommon to drive over snow-covered passes in the wintertime as we have this week.

Driving here requires the hand-eye coordination of a video game addict and a keen sense of spatial arrangements. And since it’s difficult to tear yourself off the rock until it’s absolutely dark, there tends to be lot of night driving. You drive miles of neuron stimulating roads, dodging sheep, goats, pigs, and the occasional cow until you hit a small town where your focus must be spot-on lest you run over something unmentionable. The towns can be as confusing as a rat’s maze and your task is to squeeze between cars and the ubiquitous old women wearing all black going to and fro from daily Mass. They’re difficult to see, and their piousness gives them an ungodly amount of pedestrian courage. And then there’s hazardous walking cactus to avoid at all cost.

We were totally bushed after climbing all morning at the Villaggio Gallico crags, then a long hike down to Cala Goloritzè in the afternoon with a few pitches up the Aguglia before sunset forced us back up the trail. After nearly hitting a cow and a herd of goats on the small one lane road over the Golgo Plain, my attention began to wander to thoughts of an Ichnusa (the Sard beer) and some gulurgiones (a ravioli filled with potatos). We got on the main road and began our approach into the town of Baunèi when we saw a group of huge prickly pear cactus walking on the side of the road. It had been a long day, but I didn’t think it had been that long. Slowing to nearly a stop to allow them to pass, we realized they were merely cactus costumes. Kids these days, I swear.

Animated cactus or not, Sardegna often feels like a dream state. And no place is more dreamy than the Aguglia of Cala Goloritzè. Rising 800-plus-feet out of the turquoise sea below, the Aguglia looks like it belongs in Patagonia. It’s difficult to describe without falling into a hackneyed brand of magic realism. Climbing journalist and Sard guidebook author Maurizio Oviglia does his best, but even he concedes that words fail.

“When talking of Cala Goloritzè,” he writes in Pietra di Luna, “the superlatives used to describe it are never sufficient. I have never come across a place as wild and beautiful, where the rock, perfect in every aspect, merges so marvelously with the deep blue of the sea and the green of the juniper. However it would be wrong to describe this place as the best of the best, even if classifications are the only means of comparison nowadays. Instead I would say that the Aguglia provides an emotion of its own, something that is different from what one experiences on a crag, something that is neither alpinism nor climbing, but that one must try.”

Well, we tried. We went up a pitch or two of Sole Incantore (6c), looked at the setting sun, looked up at the hard pitches above, and rapped off prudently. The easiest route up is a 6c, perhaps over our heads if we had all day. But we felt the emotion and like Maurizio we concurred that the Aguglia was yet another place that was the best in the world. And we’ll be back to finish it for sure.

For the last two weeks, we’ve stayed at Peter and Anne’s flat in Arbatax in the Olgiastra region. Today we finally got a chance to meet them. They were away in Australia visiting “mates” when we first arrived. Peter is a longtime climber from the Peak District of England and now divides his time road biking the smooth, steep, curvy Sardegnian roads with climbing the limestone any chance he gets. Anne hails from Scotland and has the accent and wry humor to prove it. She climbs too, but trends towards long treks in the mountains. After years in the corporate world, they shucked their careers and moved to Sardegna where they own and operate a bed and breakfast in Lotzorai called the Lemon House (www.peteranne.it), a ten minute drive from where we are living.

We ring the doorbell at the Lemon House, which is indeed the color of its namesake saving it from overstated British whimsy. The neighbor’s limping pregnant cat (it was knocked up, then hit by a Fiat—apparently) meows at our feet. Anne answers the door. She is short with thick-rimmed glasses, but her total impact makes her appear much taller than she is. She doesn’t suffer fools easily.

Anne gives us the tour of the three-story house where they live and entertain guests from all over the world—mostly climbers, cyclists, trekkers, and the odd bits and ends that end up in Sarda. We end up on the roof ourselves, overlooking Lotzorai, the Med, the hills and mountains beyond. From this vantage point can see that they are somewhat visionary for picking the location: Tapped and untapped crags can be seen for miles. It is possible that the Ogliastra region is set to be the next big climbing destination after the more famous, well-established areas like Cala Ganone to the north and the steep overhanging crags of Isili to the west.

From our home base in the Ogliastra region we have been able to branch out in all directions, albeit within the limits of my old lady Italian driving skills. We have climbed nearly every day save for the one sunny day when I put my foot down and went to the beach to write a letter and the first Sard dispatch. We have become hopelessly enthralled with the landscape, the people, the food, the limestone. The apparent simplicity of living within the Mediterranean brightness warms our skin, turning the long winter into the first day of summer. But of course all is not so simple. In many respects, this is a poor island. Many people are forced into leaving the island to find work elsewhere in Europe. And the tourist trade, such as it is, is seasonal and pays hardly a working wage.

Then, from our roof top position we spot a white Fiat. It’s Peter. We file down the winding staircase to meet him. On the way out the door into the sun by the sleeping pregnant three-legged cat, I close the front door to the Lemon House just as Anne says, “no need to bother closing the door.”

Too late for that…

Peter gets out of the Fiat and hobbles painfully across the street. Between now and their trip to Australia he spent some time with Maurizio, climbing British gritstone. The limp is thanks to a 15-foot fall. His ankle is swollen blue, sticking over the top of his shoe. He’s in a foul mood.

We’re locked, or more precisely, they are locked out of their own lemon-colored house thanks to me. A neighbor walks and they talk to him in Italian, figuring out what to do short of calling the locksmith. A plan is hatched after we spot a metal ladder leading on top of neighbors house. Problem is, there is an angry German Shepard with one floppy ear guarding the yard below. Peter distracts it, and I climb over the stone fence. Then I drag the ladder on top of the other house and prop it up to the Lemon House.

“Oh and you thought you’d be climbing rocks today, and now you’re climbing houses,” Anne says to Caroline, while they watch from below.

I gain entrance through the roof and open the door below. Then climb back up and lower the ladder to where it was above the still pissed-off dog. The piece of twine holding the ladder is so sun burnt it falls to pieces in my hand. Sadly, it is probably the most heroic bit of climbing I’ve yet done in Sardegna.

Despite Peter’s foot, he asks if he can catch a ride with us to the crags. Anne makes us promise we won’t make him climb too hard. So we venture up into the Campo dei Miracolo and the Ichnusa area overlooking Pedra Longa and the sea. It’s a beautiful spot, obviously, made more beautiful by the pigs we have come to know from coming here over last two weeks, and I suppose, named in part after the refreshingly good beer, which is in turn comes from the Greek word for foot. How the ancient sailors knew that from the coastline navigation alone is something we’ll probably never understand. But all this hardly matters as we spent a few hours together, goat bells ringing on the hillside above, the occasional fine snort of pig, the broad ocean below, and one move after another on another fine piece of limestone crag hanging there for no other reason or purpose than to climb somehow.

Sard in a Can: Part III

Defining Flow is a dubious if uncertain enterprise. It’s supposed to happen when you’re not paying attention, when you’re deep in the throes of say painting water lilies, blowing an Ornette Coleman riff from the mistral winds in your lungs and igniting a thousand fires. Without thought of flow, but still conscious of the absolute abandonment of deliberation, it suddenly appears out of nowhere. And the minute you think, why yes, this is strange, I’m flowing like a mofo, it disappears.

And it happened to me today. For one sweet day, I flowed. My wife flowed. And we flowed up and down one wholly satisfying climb after another at the Margheddie crag out on the hills far above the sea near Cala Gonone. The bite of the limestone holds felt pleasing to my fingers and I began to trust my feet to smears and tiny edges that would have given my pause the day before. Without putting too fine a woo-woo point on it, climbing seemed exactly what my body had evolved to do, where my mind found it’s most sinuous focus.

We warmed up on an excellent two-pitch route, Festeggiando I Tre Mesi (6a+), and rapping off high above the Mediterranean Sea, I paused to take in as much of the landscape as possible, wishing almost to do the climb again that very day. But there was another line next to it, and another. So we climbed nearly all of them. After lunch of sandwiches and fresh oranges, I spotted a finely featured bowl and hand crack above it. It looked good, too good to bother looking in the guidebook for names and ratings. After passing the crux with prefect jams, I yelled down to Caroline: “No, this is the best route in Sardegna.” It’s a running joke between us punctuated by a lot of truth, and influenced by Maurizio Oviglia’s ecstatic gusto in his guidebook, Pietra di Luna. (www.sardiniaclimb.com)

Because of how the day was going I overshot the belay and began fun-hogging the second pitch. Caroline yelled up that I was running out of rope, so I down-climbed and found the belay. The second pitch Caroline led proved even better than the first, following the exposed arête all the way up the prow of the pillar. In Sardegna they call it Ninna Nanna per Martina (6a+). It’s a climb I hope to recall on my deathbed.

Thinking that a change of scenery would do us good, we had driven over the snow-covered Supramonte from the Ogliastra region to Cala Gonone. We were dubious about this move having heard that Cala Gonone is considered the most popular, well-known (and most crowded) area of the island. On our first week we had spent two days climbing in Cala down by the rocky spiaggia (beach) of Codula Fuili and at the super classic multi-pitch slabs of La Poltrona above town. There’s nothing quite like climbing on the beach with the warm Med air wrapping you like you like Dante’s vision of Paradsio. One route stands above the rest in Fuili, a short two-pitch climb (Wolof, 6a) that begins nearly in the water and is so grand it would seem to trump the very words of mentioning it.

Still, I have to say when you see a tremendously hirsute German dude wearing a one-piece bikini under his climbing harness grunt up some 5b limestone slab, you begin to reconsider the notion of paradise.

So far we’d enjoyed total seclusion out in the hinterlands of Sardegna, climbing by ourselves and only coming into contact with the sweet Sards. Sure, we would have welcomed a run-in with Italian climbers, or any climbers really. The impulse to wave flags and get nationalistic when climbing has thankfully passed. We’re all part of the same ratty tribe moving through the world with the same earnest snap of carabiners.

And I’m no prude either. I’ve sunbathed plenty naked, my naughty bit hanging in the wind and waves of my old hippie haunt of Santa Cruz, California. Nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing to get all puritanically bunched up about. (Though let’s get one thing clear: I’ve never climbed nude for the simple fact that calling out “watch me” at the crux would seem beyond the limits of male dignity.)

But something about this hairy German and his butchy partner rubbed us the wrong way—especially for my German wife. We’d tried being friendly (in German) as they were the first climbers we’d seen. In return they snubbed us coldly.

Thus, over a dinner of culurgiones and a bottle of cannonau, the wife and I had a long discussion about the Fatherland. Or more specifically why it is that Germans become aloof when they’re outside the borders of their country. Because in Berlin, the Germans I’ve encountered couldn’t be nicer, friendlier people as a whole. It seemed an odd paradox.

We didn’t reach a lot of conclusions that night but we did manage a few broad generalizations. Like Americans, Germans have a desire to see themselves as individualistic. Of course Germany doesn’t have large swaths of open land where you can pretend to be a cowboy. But many Germans like to get out and explore the world nonetheless with a decidedly adventuresome bent. Climbing is the perfect venue for this. So when they run into other Germans their individualism must go down a notch.

And then we opened another cannonau and went all the way back to the student movement of 1968 in Germany and the differences and similarities to the late 1960s in America (of which we both experienced as young babes), and you could say the discussion became sort of hazy by the next morning. But one thing became clear over the week in Cala Gonone. Nearly every time we ran into a group of German climbers they, in turn, gave us a look of angst.

We conjured another theory: Perhaps it had more to do with the way they insisted on excessively challenging themselves on climbs that were way over their heads. They climbed a few moves, yelled mach mal zu (“take”) then hung for ten minutes studying the route above. Then a few more moves, take, hang, climb, take, hang, climb. It’s like one long frustrating boulder problem with clips, the rope a crash pad. The influence of Kurt Albert’s rotpunkte (red points) at the Frankenjura goes out the window. Above all, they probably just needed to find some Sard flow.

In all fairness, we did manage to meet a couple of fine German climbers at the Arcadio crags above town. The mistral winds were blowing hard, hard enough to blow your balance off. But this didn’t keep them from almost red pointing an overhanging 7a climb nor did it diminish their humbleness. They were nothing short of sweet and friendly. For the rest of the week we hoped to run into them again. But as fate would have it, we never did.

Enough sardonic (you guessed it—along with sardines we get this word from Sardegna as well) generalizations for the day. We’re staying with a friendly Italian family. Or rather, we’re renting an apartment (www.homeresort2p.it) from them in what would normally be filled to the hilt during the high season (with Germans). Now, we’re the only ones here save for Nicola Pira and his family. His mama, whom we call the same for lack of knowing her name and because she baked us a cake, also lives downstairs. Nicola’s English often takes a turn for the better. We went down to their apartment to inquire if he knew any Italian climbers that might want to go climbing with us. He was deep in the midst of a computer crises, cussing in both Italian and English. “When you say ‘un-fuck’ it not so bad, right?” he asked, ignoring our inquiry.

“I suppose you could say that,” I said. “But to be honest it’s something you generally can’t un-do.”

Cala Gonone is a sleepy village during the winter months. In fact it’s difficult to find a place to stay when it’s busy and when it’s quiet. The slow months allow Nicola to travel. He recently returned from Seoul, Korea but found it a noisy, intense city coming from his town of 500 or so permanent residents. He left four days early. His dream now, while the American dollar is so weak against the Euro, is to rent a large 4X4 SUV and drive Route 66. “Beeg, beeg truck that use more gas than possible,” he says. “And I wave to blond girls and go into the dirt, into the desert.”

(So, if you see a handsome Italian in Nevada, driving a huge truck through the tumbleweeds with a blond on his arm, don’t say you weren’t warned.)

Nicola never did find us any Italian climbers. So Peter and Anne came over in their Fiat from the Ogliastra region to help with making some photographs and to drop off a pair of much-needed shoes for Caroline that my mother care-packaged over from the U.S. We of course wanted to show them the Margheddie crag, and in particular get some shots of Ninna Nanna per Martina.

Peter had told me earlier that he estimates only about 100 serious Italian climbers live on the island. Which partly explains Nicola’s problem of finding us some local climbers.

We spot their white Fiat far below on the one lane dirt track while we’re climbing Dodò (6a+). Peter, hobbling still from his injury on gritstone, comes up the talus. Anne wanders the road in a hunt for wild asparagus. “Luvi,” he yells down to her, once he gets to the base of the crag. “Up here.”

We climb all afternoon and have a blast. The mistral winds that have been blowing for the past three days finally start to abate. Later we have cappuccinos in town, hatching plans to meet in Joshua Tree next winter. We have become fast friends it seems, despite locking them out of their house last week.

We had one more day in Cala Gonone and decided it best to check out the hoopla of the most famously beautiful beach in the Med, Cala Luna. Actually, it’s the three or so mile hike out there that rivals the beauty of the beach. (During the high season most people take a water taxi or hire a boat.) Winding through the thick brush and oak forest, the trail rewards with stunning vistas of the sea. Then you come down the trail onto the beach only to see German climbers plying their craft on the overhanging mouths of caves. It’s sight filled with both angst and beauty.

After a chilly swim comparable to the summer water temps of Northern California, we walk out to Scoglio di Luna, a 200-foot crag south of the beach. Here we find peace, quiet, and abundant shade. Running up the two-pitch Vamos a la Playa (6a) while looking forlornly at the sunny sand, we realize it’s time to take the route’s Spanish name (let’s go to the beach) to heart. But by the time we rap down a fog bank has destroyed all notions of existing on the picture-perfect side of a postcard. Such is the winter weather of Sardegna.

Walking out, we pass a seasonal bar and restaurant. Paddleboats and rental kayaks lay overturned in the weeds. In a few weeks this place will teem with tourists. It’s been known to be so crowded that you have to wait in line for climbs and a spot on the coveted sand takes more than a territorial towel to reserve. We will be leaving in the nick of time. Heading inland for the long multi-pitches of the Supramonte in the backcountry of Sardegna.

Sard in a Can: Part IV

The best thing about a hanging belay on a multi-pitch climb is the promise of a nice, semi-spacious belay ledge above. A place where you can kick off your shoes, have a sip of water, look around. That, and the hope that when you’re swinging leads with your partner, your pitch ends at one.

We’d gotten a late start due in part to losing our dirt road after some misleading signs led us astray over the farmland and vineyards. After a few weeks of one-pitch sport routes we started craving a long route that would get us in the air a ways. By the time we got to the base of Compagni di Viaggio (6a+) and pondered the next sustained twelve pitches above, it was late morning.

So we headed into the limestone valley of Sùrtana and quickly lost our feeling of disappointment. There, on either side of us rose perfect limestone walls. A small trail led through the valley and more than once we commented to each other that it felt like Yosemite. And more than once we were loath to compare the two.

Over long after-dinner chats out on the porch we had mused over the tendency of the traveler to find the similarities to another place. After all, no place is a metaphor of another place but wholly distinct. Nevertheless, the impulse to categorize is unavoidable I suppose, part of an essential need to encounter the familiar wherever you are. Not unlike the Spanish who, upon seeing the Sierra Nevada for the first time, thought it looked like the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain.

So we started up a seven-pitch route Cervo di Piazza (6a), one of the longest and most classic lines in the Sùrtana. The rock was perfectly clean, and we found ourselves in one of the most remote areas in Sard that we’d been. No little towns below, no sight of roads, no sign of civilization save for the sunken cave of Triscoli where it is thought a tribe of Nuraghic people hid out from the Romans.

Two pitches up we reached nice belay ledge and looked around. I knew Caroline first through her words. In the beginning we seduced each other with long and crafted emails. She lived in Georgia; I lived in California. And we found ourselves Online looking for a steady climbing partner. She wrote about Joshua Tree which gave me nothing short of thoughtful feelings in my loins. Timidly, I wrote about being up high on a multi-pitch climb on a ledge with a life-long climbing partner. Someone like her, preferably. And it must have worked. We met in person in Joshua Tree and a few weeks later got engaged at the top of JT’s Heart and Sole (5.10b). Soon after we were literally tying the knot in our rope at a small wedding ceremony in a High Sierra marriageable meadow. Since then we’ve been spending a lot of time on belay ledges together. But looking out over the Supramonte and the valley below we concede this is one of the better ledges we have encountered in our lives.

I hand her the rack. She hands me the small pack. And she’s off, going up slightly overhanging arête, then lured around the corner to some perfect jams. For an island in the middle of the Med it feels surpassingly alpine. My thoughts wander. A swallow fighter pilots by, whizzing inches from the rock. I think of friends back home (wherever that is these days) and find a strong urge to wish them here. That’s always the conundrum with travel. You want to tell them how great it was, but not so great to sound as if you have a bad case of gloat. It is a disease that affects many travelers, even seasoned pros.

Which is, I suppose, where the usual sign-off on the back of a postcard comes from—Wish you were here—a cheap and rather insincere gesture. Especially Sard postcards, which nearly always feature a white beach, a sea cliff, and the brilliant blue-green water that is so clear it makes your eyes ache. But in some ways I mean it. In Sardegna I’ve found myself wishing I could bring many friends and a highly select group of family members. Just for a few days. And yet at the same time is doubly satisfying to be climbing with Caroline.

We wander up a limestone pillar, jutting out from the slab. It’s airy and the sun is intense and warm. It’s one of those climbing days you live for, a day that keeps you motivated to search for more perfect lines.

We top out on a well-rounded summit, the unearthly limestone shaped by wind and water. It’s a moonscape with small trees and bushes in keeping with the guidebook’s title Pietra di Luna (rock of the moon). We rap the route paying particular heed to the core-cutting edges. We’re down in time for the walk out without headlamps, blissed out with the satisfaction that only comes from doing longer routes.

Last week we picked up and moved about 60 miles inland near the town of Oliena. We’re staying at a Refugio (refuge) of Monte Maccione, a co-op started in the 60’s by some Barbargios, the Italian equivalent of the American hippie. Above, the majestic walls of the P. Carabidda, which look almost, like the Dolomites—with apologies for lack of a better comparison. We stowed our belongings and immediately hit the Monte Maccione crags above the Refugio. Historically, this is the taproot of Sard climbing, the place where it all began thanks in part to the alpine military school of Predazzo who first opened many of the routes.

One our way uphill through the old holm oaks and pine forest we encounter the military training ground. The climbs are stiff, made stiffer by countless climbers polishing the limestone to its stone cousin marble. We find it unsatisfying even without the presence of a noisy German family and their five screaming children.

So we move higher up and discover the Marantonio Slab, a fine piece of rock featuring a rare splitter that practically calls out to us when we spot it. We’re losing sun, but spot a nice little dihedral leading two pitches up over a bulge. Caroline is on fire as is her usual and starts up Magico Spettacolo (6a). It’s so good I make her climb it twice. Her personality is one of contracted calmness. But when she is climbing sometimes I find it necessary to encourage her to wear herself out the way terrier owners do with their dogs. I’ve been doing a lot of this recently as the shoulder I fell on in Alabama last December is starting ache. I suspect I have torn a ligament in my rotator cuff. And with 19 days of climbing with but one rest day, it’s not getting any better. I need help just getting my left arm into the shoulder straps of my pack.

The next day we head out to the Sùrtana again, this time approaching from the west. We pass the massif of Punta Cusidore with its trad climbs on arêtes that reach nearly 3,000 feet above the olive orchards below. Once again the comparisons filter in and I can’t help but think this feels like driving Highway 395 under the late afternoon shadow of the High Sierra—that is, before Los Angeles stole all the water in the 1930’s and turned Owens Valley into scrubland and high desert. We’ll be living there in three weeks, and I promise Caroline that the comparisons will soon reverse, and it will be impossible to forget this incomparable place. That, and we must learn enough Italian so we can understand the Italian-only trad guidebook so we can one day get up some of the classics on the Punta Cusidore and its lip-smacking arête jutting into the sky.

Rounding a bend in the dirt road, the Vallata di Lanaitto stretches out before us. On either side huge, mostly virgin walls jut out of the landscape. Sheep and goats graze between the haphazard rows of olive trees, and we are quickly lost, both in the beauty and literally lost of the maze of roads leading (hopefully) to some semblance of a trailhead. At last the road gets too much for our low strung rental car and we ditch it in the weeds. Setting out on foot, we head into a canyon that at least feels right and soon meet a trail dipping in and out of a rocky wash.

An arrow etched into a boulder points the ways. And we have lunch in a meadow, contemplating the sketchy weather that has come up out of the west. The minstrel winds are gusting hard again, and our multi-pitch plans are slowly being dashed to the fast-changing Sard weather. We should have been here hours ago. Or yesterday.

From our climb two days previous we had looked down on the Nuraghic village of Tiscali, and now with the weather being unsettled I prevail upon Caroline that a cultural detour might be a good thing. She’s reluctant. She has a whole ticklist of climbs to do. Adding to the urgency is the fact that we must leave tomorrow and catch a flight to rainy Berlin. She wants to squeeze as much Sard limestone into one last day as she can. And I honestly can’t blame her.

Still, I nudge her up the trail in the direction of the ancient village, impatient to get an estranged hint of the original Sard people and how they lived, but hoping this diversion doesn’t impinge on climbing. After we’ve climbed nearly a thousand feet out of the valley, Caroline starts to wonder. A sign stating twenty minutes to the village does nothing to convince her this is a good idea. It will only be a pile of old stones, faint vestiges of a culture long disappeared to time. We make it in seven minutes. The sign must have been in tourist time.

And there we enter a huge collapsed cave, stalactites hanging from the lip of the ceiling. Small stone huts shaped like hives nestle in the bottom of the cave. It’s a small town right out of the Bronze Age, and we walk slowly in awed silence.

It’s difficult to peg the Nuraghic culture without falling into broad generalizations simply because they were around for such a long time. It is thought they begin somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 to 10,000 B.C. and went through many metamorphoses and conquests before being nearly wiped out by the Romans. To call them hunter/gatherers is correct to a certain extent, but they also grew crops. Wandering through Tiscali I am reminded of what I read about them on a Website. I am also reminded of Camp 4.

The Nuraghic culture is not classic but “impulsive,” avoiding the perfection and the finished, favoring the lack of harmony and equilibrium, the rough improvisation. The villages have no peculiar planning elements. They’re a sort of blocks irregularly spread, underling a temporary community, not really felt but accepted only for need not for a common interest. This sort of ‘building insularity’ is the result of a strong individualist philosophy of the Nuraghic families and clans.

And so, no doubt, a kinship forms as we walk amongst the ruins. And no doubt they climbed (they had to get here) this beautiful limestone, felt the bite of this moon rock on their hands. We leave the village, walking down the trail wrapped in our own thoughts of a civilization that is lost to time but fully centered in this space. We feel as though we have thread on our own precious and infinitely finite time on this fine planet. The fact that we are mere flecks of highly disposable carbon in time and space offers little comfort. It brings forth a biological urge in me. All told it fills me with a mixture of perpetuation and survival. Or put more aptly, a boneheaded boner. I am passing soon from this life and I must mate with my wife. Pull her into the bush under a 300-year-old oak, and mount her with wild Nuraghic abandon.

But Alas! She wants, nay, needs to climb. We head down valley then up to the Sùrtana and do a host of climbs before darkness falls. Must say, even with one arm, it’s nearly as good as sex.

Our flight isn’t until four p.m. and on the way to the airport we stop off at a crag near the town of Siniscola. We climb a few mad hours, a constant, irritating eye on the time. It would be easy to miss the flight, to fall into abandonment of whatever you thought was your previous life. It would be that easy to simply just stay until the money ran out. Caroline fires off an onsight of a climb not found in the guidebook, an overhanging arête that meets an exposed and run-out roof. I couldn’t be prouder of the missus, though I pass on following the route in favor of healing my gimpy shoulder.

We reach the airport, repack and are soon lining up to go through the dreaded airport security. Dreaded because last time, Hitler’s Italian girlfriend forced me to throw away our rope in the trash when we tried to pass through the first time in Sardegna. It was a prized rope, one that Doug Robinson, famed father of clean climbing, had given us as a wedding present. Beside that, we’d grown attached to it in more ways than one.

I don’t know why she thought it would be a flight hazard. I certainly hadn’t entertained thoughts of tying up all the passengers and crew so we could commandeer the jet and fly it into the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But for some reason, and against the more kindly wishes of her security cohorts, she thought it best to hassle us. Thankfully, my mulish wife refused to give up the rope and prevailed upon an Easy Jet employee to check the rope just as the plane was supposed to kick back onto the tarmac. It was close and I dutifully wrote the airline encouraging a raise for the woman who went out of her way.

Second round: Because our bags weighed too much with all the trad gear we’d brought, we were forced to put it in our carry-on. Walking up to the security detail we met eyes with Hitler’s girlfriend and immediately knew we were in trouble. She took out the cams, the biners, anything to do with climbing and told us to check it. “Can’t take this danger,” she said. Then preceded to tell me I couldn’t take my computer for which all my Sard notes were on. Caroline went back and checked another bag, lost some money, and then had to go through the whole rigmarole again with gloves and bomb-squad immediacy. Once again, her cohorts were laughing at her paranoid thoroughness. Somehow she forgot about the computer that I had re-stowed while her back was turned.

Which is all to say, don’t bring anything that even remotely resembles climbing gear into your carry on luggage. As a cautionary tale, you will be made to feel like you are nothing short of a terrorist. I suspect that this woman (who has a severe bob haircut and lousy makeup) has suffered some great injustice. Perhaps, like Hitler, she didn’t get into art school. Perhaps her only son died a horrible death while attempting to rock climb. Perhaps she is simply the embodiment of pure evil. But know this: she is the only Sard we met who doesn’t deserve the beauty of her country. May she rot in Dante’s Inferno.

Ranting aside, we made the flight and rode to Berlin with many of the same snooty Germans (see Part III) we had seen overwhelming the crags of Cala Gonone. We lifted off the ground with leaden hearts, watching the Sardegna coast give way to the windswept sea. We vowed to be back at some point in our lives, vowed we would never forget the place, the Pietra di Luna, or the friends we’d met. And we knew these things to be true.

(If anyone would like more information on Sardegna, where to climb, where to stay, how to get there, etc…. please do not hesitate to email me at bruce.willey@gmail.com. I would be happy to help.)

Line Work: The Climbable art of Danny Paulete

Originally published in Urban Climber issue #18 Aug/Sept. 2007 Photos in printed magazine were by Andrew Kornylak and were, of course, excellent in both artistic and journalistic regards. The pictures on this web version no where and no how reflect nor compare to Kornylak's talented eye.

It looks almost like any other big city art opening. Well-heeled wine and cheese hipsters mill about to ogle paintings, photographs, sculptures, and other abstract objet d’art better left described and deconstructed by the chattering artists’ statements. Then, turning a corner into another room of the Eye Drum, an Atlanta, Georgia art gallery, is something entirely different. For one, there’s a guy climbing on one of the art pieces. For another there sure are a lot of people that look suspiciously out of place for an art gallery. They’re more the scrappy kind you normally see at the Southern bouldering Mecca, Boat Rock.

Hanging from the rafters like the dead tail of a T-Rex is the 900-pound, 30 foot-long pièce de résistance, Rock Climbers Dream Route. The no-nonsense name becomes apparent once you peek underneath and see a splitter hand crack running the length of its belly. And underneath is none other than the sculptor himself who is jamming his way up the art in front of an audience of climbers and art aficionados. Meet Danny Paulete, a 27-year old Atlanta-based climber and sculptor, not to mention one of the few, if not only, artist to appear at his opening wearing climbing shoes and his hands chalked and taped.

As climbers, we search for the most aesthetic line, for the most artistic problem, solving them all with creativity born from gravity and stone. So, it’s no surprise that fine art and climbing have finally met. Paulete has simply taken the concept to its natural, or unnatural—depending on how you look at it—conclusion.

But Paulete’s artist statement takes a less didactic, down home track. “My brother and I are really into crack climbing and finding the perfect cracks in the Southeast,” he says. “So I told him, I’m just going to build this puppy. This is the piece that pretty much started the whole rock climbing theme.”
Paulete has an intense, steadfast gaze that is somewhat softened by his soft-spoken demeanor. Part of this may be due to the hours spent alone hammering rocks and welding steel in the sculpture studio at Georgia State from where he’ll soon be graduating. Another, no doubt, is the fact that he’s a Marine and was deployed in Iraq in 2004-2005, charged with leading security patrols around the Al Asad air base.
“Most of my piece are interactive and I have to be part of them to make them complete. Of course I invite anybody to try them.”

Just be sure you have your crack chops down. Paulete estimates that the Rock Climbers Dream Route is rated somewhere in the neighborhood of 5.10, or 5.11 for those whose hand jamming skills are not up to par. It’s long, over hanging and sustained.

Another piece called The Elements of Rock Climbing is a 28-foot latticework of wood, steel rods and rope that basically looks like a slack line. It also functions the same way with one caveat: Unless you are perfectly balanced the whole sculpture falls apart.

Yet another called Another Successful Climb hangs on the wall with red steel girders holding cracked granite stones moving up the wall. It’s a piece that Paulete would like to install on a building going up a hundred feet or so. He has other aspirations as well. Someday he’d like to design a climbing gym where people could climb on his sculptures, rather than a typical wall with plastic holds. It hardly needs to be said that both art and climbing always require a fair amount of dreaming.

Still, he’s firmly grounded to the idea that he’ll never replace the outdoors as the ultimate climbing destination. “I don’t want to take anything away from nature because it’s done a way better job of creating something to climb than I could ever hope to do,” he says. “But I have to have something to base my work on. I have to go through some kind of experience in order to create something."

Surfing the Sierra Wave

Greetings from Big Pine. Population: 1,500 or so living souls. It’s a town so small that the U.S. Postal Service does not deliver to your house, but one where the postmaster has the uncanny ability to not only recognize your face and attach a name and PO Box to it, but know the sound of your voice. Where? Everybody seems to ask. As these ravens fly, it’s a straight longitude line from Santa Cruz toward the early morning sun. Due east. Crossing over the Coast Range, into the fetch of Central Valley, then running up the forested western slope of the Sierra Nevada, going higher till you hit the 14,000 foot-plus Palisades—the biggest glacier in the Sierra and fading fast!—before swooping down 10,000 feet into Owens Valley. This is where I live out my summers. This is where I hope to die.

Much like the landscape that rises up into High Sierra on one side and the White Mountains on the other, to say you want to die here might be a tad overly dramatic. And the big pines? I’ve never been able to find them except between here and timberline. As you’re leaving toward the next biggest town, Bishop, there’s a well-watered sequoia filling in for the town’s namesake. Like me, the tree is an out-of-towner, a redwood interloper from the Westside. Collectively, we probably had no business being here. But I’m here nonetheless, roots growing deeper by the months.

Here, the mountains are rising and the valley is sinking, creating the deepest valley in North America—perfect place, then, to explore the universe uninterrupted by civilization’s noise, which explains the giant white “ears” (radio dishes) of the Cal Tech’s observatory outside of town. And it partly explains the hermits, the escapees, the climbers, the nincompoops who’ve found the cacophony less intense.

There is an environmental irony at work or play, too, depending on how you look at it. Los Angeles bought up all the land so it could divert (locals prefer the term “steal”) the water. What were once orchards and farmland back in the 1930s is now rangeland and scrub. In this way, L.A. both destroyed and saved it from development. Galen Rowell, a climber and well-known photographer who spent the last years of his life in Bishop before dying in a plane crash on approach to the local airport, said if it weren’t for Los Angeles the Owens Valley would look like Bakersfield.

In an equally disquieting irony, there is a billboard on Indian reservation land on the outskirts of Big Pine, advertising Rowell’s conservation-minded Mountain Light Gallery in Bishop. You gaze upon on Rowell’s famous picture of Owens Valley, the High Sierra in the background and turn an eye out of the frame of the billboard to gaze upon Owens Valley, the High Sierra in the background. A contrapuntal conservation movement, if there ever was one.

I’ve been coming to the Owens Valley and the Sierra since I was a boy. For two glorious (to borrow an oft-used word from John Muir’s Romantic-era lexicon) weeks in the summer my father, brother and I would pick up my grandfather and head north. We would load fishing poles, food, climbing boots, backpacks, a Coleman camp stove, tents, climbing rope and pitons into my dad’s car, then drive out of the smog of San Bernardino. In the middle of the Mojave Desert we would turn onto Highway 395. From there I vividly recall a state of utter expectation, waiting to see the grand escarpment of the Sierra Nevada come into view, not unlike Midwesterners seeing the ocean for the first time I suppose.

Most of the peaks I’d memorized over the years. All of them I wanted to climb. Lone Pine (Mt. Whitney) to Independence (Williamson, University Peak) to Big Pine (Split Mountain, Mt. Sill) to Bishop (Humphreys, Basin and Mt. Tom) Hot Creek (Morrison), Mammoth (Minarets, Ritter) all the way to Bridgeport with the Sawtooth ridges culminating in Matterhorn Peak.

While my dad and grandfather fished, I would take off alone for a day in the mountains. My father, who had done a lot of climbing in the Cascades when he was younger, had introduced me to mountaineering at an early age. I’ve found pictures of us camping together when I was still sucking my thumb. Later, he bought me an ice axe and gave me his Steve Roper guidebook to the High Sierra—that, and the Swiss Matterhorn oil painting in our living room for which I should receive some professional therapy. This painting so captivated me that by the second grade I found myself wearing long wool socks on the outside of my pants in lieu of actual climbing knickers. This look carried me through elementary school, despite constant teasing, and only stopped once a week by force of church.

Convict Lake, the Eiger-like north face of Mt. Morrison standing above and Mt. Laurel’s convoluted metamorphic rock swirling in layers of time and uplift, I took off on a ramble. I ended up going up the face of Mt. Laurel. The climbing became steeper, but never hard, passing the many-hued bands of rock. Looking back into my climbing journal, for which I have kept all these years I wrote: “Glissaded gloriously down a long snow slope leading into a small cirque, when out of the brush came two bucks and one doe, the highlight of the climb.” I was reading way too much John Muir for my own good and probably still am.

Now the climb is a classic in Chris McNamara’s guidebook “High Sierra Climbs.” And rated 5.4, a designation that is, while easy by today’s rock climbing standards, most people prefer to be roped, including me. For those who are parents, I too have asked myself if I would allow an 11-year-old kid to go solo in the mountains. To start, the answer has nothing to do with parental neglect but everything to do with a trust and bond found most readily through adventure. My dad and I had many of them scrambling up peaks before he set me off on my own. Besides, in those days (early ’80s) it was only Class 3 in Roper’s guidebook, climbing that is easily done with a little mountain sense and not much else.

A few days later, he was nearly busted for this trust. My little brother and I climbed the west ridge of Mt. Morrison. We’d gone off-route, run out of water and went down a chute that was too steep to down-climb. So back up into the face of a thunderstorm and down the way we came. By the time we got back to camp, the Inyo County Sheriff had arrived on my dad’s request, and was a few minutes from calling Search and Rescue. We were just looking for supper. My dad got a stern lecture from both his father and the sheriff. Today he no doubt would suffer worse. This was before they put more guardrails on all the steepness and exposures of life.

Lone Pine: Twenty or so years later my dad watched lightning strike the East Face of Mt. Whitney in July. My brother’s opera singer wife had left him for an overweight opera star the week prior and the only thing I could offer him was some time in the mountains. Whitney? So there we sat shivering in the snow 100 feet from the summit, running down the odds with our hair standing on end. The thunder was ear splittingly loud. Bolts of lightning struck from above and sideways, one hitting the nearby Keeler Needle with such force it knocked a loose boulder off the face, leaving a puff of black smoke. We climbed up between the barrage of energy. When the buzzing air intensified preceding a strike, we threw off the climbing hardware and ducked down, hoping to be spared.

The storm worsened, but by scraping snow off the holds with our bare hands and moving between strikes, we made it to the emergency shelter on top. We ran around inside the small stone hut to keep warm, quite literally, and embracing the cliché, tearful with joy. Then, without saying much except for another worn chestnut, my brother said, “There’s something I have to do.” Thus, he walked back out into the storm, to the edge of the East Face, and hurled his platinum wedding ring off into the air. Admittedly, very much Lord of the Rings, but this act cleansed him of his pain, and, as I gathered later, the unremitting thoughts of his former wife mixing vocal chords with another man seemed to cease. After the storm had burnt itself out on our convoluted, early evening descent, he said he was ready to move on no matter what that meant. (As it turns out, divorce, new girlfriend, still climbing.)

Little did we both know that a few years later he would be holding another ring in his coat as my best man at my wedding at Rock Creek, a place where the memories of summers past ran strong, and a place where my wife found a particular fondness. We had met in Joshua Tree where the monzonite desert granite pointed toward the High Sierra. She’d done her tours of the Yosemite big walls and now liked nothing better than to be in the high country of the Sierra, camping by small glacial tarns and waking for an alpine start while the peaks turned orange by the early morning light. We were suited for each other except for the alpine starts.

Doug Robinson, who has, for lack of a better comparison, been called a modern-day John Muir, and who is a climber and long-time Owens Valley resident (though he now resides in Aptos), likes to think of the Sierra as a giant, cresting wave. “The Sierra swells, gentle but powerful, out of the Central Valley to become the dominant feature of California’s geography,” he says. “Not counting the Pacific shoreline, of course, where the greatest fetch on earth throws up the waves that define Surf City. Heading east from here, toward Yosemite or Tahoe, we rise up the backside of the mountain swell and miss the big drama of this range. Only from the east can you catch it as a breaking wave, rearing up two vertical miles until gleaming granite walls toss against ultraviolet sky. We’re hopelessly drawn, paddling up to this tectonic escarpment to surf with all we’ve got—ropes, skis, nylon wings—along the wildest break on the continent. Fully stoked.”

The fact that the range is oriented in the same direction as the waves slamming the Pacific Coastline is probably no geologic coincidence given the forces of plate tectonics on the range. But he’s right. The Sierra is like the biggest and last set wave extending all the way across Nevada to the Rockies. As a recovering surfer it’s something I can understand. When you’re climbing on the Eastside of the Sierra you’re simply surfing one long wave that is eventually going to come crashing down. Geologic time only makes sense sometimes in seconds.

Robinson swung by the Big Pine cottage the other day on his way to guide some climbers up Mt. Whitney. We traded climbing stories while his sense of time got the better of him. The afternoon grew longer, the light coming through Birch Mountain above Big Pine in a slanted way. “Oh, I’ll just hike up a ways and sleep under a tree,” he said, when I asked him if he needed a place to stay. Before he left, he told us it was nearly mandatory to head up into the South Fork of Big Pine Creek and take a look around.

So last week, the missus and I drove 15 minutes up the road to Glacier Lodge in the evening to do just that. With ice axes strapped to our packs, filled with a little bread and some energy bars, we hiked up the South Fork of Big Pine creek. Departing the sage and entering the lodgepole pine forest—our pace motivated by the mosquitoes—we saw at once Middle Palisade and Norman Clyde rising above in the glow of evening light. Glorious. Most years, if you go high enough above timberline you can avoid all but the most tenacious bloodsuckers. But as the Sierra has warmed and the glaciers have receded, the mosquitoes sometimes pest all the way to 12,000 feet.

Finding it late in the day, we camped by the side of a glacier-fed lake, a lake turned turquoise green by the dawdling grate of ice. The smell of pine, granite dust, DEET and the white gas stove, always brings back specific memories. I told my wife how my grandfather would sit with us under the stars at Saddle Bag Lake near Tioga Pass, pointing out the constellations with a high-powered flashlight. I could nearly smell him again.

The same stars but no flashlight here. Just a dinky headlamp (like cell phones, they get smaller by the year), and not strong enough to point with. Aside from the pain of actually carrying it, I’ve lamented the fact that camping and climbing gear has gotten so specialized and light, that it feels more like you’re hauling toys than tools. Norman Clyde, a High Sierra climber and Big Pine resident (and who the above peak was named after) used to carry a 100-pound pack into the Palisades and stay all summer. Now that’s living large, as they say. Clyde died in 1972 in Big Pine and his ashes were spread from the summit of his now namesake mountain.

The next morning we got a compromised alpine start, and started walking up hill toward Norman Clyde and Middle Palisade. The mosquitoes behaved themselves for the most part and we were utterly content to simply breathe the slowly thinning air, and walk over tarns, alpine meadows and stunningly dainty wildflowers given the harshness of season and soil. All of which gave me an unavoidable sensation of joy, a word I don’t like to throw around flippantly. For reasons quite clear, I recalled Robinson’s oft-quoted phrase, “Mountaineering just means glad to be here.” Unlike many climbs we do in the Sierra backcountry, we weren’t hauling our climbing gear, harnesses, and ropes. Nor were our minds toiled by long pitches and route descriptions and hard climbing or loose rock, and running it out past the last piece of protection from a fall while wearing wholly uncomfortable rock- climbing shoes. No, the East Face of Middle Palisade, despite its steep look from afar, is a gentle climb made for feet and the occasional hand—no doubt one of the all-time classics for its grade. Not unlike a day of longboarding Pleasure Point—without the crowds.

We came up a medial moraine to the glacier and pulled out our axes to arrest what would be an unlikely slip. Despite the early morning and the frozen pools of water on the way up, the snow was soft. “This scares me,” my wife said, knee-deep and post-holing in snow. “This glacier is doomed.” In my own short lifetime, short by geologic time at least, I’ve seen the Sierra glaciers shrink. It was being in these mountains at young age that made me realize that they took millions of years to be built and torn down. I thought they were invincible. Now I’m not so sure.

A bit before noon, we climbed up and over the summit blocks. Most of the Palisade Crest above 14,000 feet has knife-edged and exposed summits dropping a few thousand feet to either side. Middle Palisade is no exception, as if the peak is prone to throwing off one more hearty, breathtaking (in the purest sense of the word) challenge.

To the east: The Owens Valley, the scrub and dry heat, the round circle farms of alfalfa in Big Pine, Nev. To the south: that Sierra wave ready to tumble into the Owens Valley. Streams and creeks doing their best to carry it all down before disappearing into Los Angeles’s water supply. To north: White Mountain and Bishop below, the scrappy Owens River Gorge, and the Tahoe Fire looking like a volcano had gone off. To the west: Santa Cruz tucked below the mountains of the Coast Range. Straight across over Kings Canyon, over the smog and haze of Fresno. And there it was, due west. You could see the blueness of air, the ocean’s influence, the kelp reaching through the water for the sun. Almost.

In the summit register, Peter Croft, a well-known Bishop climber of international fame minus the fortune, had signed: “From South Lake, Agassiz, Winchell, Thunderbolt, Starlight, North Palisade, Polomonium, Sill, then big hike to here. 5:30 p.m. Heading home.”

This understated achievement of several miles of technical climbing at 14,000 feet has been done by exactly seven people in the world. It’s that long and hard. Doug Robinson summed up in an e-mail thread that we exchanged over my Middle Palisade trip report when we got back (not unlike this reading material, it turns out).

“Good old Croft, sticking to the ridge until he’s over it for whatever reason, then “hiking” on to Middle Palisade because, well, he’s brimful and it’s still light out. Completely no fuss with just shoes, exactly like Muir on a rambling tear (as in ripping, not sadness).

We lingered for as long as we could on the summit. Enough so that it all became clear. It was time to go home ourselves, surf the wave, so to speak, all the back down into the scrub while we could.

The Nose (5.8) Looking Glass Rock, North Carolina

Four Southern granite pitches sure to raise a few “eyebrows”

From Climbing, Feb.08 Issue

No need for haulbags, speed records, or poop tubes on this Nose. Looking Glass Rock’s beloved romp is a rousing moderate on granite every bit as good as the Valley’s . . . if one succumbs to far-reaching comparisons. Most North Carolina climbers don’t succumb to much of anything, however; mention The Nose around these parts, and it can only mean the proud protuberance of the Glass.

The 600-foot dome of Looking Glass gets its name from thin sheets of verglas that occasionally build up to reflect winter light after a freezing rain. Yet this sheen is not what comes to mind when you stare up at the southwest face: it’s the “eyebrows” — thousands of horizontal wrinkles in the granite veneer, weathered by water seeping into the metamorphosed feldspar and mica.

From below, the first pitch’s 5.5 eyebrows seemingly trace a jug ladder to the summit. But you quickly realize you’ve been duped: the eyebrows slope decidedly downward, requiring underclings, attentive footwork, and savvy gear placement. Get suckered too far up, however, and you might find yourself thinking existential thoughts, your last cam socked deep in the eyeball of a distant brow.

All this fancy footwork gives renewed appreciation for Bob Watts, Robert John Gillespie, and Steve Longenecker, who FA’ed The Nose circa 1966 . . . in lug-soled logging boots. Longenecker and Watts also wore motorcycle helmets, and the climbers used Gold Line rope. To descend, recalls Longenecker, they ran the rope through a carabiner on the fronts of their “rock jocks” [swami belts], and then took the line over the shoulder and behind the back. “Talk about rednecks,” he says. “We were that . . . in more ways than one.”

From the bolted belay atop P1, go slightly left, as the FA team did, aiming for a prominent ramp and adding 40 feet of do-not-miss climbing (and one of the route’s few bomber nut placements). Here, you’ll meet the first steep and balancy crux, working your way right on the ramp and then straight up to another bolted belay. Another 5.8 crux above the bolts and you’re skylarking eyebrows all the way to the aptly named Parking Lot ledge.

Tip the valet and start a fine pitch of 5.7 that slowly eases into fourth class. Up top, savor lunch before rapping (not with a shoulder wrap, we hope) to the rhododendrons.

The Beta
Guidebooks: Selected Climbs in North Carolina,
by Yon Lambert and Harrison Shull; The Climber’s Guide to North Carolina, by Thomas Kelley

Guide Services: Fox Mountain Guides and Climbing School: (888) 284-8433, foxmountainguides.com; Rock Dimensions: (828) 265-3544, rockdimensions.com Equipment Shop: Looking Glass Outfitters: (866) 351-2176, lookingglassoutfitters.com

Season: Best in fall and spring, though winter and summer offer opportunities, as The Nose faces south.

Show us your photos of The Nose and win ultralight curve nuts from Metolius! Log on to climbing.com’s Photo Post, submit your The Nose images to the Classic Climbs folder, and on April 1, the photographer Jim Thornburg will pick his favorite. The winning entry will receive a full set of stonker Ultralight Curve Nuts ($109) from Metolius Climbing.

GEAR BETA FOR THE NOSE
Cams work best in the eyebrows-everything from TCU's or Aliens to 3" Cams. One set will see you through. Tri-cams work especially well in the eyebrows. Stoppers are difficult to place but bring them along for the other classics in the area such as any of the South Face crack routes. Also, bring long slings to avoid rope drag and two ropes if you intend to rap the route. Rap down Peregrine to avoid those coming up.

FIVE CLASSICS NEAR THE NOSE OF LOOKING GLASS ROCK, NORTH CAROLINA

Peregrine 5.9
Another Steve Longenecker (and Brian Lee, Sean Coffey) masterpiece done almost 25 years after The Nose. Also a straighter and slightly more difficult line that ends up in the same spot as The Nose route. Not to mention plenty of staring contests with the infamous eyebrows.

Sundial Crack 5.8
A beautiful line and perfect alternative if The Nose is crowded on a sunny weekend day-which is almost always. Though there's only about 20 feet of crack, the rest of the route will continue to hone your brow master skills to the hilt.

Titties and Beer 5.9
The hedonistic name was inspired by a Frank Zappa song, and although this is the South, it's probably not something you'll find on the route. Although, this being the South, you never know. Located on the Sun Wall around the corner (right) of The Nose, Titties and Beer was once dubbed the "world's hardest 5.8." Keep this in mind, especially on the ultra exposed traverse moves over the bulges on the third pitch. As first ascent climber Bob Rotert puts it, "The 5.8 climber might want to have a beer (or two) to calm one's nerves after tackling the terrific, sensuous, undulations of this route."

Second Coming 5.7
A rising hand crack splitting the spine of the good open book makes this one of the best climbs on the South Face of Looking Glass. (Park at the South Face trailhead right above the free climber campground to access these routes.) With this kind of climbing, Second Coming gets downright religious even for the Bible belt. Place your gear methodically, however. This route sees more accidents than any at Looking Glass and many a leader has offered up thanks after passing the bulging crux.

Gemini Crack 5.8
Astrologically-speaking the twin cracks at the crux swallow fingers and gear. Perfect crack climb to end the day before heading into Brevard for Mexican food and $6 pitchers of beer at El Chapala at the bottom of the road.

Scrambles With Doug Robinson

At a little known and rarely visited crag in the Santa Cruz Mountains called the Skyline Slabs, Doug Robinson moves carefully up the sandstone, rock that once rested at the bottom of a primordial sea. Crusty, multi-hued lichen covers most of the rock face and what’s left of the tiny hand and footholds. Robinson aims toward a rusted, 1950s-era Sierra Club bolt sunk a few inches into the rock 20 feet above him. Until he clips a carabiner to the dubious bolt, I won’t be able to catch him and my belay—a climber’s term for literally “holding each other’s lives in our hands” by running the rope through a friction brake on a harness—will be worthless. Robinson is a rock- and alpine-certified American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA) mountain guide. In fact, he’s the first president of the AMGA and has been climbing for more than four decades around the world. He’s also considered in climbing circles to be one of the most influential, respected climbers of his generation and beyond, both for his extensive writings on the subject and his bold climbs.

He’s also been called a modern-day John Muir, having spent countless years in the Range of Light, following his bliss. And on top of that, for Robinson this place is full circle: He honed his skills at Castle Rock State Park just down the road from her when he was a teenager. Still, he seems gripped, and his easy banter on the ledge—admiring the wild flowers and an animated conversation about the brain’s response to climbing—has faded to focused silence.

A group of vultures whirl overhead, swooping in close to check out this compact, 5-foot- 5-inch tall, 57-year-old man who could possibly turn into a late afternoon lunch if he falls. And Robinson would be good pickings as humans go, with salubrious muscles that have spent years straining up countless mountains. Robinson finally clips the first bolt and I begin to belay him after a rather long exhalation of relief. Though he makes the climbing look easy, it’s clear that slippery lichen is upping the rating on this climb to at least a 5.9, maybe 5.10 (5.1 being easy and 5.13 in the realm of angels and Chris Sharma). But it’s hard to tell. Plus, Robinson is carrying a pack filled with climbing gear, a sandwich that his son, Tory, made for him, and some water. He’s also been known to carry rocks in his pack into the Aptos hills near Santa Cruz, California before a big climb, just to shape up. This isn’t usually necessary though since he’s away guiding climbs or on cross-country ski trips 100 or more days out of the year. The crux comes after the bolt, where the rock face bulges vertically. One slim foothold among a wide open face, the only handhold is a dimple where the rock has peeled off, and the lichen hasn’t had time to reestablish itself. After a long time of searching with his hands and fingers, Robinson mantles on this small hold by pressing the palm of his hand on it. He pulls up his right leg, placing his foot on a nubbin of rock until his whole body comes to rest on the one foothold. His arms go out searching over the face and his left hand finds purchase on a slightly larger handhold, a hold that climbers, in these circumstances, have taken to calling the “Thank God hold.” Strangely, he doesn’t scrape much of the lichen off potential footholds. It’s as if his idea of climbing the face clean and leaving his footprint on the climb is too abhorrent despite the concern for his safety.

This is wilderness after all. Never mind the house above that we sneaked by, hoping not to startle the dogs. It’s wilderness here, where virtually nobody treads, or climbs. Even the trail to this place has been taken over by the deer, mountain lions, and the coyotes that have added some paw tracks following the deer’s trail. Around us are deep, redwood-filled canyons and steep oak and madrone-covered ridges that stretch out to the ocean; wild land that is claimed, mapped and measured, yet wild nonetheless. As Robinson put it, when we were tying into the rope: “Wilderness is about the interplay between imagination and reality. It carries us off to the edges of self-expression.”

In a small crack, Robinson places two well-worn chocks and attaches a carabiner to the rope. From here the climb eases off a bit. Despite this, the vultures swoop closer, perhaps intuiting Robinson’s adrenaline-laced blood, the fear of falling below his tenuous stance still coursing through his nerve endings.

Watching Robinson place climbing gear into a small crack is akin, to the climbing world at least, like witnessing Einstein write “The Theory of Relativity” on the blackboard—he’s a legend at work. You see, Robinson is largely responsible for the clean climbing revolution that had climbers re-racking their harnesses with chocks, stoppers or nuts (aluminum wedges placed by hand in the crack), instead of pitons and hammers. Before this, climbers pounded in metal nails known as pitons into the cracks to safeguard a potential fall. But as climbing grew in popularity during the late ’60s and ’70s, the tough granite rock of Yosemite Valley and elsewhere was starting to show signs of wear and tear from pitons. Two renowned climbers of the day, Yvon Chouinard (who founded Patagonia and Black Diamond) and Tom Frost climbed the nose of El Capitan using only nuts and stoppers. Robinson and other climbers, like his mentor Chuck Pratt, and climbing partner Dennis Hennek, were already proving that nuts were a viable alternative to pitons.

“We were coming from the John Muir mindset,” says Chouinard from his office in Ventura, where Patagonia is based. “We came up with a whole line of chocks we called hexcentrics and a line of stoppers. It pretty much covered the whole range and size of cracks. But this was such a radical idea that it was hard to convince climbers that instead of pounding in a piton with a 20-ounce hammer, you fit these things in with your fingers. Climbers didn’t trust them and thought the whole idea was crazy.”

So Chouinard recruited Robinson to write an essay in the annual Chouinard Equipment Catalog titled “The Whole Natural Art of Protection,” a poignant manifesto that outlined the techniques of placing stoppers using what Chouinard calls “Robinson’s poetic prose.”

“Clean is climbing the rock without changing it,” Robinson wrote in the 1972 catalog. “A step closer to organic climbing for the natural man.” But it was the first clean ascent of the majestic Northwest Face of Half Dome, featured in a 1974 cover story in National Geographic, that blew pitons and hammers back into the ice age that had initially formed Yosemite Valley. Galen Rowell, who would later become one of the world’s most sought after photographers before he died in a plane crash on approach to Bishop, California, had just got his first big break with an assignment from National Geographic to climb the commanding 2,000-foot vertical centerpiece of the Valley. Rowell had serious trepidations about doing the climb without pitons especially since he was expected to deliver a story for the yellow-bordered magazine with a summit ending. Nevertheless, he brought on board Dennis Hennek and Robinson who were setting the standards in clean climbing in the valley.

“We were sorting the gear, getting ready for the climb,” Robinson recalls, “when this gigantic steamer trunk arrives from National Geographic filled with Nikons. So we told Galen to sort through the camera stuff and when his back was turned we took all the pitons out of the haul bags. We didn’t tell him until we up three or four pitches (a pitch is a rope length, typically 160 feet) and were committed. Dennis pretended to rummage around the bag looking for the pitons. Galen was OK with it. His only comment was Dennis wasn’t a very convincing fibber.”

Six months after the article about their successful ascent was published, most climbers had altogether abandoned pitons and were strictly climbing clean. (In a humorous side note, high above the valley floor on a small ledge, Robinson and the others stripped off their clothes hoping to be the first naked Caucasians to grace the pages of the venerable magazine. The Geographic editors eventually declined the climbers’ slaphappy antics.)

“He’s adept at any kind of climbing, which is rare,” says Chouinard. “You get specialists these days that only do crag climbing or who only boulder, or only do ice climbing. But he does it all and he’s really good in the backcountry.”

Born in Maryland two weeks after Hiroshima in 1945, Robinson’s family moved to Los Altos, where his father, a NASA engineer, worked in the first tech wave to hit the Silicon Valley. Every summer in September, beginning when he was 5 years old, the Robinson family would take a two-week vacation in the Sierra, camping around the shores of Tenaya Lake in the Yosemite high country. These trips left a lasting impression and forged the kinship with the mountains that Robinson has never been able to shake.

On one of these summer forays when he was just 13, Robinson walked around the lake and started scrambling up the 600-foot Pywiack Dome. Nearing the top, Robinson got himself into a situation that all climbers must face eventually—he could neither go up nor down. “I got myself spaced out on some friction and froze,” he says. By now, people driving along the highway spotted the young boy and called up to see if he was fine. The ranger was called and four hours later a rescue team came around the backside of the dome and lowered a rope.

“The ranger bawled us out a bit for not keeping track of our children,” says Helen Robinson, Doug’s mother from her home in Mountain View, where she lives with Doug’s 95-year-old father, Russ. It quickly became apparent that if Robinson were going to continue climbing he would have to learn the ropes. And that’s exactly what he did, taking a rock climbing course from the Sierra Club at Castle Rock in the Santa Cruz Mountains, riding his bicycle up the steep, windy road to get to the crags.

“He asked me when he was 14 and beginning to climb, ‘do you worry about me?’” Helen recalls. “And I said, ‘no, I don’t.’ He was always outdoors if he could be, even at night,” she says in her sweet-honey voice of recollection. Then, as if that statement might be construed as some latent teenage truancy, she say adds: “But he’s a very satisfying son.”

By the time he turned 19, Robinson was climbing every chance he got, trading in a conventional life for the life of the Camp 4 climbing bum—the infamous Yosemite Valley climbers camp where climbers would, and still stay. It was the tail end of the “Golden Age” in the Valley and Robinson climbed in the shadows of greats like Royal Robbins, Steve Roper, Chouinard, Chuck Pratt, soaking up the climbing craft and lifestyle.

After the climbing season ended he enrolled at Foothill College, then UC Davis since it was the closest university to Yosemite, only to be asked to leave because he was spending too much time in the mountains. “It was just dirt-bag living,” he says. “It was easier back then to surf out to the edges of this culture and do whatever you wanted to do with less economic constraint.”

Eventually, though, he ended up at San Francisco State while living in the Haight-Ashbury heyday of the late-’60s. With five final term papers in literature to complete before he could graduate, Robinson once again turned his attention to the mountains, and penned what would become his most famous essay about climbing, “The Climber as Visionary,” published in the now defunct climbing journal, Ascent. Partly influenced by the times, partly melodious climbing philosophy, and part amateur neurophysiology regarding to the brain’s response to fear and adrenaline, “Visionary” is still widely thought to be one of the best climbing discourses ever written. It has been translated into five languages, photocopied, and still gets hailed in the streets of Chamonix, France, the largest concentration of climbing in the Alps, as les visionaire.

“Climbing requires intense concentration,” he writes in the essay. “I know of no other activity in which I can so easily lose all hours of an afternoon without a trace. Or regret. I have had storms creep up on me as if I had been asleep, yet I know the whole time I was in the grip of an intense concentration, focused first on a few square feet of rock, and then on a few feet more. I have gone off to boulder and returned to find the stew burned.”

It’s through the intense experiences, where every thought and fear is consolidated into the present moment, that Robinson wrote about the release that one feels after summiting, getting off the mountain, or when the pitch of the climb culminates at the belay stance: “... the visionary experiences are apparent: the overwhelming beauty of the most ordinary objects—clouds, granite, snow—of the climber’s experience, a sense of the slowing down of times even to the point of disappearing, and a feeling of contentment, an oceanic feeling of supreme sufficiency of the present.”

Soon after the essay was published, Robinson moved to the Sierra and took a job as a mountain guide in the Palisades—an area in the backcountry that boasts the highest concentration of 14,000-foot peaks, and the largest glacier in the High Sierra. This is home turf—or better put, granite and snow—for Robinson, and he continues to guide clients up the aptly named Temple Crag, and routes up Mt. Sill, North Palisade, Starlight Peak, and Thunderbolt Peak, where he has been credited with many first ascents.

When he wasn’t in the mountains he was working on his writings, which were published in a wide variety of outlets including Esquire, Climbing, Ascent, Rock and Ice, and Outside Magazine where, at its inception, he was offered a staff writer position. He declined because it would have kept him in an office away from climbing. However, they insisted and gave him a desk anyway. There, he learned from outdoor writers like Tim Cahil and Terry McDonell. He also formed a friendship with William Randolph Hearst III, who he guides to this day to “just sit around the fire and drink wine and speculate on the state of humanity.”

Robinson still derives half of his modest income from writing when he’s not out in the wilderness guiding ski trips and climbing routes. But when he was in the mountains he was all over North America, New Zealand, the Alps and the Himalayas, the latter a range that he says he’ll never go back to again.

ABC Sports sponsored Robinson, Tom Frost, Jeff Lowe, and David Brashears to climb the 22,494-foot Ama Dablam, which, though it stands in the shadow of Mt. Everest, is much steeper and a more difficult climb. Sir Edmund Hilary, walking by on his way to climb Everest for the first time called it “impossible.” The climbers ascended 5.8 rock in stiff mountain boots and vertical ice for over 4,000 feet on a route that had only seen one previous ascent. Robinson says he never quite adjusted to the high altitude. “I was getting stupid at those elevations,” he says. “Made a lot of bad decisions that I staked my life on, decisions I would never make at 14,000 feet.” Nevertheless, the climbers reached the summit after spending 30 days on the ridge.

Robinson’s been fortunate in a lot of ways. Aside from a major, life threatening 40-foot fall from a Buttermilk bouldering problem near Bishop, which left him with a broken back (he taught a telemark ski clinic just three weeks later and, “my doctor told me I could do anything I wanted except fall. It’s the only time I’ve skied for a whole week without falling.”), he hasn’t had any major injuries to complain about. Some of his climbing peers haven’t been so lucky. Most, however, haven’t met their deaths in the mountains as expected, but from car crashes or, in the case of his friend Galen Rowell, a recent plane crash.

“People ask me if my sense of mortality has changed since I’ve had kids,” he says, “And the answer is no. I’ve always been pretty much conservative in what I do and how I approach it.” Though he’s approaching 60 he says he doesn’t plan on retiring anytime soon. He still has at least a 100 first ascents in the Sierras that he has his eye on, some of which he hopes to do with paying clients. And he’s plugging away at a new book tentatively tilted the “Alchemy of Action,” a continuation of some of the ideas found in “The Climber as Visionary.”

At his house perched in the Aptos hills, Robinson sits at a table on the porch, a sliver of the ocean peeking through the live oaks that surround the house. Packs, climbing shoes, ropes interplay with stuffed animals and toys on the pinewood floors. Photographs of the East Side of the Sierra and a pair of old wooden skis hang on the walls. It’s a nine-hour commute from the Sierra but he says he lives here because of love, namely his wife Kristen and their two children Tory and Kyra. Back from a three-week guiding trip Robinson has only three days before he heads north to Mt. Shasta for five, possibly seven days, depending on the weather.

Kristen, an accomplished backcountry skier in her own right, puts up with it, she says, because he’s extremely kind, patient, tenderhearted, has a gift for connecting with people, and he’s a great dad. “There’s a timelessness about Doug, literally and figuratively,” she says. “And so the practicalities of running a family together are challenging sometimes when I’m not sure when he’s coming back. But he touches people in important ways. When he’s out there that’s what he’s doing.”

Kristen was working at the UC Santa Cruz recreation department when Robinson gave a slide show at the University. She didn’t know who he was. One of her co-workers, who did know of Robinson, peeked around the corner and said, ‘he’s too short for you.’” But that night they talked on the phone for six hours before they met in person. A few years later the couple took their honeymoon as far away from the conventional sandy beaches and margaritas as they could get, skiing 45 miles over the crest of the High Sierra.

Robinson reaches a small oak tree growing precariously from the face and sets up a belay 130 feet above. He calls down over the wind “off belay” and pulls up the rope until it’s tight on my harness. It’s time for me to start climbing. But within the first five feet I’m flailing on the rock like a gimped lobster finding little to zero purchase on the lichen. I fall and the rope pulls taut, my ego and thoughts of impressing this mountain legend, smashed to hell. I try again and get past the section and up to the first bolt and take out the carabiner and webbing. My left foot edges on a small skinny nuance of rock so small a pencil would fall away. Yet resting my body weight on one foothold is tiring and I must make up my mind where to go, and fast before my leg starts shaking, a motion so characteristic climbers call it “doin’ the Elvis.”

There isn’t a handhold above. So I try a few things that don’t work and find myself slipping off into space again. Robinson catches my fall but I slide down the face a few feet, skin a knee and arm in a desperate, clumsy motion, hardwired fear of heights beating inside my skull. I repeat this again until finally I figure out the move and climb up to where Robinson is calmly sitting on a small ledge.

“Good job,” he says. Usually I am on the sharp end of the rope, leading climbs in the easy to moderate class or soloing class 4 Sierra peaks. I would never attempt such lichen madness as this. Yet Robinson seems to revel in it, saying it adds a certain alpine quality to the climb as if the lichen is a substitute for ice. After two more pitches of fourth class climbing we reach the top. The vultures disappear down into the valley below and we start coiling the ropes.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for humility in climbing,” Robinson says. “Everybody gets their egos smashed on the rocks. And does so regularly. That’s the way it is.”
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On our way long way back to the parking lot we trade mountaineering stories, mine being of the garden variety of close calls and occasional falls. Despite this, Robinson listens intently, punctuated by his soft drawls of “yeah’s” as we walk through the long grass. It’s hard to get him to tell a story about himself or his exploits. Because to him, stuck in a blizzard, cold, wet, lightening striking all over the place, is just part of being a mountaineer. And more opportunity for humility.

But eventually, when we get to an old Scottish bar tucked beneath the redwoods, Robinson does tell me some new ideas he’s formulating about wilderness and how to get out into the mountains more often, and for longer periods of time. He calls this cultural paradigm the “new nomadics” where people can go out for more extended sojourns. He’s working on a new version of a Bedouin-like tent he designed made of hemp, a five-pound collapsible wood stove providing the warmth.

“There’s nothing wrong with freedom no matter which way you look at it,” he says, after we order another round of beers. “The cool thing about wilderness is the meeting between the wild outside and the wild inside. When they play on each other good things happen. The brain is, after all, the true frontier, and who knows where the human spirit will go.”

For more information on Doug Robinson visit his Website www.movingoverstone.com, read his book “A Night on the Ground A Day in the Open,” or see his best-selling rock climbing video “Moving Over Stone.” Most of all get out there.

Hetch Hetchy Climbing

Climbing
September 2006

Resurrection of the Dammed
By Doug Robinson and Bruce Willey
Photos by Shawn Reeder


The forgotten and flooded Hetch Hetchy Reservoir is poised in the spotlight of a century-old environmental battle, while a small group of climbers continue to push lines above the water.

Sean Jones was working another project in the Fjord, which as usual for Sean meant juggling. His little family in El Portal, the center of his life. Their home, half rebuilt. Work, also construction. Climbing sponsors — after all those dirtbag years he finally had some. Running back out to the dam at twilight to make the government curfew. And this wall.

He was amazed that the line was coming together. But just. Linking up the crack systems was face climbing. Thin, but the holds kept appearing. Kept being just climbable. This was his third major climb in this strangely quiet valley — quiet except for the constant roar of Wapama Falls over his shoulder, a roar maybe even throatier than Yosemite Falls, itself not so distant. And Hetch Hetchy was Sean’s fourth major area for projects in the new millennium, after working forgotten corners of Yosemite Valley, the boldly featured walls of Shuteye Ridge, and a massive backcountry dome far up the great San Joaquin River Valley.

It always came down to the place itself. This valley everyone had heard of and no one knew. Because it had been filled with water. The water was making all the difference — making it noisy and keeping it quiet. Blinding with reflection, and scorching with reflected heat. The concrete plug in the throat of the valley was attracting a lot of political heat, too. Homeland Security was afraid someone would blow it up, and environmentalists were afraid no one ever would.

Reduced to comparisons, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir works the imagination southward, sending it a mere 15 miles, as the raven flies, to Yosemite Valley for bearings. The similarities are hard to ignore … as long as you keep your eyes above what is less than affectionately called the “bathtub ring,” beneath which the granite and talus have been mopped clean of life by the synthetic ebb and flow of water. (The water, circa 300 feet deep, is so pure it doesn’t need filtering when it issues from taps in San Francisco.)

The climbing here commands a certain respect. None of it easy, none likely to attract the weekend climber who can’t muster a thirst for the unknown — who isn’t comfortable with the stiff grades, or the curfew, or the camping ban, or rattlesnakes, or the mountain lions, or the poison oak, or long approaches, or lack of comforts, or the absence of spraylords who make the “other” valley so attractive and not so attractive at the same time.

There’s El Cap’s kith and kin, Wapama Rock, as haughty and elegant as anything the glaciers of Yosemite Valley did doze. Or Kolana Rock, looking like Middle Cathedral’s older, perhaps more dignified brother — dark granite sweeping down to the water like a battleship’s bow. The eye then drifts to Hetch Hetchy Dome, to the left of Wapama Falls, one of the biggest, if not the highest-volume, falls in the park. The dome rises 1,000 feet above 800 feet of sumptuous cracks and arches, over small meadows and glacial benches filled with black oaks. If size matters, Hetch Hetchy Valley is as long and about half as wide as its so-called twin.

Of course, none of these similarities were lost on John Muir. Through three presidential administrations in the early 1900’s, the famed naturalist fought tooth, nail, and pen to keep Hetch Hetchy Valley from being dammed. “It is estimated that about 7,000 persons have seen Yosemite,” he wrote in 1893. “If this multitude were to be gathered again and set down in Hetch Hetchy, perhaps less then one percent of the whole number would doubt their being in Yosemite. They would see rocks and waterfalls, meadows and groves, of Yosemite size and kind. Amid so vast an assemblage of sublime mountain forms, only the more calm and careful observers would be able to fix upon the special differences.”

Nearly 100 years later, nobody has to be a “careful observer.” The differences between Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy are glaring. In fact, a 117-billion-gallon difference — the amount of water held in by O’Shaughnessy Dam — is readily apparent even before you set eyes on Hetch Hetchy. For one, you’ll likely be alone, save for a few tourists who have come to gawk at the dam or walk the trail to Wapama Falls (only about 50,000 people a year bother, whereas 3.5 million visitors choked Yosemite last year). By comparison, White Wolf, a single campground on the road to Tuolumne Meadows, gets more visitors — and is only open in the summer. Secondly, when you drive into Hetch Hetchy, your license plate number will be recorded for national security purposes, being that the dam is a potential post-9/11 terrorist target. And, you’ll be handed a brochure produced by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission espousing the breathtaking utility of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and its dam. Stay too late and you will be towed — posthaste.

Galen Rowell was the first climber to start poking around in the Fjord. He came to Hetch Hetchy in 1969, and in the following three years, with various partners, knocked off three of the biggest rocks above the reservoir: Kolana, Wapama, and Hetch Hetchy Dome. Later, he wrote about the experience for Ascent, portions of which ended up in his book High and Wild. Rowell set the bipolar environmental attitude for Hetch Hetchy climbers to come. Waking from a bad dream during a bivy high on Hetch Hetchy Dome, Rowell looked down at the reservoir and mused. “There lay the valley floor,” he wrote. “But I saw no roads, no buildings, no campfires, or smoke; heard no horns, motors, or voices. Below me was only a ‘narrow body of monotonous water’ … I repeated my environmental catechism: Yosemite was saved; Hetch Hetchy was ruined for all time. It had a hollow ring.”

On the one hand, the reservoir had spared Hetch Hetchy from becoming another Yosemite Valley. On the other, damming a valley in a national park was a colossal mistake, akin — as Rowell put it — to a Greek tragedy. The knotty ironies and questions go even deeper. Did cutting off the valley at the knees, so to speak, with an ever-present flood make Hetch Hetchy more of a wilderness setting? Had the dam’s waters destroyed the valley or were they actually preserving it for a time when we would have the better environmental sense to care for it?

Dams are not forever. Like scientists, climbers are well attuned to the differences between human time and geologic time. Mostly, we just try to avoid the intersection between the two, hollering down Rock! while enjoying our miniscule slice of time between epochs. Hetch Hetchy took millions of years of geologic engineering. The O’Shaughnessy Dam, a marvel of engineering in itself, took 20 years to complete. Do the math: Hetch Hetchy’s valley will one day return.

Yet, even now there is a groundswell of interest in speeding up the process. As we speak, California “governorator” Arnold Schwarzenegger is looking at recent studies by the University of California at Davis, as well as Environmental Defense and Restore Hetch Hetchy. All three studies offer a workable alternative to unplugging the dam without adverse loss of water or power to San Francisco and surrounding areas. The City, despite its otherwise green record of recycling programs and plans to turn restaurant grease into biofuel for municipal buses, strongly opposes the plan.

Unplugging the dam has sparked a fierce debate, reigniting Muir’s last stand. Admittedly, it won’t be easy or cheap. Estimates vary depending on whom you talk to, but somewhere in the billions of dollars is a good place to start.

“The naysayers say we have a mountain to climb,” says Ron Good, executive director of Restore Hetch Hetchy (hetchhetchy.org). “I respond by saying we have some of the best climbers in the world on our team. [Yvon Chouinard is on their advisory committee, and the late climber, conservationist, and former Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower was on the founding board of directors.] People ask me if I think it’s a radical idea to tear down the dam and restore Hetch Hetchy. Well, wasn’t it a radical idea to put a dam within a national park?”

In a nutshell, the idea would be to enlarge the existing downstream dam on the Tuolumne River, the Don Pedro Reservoir, and the Calaveras Reservoir in the Bay Area. As San Francisco prepares to spend $4.5 billion for capital improvements on the Hetch Hetchy reservoir’s 162 miles of leaky old pipeline and infrastructure in the near future, advocates for tearing down the dam say the time to start acting on a restoration project is now.

Good and others believe that when the dam is unplugged, Hetch Hetchy can be brought back to life in a responsible manner, without the lodges, cabins, tours buses, curio shops, and overcrowded campgrounds that plague Yosemite. There’s no doubt a restored Hetch Hetchy Valley would attract thousands of tourists, taking some of the heat off that overcrowded other valley. Ultimately, the park service would be charged with creating and maintaining a re-established Hetch Hetchy, but Good believes the valley can be restored with a 21st century environmental lens rather than the late-nineteenth and early 20th century mindset that created modern Yosemite.

Restore Hetch Hetchy’s feasibility study offers two visions for how to turn the reservoir “back to nature.” One would be simply to let nature take its course. The other is to encourage the growth of native grasses, shrubs, trees, and even lichen on the granite based on early photographs and Muir’s extensive writings.

The timeline for completing such an extensive project puts the unplugged valley somewhere in the neighborhood of 2025, at which time the Restore Hetch Hetchy study ponders the possibilities in the present tense: “Climbers are challenged by dozens of new climbing routes, most notably Kolana Rock, and the El Capitan-like rock face on the north side of the valley.”

Well, the millennium has already yielded “dozens of new climbing routes.” And, who knows what still lies below the water line? Then, there’s the valley floor. Would there be a Camp 4 counterpart — a walk-in campground — as the study suggests? Are a Hetchy Nutcracker, Swan Slab, and Sunnyside Bench drowned in the depths? Who knows? In Hetch Hetchy, imagination floats free.

If there is a Hetch Hetchy testpiece to come, it will probably be Resurrection (V 5.12c). The name defies the obvious metaphors while clueing into them at the same time. Sean Jones called this, his and Brian Ketron’s first big-wall climb in Hetch Hetchy, two years ago, Resurrection, because, as Jones puts it, it caught a bit of Rowell’s line while going in a more direct — and, more importantly, free — line up the 1,800-foot face of Hetch Hetchy Dome. Old school meeting the new millennium. “The name was also inspired by a Rob Halford Judas Priest album,” admits Jones.

Nearby, someone else had been working the same wall, the only evidence some bloody fixed lines hanging on what would later be called Zeus. Not bloody as in British-profanity “bloody,” but bloody as in blood — real blood — on the ropes. It gave Sean pause. Later, the story would unfold at the Evergreen Lodge bar, where Sean and the mystery climber, Tim Tuomey, met. It would take a few beers just to be told. And another pitcher to digest.

Tuomey is an ex-Marine with a high-tech career in San Francisco; he drives a classic VW van with a Grateful Dead sticker in the rear window. He first came to Hetch Hetchy in 1998 and by 2000 became a regular, putting up 20-plus routes with various partners, including Nick Simon, who just happened to be tending the bar at Evergreen the day Jones and Tuomey met. If there’s such a thing as a Hetch Hetchy local, Tim is it. In half jest, half deep appreciation of the place, he’s taken to calling the Reservoir the “Fjord.” Being from the Big City, he also drinks the water.

So … Tim and Clint Cummings had been jugging their fixed lines to work on Zeus, a major new 5.10 A3 line. It cut across the old Rowell route Sean was “resurrecting,” and shared the third pitch before heading off into the striking Hetch Hetchy dihedral. Hundreds of feet higher, the fixed line zagged sharply left under a small roof. That’s where Tim’s ascenders abruptly came off his rope, sending him into freefall. With moments to think or die, he reached out and barely managed to grab the line. But, now, he was rocketing down the wall. He clamped down so hard on the line that skin burned off his palms. The pain was intense, but so was the acceleration. “I would ease up my grip, then clamp down again,” he says. “There’s only so much meat on a hand.” He holds up his mitts, and you can see where the whole pad of his little finger got torqued sideways. You can also see a big scar inside the elbow.

While the rope burned through his arms and hands, Tim fell. Guided by the grace of “the great Miwok Spirit,” as he credits it, Tim crash-landed on a 4x4 platform on the wall, now more than aptly dubbed Savior Ledge. Crumbled and broken, but alive, Tim yelled up to Cummings, at the top of the lines above him, that he didn’t need any help. In fact, in his adrenalized state, Tim had become so concerned about the two of them rapping off a still-unfinished anchor that he insisted Clint keep drilling. Tim settled in with burned paws for a long wait, then hobbled out of the Fjord to recover, leaving the ropes for Sean to discover. Resurrection had taken on yet another meaning.

Still, Sean found the line on Resurrection to be “as clean as anything I’ve ever been on.” It provided the motivation to return westward across the falls to the Nose of Wapama Rock. Tim and others had already put up a few routes on the wall, most notably their proudest line, Photomultiplier, in 2005 — a VI 5.9 A3 featuring Cummings, Joel Ager, and Chris Chan.


Eight years earlier, Sean had pecked away at the first 800 feet of the Nose route with Eamon Schneider before being stalled. The climbing was horrendous, miserable — much different than the clean lines on Hetch Hetchy Dome. When they returned, a block the size of Evergreen Lodge had slid over their anchors, severing the hangers, to join the jumble of talus in Wapama Falls below.

“It’s shattered,” Sean says of Wapama, “with things ready to peel off all over the place. It’s ridiculous. Then, you get higher, and everything gets sheer, sweet, way cleaner, but again really ominous. There are bigger cleaner panels and blocks, but you know all those want to leave and will be leaving soon.” (Tim has seen similar rockfall in person — alone. While climbing last year on Hetch Hetchy Dome, he heard what he thought was thunder in the distance, then, he turned toward Kolana, witnessing a huge block of granite tumble into the water. It created a most impressive tidal wave that fanned out to the dam.)

For Sean, the missing block on Wapama gave pause to freeing the route. No more laybacking the deep corner — the rockfall forced them out onto the Nose proper. Sean is guessing, once he frees the Nose, that it will come in at 5.13a. That will come next season, though, four or so pitches later. Until then, he hopes other climbers will have the grace to leave it alone. It’s the same sentiment for which most of the climbers in Hetch Hetchy hope — to be left alone in their waterlogged wilderness. Keep it down to the dull roar of the falls. Climbing? As Nick says cryptically while serving a pint, “It’s been known to happen.”

Doug Robinson, a Sierra pioneer and the progenitor of “clean climbing,” is a filmmaker living in the Bay Area. Bruce Willey is a climber, recovering surfer, and freelance writer living in Big Pine, California.


Hetch Hetchy Be Dammed: Logistics

Season: Early spring through late fall, keeping in mind that the summer months, due to the "photomultiplier" (the reservoir, which reflects intense amounts of light and heat), can be brutally hot.

Camping: Diamond O, Car-camping sites with bathrooms; $16 a night. Visit reserveUSA.com.

Lodging, eats, and drinks: Evergreen Lodge (evergreenlodge.com), near the entrance to the Park, is the Hetch Hetchy's answer to the Mountain Room Bar in Yosemite. Full bar, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Cabins run from $99 to $259 a night.

Climbing: Despite the similarities and comparisons to Yosemite Valley, climbing in Hetch Hetchy is more backcountry than front country. No guidebook yet exists, and the approaches are long. Also, factor in the hard facts and hassles of the mandatory curfew (9 p.m. in summer, 5 p.m. in winter) and the camping ban.

A Hetch Hetchy sampler, going from left to right around the reservoir as you stand up on the dam.

Hetch Hetchy Beach
After the long tunnel, on the far side of the dam (rainy-day bouldering anyone?), you'll find a talus slope that leads down to the beach. (That is, if the water is low, which is usually in the spring or fall.) Here, you'll find short, one-pitch warm-up routes created by Tim Tuomey and Nick Simon. The best are Arrrgh (5.7), Clown Mobile (5.10), Buried Treasure (5.11d), and the appropriately named A Day at the Beach (5.9). Not to mention the longer, overhanging 5.10 hand crack Atlantis, in the dam's direction.

Wapama Rock
Wapama Mama (VI 5.10 A3-), 12 pitches. FA: Charles "Footie" Field, Forrest Rade, 1986. (See supertopo.com for topo.)

Photomultiplier (VI, 5.9, A3), 12 pitches. FA: Clint Cummins, Joel Ager, Tim Tuomey, Chris Chan. So named for the famed reflection of reservoir water that bounces onto the walls from below, heating up the routes like a solar panel.

Nose (VI 5.13a project).

Zöe Temple Area
Zöe Temple (5.10c), two pitches. FA: Sean Jones. Splitter so clean and obvious that it looks like it was picked up and shipped from Indian Creek.

Hetch Hetchy Dome
South Face (VI 5.9 A2 or 5.12c). FA: (lower half, aka Inclement Buttress) Joe Faint, Chris Jones, Galen Rowell, 1970; FA (entire route): Galen Rowell, Chris Jones, 1970.

Zeus (V 5.10+ C4/A3), 9 pitches. FA: Tim Tuomey and Clint Cummins.

Resurrection (V 5.12c), 18 pitches. FA: Sean Jones and Brian Ketron

In Memoriam (V 5.11d), 14 pitches. FA: Sean Jones and Jake Jones.

The Shire (east of Hetchy Hetchy Dome)
Two Guys From Sacramento TR Area. Great for warm-ups; five single routes,
all to one anchor (5.7 to 5.10d).

Echoes (5.11c). Slab. FFA: Tim Tuomey and Nick Simon.

Lunar Landscape (5.11d). Hetchy Hetchy's answer to Oz, in Tuolumne Meadows.
FA: Tim Tuomey

Keverne and the Phoenix (5.10c), 7 pitches. FFA: Tim Tuomey and Clint
Cummins.

Blood and Fire (5.10+). FFA: Tim Tuomey.

Kolona Rock
North Face of Kolona (V 5.9 A3). On their third try, Harding and Rowell
climbed the 1,800-foot face of Kolona. Of the 16 pitches only, half were
freed. FA: Galen Rowell and Warren Harding, 1971.

West Face of Kolona (III 5.8), 7 pitches. Runs up the huge right-facing
dihedral splitting the center of the west face. FA: John Liebeskind and
partner, 1984.

Route information provided by Tim Tuomey and Sean Jones.