Now! Climbing

A few days ago, before I woke up and decided it was time to get back to Oregon to get into some cold rain and snow, my buddy Geoff Unger and I went out to climb a pretty worthwhile line called Zenyatta Entrada, on the Tower of Babel in Arches National Park. The line is a grade IV, and goes through six or seven pitches at 5.4 C3. It’s certainly a handsome tower.

Despite its good looks, that we did this climb was a bit of an oddity for both of us. I used to be an aid climber once, but I’m not really anymore. Geoff used to go aid climbing sometimes too, but he doesn’t really do it anymore either. We talked about that fact, and we both acknowledged that at some point, which was years ago for both of us, we just decided that aid climbing wasn’t really fun anymore and we both gave it up. You can only get scared so many times hanging your ass out over a few thousand feet of air and RURPs before it stops really seeming like a good idea. Unless you’re of a certain deranged mindset, that is, in which case you embrace it wholeheartedly and go out and do stuff like this, which is awesome, but not my idea of a good time.

So how come we went aid climbing last week? I don’t know – same reason you always go aid climbing, I guess: You go because you want to get up something pretty and aiding is what needs to happen to get it done. At least that’s my reason, I think. You see, what I wanted to climb was the Titan, the biggest, meanest-looking tower in the infamous Fisher Towers, but I wanted to do it by the Finger of Fate route, which is the easiest way up and by all reports isn’t really that bad (for the Fishers), which would thus afford me all the pleasures of aid climbing (i.e. wild summit) but without too much of the displeasures (i.e. being shit-scared). But Geoff had already done that. As an alternative, he suggested we climb the Sundevil Chimneys, which is still fairly reasonable, supposedly, but which is a little more of a major undertaking going at [VI 5.9+ C3R]. I somehow agreed to this, but after a rest day following the Gooney Bird (see below), for some reason we just didn’t want to pull the trigger. I think it probably had everything to do with not wanting to get up early and not wanting to go hiking. I know it sounds lazy, but secretly (or not so secretly, really) every mountain guide I know actually doesn’t like getting up early, and as a rule, we really seem to hate hiking. A lot of the time we just consent to do it because it’s necessary. That is to say, you gotta get up early and walk sometimes if you want to climb stuff, and that’s okay. The climbs are worth it. So it goes. But if you can put the climb next to the road, a twenty minute drive from the house, from the espresso pot and warm bed, and then even put it a five minute walk from the truck, and you can make it a day route, and warm enough to do in a t-shirt, I’m betting most guides would be pretty into it. Despite the obvious contradictions inherent in our choice of vocation, we’re really reasonable people. We’re just like you, you know. We like being comfortable, we’re just willing to stretch it sometimes. But, the point is, that we saw a way out of having to drive to the Fishers and do a two-day effort on the Sundevil by just switching our objective to Zenyatta and getting scared without nearly so much effort. So we went. We woke up late, which in this case was six in the morning, we made eggs, we drank coffee, and we drove twenty minutes. We carried our packs for five, and we started climbing. I drew the first two pitches. I’d never aided much on sandstone and not at all on rock this soft.

It’s worth taking a moment here for an aside. The route is called Zenyatta Entrada, which is a play on The Police’s 1980 album, Zenyatta Mondatta. I don’t actually know what that means (Wikipedia didn’t say), but it must have been popular with aid climbers since there’s also a line on El Cap of the same name. In this case, the Entrada part refers to the rock. In the Utah desert there are five major rock types: Cutler, Entrada, Moenkopi, Navajo and Wingate. Wingate is generally regarded as the best and comprises the Castle Valley towers and Indian Creek’s famed splitters. The Fishers are Cutler, which I’m told is actually pretty good once you get through all the mud that’s usually covering it. It tends to yield some fairly ridiculous climbs, however. The Tower of Babel is Entrada. In his new select guidebook to the area, Classic Desert Climbs, Fred Knapp, longtime desert afficionado, offers a few brief thoughts on each rock type. He describes the Entrada as such:

E is for earache and Entrada. All of Arches National Park is Entrada. Entrada is personally my least favorite. By friend Bret, however , seems to think that it’s OK. I’m beginning to think it is an acquired taste and I have developed a theory of how one acquires this taste: After climbing vast numbers of sandy, sugary Entrada routes, enough sand makes it into the brain and begins to cut away at all the important fibers (as it does to the core of a climbing rope). Eventually the climber loses all ability to identify quality rock. To prevent this happening to me I shower frequently and use Q-tips after every climb.

Think of Entrada as being a step down in quality from moist brown sugar. Occasionally a nice varnish makes for good rock, but more often than not the real advantage is being able to drill bolt holes with a toothbrush and a plastic hammer.

I’m going to go ahead and say that we must have found one of those routes blessed with a decent varnish, but it was soft in spots, and I wouldn’t have wanted to do much free climbing on it. Anyway, I led the first pitch and the second, short-fixing P2 to save time. Geoff got to lead P3 and P4, which were more thin C2+ cracks with a few odd moves and a little pendulum.

Aiding cleanly on old nailing routes always seems to offer up a plethora of odd tricks, and of course this route was no exception. On granite, where I’ve done most of my aid climbing, that usually involves hand placing thin crack pro, such as birdbeaks or sawed-off angles in order to avoid taking the hammer out. A lot of times it also involves trusting strings of fixed gear, often manky old copperheads and such, or doing a lot of hooking and cam hooking. In the desert, however, it seems to involve putting gear into huge beaten-out pods where repeated ascents using big angles and bongs and stacks of pins have left bizzare scars in the rock. On the thin cracks, since cam hooks would only break the rock, one instead uses small Loweballs. Having never used those before, that part was pretty interesting. One recurring theme was the large tricam precariously placed in a scar. That looked like this.

Anyway, some fiddly bits aside, it turned out to be a fun climb. I got to lead the crux, an interesting C3 corner/roof which involved some creative hooking, a lot of small offset aliens, a number of brassies and offset nuts, a few loweballs, some really jengis tricams in some pods, a bit of me winging, and finally some more bathooking and drilled angles.

Overall, a good time was had by all, and we topped out in the light, which was somewhat to our surprise since we had refused to get up early. We only turned our headlamps on for the last rappel, we did not get our ropes stuck (aid climbs are generally steep and blank, which is at least good in terms of pulling your ropes) and we made it back to the truck for a beer and to town in time for dinner. A most reasonable outing after all, which made both of us think that in terms of type 2 fun, maybe aid climbing isn’t all that bad after all. And, since it’s south facing, maybe we should have a run at the Sundevil later in the month as I head out to Ouray. Yeah. So I guess I’ll be doing a little aid climbing again. I have the feeling The Titan might retire me for a while again though. We’ll just have to see. I’ll be sure to bring the tricams.

A more complete set of photos is up on the Zenfolio site.

In the same trip and with various partners I also had the pleasure of breaking myself in on desert towers with the Tea Party [II 5.10+ Kinda Necky] on the Gooney Bird (looks cool, right?), Jah Man [II 5.10] on Sister Superior, Entry Fee [5.8R] on Lizard Rock, the Kor-Ingalls [III 5.9+] on Castleton Tower, and the Corkscrew Summit [II 5.10+] on Ancient Arts in the Fisher towers, all of which were better than the last desert tower I climbed this summer here in Oregon, the West Chimney of Shiprock, a not-so-delightful 5.7X.