TR: Si Se Puedes (long)
JKVawter
I climbed two walls in 1978: the Giraffe on El Gran Trono Blanco in
northern Baja, and the Direct on Half Dome. After Half Dome I spent a
month on the road in the Tetons and the Banff/ Jasper area culminating
with what we thought was a first ascent of the North Face of Edith
Cavell via the East Summit. As it happened, another party had climbed it
a month earlier, though in much better conditions, and named it the
McKeith Spur in honor of Bugs McKeith.
That was the last big thing I did. I took one more long trip in 1979,
spending several weeks at Lover’s Leap and the Lake Tahoe area, Tuolumne
and in the Valley. When I turned my attention to finishing school,
settling on an occupation, getting married, buying a house and having
kids, I got weak and flabby in a hurry. In recall that in late fall of
1979, I looked up from my books one afternoon and said to my girlfriend
Riley (now my wife), “I don’t think I’ll ever do another wall. I’ll
never be in that kind of shape—physically or mentally—again.”
So I was apprehensive in September when Werner Landry invited me to join
him on the first continuous ascent of his new route on the East Face of
El Gran Trono Blanco in October. He and Mark Richards spent several
weekends last spring establishing a pitch or two at a time, connecting
the natural features by traversing blank stretches using hooks, holes,
rivets, bolts and all other manner of aid jiggery pokery. Each had taken
long (30+ feet) falls in the process: Werner sprained an ankle and
ripped the stitching out of an aider; Mark tore a knifeblade in half.
These misadventures and the fact that there was hooking, and lots of it,
on all but the first and last two pitches (all free), were the seeds of
anxiety in the fertile ground of my mind: that and the nagging
apprehension that I might flame out somewhere on the route. I wondered
if I could get my “head” back before succumbing to the pressure of
runouts above bad gear and the relentless stress of living on a wall. If
it was as hard as they made it sound, I could imagine backing off a lead
and being unable to muster the guts to get back on the horse. In the
days before the climb, I found myself more and more emotionally distant
from my family and coworkers and increasingly preoccupied with mundane
preparations in the daytime, and moments of mortal dread at night.
Canon Tajo (put a tilde over the “n”) is one of the largest and most
pristine of the many canyons that cut into the escarpment that runs from
eastern San Diego County 200 miles south into Northern Baja. It drops
into the desert as steeply as the Sierra drops into Owen’s Valley,
though not nearly as far. The canyon rim tops out at 5500 feet, about
5000 feet above the desert floor. Further south in the San Pedro Martir,
the peaks along the rim top 10,000 feet.
El Gran Trono Blanco, or the Throne as most call it, is a huge
outcropping of granite perched high on the west wall of Canon Tajo. Its
summit is just above the surrounding countryside. The rolling hills and
tableland west of the escarpment covered by pinyon-juniper woodland, is
dotted with remote ranchos and small settlements and is perfect for
weekend camping.
The immense canyon below is hotter and drier, though a year-round stream
flows through huge groves of Washingtonia palms in the bottom. The
oasis-like quality of the canyon bottom makes it a desirable backpacking
destination. But the logistics of finding your way in to this
essentially trackless wilderness and then climbing out again make it
rarely visited. From the Throne, the canyon winds down another 12 miles
into the desert. There the flat, mostly featureless expanse of desert
floor runs nearly uninterrupted for fifty miles to the mountains
southwest of Mexicali.
About two-thirds of the way across these flats is the Laguna Salada, a
gigantic silt plain covered with a few inches of water for a few weeks
after desert thundershowers. At dawn the red-orange horizon a hundred
miles distant is reflected in this huge, shallow pond creating an eerie,
spectacular sight. From high up on the face, the view of the canyon and
desert floor is stupendous. So is the sense of utter isolation. Forget
YOSAR, helicopters, or mountain rescue. If you fuck up here, you get
yourself out or you don’t get out.
The Throne’s 1000-foot southern face sports a number of high quality
free climbs, and at least two mixed free and aid climbs. The
lichen-yellow ramparts of the north face are broken by many ledges and
vegetated areas, unattractive to climbers. The east face is “the wall”
and tops 1600 feet. On the right side is the El Progresso Ramp, a
relatively easy, vegetated, way to get high up in a hurry. Several
routes take off to the left from various points along the ramp. By all
accounts, none are aesthetic.
In the middle of the east face is a huge cleft that separates the
relatively broken right side from the shield-like left side. The Pan
American Route takes the cleft. It took Karl Karlstrom and Scott Baxter
four tries, but they knew “this was a first worth suffering for.”
Baxter, one of the pioneering Arizona climbers known as the Syndicato
Granitico who developed several big routes on the Throne in the early
seventies said:
“The feeling of walking up to an El Gran Trono Blanco and knowing that
no one else has set foot on it is just indescribable. On the Pan Am
route, you get an exotic, little big wall adventure without having to go
halfway around the world. It could easily bump others in a revised
edition of Fifty Classic Climbs of North America.”
The Giraffe, climbed by Hugh Burton and John Long in 1975, takes an
audacious diagonal line following shallow incipient cracks and corners
left to right up the middle of the bulging shield, exiting via the right
side of a huge roof. Werner and I made the second ascent in 1978.
Werner’s route is between the two.
Werner likes an audience so his first idea was to invite a bunch of
people, gather a bunch of ledges and lead the whole group up as one
party. I told him I wouldn’t have any part of it. If there were more
than four in one party, I’d wait to do it with someone else. Also, I
didn’t want anyone up there who didn’t know what he was doing, except
David Raum.
David is one of those people who can do anything he puts his mind to.
Run a marathon? No problem: He does the Catalina, one of the hilliest
courses anywhere, every year, without training, just for fun. Swim the
Alcatraz Sharkfest Swim? 64 minutes: Slow but steady. Hike from South
Rim to North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and back (46miles), in a day? Did
it last weekend. He’s also done Ama Dablam with Werner, a couple of
trans-Sierra ski trips, including the High Route, and the Sonora Death
Ride (Sonora to Leavitt Meadow, to Tuolumne, to Sonora, in three days.)
The guy is tough. He goes from novice to competent in one step. He is a
decent rockclimber though he doesn’t care much for leading. Mechanically
oriented, jumaring and hauling would be easy for him to pick up. But he
hates exposure and falling and swinging: following traverses was going
to be interesting.
As it turned out, only David and Alejandro, a climber from Tijuana,
agreed to go with us. Three wall newbies wisely smelled a clusterfuck
and backed out. That meant I was in. We decided that David would jumar
behind Werner and Mark, and that Alejandro and I would climb as a
separate team. David would be the only novice and he would be sandwiched
between the two parties at all times.
Although I would have preferred to be on another route and not directly
under another party, I was satisfied with this arrangement. I took a
helmet as a concession to my increasing concern about “the odds.” The
older I get, the more I look back on my formative years as a climber and
wonder how I survived with such a cavalier attitude. Dumb luck, I guess.
Although I had never climbed with Alex, I knew from Mark that he was
solid. He had climbed the Pan Am with a novice, Giraffe with Mark,
leading some of the A4 and a good deal of the A3, and was an extremely
personable and intelligent guy with a love for all things mechanical.
Like the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, you have to hike down into the
canyon to begin a climb on the Throne. The usual approach for the east
face is the north gully, longer but less steep than the south gully.
With food and water for four days, a portaledge, a big wall rack, and
the other assorted wall gear, our bags topped 100 pounds—how much more
than a hundred I don’t know.
I’d never carried a bag too heavy to dead lift off the ground and
wrestle onto my back, until this one. I dragged it to a rock and coaxed
it to a rest on the rock about two feet off the ground. Then I
positioned myself under it and strapped myself in. As I straightened my
legs, my morale nose-dived. I knew that what was coming would severely
test me.
The usual three hour hike over rocky outcroppings, through dense
thickets of saw grass, scrub oak and manzanita, down steep ravines and
dry water courses, over house size boulders, and around and through
patches of catclaw, cactus and spear-like agave leaves, swelled to
four-and-a-half brutal hours under the monstrous loads. The exertion of
moving and remaining balanced was so intense, there were moments when I
took the pack off (or rather parked it on a rock and got out from under
it) and felt that I would puke. Strangely, getting back under the load
quelled the nausea. About one p.m., with swollen ankles, sore knees, and
bleeding or scabbing scratches on every exposed area of skin, we arrived
at the base of the route.
Mark and Werner had already begun leading the second pitch by the time
Alex and I arrived at the base. David was busy practicing jumaring on a
line fixed at the first belay. Alex and I unloaded our climbing gear at
the base and started climbing.
I took the first pitch, a free one up steep flakes, ramps and a little
5.9 face near the top. A large sloping ledge served as the belay point.
The next pitch was quite blank and steep with a few bolts widely spaced
leading up and right. Alejandro jumped on it to allay his rising
anxiety: nothing like taking the bull by the horns to chase the fear
back into its cage.
Alex sweated every hook move until he snagged the first bolt with a
draw, about 15 feet up. After another couple of dicey hooks he was again
in danger of hitting the ledge. A second bolt a bit higher quelled his
“dios mios,” and he finished off the pitch. Mark and Werner were through
for the day and on their way down. With a mixture of relief and
foreboding, I decided to put off the next lead until the morning. I’d
heard Werner grousing about A4 hooks and calling out “Watch me!” so I
was reluctant to get on anything that might take me more than an hour to
lead. It was time to rest and rehydrate.
We ferried sleeping gear and food and water for one night over to the
campsite below a large pinyon a hundred yards downslope from the rock.
Mark broke out his margarita mix loosening our tongues and blunting the
sense of apprehension. I choked down a can of chicken and a can of
three-bean salad, still a little nauseous and exhausted form the hike
down. I didn’t want to start the trip by puking up dinner. As the
Margarita bottle was drained, the tales told, and darkness descended, we
relaxed.
For me, not being able to see the wall was a relief. Our world shrank to
what we could see by the light of the little fire. A cool breeze rustled
and moaned through the branches above us and picked up ashes that glowed
then disappeared in the dark. Jupiter rose off the eastern horizon, the
lights of a little Mexican settlement beyond Laguna Salada came into
view, and the glow of the lights of Mexicali, hidden behind the
mountains, drowned out the stars above the northeast horizon. Directly
above us, the Milky Way filled the sky just east of the hard, black
outline of the wall.
The red horizon the next morning silhouetted peaks a hundred miles away
in western Arizona and mainland Mexico. The sky was cloudless and held
no portent of bad weather. It wasn’t going to be hot, as we had feared.
The Santa Ana that was developing would make it uncomfortably hot along
the coast and inland, but not in the mountains 70 miles inland.
At breakfast, David announced that he had thought it over all night and
had decided not to go with us. The wall was too big, too intimidating
and his skills too rudimentary to take on such a thing. We encouraged
him to reconsider, gently. But his quiet resolve was unshakable. We
accepted his decision without argument or teasing.
We moved everything back to the base and repacked the haul bags. I
readied the haul line and water and food for the day. Werner and Mark
jugged our line and were soon out of our way. Alex jugged up to the
ledge atop the first pitch and began to haul. David loaned me his brand
new aiders and took my old second pair to carry out. He also loaned me
his Ropeman, which I thought might be of some comfort following the
radical traverses midway up.
Alex completed the haul and took off up our fixed climbing rope to the
belay atop pitch two. We’d already been warned not to haul to there, but
to wait until the top of 3, a straight, relatively short haul because
pitch 3 was a 90 foot diagonal back left after 2’s swerve to the right.
I lit out aggressively from the belay at 2, anxious to get into the hard
hooking. A couple of free moves across a ledge brought me to the blank
area. A bolt beckoned from several feet away and up. I was deliberate
and slow, looking at a long pendulum over an ankle-eating ledge if I
blew. After the first bolt I relaxed a bit. I fell once between the
bolts when a hook popped and immediately felt better. Though I was using
two aiders on each biner, daisy chains and aggressive testing all for
the first time, the basic procedure came back automatically, like riding
a bike, something that once learned you never forget. The pitch ended
with a few feet of free climbing up steep flakes to the belay at the
base of a right-facing corner.
Alex racked all of our cams for the next lead, the double dihedrals. The
first stretch off the belay looks like a moderate .9/.10 hand crack. But
there is no place to go at its end and you might as well be in your
aiders when you get there. Some hooks, bolts and holes lead left to the
base of another dihedral, longer and wider than the first. Two bolts
near the bottom of the second dihedral could be used for a belay, but
Werner suggested that Alex just lower off, clean the gear from the first
dihedral then finish the lead on the second. That gave him just enough
rope to get top the next belay, the top of the 5th.
While belaying Alex on the dihedrals, I was level with and about 80 feet
left of the base of the huge left-facing dihedral on the right side of
the big blank face. A wide crack, and the thousands of birds that enter
and exit this crack every day make it an uninviting climbing goal
(unless you’re Brutus). I had a ringside seat for the exodus of the
swifts and swallows that make this 300-foot fissure their home.
I noticed movement in the crack: they appeared at first like hundreds of
dirty ping pong balls jiggling and moving together in the crack.
Suddenly twenty of them “fell” out of the crack and took flight. Five
seconds later another wave left the crack. This continued for the hour
of so that I was at the belay.
Werner and I had seen the birds before when we climbed Giraffe. In the
evening, thousands of them gathered and flew in a clockwise circle, like
a spinning galaxy. The birds furthest from the center and closest to the
rock flew into the fissure at top speed. This went on for 30 to 40
minutes until they were all ensconced in their high rise bird house.
The 6th is one of two “moaners” in a row. It begins with a series of
hook moves above another ledge to a bolt. As I began the lead, Werner
called out to me from the belay above: “Have you gotten to the bolt
yet?” “NO!” I was in no mood to chitchat until I clipped that first
bolt. “Say no more, I know exactly where you are.” Beyond this, another
couple of hooks on shallow but solid flakes got me to a second bolt.
This was the end of the diagonaling. Now a long, very blank stretch
appeared directly above me. I set a hook and tested it aggressively. Why
not? I was at a bolt.
Another move or two took me into the blankest area yet. I began to look
for holes. Not finding any, I set a hook on a questionable flake. I
tested it as aggressively as I could considering that I was well above
the last bolt and on a marginal hook. Then I weighted it with one leg
then two and finally I stood up gingerly. Something subtle changed as I
moved up. I didn’t hear anything or feel shifting, but I had the feeling
that all was not well.
I looked down again to check my landing zone. Seeing nothing to run
into, there was nothing else to do but step up into the next rung. Ping!
I was off. Pain shot through my right knee. I hung motionless and
groaned in agony for a few moments, waiting for the pain to subside.
“You alright?” Werner and Alex asked simultaneously. I felt my knee for
damage. “Yeah. Bruised the shit out of my knee. I don’t know what I
hit.” I batmanned back up to the bolt and started the process again.
This time I got one move higher and ran out of flakes. I saw several
patches of raw, gritty rock where other bad flakes had been sheared off.
I tried and tested another one and sheared it off but managed to remain
on my hook. I was about 12 feet above the bolt here. I tried another
one, desperate for a hole but not seeing one. I tested, moved onto and
up two stirrups before this one popped. I dropped twenty-five feet in an
instant and looked at Alex. “You ok?.” I said to him. “Yeah, no
problem.” He had me on a gri-gri and had barely felt the impact.
I didn’t hit anything that time and was just pissed that I’d come off
twice. I stormed back up and got a little higher in the aider on the
last good hook. I was about to try another questionable flake when I
spotted a hole. “Damn!” It was inches from the flake I’d just pulled
off. This led me up and left into an incipient crack and higher, a
subtle, shallow corner. This was the scene of Mark’s long fall. I passed
the remnant of the knifeblade he left in the crack, neatly sheared off
at the rock. Werner had showed me the eye end months earlier. It looked
like a piece of taffy torn in half.
Two rivets had been added to this stretch, making it a much safer
affair. Still, I got a chance here to nest some knifeblades, something
I’d been wanting to do since seeing the photo of the third pitch of the
NA Wall in Robbins’ Basic Rock Craft when I started climbing in 1971. I
continued to an overhang with a rotten crack underneath. Cams fit here
pretty well but the rock was so crumbly inside the crack that I was
nervous all the way up. A few free moves above the overhang got me to
another bolt and some easy ground to the belay. Big, bad pitch 6 was
history.
Alex raced up the line, which puzzled me. I knew we were through for the
day. Though there was “an hour” of daylight left, if he started the
steep and difficult 7th, he would have to finish it in the dark and we’d
be sharing bolts with Werner and Mark. I talked him out of it gently,
but allowed that it would be good for him to start the pitch and at
least reach and clip the first two bolts on the headwall above at 15 and
25 feet. Then we’d have four instead of two bolts to hang everything on
for the night. He got this done in minutes, and we were soon setting up
his “double” portaledge.
Alex started climbing about seven years ago at age 19. He’d take the
trolley up from Tijuana to San Diego, about an hour-and-a-half one-way,
to buy one cam. He built a rack this way, and climbed whenever he could.
Everything he couldn’t afford, he made. His wall hauler was similar in
design to the Petzl, but twice as heavy. The rope ratchet was a bit
loose and the rope had a tendency to slip out, which left all the weight
on the man hauling.
His portaledge was strictly homemade: aluminum conduit strung together
with shock cord; a deck sewed at home; buckles and cinch straps he’d
salvaged from old packs and others’ discarded gear. It went together
pretty well, but the curved reinforcing crossbar was made from three
pieces and the joints took a lot of stress. This piece was folding at
its loose joints and the result was that the deck was more of an
hourglass shape than a rectangle. So we were squeezed in the middle
where we needed it most. It wasn’t much wider than the average single
anyway so calling it a double was really a stretch.
But this was the first ledge I’d ever been on and the idea of sitting on
a ledge rather than being compressed in a hammock was very appealing. We
ate and drank like orphans at a church supper and collapsed back foot to
head as night closed in. Alex is an amateur astronomer and I used the
opportunity to pick his brain about the constellations.
I’d never been sure of much more than Orion, Ursa Major, Minor, the
north star, Venus, Mars (my first guess at anything low on the horizon
in the evening) and Jupiter. He pointed out Cassiopeia, the Pleaides,
Saturn, Andromeda, and a dozen others that I can’t remember. A few
things whistled by in the dark and we called out in mock anger to our
friends above us, well within earshot but hidden by the huge overhanging
bulge we were sleeping under.
I also asked him about some Spanish phrases I was unsure of how to use.
I learned that “Orale, pinche pendejo” is a warm greeting to a new
friend. “Chupa mi . . .” similar but even more familiar. And of course,
we explored the many uses of “chinga” when referring to a rival’s
girlfriend or mother. “How about ‘Si se puedes?’ ” I asked. “That means
‘you can do it’, or really ‘It can be done.’ ” This became the rallying
cry after each fall and, in general, whenever things looked dicey.
After a long, warm, buggy, uncomfortable night, we were eating by
headlamp as the horizon and the Laguna Salada began to glow red. As we
repacked the haulbag and sorted gear, I realized that I had never
clipped the haul bag to the anchor. Its weight was suspended from the
unreliable ratchet on Alex’s homemade wall hauler. I hadn’t even backed
it up with a jumar, as I had at every other station.
I shuddered as I pictured a hundred and fifty pounds in two bags
plummeting to the end of the unfettered haul line and shock loading the
anchor. Though many of the skills involved in climbing a wall are like
riding a bicycle, there are a million other things to keep track of and
things to think about, and these don’t come back so easily. This
oversight could have killed us. I pointed it out to Alex, who shrugged
and clipped the bag in. I didn’t make that mistake again. Alex powered
up to the last bolt clipped and began the dicey traverse in the
incipient crack above the alcove.
The crumbling, shallow horizontal crack above the alcove took tied-off
pins, hooks and the occasional tiny cam. This is where Werner ripped his
aider and sprained his ankle in a long fall when a Loweball popped. Alex
whistled, whined and swore in Spanish all the way across. Above this, he
fell once when a hook popped on the long blank stretch up to the next
belay.
Cleaning the horizontal part where the first two bolts and the next
piece are separated by several feet of blank rock was a puzzle. I
figured out a way to clean the draws from the first two bolts without
leaving a biner. I attached an aider to a fifi hook, put the fifi hook
through the bolt hanger behind the biner, then stood in the aider. With
my weight on the fifi hook, I unclipped the draw. With a long runner
attached to the sling tied to the top hole of the fifi hook and the
other end clipped to a daisy chain, I began to transfer my weight back
onto the jumars. As I swung left, my weight pulled the fifi hook with
the aider out of the hanger. Voila! Werner had left biners on both
bolts. We cleaned them and left nothing.
I never used David’s Ropeman. It just seemed too much trouble to take
off the rope and put back on every time I wanted to pass a piece before
unclipping. I regularly tied in short instead.
Pitch 8 is notable for a creaking, temporary flake/pinnacle directly
below a long series of hook moves. I put a sling on it but wondered if a
fall would just break it off as I went by. I just hoped I wouldn’t catch
an ankle on it. The pitch ends on Pancho’s Villa, a nice, flat belay
ledge shared with Giraffe, suitable for standing on.
The next pitch went up and right across some of the blankest rock yet.
This is the only pitch that feels somewhat contrived because it simply
connects the ledge with the beginning of the crack system that pitches
10, 11 and 12 follow. But it goes with many hook moves between a few
bolts. I used the fifi hook again to clean this steeply traversing
pitch.
10 starts on a ramp that could be easily free climbed. I whined to
Werner about the lack of protection bolts. Two or three would have made
this really fun. Instead, you aid it because there are so few A0/1
placements. Eventually, someone will free this in spite of the poor pro.
At the end of the ramp, the flared crack narrows to knifeblade width on
a sheer face. Several tied off pins lead to a small roof. Above the roof
a perfect fixed head beckons, just one or two scary hook moves away,
then a hole, then a bolt. A few free moves to the belay end this one.
Mark and Werner already had their hammocks set up. Werner added a bolt
on the right for us. (Take a wrench to tighten this. They dropped
theirs.) Alex had a tough time setting up the ledge. We were just a few
feet under Mark and Werner’s ledges and accessibility to the anchor was
a bit of a problem. The ledge never felt level, but we were too tired to
care. After dinner, we all talked about names for the route.
All spring and summer I’d been trying to get Werner to come up with
something imaginative, something that would evoke some of the spirit of
such an awesome place. When we were all together at the last bivvy, we
discussed names. I suggested all kinds of things: Birdland for the show
the swifts and swallows put on every day; Cascabel, a Mexican
rattlesnake; Javelina, a wild boar; Coyote; Desert Shield; Start Me Up,
The Big Top, Ferro Carril; Si Se Puedes; Manos Arriba. But it wasn’t our
call. Mark had a plane to catch at 8:00 p.m. the next night, and getting
to the top as quickly as possible was the driving theme of their ascent.
So when “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” popped into their heads, and Alex with
his strong accent began to sing “Well my bags are packed, I’m ready to
go, . . . “ we gave up.
The last day was a race to the top. The route follows the diagonal crack
system for two more pitches, neither of which had been climbed before,
nearly to its end. A squirrelly, low-angle aid pitch led to a sloping
ledge and some scary free moves. The next was all free, but scary .9 for
about 15 feet above bad pro. The last pitch is a beauty: a steep, clean
5.9 face protected by four bolts and a couple of cams under a flake.
Alex was so driven to reach the top that he climbed right past a
platform on the left with four belay bolts.
On top by noon, we stripped off our gear and clothes and bathed in the
stagnant water of a nearby rock tank. We had so much extra drinking
water we poured that over our heads too. The sun was bright, the air
warm, the canyon and the desert at our feet, the hard work behind us.
The freedom to walk about unencumbered was delicious. “Si se puedes,” we
laughed. It can be done.
El Gran Trono Blanco, Leaving on a Jet Plane, VI 5.9 A3/4. FA Werner
Landry and Mark Richards, October 7-10, 1999.
JKVawter
Bob Austin
Best Regards,
Bob Austin
Inez Drixelius
<jkva...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> Si Se Puedes
>
Wow my man, you know how to live! Congratulations.
Inez
--
Inez Drixelius
Berkeley, California
Jim Leininger
feeling to have been part of the actual complete FA team...
JKVawter wrote:
> Si Se Puedes
>
Karl Baba
place. I looked and lusted at the nearby walls, but fortunately or
not, didn't have the partner or gear with me to suffer the usual wall
pains.
Great adventure!
Karl
http://extra.newsguy.com/~climbing/
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