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You don't get that when
you have to circle back to home, and I think this same urge
called me to overnight in the vertical world. But I resigned
myself some time ago to fulfil this aspiration like a ten-year
old pitching the pup tent in the backyard. The way it would
finally happen, I'd be 15 or 20 feet up at the local 40-foot
crag, just off the ground really, friends and other climbers
giving me shit about how they were having to toss me the stuff
I forgot on the ground. It would be neat, but nerdy at the same
time.
THIS, on the other hand, would be the Real McCoy! First off,
a real multipitch situation, one where you could argue that
spending the night made good sense. 11 pitches was no giveaway.
Plus there was this ledge begging to be slept upon. Now I guarantee
that I want a portaledge at least as bad as you do, but I haven't
exactly been able to justify the expense (yet), and I wasn't
going to plunk down $600 or whatever they cost to only use it
once (can't you rent the damn things someplace?). So this was
perfect! Golden opportunity, justifiable reason, and no need
to spend a grand to make it happen. It seemed like the only
thing we were lacking was a haul bag.
Parque Recreativo El Potrero Chico, eight hours drive south
of Austin, TX and an hour northwest of Monterrey,
Mexico, is an adventure-sport-climber's paradise (translation:
it's tall, bolted, but bigger runouts than your local sport
wall). From what I see in the climbing media, besides Verdon
in France there's no other giant sport multipitch limestone
place on earth. But Verdon sounds scarier because you have to
rap in to do the routes. Me? I would probably rap in 6 pitches
my first time at Verdon, only to find out I can't crank the
first 10 moves. Plus how much do you want to bet Verdon is way
hard - unclimbable by anybody other than chain-smoking French
anorexics? Potrero Chico, in contrast, has climbing for everyone,
and friendly natives. It's worth the trip, even if you don't
climb multipitch. As long as you've got somebody in your party
who can lead 5.9 (and preferably some 5.10) you can go down
there and go nuts for a long weekend -- or two weeks or longer,
if you are still in grad school.
We just had the one long weekend, so we wanted to get on the
rocks fast. We pulled in to the town of Hidalgo, and headed
directly up the mazelike but well-marked sequence of intersecting
streets up to the park entrance. The 2500-foot El Toro, the
bigass formation on the right, looks so immense you know you
have absolutely no sense of scale. This is where Jeff Jackon
and Kurt Smith put up the 22 pitch route, named for Peruvian
Maoist guerrillas, that put El Potrero on the map and scared
away legions of us non-5.12-5.13 climbers. We drove straight
into the park on its gravel road, ill-advisedly doing like 30,
and promptly had a blowout.
Potrero Chico ("Little Corral") twists your concept of limestone
all around. Ever wonder why traverses seem like such a big part
of Central Texas bouldering (or why roofs are the ticket at
the Gunks)? It's because sedimentary rock, including limestone,
is basically layers of formerly waterborne junk - and the lines
of weakness tend to be horizontal. At the Potrero, after who
the hell knows what kind of Worlds In Collision catastrophic
event, this sedimentary rock ended up completely sideways, so
the bedding layers run up and down. (Seneca Rocks in West Virginia
is another rare example of vertically oriented sedimentary rock,
in this case Tuscarora sandstone. It's two or three trad pitches
up two sides of a fin, with summits as narrow as 3 feet). Think
"tall." Think "fins of rock with airy summits." Think "dihedrals."
Think Gobs of Fun.
After fixing the flat, we head straight for the start of Space
Boyz. It's arguably the most famous route in the park, more
so than The Shining Path. It's famous because it's really long
- 11 pitches, and ends on a little subsummit that makes you
feel like you're on top of the world (until you look "over there"
and see rock way higher, and then think about Jeff and Kurt
and how much taller and harder their climb was and how much
better they are than you'll ever be). And famous because it's
"a moderate" so supposedly regular folks can have a go at it.
I'm using "moderate" in the late 90s sense where - at least
around Austin - anything below hard 5.10 or even mid-11 is considered
casual (the cutoff grade for moderate seems to vary inversely
to the speaker's percentage of body fat). Get this - I have
an old guidebook for an eastern climbing area from 1976 that
describes 5.10 as "approaching human limitations." And now it's
considered freaking "moderate." This is worse than the evolution
of faster computer chips -- in fact, it's probably Austin and
the semiconductor industry that's to blame for all this downward
grading! Lord knows we all loved our Mac Pluses, best damn computer
ever was, and that was before sticky rubber. But I digress.
Space Boyz is all 9s and 10s. It was also an ideal choice for
this overnight adventure because since it's a sport route, you
don't have to fiddle in gear or even carry a rack.
OK, so we have all this stuff to take up, and no haul bag,
but Keven says he has it wired. He's a diver and has this Scuba
duffel made out of some kind of cast-iron rubber Cordura - totally
bombproof. "If it's tough enough for hauling all that heavy
diving gear, it can handle this," intones Keven, with jurisdictional
finality. Soon I'm leading the first pitch, dangling my handy-dandy
Kong brand Jumars with glow-in-the-dark caving handles that
I NEVER get to use, and a little $10 pulley Keven picked up
for just this occasion at REI. At the belay I hook everything
up as best I remember from the books, so I can push with one
leg down on the one Jumar. This makes the bag come up a couple
of feet, and when I stop pushing the other Jumar is right there
to lock off the rope. Continue as necessary until the bag is
close enough to grab and tie off. That's theory. Problem was,
I could stand on that Jumar and barely move the big yellow and
black overstuffed monster. It acted like a bumblebee the size
and weight of a the antique steamer trunk filled with vinyl
records I can't bear to throw out, twisting and careening and
mostly getting stuck on stuff I never noticed as I climbed (mental
note: get a real haulbag). The damn thing was snagging on every
little protrusion, which is when I noticed, looking down, that
the massive limestone fins that make up the silhouettes of the
big walls are sort of replicated in miniature as features, like
an Eiffel Tower that you can display on your bookshelf. The
bumblebee was catching on every one.
How we ever got the makeshift haul bag to the top of the first
pitch is beyond me. First off, the climbing rope we hauled with
was sort of springy and bouncy and stretchy and, well, dynamic
for god's sake, absorbing - it seemed - most of our labor (mental
note: use a static rope). The tiny pulley was useless (mental
note: get a real pulley), so we just reached down and just hand-over-handed
it up (with one Jumar to catch the rope when you stopped pulling).
In my frustration I reviewed my mental images of hauling pictures
and diagrams and realized that in every single one of them,
the route was overhanging, leaving the haul bag in midair, only
fighting gravity, not pokey, pointy rock.
The bumblebee was already ripped open, and Holofil II was
puffing out from my torn sleeping bag. By this time I seriously
doubted that even a real haulbag could have survived this sharp
limestone unscathed. Eventually - on pitch 2 probably - we got
the thing so snagged that the second had to climb up to free
it. This apparent misfortune led us to the enhanced, full-on
beta we employed the rest of the way to the bivy ledge: the
climber pulled the bag away from the rock and the belayer yarded
on the haul rope (repeat). Once the bag was lifted out of reach
of the climber, the belayer went back to the belay and belayed
the climber about 10 or 12 feet, around and past the haul bag,
to a comfortable stance, then locked him off again, went back
to the haul line, and the process began again. For safety while
hauling, the belayer tied off the climber with a mule knot (a
Grigri would have been great, but remember we're on a budget).
Doing it this way, it probably only took us six ridiculously
exhausting hours to lead, follow, and haul the four 5.9 pitches
to our overnight accommodations on the bivy ledge.
Ahh, the bivy ledge. Cradle of my adolescent big wall daydreams.
After the hauling nightmare, I was ready for this bivy ledge.
A little cramped but flat, squared-off, just like the one I
saw pictures of on the Nose. I couldn't wait. We scrambled from
the belay around a bulge to the ledge, and there it -- wasn't.
I shook my head, closed my eyes and opened them again. Where
was the dead-flat ledge I remembered? Hell, last time I was
there one of our party of three spent the whole afternoon there,
relaxing, so it had to be flat! But it wasn't. It wasn't even
a ledge really, more of a diagonal gully. This big nasty offwidth
weakness full of spiny desert plants and dirt kind of spills
into the route from the upper left, pauses like a river between
two waterfalls, then cascades off again down toward the Central
Scrutinizer wall. The itty-bitty flat part is maybe two and
a half feet long and two feet wide, but slopey.
Keven was uncharacteristically quiet. He had his eyebrows
up real high, his head bowed down with an occasional slight
side to side movement. Finally he voiced our fears: "I'm not
sure it's possible for two people to sleep here." As we gloomily
surveyed the situation, my growing fear became the likelihood
that Keven would declare the situation impossible, veto the
bivy, and insist on heading back down. Somehow I had to head
off his ultimatum! Desperately clinging to my adolescent vision,
and unwilling to declare all that grunt hauling for naught,
I blurted out words I would later question. "Tell you what,"
I chirped, pointing to the one little flattish patch and the
back-nestling crease that intersected it at a La-Z-Boy angle,
"you can have that spot, and I'll work something out over here."
"Over here" was the downhill gully. After a quick dinner,
I got to work. Inspired by the pocket-hammock minimalism of
the early bigwallers, I set to work rigging webbing under my
heels, webbing under my butt, slings eventually under my knees.
Our Thermarests went inside the sleeping bags or they'd've gone
over the edge within 15 minutes, and of course we stayed tied
in the whole time like good little mountaineers. The excess
rope Keven and I split, and each of us gladly ground it into
the dirt and rocks with our sit bones for added comfort. All
told I was feeling pretty proud of my little niche, and was
gearing up to verbally abuse Keven if he so much as whimpered
about his accommodations. His digs were no Fredricksburg B&B,
but I knew my little S&M lullaby looked way more hideous. Anyway,
he never gave me the pleasure.
About the time I was drifting off I suddenly got an earful
of dirt. Not like a cup of dirt, more like somebody sprinkling
parmesan in there with the help of a blowgun. And again. Gusts
of wind were blowing up the choked offwidth. Somehow they circumvented
me, my slings, my bag, the half-buried rope, and venturied the
gritty earth right into my open sleeping bag. I'm a quick thinker
when I need to be, so I got the picture after only five or six
more of these dirt devils that I needed to take action. I spent
the rest of the night completely inside the sleeping bag, drawstring
pulled tight.
I had the alarm set for 5:30 AM, but I couldn't take it any
more and got up at ten past, after checking my watch every 30
minutes for several hours. I started organizing, half trying
to be quiet and half-feeling like yanking that lazy-ass excuse
for a climbing partner's sleeping bag off him like a parlor
trick. Where did he get off sleeping at a time like this? Finally
Keven woke up and we fired up the stove for oatmeal, still cold
and dark. That's when we got a visitor. The cutest mouse you
ever saw - body the size of a big marble, his head a little
marble, and Mickey ears like I'd never seen. Irresistible -
until he suddenly jumps ON me to get at my food. "Shit!" I flinched
backwards, nearly disfiguring myself with a bowl of boiling
mush. Luckily my display of ferocity scared him a few inches
back, and he was his adorable self again.
As we readied for the last seven pitches - thank God we didn't
have to haul that bag any further - I felt again that anticipated,
gentle rush of freedom from waking up in a strange place and
travelling forward from new into new. As we repeatedly let out
slack and took up slack to the summit that day, I laughed at
the lessons we'd learned, and the irony that "reinventing the
wheel" is applied as an insult, yet "experiential learning"
is valued above academics. I was grateful for my experience,
for sharing this moment with Keven, for the upcoming ribbing
we'd take, for the stories we could tell over beers.
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