Return to Serenity

[freeclimb9]

Few things can possess a man’s passion and soul more strongly than women and liquor. Both can bring a man to incredible highs, and to the lowest of lows. For years of my life, the prospect of a first ascent on a remote granite dome held my desire like a drug.

About six months after I moved to Tucson in 1990, I met a group at the spring Beanfest with a kindred addiction. The late Karl Rickson referred to us as the Mendoza boys due to our shared single-minded devotion to climbing new routes in the like-named canyon. For over a half-decade, this loosely affiliated group of 10, or 20 climbing miscreants shared many climbs and good times throughout the backcountry of southern Arizona.

We often met on Wednesday nights at Chuck’s to climb on his woodie while drinking and smoking. We shared tales of recent epics, and plotted the next. It was during this time that I, along with a few other friends, became fixated on first ascents in a particular wilderness area in southern Arizona that Karl had christened Shangri-La. I often ventured into Shangri-La with Dave Webster who was caretaker for an ever-thickening loose-leaf journal disguised as a guidebook. Dave asked me to write something to document one of our many climbs in Shangri-La, and what follows is part of my account of climbing “Return to Serenity” on Enduro Dome written in 1993. Enduro dome was far from being the most difficult dome in Shangri-La to access, or climb. The climbing turned out to be well within our skill level. But the figurative path to its summit was difficult for me.

[freeclimb9]

With each backcountry climbing trip, I had gotten better. I refined my clothing, pack, and climbing gear to achieve maximum usefulness and durability with minimum bulk and weight. And with each trip I honed my own climbing psyche. I tried to become the consummate southern Arizona backcountry climber. The kind of climber who seeks out climbs which involve a gross approach through the thickest brush to obscure rock where heinous runnouts above manky gear are mandatory. Or, at least the kind of climber who aspired to the ideal. And I really felt like I had my shit together on the rock. It was a time of my life when I put up a first ascent every week on average. I felt totally capable of being able to strike out towards any dome in southern Arizona with high odds of climbing the thing. So when Dave and I conspired together to climb a big dome in Buford canyon in Shangri-La, I thought we’d have no problem. I was wrong. And the experience pulled me across an emotional landscape as prickly as the Sonoran desert.

Our first attempt at the rock we named Enduro was in January of 1993. We left Tucson around two in the morning on New Year’s day, completed the requisite four hour drive, and began hiking at dawn from a secret trailhead. Our hiking took us up a huge alluvial fan cut by a half-dozen arroyos. Up and down hiking across the arroyos eventually brought us to the mouth of the south fork of Buford canyon. Dave had spotted the dome from Blue ridge on a summer-time trip, and assured me that the dome would be found, “just around the corner” of the first ridge framing the canyon.

We hiked for over two hours before turning that corner to finally get our first glimpse of the dome. It was beautiful. A well featured, 600’ high lobe of the good stuff. Rock much like that found in the better known and more traveled Stronghold. The bummer was that the base was at least 1500’ above us up a drainage choked with brush. This last bit of groveling took three more hours, and at noon we were finally at the base of the formation completely exhausted.

The approach had taken us five hours. It was noon. The sun would set at 5 o’clock. We had no bivy gear, little water, and less food. But the worst of it, for me, was that I felt overwhelmed by the prospect of climbing. I could cite fatigue, lack of sleep, a recent bout with flu, poor physical conditioning, and impending parenthood. But it boiled down to a fear of the stone. I felt rattled, out of place and off-kilter. I had somehow become detached from my wah, or chi, or whatever it is that keeps you balanced and focused while climbing on the sharp end. I swallowed what was left of my once-inflated climbing pride, and decided to go home.

We loaded up, and continued crawling up the drainage to a saddle that topped out at about the same elevation as Enduro dome. From the saddle, we plotted a course back to the car that crashed down scree and around small cliffbands to gain the alluvial fan and a now obvious meandering ridgeline back to the car. If nothing else, out efforts yielded the best way to return to the dome.

Back at the car and, later, back at home, I continued to feel out of sorts. And I felt disgusted in myself for letting my head swell with climbing-prowess ego. I had lost touch with the feeling of joy that usually accompanied me on climbs. For reasons that I still have difficulty describing, I had been afraid to commit. The climb had been in shape, but the climber wasn’t. I learned that what the climbing gods give, they can easily take away. I needed redemption.

[freeclimb9]

Almost two months later at the end of February, we tried again. We didn’t even get close. Heavy rain had washed out significant portions of the dirt roads of the region. But we still were able to climb to snow- and rime-covered ridgetops overlooking Shangri-La I reconnected with the process of climbing on that trip, relearning that the cumulative experience was the goal, not the summit.

During the weeks that followed, I slogged away some training hours on a stair machine, and continued to climb new routes in other, warmer areas on small one-pitch formations. I gradually annealed my spirit with small doses of fresh rock and adrenaline.

In mid-March, Dave and I returned to the secret trailhead. The weatherman had predicted good weather, but we watched the stars disappear behind clouds around midnight as we drove in. We began hiking around 5:00 AM, and used our hard-won knowledge of the topography to gain the wandering ridgeline we named “The Magic Dragon”. Once we got to the scree and cliffband slope, we doggedly stepped upwards to reach the saddle by 9:00 under cloudy skies. We dropped a pack with spare water at the saddle, and descended to the base of the dome.

The clouds that came in the night were now dropping rain on the distant Mt Graham, and a few drops on us. But the wet felt comforting rather than ominous. When we had reached the base of the dome on our first attempt, I was exhausted. Now I felt rejuvenated and ready to climb.

Dave laid claim to the first pitch, and began climbing with light rain falling. We were determined to keep climbing unless the rain became totally debilitating. After grunting up and around the rotten rock of a shallow dihedral capped by a small roof, Dave accelerated up another 120 feet before putting in a belay to bring me up. I dug my way through a few pounds of rock in the same dihedral before rounding the roof and emerging onto a solid and golden-hued sea of granite.

Dave’s belay was set nearly equidistant from the right and left edges of the dome, and the golden rock rose in undulating waves above us. Cracks diverged in three directions from our perch, and sections of stone between the fissures were textured with patches of alligator-skin like chicken heads famed in southern Arizona. I racked up and began to follow the cracks leading straight up, into, and upon the unknown. The mystery of the rock lured me upwards. I linked short cracks to areas of chicken heads while the angle varied from slab, to vertical, to slab, to overhang. I felt calm while I frictioned over a couple blank and runnout sections. After scaling a slot through another roof, I equalized runners to two chickenheads, and began to belay Dave.

It felt seductively satisfying to be climbing Enduro dome after all our efforts. This dome had kicked my ass. Or, more accurately, I had kicked my own ass when I lost a sense of humility and contact with my own joy of climbing. I earlier hexed my efforts to climb with my own voodoo, and I had been haunted by it. Reconnection to my true ideal of backcountry climbing –enjoyment of the wilderness, then and now– let me shed the ghosts.

The line we had chosen to climb was striking, the rock was as good as any in Arizona, and the unsettled weather added power to our experience. When Dave’s head popped into view as he climbed the slot through the roof, a huge smile spread across his face to match my own grin. I knew we were going to the top, and I knew I had found my center again.

Dave led the third pitch. I led a short fourth one. And we were on top. We had climbed it. We huddled under a summit boulder and shared a smoke while the sky opened up and the rain fell hard. My demons were dead, and I knew I had been able to “Return to Serenity”.

 

[ 11-09-2002, 09:09 AM: Message edited by: freeclimb9 ]

[Uncle_Tricky]

Thanks for the sharing the memory. Funny how certain climbs fade into memory, and other become more vivid through time. Seems often to have more to do with what's going on inside that the rock or route itself.

[Off_White]

Yeah, ditto on the thumbs up, thanks for the story. All the sweeter since I lived in Tucson 1986-87, thrashed around just enough to appreciate the nature of the Arizona backcountry, and counted Karl Rickson among my buddies.

[Smoker]

Good read Freeclimb.