Short and Fast: Prodigal Son and
Touchstone in a weekend
April 2003
It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Zion. The last time was really the first time Robbie and I climbed together, when we botched an attempt on Desert Shield and ended up getting up Space Shot in a day. This time we were in training to do El Cap in a day and we figured banging out some easy walls in Zion might be just the trick. As usual I had a mini-epic getting to Zion from San Francisco, nearly missing my flight in Vegas and then taking longer on the drive than usual. Plus you lose an hour once you get into Utah. So by the time I arrived it was about 2am local time and my partner was asleep. I set off my car alarm to wake him up, as I am such a nice guy. Our neighbors didn’t appreciate it much, though. One of the complicating factors to our plans is the new Zion bus system, which doesn’t start running until 6:30a and stops at 10p. Buses run from April through October and you can’t bring cars into the park during that time period. We negotiated with ourselves for a while before sleep ran out and we came to no real conclusion. A sport is advanced by the handful of people who do it brilliantly, but it is kept sweet and sane by the great numbers of the mediocre, who do it for fun. Elizabeth Coxhead Saturday: Prodigal SonWe rolled out of bed on Saturday morning sort of groggy and anxious at the same time. We got into our battle gear, stopped in town to get a cup of coffee (as usual Robbie ran into someone he knew), and finally got to the park where we started sorting gear. By this time it was 10 in the morning (a true alpine start for our heroes) and Prodigal Son became the default plan. Robbie had done Prodigal before so we sort of knew what we were getting into. We brought a ton of medium sized nuts which this route eats up. By the time we got on the bus and over to the base of the route it was 11am. Hmm, we are starting what is usually a 2 day beginner wall at 11 in the morning. Is this a good idea? We were most worried about getting slowed down somehow (there were two parties on the route above us) and missing the last bus back to “town” which left at 10p. Oh, well, we started up. This is a fantastic and really easy route. I led the first three pitches in caterpillar style. We were working on moving really fast and this particular technique was great. I had my Silent Partner solo device, and I would just run it up to the anchor, pull up the slack, fix the line for Robbie and continue on soloing. Once he cleaned all the gear and got to the anchor he would send it up on a trail line, put me on belay and I’d continue on. I found the limiting factor with this system is fatigue on the part of the leader and / or sheer boredom on the part of the belayer. I have three vivid memories from Prodigal. The first occurred somewhere on pitch 3 when I realized I was starting to run out of medium sized nuts – these are the Black Diamond #7-9 size nuts. Big enough to be totally bomber but small enough to fit in aid cracks where cams won’t generally go securely. The placements are these blown out constrictions for 100s of feet, nothing but bomber #7 nuts as far as the eye can see. Anyway, I started backcleaning that size nut and I remember looking down at the pitch below me and realizing that I’d left cams and saved a bunch of nuts so I was a little run out. What the heck? Saving nuts and spending cams? Completely backwards from the usual. I guess that’s why I love aid climbing, and climbing in general… you never run out of surprises. Robbie took the lead for a while a couple pitches and then I got back on. I was cruising along and we ran into a really cool couple who’d been on the wall for two days. They were willing to let us pass and we chatted with them for a while and even jugged their line for a pitch. I hopped back on for pitch 7, which was a bolt ladder to this blank boxed out placement, which I stood contemplating for a while. On an easy wall if the obvious solution looks really hard, usually there is a less obvious one that is much easier. This notion slowly dawned on me as I stood there contemplating the box. I reached up to feel this small ledge at just about the extension of my reach and lo and behold here was a perfect hook, almost drilled out. I hopped on and scooted past the box, happy to have gotten a hook into my day. A bit later in this pitch was this “free” section that I just couldn’t figure out. I tried it a couple times, got totally gripped out at the ankle breaking fall onto a ledge and basically started slipping into that downward spiral of frustration and fear. This is C1, I am NOT backing down, I thought to myself, and banged my head against the rock a couple times to get my control back, much to the dismay of my partner and the party we had passed. Turns out there was a perfect placement for a tiny little Splitter two cam which I popped in and cruised through. What an idiot I am. Robbie sent the crux pitch 8 and we cruised off, unroped, up pitch 9 and to the path descent. It took us 8+ hours to get up and we were totally psyched. We had a drink and wandered down the path, focused on burritos and beer. If everything is under
control, you're probably moving too slow. Mario Andretti Sunday: Touchstone WallAfter our victory on Prodigal we wanted something to cap the weekend. Turns out we were pretty tired and the idea of trying Moonlight seemed a little daunting, especially because Robbie wanted to get out of town early so he could make the 6 hour drive back to Carbondale. We quickly agreed on a try at Touchstone, which we were pretty confident of doing. One of the reasons I love climbing so much is that there are always challenges, there is always something more to accomplish, no matter at what level you are climbing or who you are. And sometimes, what was once a great challenge, an event of much pride in your life, you look back on later with a mix of pride and bemusement that you were once so proud of it. Touchstone was such a wall for me. My first wall, we did it in two days – one day to fix to pitch three and one day to climb the top five pitches. We barely made it on day two – rappelling in the dark, the experienced member of our team taking more than his share of pitches, 5.8 feeling as if it was hard 5.11. On this day we showed up at 11 again and started climbing. I led pitches 2-4 in block style again, really enjoying moving fast, and we got near the top of 7 in 5 1/2 hours. It just felt really good, climbing efficiently, enjoying the wall and the exposure and the day. It got windy near the top, but nothing that couldn’t be dealt with. We almost had a total epic on the way down as our ropes got stuck rappelling (we didn’t do the top of 7 or 8 so that we could rappel the route). We tugged and tugged without success. And just as we were contemplating what would end up being four plus very short leads on a slim static line, the rope cam free. I remember feeling like God had smiled on us and saying a little prayer of thanks. We got down pretty quickly after that, walked back to the bus stop and headed into town, tired, sore, and ultimately victorious. I remember that walk 6+ years ago after the first time I did Touchstone, and how powerful it felt. How moved I was then with what we had just done and knowing that I had locked myself into doing something of the sort again. Little did I know I would be making the same walk so many years later. Somehow that memory felt melancholy and smooth, as I pondered the time that had passed, the people I had known and the experiences I’d had. It seemed all of a sudden like a very long time, defined as it was by my passion for climbing. I heard the echoes of the experiences of the intervening years the way you hear whispers in a cave. I was sad and joyful and unspeakably full all at once. Soon we were back to the car and sorting gear. Robbie blasted home to Carbondale and I contemplated a trip back to Vegas to stand by on a flight. Instead I opted to sit in a meadow underneath these towering sandstone cliffs and wallow in that melancholy feeling as I prayed, meditated, and reflected on the years and on my upcoming baptism. Soon the sun set and I was on my way back to Vegas, back to reality. The gremlin was finally
banished, at least for a time, and the vacuum it left was filled by an odd
combination of elation, sadness, pride, and an immense feeling of
accomplishment. The sensation was something like an endorphin high for the
brain. I had been fighting with exposure, cold, and especially fear for such
a long time that walking along the flat, hard asphalt toward Adam’s truck seemed
like too simple a task. I felt incredibly high and safe. From the report of my first trip up Touchstone |
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A few random pictures:
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