Friends, there’s something important I need to tell you before you start to read this story. The Ugly Sister, as we’ve named this peak, has a history which is contained in some previous chapters posted earlier on this website. It might be helpful to take a few minutes and go back and read them once again, in the following order:
Peak 6328 – Part 1 Peak 6328 – Part 2 Thanksgiving With the Ugly Sister Another Look at the Ugly Sister
Once you’ve done that, you’ll be perfectly set up to read what follows, the conclusion to the story of the Ugly Sister, the final chapter. I know that reading the four stories named above will allow you to make a lot more sense of what you’re about to read here. But I’m not going to tell it myself. Rather, I’ll leave that to a talented storyteller, Brian Rundle, who led the climb and is more qualified than anyone to tell it. Here follows the entertaining tale, in his own words.
THE UGLY SISTER, TOM THUMB AND OTHER FAEIRY TALES
Area 51 Productions in association with Monkey House Climbing
If, in the end, you cannot explain your doings to others, then your doings have been worthless
– Erwin Schröedinger
Wow, it’s sure hard to believe. Several years have passed, along with a lot of posturing and naysaying on my part about desert climbing. I suppose that what they say about alpine climbers is true about desert climbers as well: To be a good desert climber, one needs three attributes: One, a high pain tolerance; two, a bad memory; three, …I forget…. That leaves me here on a typical bleak, cold, and windy Chicago winter day. I am supposed to be working, but who can work in this situation? Maybe it’s the silk noose that I am wearing around my neck that is cutting off the circulation to my brain…yeah that’s it. Or maybe, just maybe, I have had a curse put on me. A spell cast by a witch of the desert: The Ugly Sister.
Several years back we did a climb at an undisclosed location in the Arizona desert. No matter what your perspective, it really was this huge pile of choss. There wasn’t too much going for it. Maybe it was a first ascent. If so, that was its only really redeeming quality. Or was it? The approach, though not long by most alpine standards, was through nasty desert scrub, with all kinds of evil, nasty pokey things to stab you, tear at your hide, and your pack, and draw blood and curses. Water was the usual desert challenge. The climbing, while not very hard, nor terribly exposed, was still daunting and frustrating. The rock was junk, lots of loose stuff. There was vegetation everywhere. Some was helpful for building natural belays, but most was dubious, in the way, and sharp. There were long run-outs on poor pro.
Success in climbing should be measured by one thing only, that being total and undivided attention to the two cardinal rules of climbing:
Rule No. 1
Don’t *$&#-up and die.
Rule No. 2
Have Fun
(Caveat: It doesn’t have to be fun, for you to be having fun)
Nothing else should define success.
Our rope management skills had somehow been erased from our minds. Perhaps the Sister was already casting spells our way. We had several extreme tangles at belays that also caused my mind to become knotted. The rope eventually got free, but not the Gordian knot my mind had become entwined into. I think it has taken until this day almost 3 years later to finally cut the last strands free. We did eventually summit. On the descent we had a series of misadventures. A huge rock almost ended both our days, as we were trying to free the rope that got stuck on rappel. We got benighted and had an unplanned bivi, and many, many rappels on dodgy anchors. On the thrash out to the truck my mantra was: never ever again, never ever again…
However, the whole time we were in the area, we were being watched over and bewitched by la Hermana Fea. My climbing partner, the Desert Mountaineer (DM) travels in this area often and I am very sure that he was already possessed by her. I, on the other hand required time. Her poison entered me for sure, but it was slow- acting. Very slow and insidious. It took years to spread it’s infection throughout my being, slowly fermenting and mutating, until one day it just reached a threshold and crossed over into my conscious reality. So now I have no choice in the matter. There is only one way to be “cured‟ or exorcised. I must go and meet with the sorceress on her own territory and on her own terms. The engagement with her will be a journey into the unknown. At this point in time and space it is unclear if the meeting will take the form of a dance or a battle, or both. It is also clear that a part of the magic she has worked on me has been designed to prepare me for our meeting, because she too is a warrior and a warrior always values a worthy opponent. The reason for my training is suddenly clear. Her machinations have finally reached the surface and have become the catalyst to begin “training‟.
Chicago, December 2005
The training begins:
The value of something is determined by what you had to give up to achieve it.
– The Dalai Lama
The map is not the territory any more than the training is the climbing. There is no way to replicate the climbing effort accurately enough in training. All one can do is approximate. The more craftily this is done however, the closer the approximation becomes. The training must become tailored to match the climbing expected. In the words of Reinhold Messner: I do not want to become dependant upon my future.
Don Juan Matus instructs us that it is especially fitting and appropriate to use Death as your advisor when training for an encounter with a magical creature. There is no way to predict the event. The witch has many diverse and arcane tools at her disposal. She can bring into play the elements. In the form of heat, cold, wind, rain and snow. She can cause avalanches and rock-fall. She can lure you with falsely- placed confidence into blind alleys, or worse. She can alter the very fabric of time, leaving you cold and hungry, stranded on a ledge long after the sun has gone down. She is an adept in the disciplines of chaos, randomness and non-linear events. She can turn your very strengths against you. The subtleties and nuances of her craft are endless. Even from afar her sorcery can control you. It can affect how you think and how you train. You must be keenly aware of this and be on your guard at all times. Hard training to improve your grit and resilience is always needed. Your goal, of course, is to become indestructible; but go too far, train too hard, and you will be overcome by her spell, and possibly beaten and doomed before you even get a chance to meet her up close.
More Fun:
There’s a whole lotta things I never done, but I ain’t never had too much fun.
-‘Too much fun’
Tom Thumb. What the hell is Tom Thumb? I am not only lame enough to suggest doing the Ugly Sister, but I have added Tom Thumb to the mix. They say that if you are going to be hung for stealing a lamb that you might as well steal a sheep. Tom Thumb is a striking spire, way, way out there. There doesn’t appear to be any information about it anywhere. The geology of the area indicates volcanic, so it’s probably very bad crud, held together by dust and valley fever spores. Peak 2650. This is DM’s addition to the mix. Should only be one pitch of horribly rotten and exposed rock. I think the catch is that you have to illegally sneak into Mexico to do it. Cool!
I am doing 1-1/2 hour runs in sub-zero temperatures. Well, running is really too noble a word to describe the pathetic shuffling that I barely accomplish swaddled in all I can wrap myself in. I always question if it’s at all relevant to preparing for the task ahead. But what else can you do? I climb laps in the gym. Nice plastic. Nice plastic. That’s gonna be a real close approximation to the real deal in Arizona. Grapple with the weight pile from time to time. Again. Relevance. Mostly I just try to get in the right frame of mind. The frame of mind that accepts loose class 4 and long class 5 run-outs on shaky gear, on equally shaky rock. Think I’ll have another double espresso, thank you very much! I am sore all over. There has just gotta be a better way. With a little over a month to go I am going to have to get in gear. Time is indeed running out, and the latest recon photos of Tom Thumb look insane. And I mean that in a bad way…
Arizona February 2006 – The climbing begins:
As DM likes to say, we get a “crack-o-early‟ start from his casa in Tucson. In too short a time we are bouncing up the dirt road to the Baboquivari campground. Strangely, there is a makeshift barricade across the road. We don‟t really care much for such contrivances, but are careful enough to re-assemble it after we have passed. As Lonesome George’s landlady says: “that don’t confront me none”
It is still quite dark and rather chilly as we make our start. The first half hour or so is done by headlamp, but soon enough the light and heat from the rising sun welcomes us, as we move into “open‟ country, surprising a deer in the process. We had tried to pare the weight of our packs to a minimum but they still weighed in at over 14 kilos each. We had 2 ropes, plenty of slings, 2 litres of liquid each, headlamps, 1 meagre first aid kit, 1 camera, 1 cell phone (for ballast, since it didn‟t work worth Jack), 1 jacket each, 1 helmet each, 1 harness each, 1 pair of rock shoes for the leader, 1 set of Jumars and a very modest amount of food, mostly in the form of Clif Bars, and energy gels. We also had a reasonable rack; that I did not dare reduce much further due to the unknown nature of the terrain higher up. 1 set of wired stoppers, 1 set of mid-range cams, and a couple of small and large Tri-cams. So the packs were heavy and awkward, but we still made reasonable time to DM and Mike‟s high point, a smallish “cave‟ underneath a large chock-stone, and where the actual climbing begins.
The first pitch was simple with an easy low class five move around the chock-stone followed by a class four ramp to gain the summit ridge at the base of the first notch. The next pitch was also easy low fifth although on loose rock. This brought us to the first place that caused me some consternation. There is a series of moves that involves negotiating a group of three large blocks that are very precariously perched on one-another. I dubbed this feature the “unholy trinity‟. To add to the fun there was a heart-stopping drop off the north side of this ridge. There must have been 400m of free air straight down.
I actually tried my rodeo skills as I attempted to lasso one of the trinity and pull it off the mountain to make our passage safer, but to no avail. I finally screwed up enough courage to delicately pick my way through these blocks without trying to even touch them, let alone put any pressure on them. Think quiet thoughts… Once past this, we arrived at the top of the second notch. We fixed our spare rope and rappelled 25m into the notch. From the notch, a short easy pitch led us to the start of the upper ridge. Because of the blocky and meandering nature of the whole ridge we were required to climb short pitches to avoid the excessive rope drag that would otherwise quickly accumulate in the system.
The final pitch was fun. It had a reasonably hard set of starting moves at about 5.7/5.8 but well protected with gear, although the exposure was tremendous.
This left us with one short walk to the summit and we were up.
We spent precious few moments on the summit as the “daylight-o-meter‟ was running and I wanted to get back down safely and before dark. It would have been nice to bask on the summit a while longer, but I didn‟t think that we could afford the luxury, so we bailed as soon as we could. We did a series of down-climbs and rappels that brought us back to the notch.
The rope was fixed, so we could Jumar out of the notch if needed, but I was sure that was going to get messy and gobble up time. The Ugly Sister would have her way with us if we attempted this, I’m sure. It looked as if I could climb out and that’s just what we did. The exposure was there, the moves were hard to protect (in fact we had to abandon a #2 Trango cam that got stuck) but the holds were great, and in short order I was up and DM was soon cleaning the pitch. It went maybe as hard 5.7. We executed a series of rappels, lowers, and down-climbs and eventually ended up back under the chockstone where we had stashed one pack, my boots, and our extra water. All of the rappels went great and the rope never got stuck or tangled. We had done it! Was I ever happy to pry those rock shoes off of my mangled feet.
Well, as you know it’s never really over until you are back in the truck swilling back a pint. We had about 1 hour of daylight left and maybe 3+ hours of hiking and bushwhacking to get back to the truck. We didn’t discuss it too long. It would have gotten ugly trying to find our way down by headlamp. We could have done it, but we opted to bivi instead. DM and Mike had discovered a pretty cool cave on their last reconnaissance.
We located the cave and spent the last 40 min of daylight gathering firewood for the long night ahead. Actually, by bivi standards, it was very comfortable and we spent a warm and safe 12 hours, albeit with little sleep.
By 0930 the following day we were back at the truck.
All in all, the Ugly Sister danced with us as fairly as could be expected. She let us have our prize, but not without us working for it. I turned to face her and silently offered my thanks for allowing us this engagement.
There’s more – stay tuned for The Ugly Sister – Part 2
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