Captain Pugwash

A No-fixed-anchors first ascent, 1999

Snow? I hate it. I’m neurotic about the weather, and the forecast was grim. Friday was down the tubes, pissed away buying new tires from the only place that wasn’t busy. When I got the bill, I found out just why they weren’t busy. Now I was near-broke and hours late, swearing, packing, fretting, and not answering the—shut up, damn it!—phone. We got a silly start, 7:00 pm, long after dark; the graveyard-shift drive to Utah was looming like a prison sentence. Kath Pyke was not happy about having been kept waiting so long, but shrugged stoically. I felt sleepy, strung-out, not at all ready for the desert trip I’d sold Kath on a week previously. She ignored my whining about late starts and poor weather forecasts. She looked at me. Her eyes spoke, not her mouth: we are going to the desert—stop whining. I shut up. The clutch started slipping on the first hill out of Boulder.

“That’s it,” I said. Release and relief. I turned the truck around. As we rolled back into town my thoughts were mixed; most of me was looking forward to frittering the weekend away, but slivers of guilt crept in, as if I’d caused the clutch to slip and willed our desert trip to fail. Kath said nothing. She was probably angry; she had every right to be. I had been unprepared, hopelessly late, then, once we got going, I’d whined. And now this. But she was pragmatic: if the clutch was going out on the gentle rise up to the Rocky Flats plateau, it would be foolish to try to climb over the Rockies, late on a Friday night in January; and even chancier four-wheeling around the deserted White Rim Trail.

Next Friday, the truck had a new clutch. I was down several hundred more bucks, but my mood had shifted—I felt relaxed and happy to be heading west. Kath, as always, was patient and confident. With a few well-timed phone calls, she made sure, with just the right degree of subtle firmness, that I was going to be ready on time.

Saturday morning saw us lined up at the Island in the Sky ranger station, waiting for a lone midwinter ranger to show up. We reserved Gooseberry Campsite for two nights. Then came the drive down the White Rim Trail. The shady switchbacks at the top of the Shafer Trail were packed with snow a couple inches thick, right where the truck hangs over a drop of hundreds of feet of talus and cliffs. The passenger, as it happens, is on the uphill side for the scariest section, so Kath discreetly cracked the door—no need for both of us to go.

DABNEYLAND

Down on the vast expanse of the White Rim itself, there were no bikers, no birds. Nothing moved. The sky was the cobalt blue of old medicine bottles, the horizon so clear it looked as if the air itself had gone away for the season. The extreme clarity and silence produced an eerie we’re-being-watched effect.

Our destination was not Monument Basin itself, but the lands beyond, a place where few humans had ever been. A scramble of creek beds had etched themselves into chert-strewn flats and sprawling buttes. A handful of towers slid in and out of view—now visible—now gone.

Next morning there was a brisk wind, not particularly strong but dry and cold, straight out of the north. Twigs snapped under our feet; loud reports that emphasized the enveloping silence.

I was reassured by being with Kath. Working at that time for the Access Fund, she specialized in raptor closures. Outside office hours, she refused to talk about her work.

She was, however, intrigued by the idea of climbing a new desert tower and getting back down without leaving any anchor behind. The inspiration for this idea was the introduction of strict no-new-fixed-anchor regulations in 1995 by Canyonlands National Park superintendent Walt Dabney. The regulations banned new fixed anchors, of any kind. They also banned hammered aid. But there were more towers to climb! What to do? Most would-be first ascentionists left, and looked elsewhere (slowing new route development was the point of the regulations). Kath and decided it’d be fun to take on the implicit challenge: to climb a new route hammerless—ideally free—and remove every piece of hardware when we descended.

Kath seemed the perfect partner for such a project. She’s a strong climber and, more importantly, a solid one. Calm, sensible, a sense of what’s right and wrong that I can only envy. No games, no ego, no hidden agenda. Utterly reliable, whether dealing with a hard spicy lead, a grumpy partner, or complex ropework logistics. And that’s what you need for climbing in the desert. Your end of the rope demands all your attention; it’s great to know that the other end of the rope is well under control.

The tower Kath and I picked for our experiment was perhaps 150 feet high, with red and white bands, bulges concertinaed into an ungainly but streamlined shape. From the side it looked like a Spanish galleon, stranded hundreds of feet above the Colorado River. Kath enthusiastically offered to lead a steep finger crack on the shady west end of the thing. Alright, I said, and we geared up and Kath got going.

We climbed two pitches to the top on that day. But there was just an hour or so of daylight left. We decided to fixed our ropes, tied off around the final summit blocks, so that we could give ourselves plenty of time the following day to figure out our retreat.

Next morning the wind had shifted, warmed, and calmed down. It would have made a perfect climbing day. We jugged the ropes to the summit and pondered how to get down. In theory, we could both rappel simultaneously, one on each side of the tower, counterbalancing each other—the classic simul-rappel. However, we’d be completely out of communication with each other and would not know when the other person was down, so we deemed this too hazardous.

Another plan, one that we eventually used, was to use each other’s weight as counterbalances, but to descend one at a time. That way we could communicate and employ a number of checks on ourselves and each other as we went. Kath, being lighter, would go first. I sat down on one edge of the tower (in the photo below, I sat on on the left side, wedged solidly against the topmost band of rock) and lowered her to the ground.

One other worry with such a rappel on a bulky landform is whether or not the ropes could be retrieved afterwards. Would they pull over the summit? My guess was that they would not; the sheer weight of 150 feet of rope hanging down the far side, plus the friction on the summit rock, ought to cause the ropes to hang up. Once Kath was down, we tested this; to our surprise they pulled easily. She pulled the ropes until the knot joining them was just over her side of the edge, then tied into the rope and waited. The plan was that she would remain tied in and wait until she saw me walking around the base.

I now had to rappel the rope hanging down the side opposite her. One needs a lot of trust that the other person, on the ground, out of sight, is doing exactly what should be done. Before I launched into space, we yelled back and forth a few times. I worried.…

“Are you ready …?”

“Ready!”

“Umm, are you sure?”

“Yes!”

“Okay … I’m, uh, rappelling …!”

I eased off the edge and lowered myself, feeling the taut rope give a little. Perhaps Kath was taking a step forward or something. No more communication from here on. Just as I leaned back into the horizontal rappel stance, my weight fully on the rope, I started falling…

DOGS AND FIRE HYDRANTS

I fell 10 feet, then the rope came tight again. What had happened? Puzzled, I rappelled the rest of the way. Once safely on the ground, I ran around the tower and asked Kath about the sudden falling sensation; she said she never noticed anything. It’s just the nature of climbing ropes; they will suddenly stretch at a certain threshold of weight, and my hefty carcass exceeds this threshold.

We pulled the ropes down and congratulated each other, grinned and laughed, coiled the ropes and walked away with big smiles on our faces.

We were joyful, thankful. We had visited an area where few had ever been, climbed to a fine summit via an all-free 5.11a route. From the top, we had enjoyed tantalizing vistas of canyons, cliffs and basins, even a glint of the Colorado River, another mile beyond. Beyond all this, we had the satisfaction of knowing that we were walking away from a tower that was left exactly as we found it. A second-ascent party would find a pristine climb and an anchorless summit, just as we had. It felt liberating to use creativity instead of technology.

While on Captain Pugwash, Kath Pyke spotted a herd of bighorn sheep, who had run off at the sound of our voices. Kath was concerned that humans, visiting the area, might stress the sheep and hurt their chances of survival. She decided not to return. I wondered if I should do the same, leave the wildlife in peace.

A couple years later, I went to a slide show in Moab, given by an NPS ranger, about the local bighorns. After explaining that the sheep in the Monument Basin/Lower Basins area comprised the largest and healthiest herd anywhere in Canyonlands, he showed a video of rangers chasing the sheep with a helicopter and nets, in order to catch and relocate them to other areas where they were not doing so well. The greatest fear for their future was that such a successful herd—located where there were no predators—might be susceptible to disease. The video of the terrified beasts, sprinting across leg-breaking terrain and slamming into the nets, was a shock.

If such treatment was deemed acceptable, then occasional visits by humans on foot are surely not too distressing. But Kath had made her decision and stuck to it. For me, Captain Pugwash had been the most fun I’d had on a tower in years—I wanted more.