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Outside Magazine July 2002

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The Hard Way
The Stone Mirage (Cont.)

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS EARLIER:

We are up at four. By daybreak we've battled 500 vertical feet of thornbushes to gain the base of the wall. I get the first lead. Classic 5.9 toe-heel off-width crack, eight inches wide—too big for my hands, too small for my body—with the occasional yucca to climb through to keep things interesting. On the next pitch, Todd leads up through 5.10, legs straddled and stemming, with no pro—hand jams, a fingertip lieback, then a dirt overhang that requires an ungainly belly flop onto an ill-placed cactus.

Pitch three starts in a chimney and shoots out to a giant roof hung with clumps of green moss the size of pineapples. I stem in full splits, tearing away the moss.

"Is there gear?" Todd yells anxiously.

"The rock is rotten!" I hear the fear and weakness in my voice.

Digging desperately with my fingers, I manage to hollow out a space for a camming unit in the wretched rock.

We are trapped midway up our mythical wall. The sun is falling, the wind screeching. We have no alternative but to go on instinct and experience.

There's an absurdly flaring crack that goes out the left-hand side of the roof. In a full-body stem, both feet on one wall, both hands on the other, I attempt to calmly assess the feasibility of the crack. But soon I start shaking so bad that at the last possible moment I cram a fist jam deep into an exfoliating hole—and fall.

To my surprise, the fist jam holds. Dangling by one arm, I slam in another cam and then promptly fall on it. Unbelievably, the piece holds, although only two of its four lobes have wedged. It could pop at any second. I'm swinging in space.

I'm too scared to lower off this horrifying piece, so I climb. It is the ugliest off-width in Mexico. I use flared fist jams, chicken wings, arm bars, a shoulder wedge, stacked fists, a head jam, every single crack-climbing trick I ever learned in Vedauwoo. There is nothing for my feet. The upper half of my body is plugged up in a hole, and my legs merely flail in midair. I manage to insert one side of my body in the crack. But there's no pro. None! I'm so far past the point of no return I could vomit. I talk to myself. Calm myself. Consciously stop my legs from shaking. Then, inch upward.

For the next hundred feet of climbing I stab the dirt in the back of the crack and the wind blows it back into my eyes and mouth. Crazed with terror, I somehow wiggle in just two small, bad, no-hope-at-all-of-holding-a-fall pieces before hitting the end of the 175-foot rope.

The crack is too wide to protect. There is no belay, only clods of dirt. I have no choice: I tie into them with a sling. The wind is now howling. My eyes are so packed with dirt I can no longer keep them open. I scream instructions for Todd, 175 feet below, and he screams back at me, but neither of us can make out what the other is saying. I yell myself hoarse trying to make sure he knows he can't fall, no matter what. The dirt-clod belay would not hold us.

We are trapped midway up our mythical wall. The sun is falling from the sky, the wind screeching. We can't communicate. We have no alternative but to go on instinct and experience.

With my eyes crusted shut, I feel the ropes. At the slightest change in tension, I delicately pull up rope. Time is of no importance. As long as Todd doesn't fall and pull us both to our deaths, I could belay for hours, days, weeks. I go into a half-conscious state, concentrating on sending good vibes through my fingers down inside the rope to Todd.

The next time I open my eyes, Todd has climbed through the roof and heaves into view on the face below me. He motions for me to pull up the haul line, which I do. Knotted to the end, I'm everlastingly grateful to find, is a cam that Todd had removed from the crack below. I jam it deep into the crack, and it's solid enough to anchor a fall. Suddenly I have a real belay.

When Todd climbs up to me he's as shaken as I am.

"Holy Christ, hombre! That's harder than any 5.12 I've ever done! I would never have led it."

"You did, Todd. We both did."

There are two more difficult pitches to the top. It's dark when we pull over the lip. In a summit cave we gather wood and make a fire and settle in for a long, garrulous bivouac.

THE ASHES ARE COLD and we're stiff as wood when the sky finally begins to lighten. It will take us half a day to find our way off the mountain. For the first time, we're actually talking about climbing, the pretext for our adventure in Mexico.

We agree that the middle pitch was absurdly dangerous, deserving of an X, or death fall, rating. We thus dub it the Dos Equis pitch.

And a name for the climb itself? El Vedauwoo.

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