Andy's cracking fingers, yum!
Andy: Monday morning, back to work. Out to Hound Rocks for some more fine crack climbing. Right Baskerville Crack (10a), Tossed Green (10a), and Eye to the West (9). Things are heating up in the desert, so we've started to seek out the shade like the other desert dwellers. Just us and the lizards, tortoises, coyotes, and rabbits. The place really empties out during the week.
Wendy wrestled with climbing demons of the past and finally lead Double Cross - a bit of a Joshua Tree sandbag that should have hash marks at its base for all the injured climbers (bones and egos) it has spawned. Many have whimpered away after taking their beating from this climb. It's only a 5.7, so the guide book says....
Witnessed some ego thrashing on Double Cross today as well. When we arrived at the wall, a climbing couple showed up right behind us and promptly started up a neighboring climb called Double Start. In my fourteen years of climbing in Joshua Tree, I've never, not once, witnessed someone climbing this ugly looking route. He was an extremely buff, shirtless, 220 lb military man, and she was a stout, buxom (clearly obvious with her very, very, very small tank top) woman. As he started up the climb, she was busy expressing how this was only her fourth day climbing.
We knew this was going to be good.
His back was littered with blood and scabs from their earlier climb that day - Dogleg, another fine Joshua Tree sandbag. I guess he just liked climbing shirtless and getting scared. Sure enough, within 5 minutes he was neck deep in a chimney, scraping his back, chest, arms, and legs up the rough rock. He was making about an inch of progress for every five minutes of climbing, clearly struggling, and she was busy chatting away with us - oblivious to the epic going on 50 feet above her! After 20 more minutes of torture, he finally relented and backed off the route - leaving about $200 worth of climbing gear in the crack. On our rappel, we offered to grab his gear for him - but he said no....
Now he needed to retrieve the gear, so he decided to climb neighboring Double Cross and rappel from the top to collect his belongings. A girl (Wendy) just climbed it, so he figured it couldn't be THAT bad...
He was woefully unprepared for the wide crack climbing business of Double Cross, so we offered to loan him some of our gear - we weren't the least bit interested in carrying all 220 pounds of him in a litter.
This got down right scary to watch. His 220 lb frame struggled up the first 40 feet of the route, and she was barely holding on to the rope. We attempted to offer feeble encouragement as he crawled up the rock, when in reality we kept passing glances at one another wondering if Double Cross was going to score another hash mark. His poor tape job to protect his hands was falling off inch by inch in the crack, strands of tape were literally hanging down his arms.
What he lacked in skill, he made up with determination. Inch by inch he got past the difficult sections of climbing. Eventually, we figured the probability of a disaster was low enough, so we decided to return to camp. They would drop by later to return the gear.
When they finally showed up at camp, it had already been dark for 2 hours.... we didn't even want to ask how the epic ended up - because we knew it couldn't have been pretty.
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Andy's cracking fingers, yum! |