Beaking in Tongues

Spring 1997, with Dave Levine

Doubts

The Oracle intimidates. If it were not for its neighbor, the more famous Titan, it’d be the tallest of the Fisher Towers. It was the last of the giant Fisher Towers to be climbed, in October 1970, by Harvey Carter, Tom Merrill, Steve Kentz, and Mike Pokress. Their route Fantasia ascends the south ridge, via, according to the guidebook, 17 (!) pitches. (In the photo above, Fantasia takes the right skyline, after starting almost directly from the trail). In early 1996 Chip Wilson and I climbed this, weaving our way around those crazed gargoyles. We were the third ascent, shortly after Rob Slater and Stu Ritchie’s second.

Sixteen years after the first ascent, Fantasia was still the only route to the summit. We wondered, could there be another route? A more direct line, up one of those enormous faces to east and west, 700 feet or more in height? Mike O'Donnell suggested that there might be a line on the west face, which featured obvious criss-cross slashes high up. The problem was that below this zone was several hundred feet of featureless, dead-vertical stone. Or was it featureless? Chip and I were learning that the best cracks in the Fishers were often unrelated to the superficial features like the scoops and chimneys. I hiked around with binoculars one day, teasing out possible lines. Maybe, just maybe, there was a line… Only one way to find out. And, with the sudden popularity of the Fisher Towers, we had better hurry.

Chip and I drove over from Boulder, hiked in with huge packs loaded with ropes, gear, and some A5 Birdbeaks, tiny hook-shaped pitons recently developed by John Middendorf as a sort of hook-shaped RURP, combining the best of both. Bill Roberts and I had used a few of these a few month earlier on Jim Beyer's Jagged Edge, we’d been impressed how securely they lodged in the tiniest seams.

At the base we roped up under a vague scoop. A mantel landed me on a sloped ledge from where I could reach a vertical seam. The problem was, this seam quickly vanished behind a muddy veil. Under this, god only knows what was going on. I placed a couple Birdbeaks, stalled. Over the preceding several months, I’d built up some expectation, in an abstract way, of doing the climb but failed to prepare myself for actually getting started, to step onto the rock and commit to what would clearly be a major, and majorly demanding, project. The immense cliff above and the scale of what we were contemplating now hit home and made me feel small. Doubt niggled, then burrowed deep, undermining everything. Finally, I asked Chip if he was interested in trying. He was not. That decided it. I removed the beaks, downclimbed and untied, not twenty minutes after uncoiling the ropes. We silently coiled them back up again, packed our bags, wandered slowly back to the truck.

What ever else we did that weekend is forgotten. One thing I do know is that as soon as I was comfortable at home again, that cliff, that next placement, that decision I’d made that day, began haunting me.

Above my high point, in my imagination, now seemed sunny, welcoming, and doable. Self-deception or honest appraisal? How does one know without revisiting the scene?

A year later

Around the same time, the mid-90s, Dave Levine and I had become friends and regular partners on the rock. He had spent a year as camp host in Rifle, rapidly mastered every outdoor sport he tried. He rented a room at our house and began a graphic design career. Generally, I avoid climbing with roommates—it can quickly become too much of the same person, 24/7—but I made an exception in Dave’s case. Considerable physical strength was supported by an understated determination, tempered by a humble, astute intelligence. He encouraged me to boulder more, climb harder routes in Eldo, and in turn I encouraged him to climb hard aid climbing in the desert, which he quickly picked up.

February of 1997, we were lured to the desert one freakishly warm February weekend and camped in the Fishers, no particular goal in mind. Perhaps now, I suggested, now was the time for a return to the Big Project. Dave was psyched and we hiked in.

This time I had no expectations, no worries, not much thought at all. I tapped those same Birdbeaks into the same tiny creases, moved upward into the mud curtain, chopped it away, found more seams that lured me in. There’s a rhythm. Place piece, test—as much as you dare—glide up to the highest step, clip in, reach high, explore, place piece. Repeat. Any given placement might fail without warning, but that thought had to be compartmentalized, put away. Keep moving, move smoothly. No fidgeting, sneezing, talking. Outside distractions and unnecessary thoughts are saved till later.

Later, possibly hours later, placements on this pitch became deeper, more secure. I could relax. Coincidentally, birds began singing again. I noticed my dry throat and sore feet. Finally, at a place where the crack opened up for perfect A1 nut placements I leaned right and placed a couple big belay bolts and smiled and shouted with joy.

Dave Levine was new to the Fisher Towers. But he had heard about the mud so made sure to bring the essential protective equipment: swim goggles.

He stormed up the next pitch:

Pitch 2 followed the same, singular, amazingly consistent crack. He placed no aid bolts. Before he finished the pitch we were out of time and left for home, leaving ropes fixed for the following weekend.

The next weekend was cold—well, duh, it was February—and the combination of winter weather and northwest-facing aspect would haunt us the rest of the route. Pitch 2 ended where the crack jogged left; he leaned rightward to place a pair of bolts as much out of the way of falling debris (or falling climber...) as possible.

In the photo above, that bright green object on the ground below me is my sleeping bag. I belayed from it—yes, it was that cold—then jettisoned it.

Pitch 3 loomed above. There was now some pressure. We made a great team, Dave and I. But there was some friendly competition in play, a game. I'd placed no bolts on my lead, Dave had placed none on his. We had several hundred more feet to go, which of us would place the first one? We each resolved to not be that guy, the one who Placed The First Aid Bolt…

Pitch 3, depending on one's outlook, could be described as the worst pitch in the entire Fisher Towers—or one of the finest. The crack was full of mud and dead insects. It felt like a seam of fossilized cake mix, baked in place amid ancient walls. Sometimes the dirt was harder than the "rock" on either side. Other times it felt like nailing the filling of a giant Oreo cookie, pitons wobbling in mush. Memory is blurred by time but apparently I spent the better part of three days toiling here. I do still recall a football-size chockstone wedged deep in a section too wide for any of our cams. Its edges crumbled, as did the walls that held it in place. Lost for options, I excavated a passage all the way behind it—seemingly hours of labor—and threaded it with a long sling.

The rope ran out just as I reached a wide band of monumentally massive stone that reminded me of Stanage in the UK’s Peak District. Placing solid belay bolts, I smiled to myself, yelled weakly, Dave hollered back. This pitch had been the most exhausting and filthy I'd ever led. And still no aid bolts! This was a great place to stop. Though, not so great for Dave, because the single crack we’d been following for several hundred feet now arced severely left and the wall above, where he would have to go, looked bleak.

Memory has Dave and I, at around this juncture, spending hours pacing up and down the talus below, gazing through binoculars from every possible vantage point and strategizing, taking note of how features emerged and vanished again as the sunlight probed the cliffs. Doing our homework.

As determined as I was to not place the first aid bolt, Dave, behind his quiet smile, was equally resolute. Above Pitch 3, the magnificent crack we'd followed for over 400 feet petered out. We were now in the zone of criss-cross slashes visible from afar. But up close they were tight and shallow, the hardness of the rock now working against us. Dave carefully placed a Birdbeak, then another. Some attempts immediately met refusal, some bent the steel. Some beaks he did manage to place were so bad he didn’t clip them into the rope (see photo above). But he persevered, working generally upward, never knowing if where he was heading was going to pan out.

Meticulous care and patience—and lots of long slings—paid off and he navigated to a blind corner where a horizontal ripple/gutter we’d seen from the ground shot straight right.

Next weekend, it was Dave’s turn to be relaxed and my turn to sweat.

At the belay he’d established, there were no cracks. But, there was that shallow half-round gutter leading rightward. If I could place our biggest cam just so, it might hold bodyweight ... yes! ... then another....

Thirty feet right was, mercifully, a faint vertical crack that led upward for several bodylengths. It petered out in yet another plate of dead-blank meanness. I placed belay bolts and smiled for the first time in days. Over to you, Dave!

I’d left him a mess to clean up. There were random gaps where I’d backcleaned cams and what gear I’d left in place barely supported the sideways twisting that cleaning a traverse entails. He had to aid the pitch all over again. I sent the leftover cams back to him to help with this. A year later, during the second ascent, rumor has it that cleaning this pitch was the point where Cameron Tague’s girlfriend, after one bruising pendulum fall too many, decided to became his ex-girlfriend.

We were now 40 or 50 feet from the saddle behind the final tower of the Oracle. Dave was going to have to work up and right to gain this obvious and welcome spot, the first ledge—hell, the first foothold!—in 500 feet of climbing. Dave took over the lead and to my amazement—his amazement, too—actually managed to find a tiny seam for a Birdbeak that held bodyweight. Then another. And another.

Traversing on marginal gear is more harrowing than moving upward because it's near impossible to bounce test anything when each new placement is at arm's reach away.

Dave gained a faint groove, then moved upward. For the whole pitch, he placed only Birdbeaks, about a dozen in all. A tiny midway Alien in a horizontal looked okay from where I was but he did not dare weight it. Toward the end of the pitch, in a carefully planned act of desperation, he pulled up a long length of the haul line, tied off a load of pitons and tossed them over the saddle as a kind of counterweight.

On the plus side, cleaning was a breeze.

And we were at the saddle! Dave, when I joined him, was wide-eyed with happiness and relief. Still no aid bolts! And he was done leading! There were sublime views out east to the Mystery Towers and we were in sight of the summit, just a couple hundred feet above. Thirty feet right, an easy-looking vertical crack bisected the final tower—we just had to get over to the crack.

Next day Dave wanted—needed, badly—a rest. For me, being so near to the top did not allow me to relax. I hiked in, jumared and started rope-soloing the next section. Of course, once embarked upon, this proved more fiddly than it appeared. Dave, hearing plaintive cries, took pity on me and came up to belay and offer some support as I worked out and fixed the first half of the zigzagging traverse toward that final crack.

Next weekend we arrived at the Fisher Towers with one aim: there was not going to be another "next weekend" on this climb. Worried about rope drag, I set off tied into two lead ropes. I finished the rightward traverse clipping pieces into the first rope, then, after securing a few good placements in the vertical crack, untied from the first rope, dropped it, and forged upward clipping the second rope all the way to the top. The plan was for Dave, cleaning, to lower out the entire way until he was under me, and, once on top, we’d lower from the summit to clean the remaining pendulum points or if time ran out just leave them be.

Of course, the “easy-looking” vertical crack was not simple; it was grungy, steep, and rotten, typical of the topmost bands of Cutler just before they meet the Moenkopi. For a final flourish the Moenkopi caprock overhung and I groped, blindly, for a hook placement on the lip. I stepped into my aider and swung out—a thrilling maneuver, suspended over 700 feet of empty space. This was made particularly frightening by the arrival of a vicious windstorm that tried to knock me and my aiders, and hook, sideways and into space. The wind had been rising all day and now it threatened to make what should have been a relaxing visit to the summit into something much more grueling.

In the photo above, Dave Levine, cleaning the last pitch, has a deliriously happy smile... perhaps from the sheer joy of being outdoors in a wonderful place. Or maybe at the thought of being almost done with an ordeal that seemingly had consumed our entire spring.

As planned, we placed rappel bolts directly above the saddle. The rappel, we knew, was going to be awful. Dave went first and I lowered out rope to him as he went. Midway, to reduce the pounding he was getting from the wind, he placed a piton, clipped the ropes in, continued thrashing, sometimes downward. Landing on the saddle was not easy; he kept getting blown 20 feet out from the cliff. On the plus side he was easily able to reach and clean the various lower-out/pendulum points on the traverse into the final crack. Next it was my turn, with Dave giving me a firemans' belay. Most of the time the wind held me far out in space, struggling to breathe let alone descend the ropes. On a whim the wind would drop and so would I, pounding into the cliff as if plummeting from a highball boulder problem. After each impact, there would be a few seconds of calm air and frantic rappel action before the invisible hand began shoving me back out again. We reached the ground around midnight, very, very relieved, very, very happy.

Looking back, 20 years later, I'm proud of what we did here. We both are. To this day, Beaking in Tongues is still the only route to a major Fisher Tower summit with no holes drilled for upward progress. Dave and I took the time to work with the rock, probing, searching, doing our homework from the ground. We worked with whatever the cliff shared with us. Most importantly we worked with each other, supporting and quietly pushing each other. In the two decades since, life has taken Dave and I in different directions but I treasure that deep, effortless partnership we had and the magnificent climb that came out of it. Beaking in Tongues is one of the best climbs I've ever done. Thank you Dave!