And so castles made of sand
Fall into the sea eventually
—Jimi Hendrix, “Castles Made of Sand”
“Did you hear the Crooked Arrow Spire fell down?” my buddy, Ben Kiessel, asked me.
Another one bites the dust, I thought. I used to be surprised when I heard a climb or a major section of a climb fell off, but now two decades plus into my climbing life, it seems to be commonplace.
This piece is an excerpt from Volume 24 of The Climbing Zine, now available
Banner photo: Jimmie Dunn on the first ascent of The Cobra, Fisher Towers, Utah. The tower has since fallen down. Photo: Jimmie Dunn Collection
I climbed Crooked Arrow Spire ten years ago with Dave Ahrens, and I recall a winding chimney that led to a bolt ladder. It’s one of those exciting chimneys where your body is the gear, placements are sporadic, but there’s no need to panic. I’ve always felt very comfortable in these types of chimneys, like a hand crack for your entire body.
Just across from this spire in Castle Valley, Utah, is the classic Jah Man. Well, it used to be classic until the first two pitches fell down.
I remember when I got the news that Jah Man had collapsed. I was in a hotel in Denver, about to fly to Thailand, and I was doing the usual morning social media posting and scrolling. I’d rather be writing in a notebook than pecking on my hand brain, but as a publisher, it’s important to have a constant presence on social, and I was there writing away with my thumbs in the matrix, like many of us are these days.
Of all the climbs that have fallen apart, Jah Man was the only one that made me sad. It was the classic of classics, a tower route that I’d repeat often. I recall an awkward 5.10+ start (the universal default grade for a hard, weird section in the desert of Southeast Utah) and then a 5.8 chimney (also another default, possibly sandbagged grade) that led to a glorious ledge that, once you arrived there, life was beautiful and your only care in the world was a #1 Camalot–sized pitch. (If you had enough of said #1 cams.)
They say you can never truly go home, a statement that contains truth and lies, but returning to a classic tower with a good friend sure is close.
From what I understand, that glorious ledge where thousands of us climbers once stood is where the chimney collapsed. Climbers’ memories, mine included, are often as unreliable as a politician’s promises, but this particular ledge is cemented into my mind for a couple of reasons.
The first time I stood there, my partner and I were struggling. We were in our first couple years of desert climbing, and we didn’t have the gusto for that thin hand crack pitch. I can’t remember which one of us backed off—maybe both of us, maybe we didn’t have enough #1s—but I remember that we retreated. I remember looking at the rock and next to the anchor bolts seeing several holes similar to a block of Swiss cheese. I’d yet to drill a bolt in sandstone, so I wondered what the hell was going on there. Now I know that the holes were probably ovalized due to the quality of the rock, and when they tried to place the bolt, it wouldn’t properly tighten, and thus they had to drill another hole, and another, and another, till they finally got a good one.
I also remember that day, in a momentary lapse of concentration, that I’d unclipped myself from the anchor. I was on that big ledge and must have felt safe and comfortable, but I remember writing in my journal that it freaked me out that I’d completely detached myself from the system.
Years later that crux pitch would be in my wheelhouse, and I’d led it several times. There’s a beautiful metaphor for life in these types of climbing experiences: one day you can’t do something no matter how hard you try, but when you return with more experience and strength, you can enter that flow state, the state that provides some of the best moments for our lives.
The era when I would return, year after year, was when many well-traveled desert tower routes still had tiny quarter-inch bolts about the size of a nail on them. It was also when I still used a hand drill, and I talked more than one climbing partner into doing the hard work of hand drilling a bolt or two on an ascent. Replacing a quarter-incher with a proper modern half-inch expansion bolt is gratifying work.
Photo of Dave Ahrens hand drilling a bolt on Jah Man, circa 2013
Those bolts that we replaced used to get clipped hundreds of times a year, but now they never do, just sitting there on a hunk of rock, a tower that itself will fall down someday. And perhaps aliens will find a chunk of rock with a bolt in it on the ground and be puzzled by what the humans were up to.
Perhaps my statement about those bolts never being clipped is a bit incorrect, because there was a route that emerged from the ashes. Just days after the chimney collapsed, a crew of Moab locals established a route amidst the carnage. From a bit of Mountain Project research, it looks like the grade is solid 5.12, and it gets climbed every so often. I’ll probably never climb it, my appetite for obscure trad climbing is little to none these days, but the fact that a new line arose from the ashes shows that life and climbs go on.
It’s pretty wild to think about standing and climbing on something that fell to the ground. In enough time, like the Jimi Hendrix lyric, all these towers will eventually crash and burn. How wild and awesome it is to climb on them knowing this. Even more wild is that the ones that seem destined to collapse any day now seem to remain on and defy gravity. The Texas Flake on The Nose of El Capitan is one that comes to mind, one of several that climber geologists in Yosemite have their eyes on.
A few days after Ben shared with me what he heard about the Crooked Arrow Spire, I decided to do some internet research. I found a Reddit thread with a picture of the rockfall incident. A massive boulder had fallen off the top of Parriott Mesa, and while it appears as though it may have struck the top of the spire, the tower, in fact, was still standing.
Rocks are so mysterious, and so is rockfall. Sometimes it happens in a predictable way, after a big rainstorm, but usually there seems to be no rhyme or reason. I remember one time I was camping out in the hinterlands of Indian Creek, way back in the Davis wash by the Cave Wall, I was just waking up, making my tea, savoring a crisp morning, and all of a sudden, I heard a large boom. I looked across the valley, and miles away a huge cloud of dust had formed. A major rockfall had just occurred in the vicinity of the Meat Walls in the main canyon.
The Cave Wall was also the site of the most mysterious and spooky rockfall incident I’d ever come across. Tim Foulkes and I stumbled upon the undeveloped wall in 2015, and for three-plus years our crew of friends became obsessed with the zone, establishing nearly one hundred routes on what became one of the most stacked and definitely most remote wall in The Creek.
As with many walls in The Creek, there were five-star lines—yes, I prefer the five-star system, especially in five-star areas—and there were two-star lines. One day Dave Marcinowski was establishing a two-star line, right next to his five-star mega 185-foot dihedral To The Moon. The climb went relatively straightforward, except for a foot slip that caused him to take a small fall—he hit his junk on a protruding flake.
A week later he came back to do the climb again. When he reached the section past where we had his little fall, the climb suddenly seemed different, as if the crack that he’d climbed previously was mysteriously missing. After analyzing the situation some more, he realized the crack was missing!
When he lowered off to the ground, he closely looked at the base of the climb, and sure enough, there were several blocks that looked like they’d recently fallen off the cliff. In the few days between the first ascent and when he’d returned, a ten-foot section of the climb had fallen down.
After some deliberation, we decided to move the anchors down and make the climb shorter, only going up a small, boot-shaped flake, giving it the name: Moon Boot.
Climbs fall apart. And from my perspective, the ones with the features that look like they are going to come crashing down rarely do—at least with rock climbing. With ice and mixed climbing, every year the climbs come and go and are different, which seems to be appealing to some climbers.
One of my first times ice climbing, on a warm spring day, I heard an entire pillar collapse and land on a climber who was tying in and about to climb said pillar. That was the last day of my ice climbing career.
I used to view climbs as permanent fixtures, but as the years go by, I realize that just as I will someday no longer exist in the flesh, my favorite desert tower could possibly give way to gravity and erosion.
Jah Man was a climb for an era, perhaps a GOAT of a tower. I think part of what made me sad about its demise is that other climbers won’t get to have the experience. Of course there are plenty of other great towers in Castle Valley, which is, in my humble opinion, the best place to climb towers in the Southwest.
Though I climb in the desert less and less these days, Castle Valley is one place I plan to return, again and again, for the rest of my life. These castles made of sand are so beautiful, the landscape so stark, the sky so often azure, the mountains in the distance so novel. It’s a unique place, one that always provides adventure and meaning.
In a way, it’s also very cool that the climb no longer exists. Now the classic only exists in the mind’s eye of those who have done it. There’s that cliche saying about death: you die twice, once when you physically die, and again when your name is mentioned for the last time. Jah Man, as it stood as a classic 10+, continues to exist in the mind of those who climbed it, a memory that is the closest when you’re standing on top of a neighboring tower, looking off in the distance, pondering which one might be the next to fall.
Luke Mehall is the publisher of The Climbing Zine. He is currently writing his sixth book, American Climber 2.
