It was that familiar feeling you get when you finish a big climb—that immense wash of relief that climbers all know, when you finally touch down from that last rappel, and you are once again planted on solid ground. It’s a bittersweet transition from the transcendental vertical realm to the horizontal plane of the ordinary. Guerreras was finished at last, we were safe, and months of hard work had come to a close. After so many doubts and fears, the vision was complete, and every bolt was tight. But most of all, deep fatigue was setting in because we could finally let our guard down.
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Photos by the author
It was midday, spring was upon us, and the intensity of the Mexican sun left us with a strong desire to siesta. All we wanted after four days on the wall was to lie down under the shady old tree that signified the start of the original La Gloria route, Rezando.
After doing just that, I turned to Tony and asked in a moment of heat-induced confusion, “Do you smell smoke?”
As the words left my mouth, I looked up to see a gigantic plume of white and orange curl over the summit of La Gloria. Without a word, Tony popped up from his comfortable napping position, looked around the corner, and came back wide-eyed to say, “We need to get out of here, now. There’s a wildfire coming directly for us.”
The route, Guerreras, was a product of my ongoing love affair with the outrageously beautiful mountain named La Gloria in Northern Mexico’s Sierra Madre Oriental. While exploring the north side of the mountain for potential lines, I met a family who had inhabited Canon del Alamo since 1610. La Gloria has been the backdrop to many generations of hardy farming folk, and naturally, equally rugged mythology flourished around the massif. They told me that it was an ancient sanctuary and that it was a place only for warriors and light seekers. The name Rezando means “to pray,” and Guerreras means “warriors” in the feminine. They did not believe me that I had stood on the summit until I showed them pictures looking down on their farm. I was then met with a look of surprise that I have not seen since.
In a place that has become world renowned for single-pitch sport climbing on dreamy tufas, there also lies wild potential for high-elevation, multipitch sport routes on primo limestone. Next to the otherworldly, three-dimensional climbing lies major adventure times on real mountains. El Salto is much more than its reputation would suggest.
At the dawn of 2020, Dave Henkel and I finally completed tireless months of bolting the first route, ground up, on this lofty pyramid and stood on the summit for the first time. And in January of the following year, Michael Perry and I freed the climb. When I first laid eyes on La Gloria, it was very obvious that this high-desert peak would one day be host to a multitude of futuristic hard lines, but first and foremost, our dream was to pick the obvious cherry line to the top, the “Beckey Line,” as it were. Some of these once-donkey-trail roads that reach high places in the range were only paved, or made accessible by vehicle, relatively recently. It really felt like a genuine Fred Beckey experience. To show up to a roadside peak of that stature and be able to trace the obvious line is an exceedingly rare opportunity in our modern era. Most adventure climbers today tend to think that is something that only Fred and his contemporaries were able to experience during the “golden age” of climbing. But alas, I found La Gloria with all of the mysteries intact in 2019. There would only be one first rock climb on La Gloria, and this was it. The central pillar splitting the stunning pinnacle of blue, orange, and gray paint-stroke stone was the obvious choice.
Although Dave decided to stay home in Whistler, BC, for the snowboard season and not return to Mexico the following season for the free ascent, he was absolutely overjoyed to hear that Michael and I persevered to reap the true reward of all our hard work.
Both of us were in total agreement that, if anybody, Michael was the man for the job. Perry is not only a nurse in Austin, Texas, but is also a bone-crushing climber who grew up doing competitions with Adam Ondra and the like. The guy knows his limestone, as he has extensive experience climbing and bolting in Mexico, among many other world-class sport destinations. For him to say that this was one of the top-three coolest things he has done in climbing was the very best compliment he could have given Dave and me.
Afterward, I rode one of the highest highs of my life. To see a project of that scale come to life with my imagination and grit and, most importantly, have another willing soul to see it through with was one of the richest experiences I could imagine. This was the meaning of the Brotherhood of the Rope, and our bond as dreamers turned us from merely friends to genuine hermanos through the process. Then to show back up with only a rack of quickdraws and a seventy-meter rope to ascend an alpine peak of perfect rock was almost too good to be true. The creative process of turning a mental vision into a physical experience was addictive and profoundly rewarding. I wanted more. Rezando was a major challenge, but all of those futuristic hard lines were still there staring me in the face, and I knew I had more to give.
Almost immediately, I got right to work on Guerreras. At least when Dave was around, I seemed a little less like the crazed, fanatic solo guy with only one thing on his mind. But in 2021, I must have really played the part. Living at a place like Rock Camp, a climbers’ hostel of sorts, you are surrounded by a heavy sport vibe, where the end-of-the-day stories shared around the fire usually have something to do with kneebars and gastons.
This is also a place where anything more than a five-minute hike may as well be a lunar expedition, so needless to say, no amount of spraying about top-notch first ascents and endless beauty could convince anyone to join me. I suppose that a savage approach with scary slabs and a heavy pack to do loads of manual labor in the sun is less appealing when five-star sport routes are a stone’s throw away. But if it wasn’t that good, I wouldn’t be so driven to go up there uncountable times alone, making triple the effort for a third of the progress. So I would typically disappear for four days at a time and come back with the thousand-mile stare and a different kind of story to tell.
Despite what many would think about bolting a big line solo, I actually find it much less risky and lonely than it would appear. After all, loneliness is a state of mind, regardless of how many people are around. Alone, you are forced to be completely honest about your own limitations without the positive or negative effects of a partner to influence decisions. And for better or worse, I also find that my time spent solo in the mountains brings me a greater feeling of connectedness to the wilds. Whether I was having a run-in with King Rattler or questing into the unknown to drill from stances and hooks far above my last bolt, the experiences were always intensely meaningful alone. To me, there is something very liberating and conducive to inner growth when you work through great challenges solo. When the only person to consult is yourself, different mind games are at work. The best part was trying to explain all of this in my broken Spanglish to the old rancher dudes on donkeys with cowboy hats and snakeskin boots. They just laughed wildly and said I was going to freeze to death for sure.
In reality, the place is an absolute paradise, and I just wanted to live up there. Every morning at the bivvy, you are greeted by the first rays of golden sun along with a pair of peregrine falcons that call and swoop around the giant cave situated between Rezando and Guerreras. The orange and blue streaks that trace the contours of the wall are embellished to cartoonish fantasy with the alpenglow of sunrise. Stubby old-growth trees, century plants, and towering yucca trees flourish right up to the first holds of the climbs. Sometimes, a thick, freezing mist will sit over Monterrey and El Salto, while La Gloria is basking in the sun above a sea of clouds. During one of these weather events, I awoke during the middle of the night in absolute confusion to the booming sounds of thunder all around me. I thought the whole mountain was about to fall down on me. I had somehow found myself sandwiched between a crisp, starry night above and a massive electrical storm below. I then watched in amazement as the clouds under me flashed and boomed with lightning and thunder. On the edge of such a storm during daylight hours, you could often look away from your task on the wall to see the mist filtering up through the trees as if it were the soul of the mountain making its rounds. And if it just couldn’t be any more beautiful, there are also droves of bright green parrots that migrate to this part of Mexico every year from the tropics. Some days, you will see the falcons dropping out of the sky like fighter jets to defend their nests from the egg-stealing intruders. It can be quite a show from the belays. This sentinel of a sky island attracts all sorts of other aviators, and it is not uncommon to be approached by hummingbirds, butterflies, and flocks of other wild-spirited and bright-colored birds as they rest their wings and watch you pull the crux move. The word soulful comes to mind.
It was on one of these forays into the sublime that I returned to the land of Wi-Fi to hear that one of my original backcountry snowboarding partners from my formative years in the Wasatch died in an avalanche in California.
His sister reached out for photos that I might have of him, and I absolutely lost it, thinking of my own sister in a similar situation. I had all but stopped big-mountain snowboarding to pursue my rock climbing full-time in 2018, and much of that reasoning was because I was tired of being gripped out of my mind in avalanche terrain.
I was also tired of my friends getting killed by avalanches, but that wasn’t going to stop. Dave bolted Rezando with me on his first winter hiatus from boarding, and that is much of the reason we became such close friends. We talked often about our dead buddies and realized we had each lost at least one friend every year during the last decade. Those therapeutic conversations that stretched deep into the night around the campfire fortified our souls and our friendship—so much so that the silhouetted view of La Gloria etched against the stars of a moonless night and the smell of century plants will forever remind me of that bond.
Before heading up to La Gloria one day, I got a text from Dave with a picture of some burly line in Canada that he had just punched up with crampons and an ice axe, terrified and thinking that if anything goes wrong, he is no more. In that moment, he confessed that he wished he were still in Mexico climbing in the sun with me.
It was the very next time I returned to Wi-Fi that I was met with the news that Dave had been killed by an avalanche in Brandywine near Whistler, BC. I was halfway through this new climb, with unfathomable amounts of gear cached and hundreds of meters of static line rigged. But I was also in a pit of despair. I was all too familiar with the feeling of grief, but this time it was particularly intense. Instead of crumpling up into a little ball, the floodgates opened. And not just in the way you would expect.
Through my tears, I found an unexpected feeling of powerful momentum. I thought so much about Dave and all of my other lost brothers and sisters and how proud they would be of what I was creating up there. I felt like I had the legs of them all as I hauled loads up that relentlessly steep mountain and made upward progress on the wall with the fire in my belly of thirty bright-burning human spirits. Nothing could stop me from finishing Guerreras, not even myself.
Unfortunately, time was not on my side. The season’s end was rapidly approaching, and the creepy crawlies were starting to come out. On one spooky full moon night, I was lying in Dave’s bed that he had worked so hard to dig out, reading a book by headlamp to fall asleep, when I suddenly got the unexplainable feeling that a hand grabbed my spine and shook it. I launched forward, totally freaked out, and somehow knew that I needed to look under my sleeping pad. Slowly and apprehensively, I lifted it up to find a scorpion well on its way to where my head was. I then went over to the firepit area to scout another place to rest my head at dirt level when my headlamp caught the reflection of bright, beady eyes. A monster rattlesnake was coiled up just a meter away, apparently unfazed by my presence. It just looked at me while its tongue slithered wildly, catching my scent. I quickly cleared out so he could get back to full moon rodent hunting. At least he was kind enough not to rattle his tail right underneath my sleeping pad like before, but that’s a whole other story.
That night, I abandoned ship and hiked down at midnight. I was ready to throw in the towel and pull ropes for the season. Warming temps meant constant encounters with all of the above, along with giant wolf spiders, and it had me rather spooked. I broke the news to my good friend Tony Pavlantos, who was en route to Mexico to help me finish the line. When he arrived, all he said was, “Why don’t we just bring up the portaledge and sleep six feet off the ground?”
Brilliant! It’s a snake-proof tent. Why didn’t I think of that? We were back in business, whether it was idiotic or not. With an actual human belay and a strapping young fellow to carry all the heavy stuff up that approach of brutality, the pace tripled, along with my bravery for bolting on lead.
Tony and I have been close friends for fourteen years. From cutting our teeth in snowboard mountaineering amongst the Wasatch to a decade of Alaskan glacier camps, our adventures together are uncountable. But this was an entirely different game.
After two days on the wall together, we were finally ready to make a high camp and bolt the final pitches to the summit. Our bivvy was as deluxe as it gets, where you can take off your harness and sleep in a comforting torpedo tube of rock. From there, it was only another four pitches to the top. But unlike trad climbing, this took two more grueling days to bolt in the ripping wind.
Summits usually mark halfway for any success story in mountain climbing. But often is the case on first ascents, it marks the end of a tremendous amount of work and the home stretch of navigating the great unknown. In the case of equipping a fourteen-pitch sport route ground up, it means months of toil—hiking, leading, rappelling, jugging, and generally being an overloaded human yo-yo.
With all of that alone time up on the wall before Tony arrived, seeds of doubt were planted, and I thought I would never finish. He was an absolute savior in those finals days, and that glorious summit experience wouldn’t have been possible or nearly as joyous without him. It was truly one of the finest moments of our lives.
The route is not free yet, but it already makes Rezando look like a casual day out sport cragging. There are pitches far easier and far harder than anything on Rezando, yet unlike its neighbor, with straightforward thirty-five-meter rappels the whole way, you cannot get off Guerreras with one rope unless you reclimb the traverse and reverse the downclimb over a seventy-meter cave. The route has a very definitive feel of commitment since you need to descend Rezando. It is surely a fine adventure with some of the hardest pitches up high!
After spending four days at our high camp, situated 1,200 feet up Guerreras, we rappelled the route with equally heavy winds and packs. Tony looked like he was paragliding on the final seventy-meter free-hanging abseil as he swung dramatic pendulums, loose ends of the rope snaking wildly in the opposite direction of gravity. It had been increasingly windy for days, and we were just happy that it kept us cool in the hot Mexican sun.
But the moment I saw that look on Tony’s face when he saw the fire, I knew he had just hit the panic button. I looked around the corner myself and was met with a blast of wind in the face and the view of a massive forest fire about five miles away. Although I agreed with Tony about needing to leave immediately, I clearly had no idea how fast fire can move, so I calmed a bit. He took off down the hill ahead of me, and I just stood there looking at a pile of six thousand dollars of my finest climbing and camping equipment. I asked myself what I wanted to run for my life with. Seconds matter in a situation like this so at the last moment, I grabbed my custom Canadian Alpine Tools hammer, TC pros, drill, and little else. Ten minutes had passed, I looked back at the fire, and it had quadrupled. I was now starting to understand Tony’s sense of urgency. I shouldered my pack, stole another glance back and forth between my small mountain of gear and the growing flames, and took off running.
We turned that two-hour hike into a fifty-minute dash. Mind you, this is a very steep, cactus-riddled mountainside, with places where you can fall and die if you lose your footing. There are lengthy slabs and 5.5 downclimbs. It stays technical to the last footfall. Still high on the mountain, Tony made sure to stop, let me know which pocket his keys were in, and told me that if he fell and hurt himself, that I should take the keys and make a run for it. I looked my trusted expedition partner in the eye with a quick fist bump and said, “Not going happen, buddy. We are getting down this mountain together.”
I knew the “trail” like the back of my hand after countless laps over the years, often in the dark with a podcast playing in my ears, but it was anything but straightforward. Subsequent parties had taken up to seven hours to navigate this complex mountainside. Tony did not have this supreme confidence, and I could read it all over his face, as if he wanted to say, “Don’t you dare leave me, Zach.”
So we ran. And my mind slowly relaxed with elevation loss, because no matter how out of control the situation felt, I was doing the only thing I could do to survive. It didn’t matter what toll it took on our bodies. Every five minutes I would stop and turn my gaze from feet to flames, waiting for Tony to catch up, with impending doom on the horizon. About halfway down the mountain, I looked back, and the smoke had already enveloped both of our high camps and was beginning to wash directly over us in thick orange waves. In a brief clearing of smoke, I swear I witnessed a sixty-meter flame blasting vertically off the tip of a ridge as the wind rushed it ever forward. In the blistering sun, we did our best to avoid heatstroke, and Tony explained to me the protocol of what to do when you are about to be enveloped in a forest fire as he forced me to drink water periodically. Within this, he noted an open apple orchard that would make a fine sheltered zone to be burned over. Aghast, I asked, “What do you mean burned over?”
Another wave of adrenaline hit me like a freight train as it dawned on me that we would already be dead from smoke inhalation if we were still at base camp. The brutal realization crept in that we were not out of the woods yet. This rush kept us sharp and guided us downward with an extra burst of speed. Once we were within view of Tony’s Jeep, I just kept thinking that as long as the rig starts, we are going to live. And sure enough, it did. As we drove away, I filmed the disaster scene out the sunroof and was once again met with that incredible wave of relief. Only this time, it was not so familiar.
As far as I can tell, we made it down with about twenty minutes to spare. Any slower and we would have ended up just like that portaledge—no trace but a pile of bones in windswept ash. The gales persisted, and the sky island transformed into an island of fire for over two weeks. The Mexican military, national guard, police, and countless volunteers worked round the clock to dig trenches to defend nearby properties, but La Gloria was on her own. She is just too wild to access in a situation like that. In an instant, the beautiful rural village of Los Boquillas transformed from a serene orchard setting with old guys in cowboy hats picking apples on donkeys to an apocalyptic disaster scene where military cargo trucks carried humans and chickens alike to safety. If it weren’t for the tireless work of those heroes, things would have been immensely worse off in the end.
I cannot express how grateful I am for Tony showing up in Mexico right when he did. I would never have finished Guererras alone that year. The only thing that may have been finished at all was me. He saved the route and almost certainly my life when the wildfire broke out.
The next season, I drove from Alaska to Mexico for the fourth time. And together, Tony and I went to see what remained of all my burnt gear. It was so much worse than I could have ever expected. The fire burned so hot that anything that wasn’t metal didn’t just melt—there was no trace of it. Large items like ropes, backpacks, and sleeping bags simply vanished. I hauled some plastic bins up there to keep food and gear safe from the conniving coatimundi, so those melted into heaps of carabiners, belay devices, and bolts, making for some cool, artsy-looking pieces. I also thought it was pretty interesting that I could bend carabiners with my hand. But for the most part, it was really sad. And luckily, we had the right help to haul all the trash off the mountain.
After weeks of making attempts at freeing Guerreras, it just wasn’t happening for us. The approach was considerably harder after the fire, and general living conditions were very harsh with the ash and lack of shade. And damn it, that route is just hard! As is tradition, I couldn’t stay away, so I decided to make a final solo trip for the season to install a lovely tribute plaque of stainless steel for Dave. It was designed by his girlfriend, Natasha, and created by a very kind and appreciative local, Boby Drum, who climbed Rezando and was overwhelmed with gratitude.
In a ceremonious act of grief and closure, I rolled up a gigantic doobie, drilled two holes, and tapped in Dave’s plaque below the first lead bolt as golden sunset light washed over the scene. A different, and much more pleasant, kind of smoke cloud enveloped our bivvy that night. As ash fell to my feet, I spread Dave’s ashes across his bed that is now nothing but ash. It seemed very fitting. And in that moment, a barrage of rockfall descended from high on the mountain and exploded twenty meters away from me. I simply looked up and hollered, “Quit messing around up there, Danger Dave!”
Guerreras is still yet to be free, and it is my great pleasure to open it up to the world. It’s not that I will never go back; I certainly will. It’s just that I realized something that last day on La Gloria. I had to say goodbye to not only Dave but that era of my life. I realized that I needed to loosen my vice grip on that mountain and be more like my hermano, who was overjoyed to create a beautiful and challenging experience that will enrich the lives of others. That was enough. So this is a call to arms for anyone who thinks that they are ready for a wild adventure into the unknown. There is a first free ascent of world-class proportions waiting in Mexico. All you need is some quickdraws, a rope, and that warrior spirit.
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Zach Clanton is a creative behind the keyboard, camera, and camming device with a heart that will forever reside in Alaska. Part migratory bird, part bear by nature, he follows the hummingbirds to the Chihuahuan Desert each autumn and awakens each spring, refreshed and hungry, in the great northern rainforest. More of his work can be seen online at zachclanton.com or on various rocks across the Americas.
