“If this climb doesn’t blow you away, nothing will,” James ventured as he hit the brakes. “I still can’t believe that Earl and I did it.”
We hopped out of the Youth Challenge Bus and ambled over to the abrupt rim of a dark abyss at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River. Never in my life had I seen such an enormous wealth of accessible and terrifyingly steep granite. As we stood on the edge of the canyon, the Nose of Chasm View Wall and our hoped-for route, The Cruise, loomed up out of deep shadows.
Published in Volume 23, the current issue of The Climbing Zine, available now. Banner photo of Bryan Becker the second ascent of The Cruise from the Ed Webster Collection
Their aged and battered faces dropped nearly two thousand feet below the high Colorado plains and grasslands. I felt an inexplicable loathing for the eroded depths of the chasm, but at the same time, I had a half-crazed desire to be upon those isolated walls. Bryan Becker and I bumbled about as if we were on recess from school, which we were, while Jimmie Dunn and Earl Wiggins gazed across the void, hoping for a moment to relive some of their previous adventures on the walls of the canyon. A steady updraft buffeted us from the emptiness below.
After several minutes, we rounded up the dogs and drove to the campground above North Chasm View Wall. James and I strolled above the crest of the wall in the warming afternoon sun. Every so often he would stop suddenly and excitedly point out particular features: “There’s where The Eighth Voyage comes up…see that off-width down there, Ed?”
“Right, James,” I replied with a lump in my throat. “Sure looks pleasant!”
At one point all four of us bellied down on the very edge, peering foot by foot down the insanely overhanging face, all the way down to the narrow, silver thread of the river. Now usually I like exposure, that tingly feeling and lack of perception, but this time the suddenness of the two-thousand-foot gulf rushed to my head. The violent, overpowering roar of the river was tremendous. I was forced to pull back. We hadn’t even roped up yet, and I was starting to think that the Black Canyon was the most frightening climbing area I’d ever visited.
That evening we met Bryan Teale and Dan Morrison, other friends from Colorado Springs, who’d just tried the Chasm View Nose but bagged it when they reached a pitch on which Dan unzipped forty feet of A4 pins. The two looked remarkably calm and high spirited, no doubt because the climbing stage of their trip was over; now they could just relax and space out in the company of friends. But before we could sit around our fire, they disappeared in search of Dean Tschappat and Steve Miller who were due off the Dragon Route.
Tired, but overly anxious, I shivered the night away in a lightweight sleeping bag with a broken zipper. Too late, perhaps, we were off: running through dwarfed pine woods, losing control on a steep slope, nuts clanging, hopes and buried fears quickening under the pace.
Earl and James raced down the descent gully eager to begin their climb, a free ascent of Layton Kor and Wayne Goss’s The Diagonal, a two-thousand-foot A5 route on North Chasm View Wall.
Bryan was taking it slow, having been kicked in the shoulder by a rodeo bull two days previously. As the morning sun rose higher in the cloudless sky, we descended lower and lower out of its reach, to where water met granite. Our climb, The Cruise, began here. James and Earl slipped out of sight, wishing us the best of luck.
Our starting was off key; words were crisp or fell silent before they were spoken. Bryan felt distant and led the initial 5.9 section in a huff before I had the belay set up. Soaring above, my perspective of the climb faded into obscurity. The crack system we were to follow for five pitches ended suddenly, intersected by a huge, rotten vein of pegmatite. Higher up, the vague lines of cracks and corners blended with the gray-blue tinge of the subtly banded gneiss, for upon closer inspection the rock revealed itself not to be granite at all, but a widely varying granitic gneiss, boldly foliated. I suffered up the first two leads, wearing our day sack, which contained a pint of water, sneakers, sweaters, mitts, balaclavas, and my camera. Since we had taken only the essentials, it didn’t add up to much weight, but on those first few pitches, the pack impressed us with just how much of a nuisance it could be.
The weather was perfect: a brilliantly clear sky hallowed the October sun, which imperceptibly rode an ancient arch above the jagged South Rim opposite us. Always it was the engulfing air and sullen rock that weighed upon us, spinning our thoughts. We weren’t climbing to reach unattainable heights or mystical summits. We were climbing up from beneath the surface of the earth, out of a darkened wound.
A pitch later, Bryan found himself belaying in the recesses of a claustrophobic squeeze chimney, which pinched to a 150-foot 5.10 off-width above him. Armed with a four-inch tube and several hefty hexes, I artistically leap-frogged nuts all the way up the struggle, sparing myself any sort of embarrassing runout.
Meanwhile, Bryan cringed helplessly as friable flakes rattled offensively down the crack. After what seemed like ages, I was finally up; the fall days had grown short, and we would have to be quick if we were to avoid being benighted. Somehow Earl and James had made the first free ascent of The Cruise on their first attempt in only six hours. That’s 1,700 feet of climbing in the 5.8 to 5.10+ category for fourteen leads, all protected with nuts. And they hauled a pack heavier than ours—impressive!
A bit overawed, Bryan shouldered the rack for the crux pitch, a 150-foot left-facing corner, overhanging in the middle, laced with a narrow crack. Fifteen feet out, with no protection, his fingers strained and gripped the rock. “Ya got me, Ed?”
“I got you, Bry!” I said, tightening my belay. “You’re safe!”
“No, I’m not,” he corrected. Without warning, danger sprang from nowhere: his foothold broke. The large blade tumbled into our tangled ropes, though afterward I discovered them to be unharmed. Bryan clenched his wits, ran the rope up several more feet, and finally placed a good stopper.
“I’m comin’ down,” Bryan quavered dryly as his limbs gave out. Back on the belay stance, he stared in bewilderment at his trembling hands as sweat poured through the chalk. I was handed the dripping rack of nuts.
Move by move I eased up the corner, each jam painfully bad, my feet bridged out between paper-thin edges. All other cares I had—my love for a woman, an education, worries over a future I had to resolve to live in—were all replaced by an immediate reality and a heightened awareness of my position. Slowly I became sympathetic with the rock; I was allowed to rest. No. 1 and 2 stoppers protected me on the most difficult moves. I knew that uncounted pitches still lay hidden above us and that we must discover each one before reaching, once again, our starting point, the plateau surrounding us. Our finish would be our start; our start would be our future. Perhaps nothing would be too different, only that our memories would be filled with stark, chilled images of a deep canyon where few have ever climbed.
Tired, but clear minded, I reached a belay niche at last, anchoring to several opposed nuts, avoiding a belay stance with a half-driven bolt on my right. Bryan joined me, and we talked openly, cheerfully, happy to be here together, for being here together was more important than doing the climb. The warmth of the moment felt somewhat temporary, though, when I realized that once the sun passed behind the Nose to our left, we would be left in the aging autumn shadows. As I clicked off a couple of photos, Bryan mastered the crumbling band of feldspar and biotite crystals, a lead we had been warned about in advance.
Earl’s fantastic finger crack was next, piercing an unlikely looking blind face to our right. Hours wound away as I eased past half-inserted stoppers, worth little beyond holding their own weight, to the crux that finally defeated me. I lowered delicately and handed the sharp end to Bryan. Hyped from crouching in the cold, Bryan swarmed past the move, only to end up aiding another 5.10 move above.
With difficulty, I tried to envisage Larry Dalke and Layton Kor nailing this pitch thirteen years ago on their two-day first ascent. I placed a No. 1 stopper in one of their A4 scars. I wonder, Did they ever imagine that this route would one day go all free?
Inevitably, now that we were above the two crux pitches, we talked openly of retreat, of long and tortuous rappels to the ground. Back to the gorge of raging water and foam, of poison ivy and poison oak, of desolate rock. Back to The Land of The Dead, which the Utes avoided so many years ago.
“No way, Ed. We’d have to climb back out of the canyon up the gully.”
“James told me that walking out the descent gully is a fate worse than death,” I said, cutting off Bryan as we reracked on a tiny ledge, close together in the shadows.
“Rapping down we’d lose all our gear besides!” Bryan added.
“Really, man. Wish we had more light and I hadn’t wasted so much time fooling around on that last pitch. Oh well, all the more reason to get the hell out of here!” I answered.
I really love to climb with Bryan because failure never seems to bother him, at least he never lets it show. I guess that’s because he hates rappels and their inherent danger even more than unplanned-for bivies. With his encouragement, a second wind swept me up a 5.9 finger crack and diagonally left across a beautiful wall speckled with turkey heads. There was no mistaking the lateness; a pale-yellow light glowed on the far rim. I sat by myself on a narrow ledge, my adrenaline pumping several hours too late.
Bryan breezed up a hand crack framing the right side of a tottering pillar. Minutes later I followed by feel in the dark, glancing up at the remainder of the wall, so menacing and out of touch. Bryan roughly ordered me to lead the next pitch before he did. Maybe we could thread our way through to the top, he argued. We only had a couple more pitches. Those other guys said it got easier. Obstinately I climbed up, entering a black chimney affair, watching the world sink deeper into a final numbness. A sharp, gaping tooth presented itself out of the haze, and groping along, slowly and blindly, I landed a two-bolt belay. After checking out my poor stance, Bryan opted for a bivy alongside the towering fin, using that as a windbreak.
We spread out our 9-mm haul line over several flakes loosely jigsawed together to form a platform. This is it, I thought, donning my hat and mitts. “What if that snowstorm moves in tonight, Bryan?” I said aloud.
“We’re going to start climbing as fast as we can, whether its light out or not,” he replied candidly.
The temperature began to drop; we tried to sleep, before the real chill of the night set in, but couldn’t. What more could we do besides shiver and hug each other and otherwise cajole warmth into our bodies? In a vague, throbbing darkness, we embraced each other, shivering in almost uncontrollable spasms, lapsing into our own dreamful memories for minutes at a time, only to emerge trembling with cold, hugging each other even closer. Storytelling and dreaming, aching and laughing, never sleeping, we sat and watched the roaring blackness, where the raging flow of the Gunnison and the deep black of the canyon became one, a torment to our thoughts.
My feelings went out to Earl and James. Were they off their climb? Had they been benighted like us? They had no food, no extra clothing, and no water. They had put all their chips on the table, laid their lives on the line, bringing only a single rope and a rack of nuts for a two-thousand-foot wall!
Legend had it that there was an A5 pitch on The Diagonal, which took Kor seven hours to lead. From high on the route, they would have no chance of retreat. And what about Dean and Steve? Were they okay? Had they succeeded in mastering the Dragon Route on the Painted Wall? All day long, we had seen no hint of other people.
Dawn was signaled by streamlined orange wisps. Just as the sun rose above the east rim, a cloud bank stole the warmth we craved and filled the bleak air with spindrift flurries. After moving up to the two-bolt belay, Bryan traversed right for thirty feet, underclinging in his mitts, breathing cotton into the air. I rooted for the sun, feeling as if I was at a sports event, sitting in as a spectator. Out of sight, Bryan led a 5.9 face, with tied-off bolts for safekeeping. My strength and drive returned when the sun burned off the early clouds and banished the snow into space.
Ten minutes later, it was so hot I stripped to a t-shirt. Bryan was sitting in a stupor as I grimaced past a strenuous overhang when I heard a faint yell from above. Two dots sat perched on the very top of the precipice, legs dangling carefree over the side. I was so spaced I just yelled, “Where do we go from here?”
“Straight up!” Earl replied, jerking his thumb in the appropriate direction. The wall reared vertical and was littered with rotten flakes, so I exited left toward a thin, vertical crack system that seemingly led to our friends.
Belaying Bryan up in the heat, I felt so nauseous I thought I’d vomit. We argued feebly about which way to go; finally Bryan led a long and difficult pitch to my left. I collapsed against the fractured rock, praying he wouldn’t come sailing into view, because I knew I’d never hold him if he fell. Even if I could, the dream wouldn’t end, no, not yet. My stoppers would pull as the rock broke into small shards, and, twisting and turning, falling free in fantasy, we would float without meaning to the bottom of the gorge. Something pulled me together just enough to follow Bryan’s fantastic lead.
He said, “You know, Ed, I almost fell.”
I was tied in, and someone cleaned the web of gear hanging in a knot around my neck. I felt sick and hungover. The canyon shimmered in my eyes, white light flickering off gray rock. Dean was perched out on the tip of a slender rib protruding off the rim.
“Gee, boys,” he said, “wish I had a camera. You two sure look neat out there!”
Occasionally, Earl popped up from over the edge, and higher I could just make out Dunn lounging atop a mushroomed blur of rock.
The Hobbit volunteered to lead the final pitch, leaving me wondering where he was getting so much energy to lead these last pitches, haul the sack, and belay me up. He bopped up the crowning seventy feet, and there was a prolonged period of silence before I saw Dean’s outstretched hand, clenching a tall can of Coors beer. Licking my lips, I whimpered up the final crack.
Dean simply grinned and cracked, “Gees, Ed. Looks as though you need one of these!”
Earl passed me a gallon jug of water and, laughing into my thankful eyes, said: “I wish I had a picture of this.”
I returned to the Black Canyon two months later on my way home from Arizona, the memories having distilled somewhat. The tremendous rage of the Gunnison River hung like a dead weight around my neck, the incessant noise dragging me down, straining my will to hold back from the edge of the chasm. I reeled back, but the next free chance I have, I’ll return. Something very treasured is down there.
Postscript: Jimmie Dunn and Earl Wiggins were successful in climbing The Diagonal, in one day, on their first attempt. The climbing was 5.10, and the aid was reduced to just two tension traverses. Both climbers felt it was by far the most frightening climb they had ever lived through.
Steve Miller and Dean Tschappat succeeded in making the second ascent of the Dragon Route on the Painted Wall, which they found characterized by sustained, strenuous nailing, loose rock, and airy situations.
Ed Webster was a climbing legend and prolific first ascensionist. He passed away last year. This piece is republished with permission from his wife, Lisa Webster. It was originally published in Mountain Magazine in 1977. Big thanks to Vic Zeilman, Henry Barber, Jeff Achey at Wolverine Publishing, and the American Alpine Club Library for the help with republishing this piece.