A relationship with a climbing area can feel like a long-term romantic entanglement. The similarity makes sense when you think about how much identity we invest in our sport and how triumph and tribulation inevitably change us over time. Our crags aren’t static either, and their nature shifts with fluctuating visitation or natural disaster, both of which can alter the character of an initial infatuation.
The full version of this piece is published in Volume 26 of The Climbing Zine, now available
Banner photo of the author climbing Monozygotic, one of Capulin’s rare 5.9s. Photo: Eric Bowes
That long-term intimacy is what makes people so protective of their favorite places, and it is why, weirdly, a crack in a rock or a string of bolts can become central to someone’s identity. A commitment to a crag can be a good thing because it fosters stewardship, but occasionally you hear about a fistfight in the parking lot when two people get possessive about the same route.
Most serious climbers I’ve known have this type of invested relationship with at least one crag. For years, I had it with Indian Creek, though I see in retrospect that things were doomed because we were in different states and neither was willing to move.
I live in Los Alamos, a small Northern New Mexico town whose notoriety arises from the part it played in producing the world’s first atomic bomb, though its climbing is pretty good too. I moved to Los Alamos in 1993 for a writing internship and stayed because a fellow student took me toproping at a roadside cliff called Cattle Call Wall. We danced gingerly around deposits left by the eponymous bovines, scaled a few 5.7s and 5.8s, and my life changed. The next day, I bought shoes and a chalk bag and began saving up for a rope. Trad climbing quickly became my thing, and I naturally gravitated to Indian Creek, but the bleary-eyed Sunday night drives back home made me yearn for someplace closer to hone my finger-locks and fist-stacks. Finally, in the fall of 2009, I found what I was looking for in Capulin Canyon, a scrappy cliff in the Jemez Mountains, a mere thirty-five minutes from my door (twenty-five if I was sliding the corners).
Capulin Canyon, named for the chokecherry that grows well there, starts high in the Jemez and drops gradually to the Rio Grande over some fifteen wandering miles. Ownership-wise, the canyon is broken into three pieces: The Santa Fe National Forest, the Dome Wilderness, and Bandelier National Monument. The climbing area is fully in the Dome Wilderness, just up canyon from the Bandelier border, a fortunate coincidence because climbing is illegal in the Monument. The wilderness portion of the canyon is small, only 5,200 acres, with a convoluted boundary sketched a few hundred yards back from the rim. In the Dome, the canyon is seven to eight hundred feet deep, and the tallest cliffs are just over 220 feet. They are made of Bandelier tuff, a layer of welded volcanic ash that blankets much of the eastern slope of the Jemez Mountains and comprises the Pajarito Plateau. Over most of the Plateau, the tuff is too soft to be climbed safely with gear, but in this one precious stretch of the Dome, the rock, while still variable in quality, is hard enough to take small cams or even small nuts.
Sometimes a line is almost too perfect. The author on Holy Grail, an immaculate 5.11+ fingers-to-fists corner that culminates in a ten-foot roof. Photo: Eric Bowes
Climbers first visited Capulin in the late 1980s or very early 1990s, establishing three routes on what is now called the Upper Wall and two more on the Main Wall. At that time, the canyon was a wonderland of towering old-growth ponderosa pine with a permanent stream and well-developed hiking trail. Established access points required walking several miles in the canyon to reach the good rock. A climber from those early days told me that the cliff was too remote for their tastes when they could bolt routes at nearby Cochiti Mesa, a welded tuff crag with a five-minute approach that was gaining a national reputation in the relatively new activity of sport climbing.
Then, in 1996, disaster struck the area in the form of the Dome Fire, which scorched 16,500 acres, including all of the Dome Wilderness. The fire started when a climber visiting Cochiti Mesa left a campfire unattended. The Cochiti climbing area was spared from the conflagration, but existing trails in Capulin were destroyed, and visitation, even hiking, essentially stopped.
Fast-forward thirteen years. In late 2009, I had grown increasingly frustrated with the lengthy drive to Utah and was obsessively bushwhacking through remote canyons looking for new rock to climb when I remembered rumors about Capulin. On a blustery December day, my wife, Mandy, and I started at the Bandelier Monument boundary and began struggling up canyon through the dense brush that had grown up in the years since the 1996 fire. Late in the day, I spotted a splitter crack high on the north side of the canyon. It was surrounded by promising-looking dihedrals, and I felt as if I’d discovered a lost hoard of Spanish gold. The fading and bitterly cold winter afternoon precluded further exploration, so I took pictures, and we made a steep beeline up and out of the canyon, short-circuiting the formerly lengthy approach to just three-quarters of a mile.
The next day, I revealed my discovery to my friend George Perkins, who was game, though understandably dubious of my manic descriptions of a climbing Shangri La hidden in an old burn. The problem, and it was a showstopper, was that the forest road was closing for the season and wouldn’t reopen until April. I bit back frustration over what I knew was going to feel like a very long winter….
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