9- WELCOME TO BOULDER
After a week of eastbound trekking through the Colorado Rockies, undulating up and over the rugged backbone of the continent, it was a surprise to abruptly be cast upon the Great Plains. We coasted down out of the mountains on Interstate 70, Denver spread before us on a vast prairie that stretched out to the horizon like an ocean. Denver: the Mile High City, home of the Broncos, population 600,000. We hadn’t seen this much concentration of humanity since leaving the L.A. Basin. And though Denver is a splendid city, it was not to be our destination. Instead, we swung onto Route 93 as soon as we emerged from the mountains and drove north along the foot of the Front Range, towards Boulder.
For several years now, my friends, Ellen and Paul, had been urging us to come visit them in Louisville, a small town next to Boulder. The climbing is awesome, they had maintained. And it is awesome, because I had spent some time sending routes there a dozen years ago, so I knew first hand. The Boulder area is very special indeed. I would even go so far as to call it enchanted.
Ellen and Paul were living in Los Angeles when I met them in 2000. Ellen and I both joined the SCMA that year, and she was one of the first climbers I met in the club. Paul was already a member, and at some point, he and Ellen started dating. And then they got married, and then started a family—twin boys. Soon after the boys were born, they up and moved to Colorado, looking for a nice, bucolic town to raise a family: a town like Louisville.
Soon after we arrived at their house Saturday evening, Paul whipped up a batch of margaritas that were to die for—maybe the best I’ve had, ever. He’s a talented bartender. Terry had bought gifts in Breckenridge for their boys, Aidan and Axel. They’re nine years old now, and quite handsome lads. We sat on the backyard patio and watched them play, everyone savoring the end of a hot summer day. Ellen’s parents, Nils and Linda, came over to join us for dinner. Paul manned the barbeque, demonstrating that he was not only an expert bartender, but also an exquisite grill meister.
Mas margaritas, por favor!!
We stayed at Ellen and Paul’s cheery abode for three nights, making the most of our days by climbing or visiting some of the local sights. We spent a day in the Flatirons and another in Boulder Canyon. We enjoyed a sunset picnic in mystic Eldorado Canyon, where I joined the boys in skipping stones across the creek (ah, to be a kid again…).
Sunday evening, Ellen’s parents watched Aidan and Axel while the four of us went to dinner in Louisville, which has the ambiance of Mayberry, USA. Louisville had found life in the latter part of the 19th century as a coal-mining town, built atop a bituminous seam that provided Denver its fuel to thrive and prosper. When the coal played out, the mines were sealed. Gone are the vestiges of its past life, replaced with a happy suburbia of vintage homes, housing tracts, greenbelts and soccer fields. We ate at a charming downtown restaurant with outdoor seating. It was a beautiful night. After dinner, we strolled down Main Street to an ice cream parlor that was doing sensational business. We sat out on the parlor’s front lawn, under the stars. You couldn’t break the spell. I wouldn't have cared if it lasted all night.
10- RECOUP AND SENDING
Okay. I probably shouldn’t have accepted that last margarita when Paul offered it to me. But they were so damn good. And I probably shouldn’t have had the ale later that night in the kitchen while we reminisced about the old days with the SCMA. But beer and good climbing yarns kind of go hand in hand, right? So it became a matter of consequence when I woke up the next morning with a dull headache and feeling as parched as the Mojave Desert in a drought year.
It was a Sunday, and the plan was for Paul to join Terry and me for some climbing in Boulder Canyon. Ellen opted out, as she had injured her foot on one of those tire spikes you find in parking garages, plus she had something going with the boys and would maybe join us the following day. After breakfast, we pitched the gear into the back of Paul’s car and motored fifteen minutes up the highway, through downtown Boulder, and into a scenic, mountain canyon studded with granite crags (I can’t help but envy someone who lives fifteen minutes from a world-class climbing destination).
By now, the roadside pullouts were filling up with weekend climbers, especially for crags on the cooler north-facing side of the canyon. Paul suggested we check out Happy Hour Crag. Though it was on the sunny south-facing side, he recalled it as being secluded and thus would avoid—hopefully—the crowd scene. My head hurt. I was still dehydrated. It was hot. But yeah, I was game. Let’s do it.
Locating the Happy Hour Crag, however, became a challenge. I suppose that’s the downside of a “secluded” wall: the guidebook directions are always sketchy and people have a hard time finding it, and many times, just give up. In our case, the beta was so ambiguous, that even though Paul had climbed there a few years back, it took him a while to dial in on the correct parking spot for the approach. Alas we found it, and followed a steep climber’s path that meandered up to the base of a 90-foot wall. We dropped our packs in the inviting shade of a ponderosa pine and each of us slaked our thirst on a liter of water or more. After that hot slog up the slope, I was ready for a recoup siesta. But Paul and Terry were breaking out gear and scoping out the routes: their focus was on climbing, not napping.
11- RUNOUT IN THE FLATIRONS
The alarm sounded at dawn. Ter and I rolled out of bed; dressed quickly; tip-toed downstairs; slipped out the front door; and as we were warming up the van, Paul stepped out to wish us good climbing. He was off to work and wouldn’t be able to join us. And though Ellen had planned on coming along, her foot was still giving her trouble and she ruefully bowed out at the last minute. So it would be just the two of us for the Third Flatiron.
In my Boulder Classic Climbs guidebook, it touts the East Face Route of the Third Flatiron as the “best beginner route in the solar system.” It is 1,200 feet of scenic, casual slab climbing, the last of the eight pitches being the crux at 5.4. But where it may be a “beginner” route, it most certainly is not for the novice leader. There are six bolts total on the entire route, and only one of those is a protection bolt: the others are parsed out at five of the belay stances. Cracks that can take gear for protection are scarce. Runouts up to 150 feet are the norm. Falling on lead is not an option.
Two brothers, Floyd and Earl Millard, completed the first ascent of the East Face in 1906, and it may be one of the first technical climbs achieved in the country. In the 1930s, climbers installed the six large eye bolts that are still used today. The next “renovation” came in 1949 when two wily University of Colorado students hauled up buckets of white paint and added a giant, 100-foot tall “C” near the top of the formation. A posse of irate citizens caught them on the descent trail and tied them both to a tree, abandoning them in the forest to teach them a lesson or possibly as cougar bait. But they managed to escape. In 1955, a big white “U” was added so that the moniker read “CU”, and 25 years later, both letters were re-painted a ruddy brown to match the natural color of the rock. In the intervening decades, the East Face has been climbed in various fashion, including on roller skates, using no hands, by naked people, blind people, an Amish rock band, Santa Claus, young ladies in bikinis… a portion of it has even been skied.
Our first stop was Starbucks for coffee and scones. But as we pulled into the parking lot, the van’s carbon monoxide alarm began to screech. It hadn’t made a peep since that fear-and-loathing day on Independence Pass, but now it was malfunctioning again, wailing away, alerting us to impending doom, the almighty apocalypse—and this time, it wouldn’t shut off. I fiddled with the reset button; smacked it; cursed it; dropped the F bomb on it. Nothing worked. Finally, Terry suggested I go get breakfast while she took a shot at it. But when I returned, the alarm was still screeching. Ter had the tool bag out and was in the midst of disassembling it, looking for a shut-off switch, anything, just turn the damn thing off, but of course there weren’t any switches. Finally, she grabbed the dikes and snipped the red wire. Problem solved.
With the errant CO alarm defused, we drove in silence to Boulder, parked at beautiful Chautauqua Park, and tramped 1½ miles up to the base of the Third Flatiron. In was a Monday, so I didn’t anticipate a crowd. Yet there was another party just starting the route when we arrived. They were a middle-aged couple, looking fit and self-assured. The man had just clipped the one and only protection bolt as he ascended up and left across the face, the woman belaying him. I watched their progress while I flaked out the rope and got ready. Along with a few slings and carabiners, I also clipped four Camalots to my harness for good measure: #0.5 through #2. Who knew? Maybe I’d find a useful crack along the way.
But looking up the vertical sea of slabs, I didn’t see any crack systems. The guy had traversed about a hundred feet across, and then ascended straight up for some distance, and he wasn’t plugging in any gear along the way. There just weren’t any cracks. He began to stop every move or two, peering up, searching for the bolt that would mark the first belay stance.
“You got twenty feet!” the woman shouted up to him.
Not a good sign: he was running out of rope. Had he missed the belay anchor? Onwards he climbed, scanning the terrain above, upwards another ten, fifteen feet. The woman was getting nervous. But it looked like he had reached a small dish. He stopped; rummaged through his gear; took a bite of rope and tied in.
“Off belay!” he hollered.
The woman was quick on the rock, nimbly ascending to her partner’s belay stance. As soon as they started the second pitch, Ter put me on belay and I started out. I clipped the protection bolt and continued up and across the sandstone monolith. It was exposed but easy going. But pretty soon, I was a hundred feet above that protection bolt and there had been no sign of a crack to plug in a cam. I just kept climbing, aiming for the spot where the couple had been for the first belay. By then, the guy was already at the second belay stance and was belaying his partner up.
“Twenty feet!” Terry shouted.
No problem honey, I’m almost there. A few moments later, I was at the small dish the couple had used for a belay stance—but there was no anchor bolt. Nothing. Nada.
“There is no bolt,” he said.
That’s when cold reality hit me: They were off route, and I was following them. The guy had somehow passed by the first belay anchor, and then simply run out of rope at the insipid dish where I was sitting. Now what?
“I was able to get some gear in a crack,” he offered.
A crack? I looked around. At first I didn’t see anything, but then, hidden above a flake, there it was: a good crack, about a foot long. My two smallest Camalots fit perfectly.
We never saw much of this navigationally-challenged couple again. They did eventually get back on route higher up, but they were always a couple pitches above us. From here we found our groove and ticked off the next four pitches in quick secession, arriving at the top of the giant “C” and the last anchor bolt on the route. Three hundred feet of climbing remained, however, starting with a small roof, to which I surmounted and ran the cord out, every meter of it, to a good belay ledge with an adequate crack to build an anchor. A short, horizontal pitch to the right was next, belaying from a tied-off horn. All that remained was a hundred feet of 5.4 slab, the crux of the route, straight up to the summit. And as I readied to lead the pitch, it began to sprinkle.
“Relax, dear,” I had told her. “It’s not gonna rain.”
But there we were, getting peppered by raindrops. A sense of urgency prevailed as I left the belay ledge, bearing upwards on damp sandstone. My worst fear was a cloud burst, but as providence would have it, I summited without mishap and the rain departed soon after, beams of sunlight breaking through the clouds. There’s nothing like the feeling of topping out on a climb. I belayed my sweetheart up and together we relished the splendid view of the town of Boulder below, the Denver skyline glimmering on the horizon.
We were back at the van by two o’clock, celebrating with ice cold Leinenkugels that came right out of the fridge. Car to car, the East Face Route had taken us 6½ hours, which was practically a tourist pace when compared to the all-time speed record (36 minutes!). However, our time did beat the roller skaters. In any event, the ascent marked the crossroads of our trip. From here, our journey would loop back westward, towards home.
But all of that would come tomorrow. Today, we still had plans for a picnic dinner in Eldo Canyon with Ellen and Paul and the boys; skip stones in the stream; enjoy the sunset; watch the constellations come out. It was all good.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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