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dominic7
Jan 23, 2006, 4:15 AM
Post #1 of 2
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Registered: Mar 7, 2005
Posts: 18646
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My girlfriend Jes and I escaped the cold of Maine for 9 days of climbing in Mexico. We are primarily trad climbers (with the White Mountains’ Cathedral and Whitehorse Ledges being our usual stomping grounds), so sport climbing was generally new to us. We might have done the odd sport route here and there - not out of snobbery, but just because we’d never gotten around to making it to Rumney. As a rule, we don’t go at it very hard – leading 5.8, top-roping 5.10s, bouldering V2. At any rate, we had made some trips down to MetroRock in Boston as they’ve got a pretty good indoor sport climbing setup to get comfortable with the milieu and put in a token effort of getting in some sort of climbing shape. We debated taking some trad gear but decided against it (this was the right decision). The gear we took was:
· Two 60m ropes (one of which we never touched)
· 20 quickdraws (5 or so were long runners)
· 8 or so lockers
· Short and long sling for each of us
· Belay/rap devices, shoes, harnesses, etc.
· Helmets (we didn’t see much rockfall, but wore them on the multi-pitch stuff just on principle)
We booked flights into Monterrey, MX and arranged to stay in one of Posada’s rooms. Most people drive down and camp there, as the campgrounds have excellent shared kitchen and bathroom facilities, but we didn’t feel like lugging all the camping gear. The room was small, with a private bathroom, and a very saggy queen-sized bed - on the whole livable and a pretty good deal at $25 a day. The week after Christmas there was apparently 600 climbers at El Potrero Chico, but in the first couple of weeks of January there were maybe 100 or so. With 500 climbs there, odds are you’ll be able to get on something.
Day 1: We tracked down a guidebook at Tami’s café ($20 for the guidebook and a T-shirt). Tami and Magic Ed are the matriarch and patriarch of El Potrero Chico and absolutely delightful people. We ended up going and doing one-pitch stuff on the Central Scrutinizer wall to get the feel for the dolomite rock and check out the area. All the routes there we did there were fun and well-bolted. We did the following:
Slip of the Tounge (5.7)
Blood Meridian (5.9) – Traversey
Sabroso (5.9) – Very good
Foopa (5.8)
Mr. P Mosh (5.10a) – Good. One sort of balancy move over a bulge.
Feeling cocky, we headed back for lunch at Pagoda (which was good). We got back in the afternoon and wandered up to find something to climb. After walking by all the canyons, we came up to the Spires, which are neat looking. On a whim, we scanned the guidebook decided to try out Crack Test Dummies (5.9), a 2-pitcher on the eastern (Grande) spire. It had a 5.7 for Jes to lead and a 5.9 for me – perfect! It was late in the afternoon, but after the relatively short cruisers on the Central Scrutinizer it seemed doable – besides the sun was still high in the sky. We didn’t have our headlamps, but figured we could nip up and down and be out before dark. NOT! This was our sketchiest experience of the trip and made it clear that despite being a bolted climbing, the area has an alpine adventure flavor to it. We learned some valuable lessons on this climb (lesson #1: in lower latitudes, it gets dark fast. The sun doesn’t mosey down at an oblique angle to the horizon, it goes straight down and its lights out).
Jes led the first 5.7 pitch and commented on how run-out it was. She got to the anchors and rigged up her Reverso to belay me. She is generally resistant to new-fangled technology, and mocks me incessantly about my Gri-Gri, so I had resorted to my only option for getting her an auto-locking top belay set-up and put a Reverso under the Christmas Tree for her. I am happy to report my little Luddite now swears by her Reverso for bottom and top belays, rapping and opening beers. It took us a bit to get the Reverso rigged up and test out the auto-locking before I followed up the dirty chimney (all the while the sun was diving for the horizon). She was right about the run-out, sometimes you couldn’t see the next bolt from a clip stance. This grated on our trad sensibilities, where you protect based on availability and comfort level: if you are feeling nervous, stopping to put in a piece of pro sometimes settles things down. As our trip wore on, we noticed a comforting correlation here though. Easy climbing was consistently bolted more widely and you began, in an odd way, to look forward to run-outs. Anyhoo, I got up to Jes at the anchor, which was an awkward little notch reminiscent of the Toilet Bowl on Whitehorse. I grabbed the draws and off I went on the second 5.9 pitch.
The climbing was fun and varied, not particularly challenging. There were some weird rusty rings the guidebook called “old Mexican iron” that looked like mank from the Gunks. Nothing to be done for it so I clipped them and went. And went. And went. I was trying to hurry but the pitch was long, more than 30m (we had a 60m rope). Jes was yelling up that I was past the middle mark, but it was windy and I didn't hear. I got up to the top (actually the anchors are about 15ft below the very top) and clipped in and Jes started climbing. By now the sun was much lower and I started getting nervous. After a while I shouted to Jes and told her I should just lower her from where she was or else we wouldn’t get down in the light. She yelled up that the rope wasn’t long enough for me to rap down, I’d climbed past the middle mark. My thought was let’s use the light and get her back to her anchor and I’ll just leave a biner on the way down to get back to her. I was belaying her with a Gri-gri so I lowered her until she was back at the anchor and untied. I asked her to tie a knot in her end, untied myself, threaded the rap rings, tied back in and rigged my Gri-gri on the other side of the rap rings to lower myself. I suppose I could have hauled up the rope and rapped normally with my ATC but a) the light was going fast now and if I lowered the rope didn’t need recovering, finding the middle, etc. b) I knew I was going to have to rig a leaver biner so the hands-free option seemed desirable and c) most worrisome, I knew I had traversed right quite a bit during the climb and getting back to Jes’ position was going to be a bit dicey. Looking at the guidebook later, it clearly tells you to rap down a different climb, but I hadn’t absorbed this for some reason (lesson #2: read the guidebook, it tells you when you need a 70m rope, or 2 60s or to rap different routes from what you climbed. The multi-pitch climbs there often aren’t straight up 30m pitches). I lowered down in the last of the light (did I mention it gets dark fast? Lesson 3: don’t leave the ground on a multi-pitch climb without your headlamp). Here's where I made my next blunder.
I was lowering myself (not rapping) and an overhand knot had somehow gotten into the rope below my gri-gri. Crap, and now it's really getting dark. Wanting to hurry, my brain somehow makes the calculation that all I have to do is pass the knot (get it above the Gri-Gri). I clip into a bolt and re-rig the gri-gri below the knot, get off the bolt and I'm on my way again. Feeling good. Until the brakes get slammed on. Of course the knot has now made it's way up to the rap rings and is bound up. Jes is wondering what is happening and I'm not feeling like taking the time to explain the blockhead contortions I'm going through. She takes a dim view of lowering oneself with the gri-gri as opposed to rapping to begin with, and my little knot adventure is making me wonder if maybe she's not onto something.
Now I'm stuck and there is nothing to be done but roped solo back up to the knot. I make a move or two, pull the slack rope through the gri-gri and repeat. I'd never done it before, and a dark Mexican night was probably not the best venue for sorting it out, but it went quickly. The knot appeared out of the dark at the bolt I had originally clipped to pass it. I clipped in again and did what I should have originally done, worked the knot out. Re-rigging again, I lowered until the real knot in the end of the rope came into view. Now however, Jes was way off to my left and below me.
A pendulum for 30ft or so (gri-gri made it easier) got me to a bolt over Jes. I clipped in and rigged a leaver biner to lower down to Jes and we carefully rapped down the first pitch by feel and the light of the half moon. We felt a bit chagrined by our sketchy little outing, but the lessons were well learned.
Day 2: We needed to get some foodstuffs and this being market day we cruised into Hidalgo. The Friday market isn't as good as the Tuesday one, but it is fun.
Day 3: In broad daylight once again, we decided to tackle the Jungle Wall. The guidebook declared that Jungle Mountaineering (5.10) is, by convention, supposed to be your first climb at Potrero (I missed reading this until the night before), but also talks of being run-out. After having being taken down a couple of pegs our last time out, we thought maybe Jungle Boy (5.9) was more our speed. We wandered over to Tami’s for coffee and talked to her for a while and she said that Jungle Boy and Las Chimuelas (5.9), were excellent and confirmed how run-out Jungle Fever is. So off we went. On the way we looked at the guidebook and the entry for Jungle Boy claimed that 2 60m ropes were needed to get down. Wanting rock-solid guarantees of regaining the ground with all the gear we left the ground with, we settled on Las Chimuelas. Tami later told us that this means “toothless ones” because when Magic Ed was bolting it he had to keep stopping to alternately take Tami and her mother into town to go to the dentist for one tooth ailment or another.
This was a fun route. Jes led the first pitch (5.8) and I led the second two (5.9, 5.9). We were in the sun, the rock was warm, the bolts were new, the Mexican music was blaring from car stereos below: this was why we had come here! Over lunch we decided to try one of the bigger classics on the Jungle Wall the next day, the 11-pitch Space Boyz (5.10d). I hadn’t done a 5.10d there yet, but figured I could fake my way through it, given how we’d been dancing up the easy stuff. We decided to head back to the Central Scrutinizer to try out a couple of the 5.10d’s to test out this theory. I hung a couple of times in the crux of the one-pitch Golden Puff (5.10d) but made it up without French-freeing it. Jes followed to clean. I was feeling pretty pumped from the effort, but we thought what the heck, let’s give it a shot.
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Day 4: It was cold during the night and as we walked up to the Jungle Wall the wind was whipping and it must have been 55 degrees or so. Jes does not like to climb in the cold, at all. Her hands don’t work and it activates her whine gland. :) Luckily there were some locals doing the first pitch of Space Boyz so we saved face in delaying our decision for a while. It was 10am by the time they were done and the sun was touching the summit of the climb and rapidly moving down the face so we made the decision, with some trepidation, to go for it. I led and we made steady, if not fast, progress through the first four pitches (5.8, 5.9, 5.9, 5.9). I think we were climbing fast enough, but our changeovers took a long time. We’d never really pushed ourselves (timewise) on multi-pitch climbs, usually running out of energy or rock before we ran out of daylight. I think I figured out at some point we were averaging over 45 minutes a pitch. On the easy pitches. An average rate (if we sustained it through the hard stuff) that would put us at the top at around 7PM (well after dark).
The sun hit us after the first pitch and it went from cold to hot. The poorly designed bite-valve on my new hydration pack from EMS decided to give up and piss my water all over me along the way. One thing I’ll note on these pitches, several were 30m exactly. There were some rusty dangly chain bits off to the right of the climb as potential subanchors, but rapping with a 60m rope was going to be delicate. The climbing wasn’t hard but was sustained. The lack of fitness and the pump from the day before started creeping in during the fourth pitch and some twinges of forearm cramps started but were easily ignored. I also had made the poor choice of wearing my “performance” Anasazi Velcros rather than my “comfort” 5.10 Coyotes with the thought I’d need them for the harder pitches. Not a good choice. My feet were aching from the mileage and the rock is so sticky down there wearing toe-curlers is like bringing a bazooka to a knife-fight if you’re on anything less than 5.13. There was a nice ledge at the top of the fourth pitch where we had a sandwich, sucked up the last of the water and took some pictures. I took off on the 5th pitch (5.10a) and started feeling the forearms twinge again through the crux section and grabbed a draw to pull up through hoping my muscles wouldn't cramp up harder. At the tiny belay ledge I rigged the gri-gri to bring Jes up and began to realize we were into something bigger than we’d expected. As Jes made the last moves to the anchor I could see she was nervous. We were higher than we’d ever been before and the exposure from the semi-hanging belay stance was a pretty complete 500’ straight shot to the deck. We were at the crux 5.10d pitch and it was time to make a call as to whether we would push on. Given all the factors, we declared victory and retreated. :) During the descent, we tried simul-rapping for the first time. Back home, everyone does the one-at-a-time thing, where one person stays at the anchor while the other goes down both strands, then the next person follows on both strands. Here we saw partners each taking a strand and rapping down side-by-side. Once we tried it we were hooked. I would have preferred that Jes had had an auto-locking device (like my beloved Gri-gri) but in loose sections I would go first in case rocks were displaced to knock people unconscious. One could have argued for her to back up her Reverso with a prussik on her leg loop, but she wouldn't have went for it.
The simul-rap thing was good not just because it’s twice as fast, but because you got to go down together and post-mortem the route. I realize now there is something depressing and anti-climatic about sitting around on a ledge waiting for the other person while rapping. We’ll be all the shit at Cathedral this summer with it. So anyway, our Space Boyz attempt didn’t go off as planned, but we made it down in one piece and had an idea about what it was going to take to do one of these big ones. I suppose people that took their climbing a bit more seriously would have been disappointed after such an experience, but I’ve become a bit more philosophic in my old age. If it was easy to just run up stuff every time, it wouldn’t be much of a sport, now would it? Mixing in the setbacks makes the successes that much sweeter.
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Day 5: We had heard good things about the Virgin Canyon, which has nice paved paths to belay from and a big number of single pitch climbs. Many people seemed to spend their whole stay here (sport climbers with no multi-pitch gumption I’d expect). We had a great time, hooking up with our new friends Jason and Megan from the Midwest. Jes and I swapped leading and cleaning duties. She did Cat’s Meow (5.8), which is a good one to try if you want a relatively easy climb with bolts close together, Skaredy Kat (5.8+) and Spin Doctor (5.8) and I did Penitente (5.10b) and Catwalk (5.10b) and we both top-roped 31-foot Smurf (5.9+), which Jason had set up and cleaned while lowering. All of the climbs were very fun and recommended. We had talked about doing the classic Estrellita (5.10b), another 11-pitcher and asked some guys to point out the line to us (Las Estrallas canyon is right across from the Virgin Canyon). One guy had climbed it and pointed it out, but didn’t have much nice to say about it. The 5.10b routes up high were not 5.10s, he claimed, for anyone with rudimentary crack-climbing skills. He recommended Will The Wolf Survive (5.10a), a four-pitch climb next to the rap line for Estrellita into Los Lobos canyon.
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Day 6: We took a rest day, getting ready for another big wall attempt. We talked about Estrellita. While Jes read her book, I hiked up to the base of El Toro to check out the bouldering cave and take some pictures. We hung out with people the rest of the day and had a big dinner at Checo’s across the street with our buddies. I ate too much.
Day 7: Though the water is safe to drink, making a pig of yourself with the spicy Mexican food is not a plan for gastric success. I woke up not feeling all I could be. Some Immodium helped but I just didn’t think an 11-pitch climb would be a good place to be when it wore off. We grabbed our gear anyway and headed up to the climbs. Somewhat on a whim, as I was feeling better, we decided to try the four pitch Will The Wolf Survive (5.10a). This was a very cool route. Los Lobos canyon has a remote kind of feel to it. Jes led the first 5.8 pitch and I led the last three: 5.9, 5.9 and 5.10a. The third pitch was the hardest, being very long (there are sub-anchors to rap it with a 60m rope). At the top of the third pitch, it becomes apparent how thin the fin of rock you are climbing is. There are holes in the rock you can see through to the narrow canyon on the other side. The last pitch was short and not that hard. The grade seems to be for the exposed move off the belay ledge. The top of the climb is the summit of Razorback Ridge, which is a charmingly narrow perch. We hung out, ate sandwiches, took pictures and simul-rapped down.
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Day 8: Our last day of climbing. After the day before, we finally felt comfortable, but it was almost time to leave. We had the rack and gear dialed in, had clean and fast changeovers that went the same way every time and had trimmed our average pitch time down to almost 30 minutes. We got our usual late start (we’re on vacation after all) with the idea of doing SuperNova (5.11a) an 8-pitch climb at the top of Las Estrallas canyon. The gaudy 11a rating was the first pitch only (which could also be done as a 10d). The rest of the pitches were 5.6-5.9. By the time we’d hiked to the base of the climb and were ready to climb it was noon, so we were pushed for time. The 11a wasn’t hard, but I hung once in the first crux. Higher up, I was really enjoying myself and climbed hard though the second crux only to take a pretty good fall, the first of the trip. At the anchors, I knew I could get the redpoint if I lowered off and pulled the rope. But it was apparent that if I did so we wouldn’t be able to do the whole thing, so I told Jes to come up. She weighted the rope once in the first crux and I told her if she didn’t hang again somewhere (I had weighted twice) I would knock her off when she got within kicking range. She gained the anchors past my flailing feet. The rest of the climb was a great outing. All in the shade, an odd vertical breeze blowing gently down on us. Jes led 4 pitches and I led 4. The 5.6 pitches were predictably run-out, but in that comforting way that says “easy climbing ahead, come on up!”. I led the second to last pitch (5.9), which made an unexpected turn at the end out of the big notch we’d been climbing all day. Jes climbed to and then past me to lead the last 5.8 pitch. She shouted down that it was a cool pitch and it really was. At the anchors there was a fixed rope and some 3rd class terrain that apparently led to a flat area and a bivy shelter, but we didn’t head up. We took some pictures (amazing views of the Jungle Wall, Spires and Virgin Canyon) and rapped down the 8 pitches in an hour. It was getting dark as we slid down the canyon to the road (it was a steep, scree-filled trail). Jes’ headlamp’s batteries were dead (one more corollary to the earlier rule about headlamps I suppose), but we made it down before it was completely dark.
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Day 9: We headed out the next morning back to Maine. I’d like to be able to say we did some of the signature routes like the 23-pitch Time Wave Zero, but I’ve come to realize that life doesn’t always work the way you plan. Being up high with the girl you love, developing into a more efficient climbing team, hanging out with cool people from all over, learning new skills, torturing the locals with mangled Spanish – there’s worse things one could be doing. El Potrero Chico was a great place to climb in January, we’ll definitely head back for another vacation and get some of the big stuff next time.
http://flickr.com/...s/72057594049792546/
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bill
Jan 25, 2006, 1:19 AM
Post #2 of 2
(1947 views)
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Registered: Apr 4, 2004
Posts: 1061
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Nice trip report, thanks for posting it. I think I need to go there.
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