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The Tao of Tree Route |
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by Ray Purcell |
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I felt like I'd been sentenced to twenty-years to life in photo hell; cast down into a temporally discontinuous morass devoid of any landmarks to guide me out.� What I was looking at was twenty three years of family pictures, in boxes, mostly unlabeled, and loosely arranged into one or two year groupings.� After having organized the most contemporary decade, I realized that every year there were pictures of the Tree Route on Dome Rock.� As I flipped through the album pages there was an emerging pattern of photos: Tree Route and Disneyland; Tree Route and Cable Car rides; Tree Route and the Jefferson Memorial; Tree Route and first dates; Tree Route and high school graduation; lots of climbs with lots of friends, and still more Tree Route. |
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| What I realized is that Tree Route had become the same metaphor in my life that the black monolith was in Stanley Kubrick's, 2001 a Space Odyssey; Tree Route appears at times of significant change, a nexus.� Tree Route first appeared ten years ago after my friend Kent Simmons started talking to me about climbing.� He had never climbed and I hadn't climbed in years; I mean the last time that I had climbed, my Swiss Seat was tied into a Goldline rope, and I was leading on Forrest stoppers off of a hip belay.� |
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| But I was getting really jazzed about the prospect of climbing again.� While I was in Seattle for a conference I made a pilgrimage to the old, original REI and bought a harness, locking carabineer, and belay device.� Because I was too cheap to buy a new pair of shoes I went across the street to a used sporting goods store and bought a too small pair.� I remember the salesman saying that tight wasn't a problem because toenails just get in the way. |
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| Kent hooked us up with a guy from his church named Gordon, who climbed and knew the local area.� We met up one weekend and I was introduced to an animated and engaging, totally gray haired guy with bifocals and not one but two hearing aides.� He said that we should go to Dome Rock for a really great climb.� Gordon told some solid sounding stories about climbing, and moved with an energy and centered rhythm that belied his clearly sixty-something age; something made me want to trust Gordon, but then I bought these shoes to.� We laid out our gear at the base of the Tree Route and Gordon took us through the safety systems that had obviously changed since my last hip belay and Dulfersitz rappel. |
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| Moving over the stone on the first pitch, I was exhilarated by the texture of the granite, the vanilla scent from the pine bark born on the up drafts, the sense of exposure, and most of all the views of the Needles.� Buy the time Gordon had belayed me to the first anchor I was infected; no, climbing and I had become like these two different and indominatable trees that are so inextricably rooted into the rock at the end of the first pitch.� Of course the scariest part of the climb was when Gordon took out both hearing aides because he said they shorted out when sweat got into them. |
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| In the ten years since that first climb of the Tree Route I've been blessed with opportunities to climb an incredible diversity of routes in the Southern Sierra, and through climbing I have meet some of my truest friends.� Most of those friendships began on Tree Route since that's where many of my new partners and I have tested each other's competence and compatibility.� In a weird sort of way it's been like taking my date to meet my parents. |
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| Tree Route was where my kids learned to climb, and it was where my daughter did her first lead.� It was on those pitches and at those belays that the term traditional family values were redefined into something substantive.� Tree Route has become a mandatory summer outing, a season opener; one which isn't complete unless it's followed by lying out in the Sun on a granite slab next to Peppermint Creek, and then topped off with a burger at Pete Brewer's Ponderosa Lodge, not to mention the Southern Sierra Climbers Assn. annual slideshow. |
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| My daughter and I were kicking back with a new partner, Steve Ford at our campsite at Dome Rock one weekend.� Tuna was searing on the mesquite grill and we were working on a Petit Sara when a couple of guys strolled by.� One had a thick curly black and gray hair with a bushy beard and introduced himself as Ed Hartounian, the other had thick curly hair and a beard that wasn't grey, named Joe Metz.� I made them for fellow travelers and asked what they'd been climbing.� Ed said he and his friend had come from the Bay Area with Joe's daughter Rachiel, and her friend Julia, and that they had done Tree Route and some others that day, and were headed to the Needles the next.� On a whim I asked Ed how many times he had done Tree Route, he looked at me like an astonished man pondering infinity- I thought so. |
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August, 2002 |
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