So, I have to tell ya. My friend Scotty (aka Surfer Scotty) isn't real fond of heights. Big deal. Mostly it's just the not-wanting-to-fall thing, I think, but still, he's the one that's really gotten me into vertical stuff, so I have no complaints (usually), and when he wants to go climb somewhere I'm usually game. But oh, do I have stories that he's not going to want his kids to see. Like: Very early in my technical climbing career, maybe 4 or 5 months in, on a sunny fall afternoon at the Garden of the Gods. I'd quickly picked up both some moderate skills (stupidly believing in my abilities) and a decent rack of trad gear, and after Scotty got off work we still had an hour and a half of sunlight to go climbing. These, of course, were the days of drinking, debauchery, excessive partying at the '70s house that he rented with several other young guys in a semi-wild part of Colorado Springs. We'd spend most of our partying evenings at home, buildering around on the huge fireplace in his living room, trying to work out an out-and-back traverse sequence that would go at our level (roughly the unbelievably hard grade of V negative 2). Other people at the parties just looked us strangely for a few minutes, then wandered on and generally ignored us.

The Garden. It's what I affectionately call "The Scary Place." The changes in the routes over just the last few years that I've been climbing there are tremendous. 5.8 routes have flaked away into .10b horrorfests protected sparsely with 1950s vintage drilled angles, unlkely to hold a slip, let alone a good lead fall. Coby made me pick up my first pair of shoes in the summer or '99 after yet another scary AI/snow climb in RMNP where the weather turned on us nastily at the summit. We drove back home after the climb, and Coby was cursing the slogging up snow and talus the whole way until we passed a now-gone REI store in Westminster. With new shoes in-hand and no idea what I was getting into, the next morning he led me up Montezuma's Tower, the classic 5.6/7 airy spire at the Garden. It's a classic route that needs to be done once by everyone, but really shouldn't be repeated without good reason (I've repeated it with scads of others now, and climbed it every way but solo and naked, testifying to my unreasonableness and lack of common sense). It wasn't half bad, I told him. And then, immediately, he dragged me over to Silver Spoon, the sandbagged 5.5 slab visible to everyone walking into the park, and put me on lead.

I had no idea what I was doing. I clipped the first couple of bolts, moved out towards the overhanging dihedral that marks the route turning right, and was immediately stymied by the next move, four long, long feet from the next clip. I had nowhere to put my hands or feet, just a narrow less-angled ledge at about my chest level. "What do I do here?", I asked. "Mantle," Coby yelled back up. "What the hell is a mantle? That's the thing above a freakin' fireplace, man!" Coby pantomimed the move for me, told me I wouldn't fall far if I blew it, and egged me up the move - probably the first technical move I'd ever done, on my first lead, on my second roped climb ever. Oh, so many more stories from the Garden to tell, on changed (now sandbagged) routes, big lead tumbles directly over tourist groups watching people climb, nasty seldom-repeated routes hidden from the tourist walkways... But they all taught me something.

This particular afternoon, we knew we only had a limited amount of time before the sun would set, putting us in the cold and dark on the east face of Grey Rock. I had been impatient to get out and climb the route, New Era, and Scotty couldn't beg out of work earlier than 5 pm any working day. New Era's reputation of being a solid, fantastic 5.7 with two or three pitches depending on your approach, along with it's excellent crux lieback crack moves leading to the alcove, made me want it so very badly. We opted for the three-pitch approach, using a poorly-designed and ancient intermediate hanging belay at about a hundred feet. Scotty took the pitch, and it was clear that even though it was easy (5.6ish) that it didn't protect as well as he'd like. It was already twilight when he reached the bloody american triangle of webbing set up as the anchor, and he backed it up with trad gear. At this point I feel also compelled to mention that Scott doesn't like the dark much, either. Probably especially at height. I had a heckuva time talking him back to a semblance of calm as he was anchored to the hanging belay, in the increasing dark, and there was no way I could talk him into continuing the climb as we'd planned. The panic was evident as I talked him through the rap setup that we both knew as well as we could, checking him and making him double-check his setup and rig. He rapped down (wisely not trusting the crap gear to hold a lowering session in the dark, on an unknown climb), and we ended up leaving all of the gear in the pitch. It was full dark when he finally got down, and only after a couple of beers at home did he really recover and start to say to me rationally 'Screw the gear! Leave it!" We went back out the next morning early, and put the route up fully, recovering everything we'd left, and loved the route (even though transistions with me leading the last two pitches instead of leapfrogging made things a rope management nightmare).

It didn't really surprise me when he said he wanted to go up to Devils Tower, the 865' monolith in NE Wyoming, because he really wanted to get to the summit. He'd been a year or two ago with his early mentor Alan Moseman, and a long line of climbers ahead and time constraints forced them off after pitch 2. Well, since he might be off to Cali for a new prosthetics job shortly (isn't there surfing there, too, I asked, and he smiled), we decided 'no time like the present' and hopped in the car after work on Friday afternoon, 7 July. What the heck. How hard can it really be?

I had no beta from him or any sources, other than Scotty's assurance that 'It's a crack, and I've seen you at Turkey Rocks - you'll have no problems.' That just made it more interesting. Unfortunately, the traffic to Denver was insane, and it took us 2-1/2 hours to get to the Tech Center, only 60 miles away. Not an auspicious beginning to a 500 mile drive. I switched out driving shortly thereafter, and made it as far as Douglas, Wyoming, around midnight. My idea of roadtrip car-camping is to pull off on some deserted road and toss out a sleeping bag next to a warm car tire. Scotty wasn't particularly thrilled with this idea, and slept in the car (the front seat of a loaded Honda being so big and comfortable). About 0220 someone drove up in a big truck and asked us if we were lost or okay, but she went on her way when I explained I just didn't want to hit any antelope, being so tired and in the middle of nowhere. I was getting tight on gas, but the signs said it was only 35 miles to Bill, the next town. I got up at 0530 and started driving again, with Scotty still asleep in the passenger seat. Well, Bill has exactly 3 buildings; one's a post office, one's a metal railroad maintenance building, and apparently the employees from the first two sleep in the other. Uh-oh. I cruised the next 40 miles to the next town, coasting down hills on fumes, and was oh-so-thankful when there was actually a truckstop in the next little town, still 35 miles south of Gillette. I'd have been so embarrassed to have had to stop and flag down a ride, waking Scotty and saying, 'We're outta gas.'

It's about an hour past Gillette to the Tower; we pulled in at just before 9. Well, the weather looked good, and the young summer-hire ranger (cute, but for the nose ring) said they only had two other groups on the Tower at all. Very surprising, especially for a summer weekend. We quickly sorted our gear and started the easy hike up to the boulder field. It's about a 5 minute walk to where you leave the trail, and then head up over the SW shoulder through boulders and onto slabs. The Durrance starts maybe 350 feet above the plain, but the shoulder of the tower is already a couple of hundred feet above the plain below. We got to the leaning column which starts the route just as a couple, Wes and Connie, started up ahead. Just enough time to get our gear sorted so we'd have a clear lead.

Pitch one, the leaning column, is maybe 75 feet of semi-face and some offwidth with a left-foot stem to a nice, 4' diameter pillartop belay. We'd already decided I'd have lead all day (I like hand and finger cracks); as I was climbing we could hear Connie talking to Wes, complaining that he hadn't shown her how to remove a cam from the second pitch. She didn't sound real comfortable, hanging 15' above the stance and trying to figure out new (to her) gear. As I got up and clipped to a #3 camalot, she dropped a nut and quickdraw into the crack behind me. It missed me, slightly, and ended up lodged well down inside and behind the leaning column in a windy offwidth. It'll probably stay there for a while. Lots of 'I'm so sorry' came from above.

Pitch two, the Durrance crack proper, is supposed to be a double crack around a small pillar, on the left side of another slightly hanging column. Well, it ain't. Maybe back when it was first freed, but since then it's gotten wide and smooth, with a serious dearth of anything to hold or put feet on. Stemming one foot left and off-widthing the right side is the only good way up now, and it's a pain. Scotty kept telling me how hard this all was, and how his old partner Alan Moseman (who put in a bunch of the routes at Jackson Creek Dome in CO) put in like 10 pieces all the way up the 70ish feet. It was just too damn big, so I put in a #4 camalot about 20 feet up, ran into two fixed pins at 25 and 28 feet, and then freed the damn o/w to about 50 feet. Scotty was pretty happy when I found a place for the #3 camalot, but I still had 20 feet of heinous o/w to get to the stance. Around here, Wes and Connies' second rope, which they were hauling uncoiled, had tangled itself and knotted under a little chock stone in the main o/w. I pulled it out for then and pulled myself further in for a rest. About 20 seconds after getting it out and having it hauled up by Connie, it was abruptly dropped on my head again, in a big bundle. Having stuff falling on you in an offwidth with little pro is unnerving, to say the least. I got pretty well pinched for the last 10 feet of smooth offwidth; I asked Connie on the stance above what she'd done where I was, and she said 'oh, I was about where you are and I fell.' I guess a better move would've been to stem of the column way off right and use the less-damaged left crack more. I pulled the moves, not as hard as they seemed, and came up on top of the pillar as Connie moved out, still apologizing profusely.

Pitch three, the cussin' crack, was about 3 mini-pitches of cracks (or more correctly, more offwidths) to the second set of bolts on the pitch. Where I stopped it was only about 35' below the traverse to the meadows, but the rope was getting really draggy so I decided to hold there and belay Scotty up. He enjoyed this pitch even less than I did. It was probably only 5.6 all the way through, but I still had some interesting moments. Scotty traversed out around a boulder for the second small pitch (to the right) and found a nice short hand crack to get up far faster than I did.

Pitch four looked to be a real wide offwidth, so I treated it like a chimney. I couldn't jam myself into my selected route with my pack (rope, shoes, food, and extra gear), so I downclimbed from where I got stuck and rigged it for a haul after I'd gotten up. Scotty slowly got the idea that I couldn't do that, without taking out the other rope and hauling bags between us, without completely soloing the pitch. "Yep," I said. The chimney was fun; I think my body would've just been a big chock if I'd fallen (except right at the top), so up I went, free but not concerned.Hauling the bags up wasn't so much fun. The various protrusions and overhangs between us jammed the packs pretty well a few times, necessitating a lot of see-sawing of the ropes to free them between us.

We decided to try to work around the jump traverse to the meadows (a big hole between two columns) rather than shoot the last 150' 5.4 crack pitch straight up. I have no idea how you could actually jump without hang-dogging off a pin plugged around the nasty side of the boulder you have to swing out from under; I climbed down about 15' onto a small, slick sloping ledge and amazed myself by doing two crossovers and not falling, until I got to the other side. I set a hard trad belay on the other side and Scotty followed. Since I couldn't see him, I kept yelling for him to give me slack/take directions; as he started down, I was yelling 'Do you need slack?' as the rope went taught. I yelled down, 'Talk to me!', and he said 'I fell.' Oh. Fortunately, the fall brought him across the gap, and he chimneyed and face-cliimbed up to the start of the Meadows, where the first of 3 rap anchors to the ground is set up.

We went off with the rope coiled around my neck, and Scotty got to lead some easy 4th-class scramble stuff across the Meadows, and up some gullies to the summit. He wasn't real happy with the exposure, but did fine climbing on up. The summit's a pretty bare, slightly rounded place with lots of boulders and grass and a good view, about half the size of a football field. Nowhere at all to put a spaceship. We finished off our third and last liter of water, and started looking for bolts to rap back down. The first Scotty found led right off the west face, and I decided that was a really bad idea. I looked further until I found some that seemed to go down to the Durrance area.

The first rap (they're all doubled 50s, and in retrospect it would probably have been far easier to take two 60s) was going straight down the 5.4 we avoided, and necessitated swinging over the jump traverse on rappel. The second started the more vertical stuff, going down the main 'gully' that's next to Durrance. We ended up on a small pillar-top with three hangers, two with chains and cold-shuts. Scotty saw another station about 40 feet below on the right, but we figured we'd be fine. I went on down to basically ropes-end, and Scotty rapped on down. I told Scotty, 'Pull red,' and he gave it a tug. He gave me a bad look. The ropes wouldn't budge, and we were back down at the level of the start of the first pitch with another full rap to go. Yep, they were pretty well stuck, and we were pretty well poked.

At the time I had something like 11 years of ropes and mountaineering experience (but only less than 1 of rock), so I got the honors. I broke out my BD ascender from Scotty's pack (emergency gear I'll never go without again), and tied myself off to a web-prussik and my waist and the ascender, fully locked into the rope, to my anchor-daisychain. The ropes were fixed off on the bolts we were at to give me downward tension to move up the prussik (and fix the ropes incase they started to move with me up on it somewhere), and up I went. A full 110' of offwidth up an aid route ar�te (Mateo Tepee, 5.7 A3) slowly, slowly, painfully led me up to the belay station I'd foolishly bypassed, and still the ropes were caught. I aided up the last 40 feet, and found that the ropes had gotten cammed to the rock by the shuts, and had to manually feed the rope even right through them. What a pain, and thank god for knowing what to do and having the gear. A straight 2-prussik Texas ascent would have been areal nightmare. I rerouted only 40 feet through one of the shuts (angled out so I could pull it from the next station), and down I went. The next rap was picture-perfect, back down to Scotty an hour and a half after we'd gotten ourselves hosed. I can only imagine what the tourists pointing at us all day, were saying or asking the rangers.