Oh dear. At the very top of the headwall on the Funnybone, a seedy 60-foot rhyolite spire in the middle of nowhere in Idaho, the next move onto the top seemed to be a flying bellyflop from aid slings over an overhanging lip, onto a desolate anchorless tabletop consisting of bird droppings and shattered plates. What to do? What to do?

Well, I’ll tell you what I did. I stood in the second steps, reared up above the lip, reached over and swatted one of the crumbly plates on the top, rousing a small cloud of dust and guano. That was the top, and I had touched it. Then, nauseous with fear and relief, I dropped, down-stepped and started rigging a rappel off the top piece, a baby angle I’d just driven with unsettling ease into an undersized hole right below the summit rim. Outa there! Yes! Down, down, down! Never again!


The length of this trip report has already exceeded the extent of any conceivable claim on the reader’s interest. But let me give the Funnybone – and our strange interest in climbing these things – a moment of appreciation here. However decrepit and seedy, the ’Bone is an interesting spire, overhanging on all aspects and looking like an inverted bowling pin stuck weakly into a dusty hillside. Whatever its shortcomings as a climbing objective, the Funnybone is the proudest of the bunch in its Idaho neighborhood. The neighborhood is a swath of rhyolite outcrops and bluffs on Bennett Mountain, originating in a hot ash flow that took place, the books tell me, eight or nine million years ago.

I originally started the route on the Funnybone for training, sad as it sounds. I wanted a nearby little C1 clip-up route all to myself, where I could hone my geriatric grunt-and-grab aid chops in case I ever wanted to undertake something worthy somewhere else. The Funnybone is 20 minutes by highway and doubletrack from my house in Central Idaho.

Well, I found a route on the ‘Bone’s south side that seemed relatively safe, a vertical strip where the scaly rind had fallen off, leaving behind an inset panel, three to four feet wide, of compactly bedded grit and glass. This strip led topward between an overhanging arête of stacked mud blocks on the left and a multi-ton gargoyle block weirdly overhanging the route on the right. From the top of the inset strip the route humped up over a frightening and shattered ceiling, past a sloping foot-ledge and a Triclops of huecos, and finally up a gently overhanging and scaly headwall to the biscuit-strength flange defining the top. So much for my dream of a solo C1 training clip-up – no cracks, and not even a single edge stout enough to bear a hook!

The way ahead became clear. Out, I blush to admit, came the drill. Two early speed-the-way experiments with venerable quarter-inch split-studs found in the depths of a moldy boltbag resulted in mortifying butt-in-the-dust groundfalls – the whole outer rind busted off when I stood on the things. So out came the big iron. Happily, the drilling was easy and fast. Less happily, this was because it was like drilling into a huge Lorna Doone cookie. Fast, though.

So up it went, over the course of several solo visits! Up, up between the overhanging mud arête and the grotesquely overhanging gargoyle block! Rising alongside the top of the block was an eye-opener – from there I could see that nothing seemed to be holding this horrible thing to the spire but an adhesive plug of guano and sticks and rodent bones sagging into the split on top. Up and up over the creaky shattered ceiling, hole after crumbly hole, past the foot-ledge (I named it Camp 4) and the Triclops, and finally up the scabby overhanging headwall, where a pair of Canada geese, on the final triumphant day, circled the spire as I hung there toiling away, griping at my harness wounds.


As the top crept down to meet me, I ran out of food, water, hope, fire, strength, delight, brains, everything. Gear, too. I knocked in my last 3/8” bolt a couple of feet below the rim. Ah, but the moldy bolt bag (I was using it to blot up my impotent tears at the time) yielded up a solitary and forgotten treasure: a cauliflowered ½” angle I must have found or stolen decades before. So I grunted upward in the slings, drilled a final miserable hole just below the projecting lip and beat the sad old piece in up to the eye with four whacks. Laugh? Sob? There I was. The final move to the top of the Funnybone had announced itself. Overhead it was all blue blue blue! And I was about to head home.