The Sugar Daddy

I’d been driving past this rock, near Hanksville, for years. It’s just begging to be climbed. I’ve even walked around the thing a couple of times, but dismissed it as impossible without drilling huge numbers of large holes for spikes (rebar? footing stakes?) of some kind. The “rock” appeared to be too soft and flaky to nail, too crumbly to bolt. There were a few traces of seams, but crumbly and vague, leading into blank shields of peeling pastry. A untidy frustration, at the back of my mind; that damn thing is right by the highway, flaunting itself.

Last year, yet another token reconnaissance, to laugh at this ridiculous tower, was different. It’s easy to read the hard rocks, like granite, but reading the hieroglyphics of of the more esoteric desert rocks takes more time and practice. Previously, just a few words here and there made vague sense. Last year, words became sentences, then whole paragraphs jumped into a kind of structure. Of course, once you learn to read, you have to work out what it’s saying, all the way to the end. So in May last year, Chip and I returned with huge piles of gear, and started up a prominent crack on the south side.

Here’s the formation, back right:


It’s not changed much in 50 years:


This is what we found close up:



I started off the ground, and this is Chip on the second pitch. I elected to belay from the ground, so as to out of the way of any falling debris, so this is taken with a telephoto lens.


A view of Chip from further out from the cliff:


Chip actually hammered in a couple of texas tacks on his pitch.


We left, and came back next weekend to finish. It was hot, 95 degrees in the shade, of which there was none. It was my lead, but up on the climb was actually better than being broiled at the reflector-oven base. The last pitch was a doozy, starting with tipped out #5 Camalots under a temporary-feeling flake roof. After a while, the crack turned to dust, twigs and dead insects, so I started nailing Toucans straight into a calcite seam in the flake, hoping that the whole thing, trembling with the hammer blows, would not fall off, with me under it. Here’s looking down from near the summit.


Here’s a neat calcite seam placement: a stacked Toucan.



At the top, there was nothing to anchor to. With about 2 hours daylight left, I spent about one hour enhancing a natural bollard, and we ended up leaving part of my lead rope as the rap anchor:


The summit pic.