Stacked-up contour lines on a map. Dark shadows on Google Earth.

She Who Discovers New Cliffs had read the topographic tea leaves and prophesied a New Cliff. Since her last discovery now has ten routes, with scope for another thirty, I was in.

We checked it out. Access was via a gated road, but we had bikes. A bit of a grunt in spots, but less than two miles. Gorgeous spot, what with waterfalls, and steep riverbanks, and a tantalizing hint of rock above. And a death approach which I backed off. But she continued upward and returned with confirmation of a small wall. Here’s the river.

We returned a week later, cycled further up the road, then fought our way through blackberry hell to the cliff top, made our best guess about where to hang ropes, and dropped in. My rope, tied off to a tree, reached the base, but was definitely in the wrong place, and, what with the sharp edge near the top, not juggable. Her rope, just doubled around a tree, turned out to be in a good spot, but didn’t reach all the way. Scary diagonaling got her to a tree part-way down and she was soon at the base. Seemed like good potential. Not too dirty (by PNW standards), and offering several good looking routes featuring small edges and no natural pro.

A week later, with most of the blackberry-torn flesh healed it was time to go back. We wanted to move my rope, and add a rope to her line. All via a new approach that would avoid the brambles. Would fate smile again? Would the alternative road we’d spotted on the maps be open? Or suitable for bikes if not? Would the spurs that appeared to lead to the area above the river still exist? Who knows? The weather looked good for Tuesday, so why not go find out.

But Monday there was another question to be answered: Would I even be able to walk on Tuesday? Sometime Monday morning I started limping. It felt like all the hardware that holds my left hip together had rusted out overnight and grown sharp spurs. By evening, I could hardly move (ask Wayno, Steve, or Mimi – they all saw me hobbling around), couldn’t get up from a kneeling position, and found the toilet seat to be a new torture device.

Pain killers left over from some previous physical destruction got me through the night, but things weren’t any better on Tuesday morning – except for one oddity: the one thing I could do without too much pain was ride. So we threw the bikes in the car and headed east, figuring that if I couldn’t hobble from wherever the road ended to the cliff top, I could always wait by the bikes until Mari got back.

Pavement’s end:

And the sign says bicycles welcome.

So off come my sandals, on goes one shoe and then... F*#k... Not only am I gonna have to do this with one leg, but I’ll have two left feet. Looked pretty funny, and felt weird, but it seemed to work.

The road was dead flat and in perfect shape. We dodged a few logging trucks…

Saw some nice scenery…

And eventually reached the first turn-off.

The spur hadn’t seen much action lately, but was still in good shape. We had to lift the bikes over a couple of fallen trees, but otherwise had smooth riding. Off the bike I wasn’t so smooth. I could barely move my left leg outward, and couldn’t step up on it at all. We finally parked the bikes, and hiked the last couple of hundred meters into what looked like a reasonable clearing. Well, Mari hiked and I hobbled.

But the clearing was not reasonable. Bramble city, and brush too high to see more than a short way. Mari whined a lot because she HATES bushwhacking, and HATES brambles. I whined a lot cuz every f*#king step hurt, and if I wanted to get my leg over anything (like the 50 gazillion fallen logs we encountered) I had to lift it with my hands. But we’re kind of obstinate sometimes, and eventually got clear of the brambles. Of course to do this, we’d had to go the wrong way, and wound up getting to the river well upstream of where we wanted to be. So we thrashed some more, and then some more after that, and finally…

Probably doesn’t look like much, but there’s a drop-off of about 150 feet along the line of the foreground shrubbery, and it felt good to get there. Sort of. In an “at least we’re still alive” sort of way. And there were a couple of challenges remaining. Like getting my rope back. It was running off slings around a tree that actually overhung the cliff. Doing the one-legged belly crawl to get to it was kind of exciting.

And of course there was the return journey. Which turned out to be no problem – or no problem for anyone with two legs. We found the right path, and realized that with a bit of work with garden clippers it would probably provide a casual ten-minute approach.

And late that evening, while puttering around the house, I suddenly realized that the pain was rapidly receding. I could dance a sort of clumsy jig. And more important, sit comfortably on the toilet.

Oh, about the pictures -- cell phone quality, cuz I forgot my camera.