My Very First Tower Climbing Adventure

I miss the sun so much right now.  Currently all of my day dreaming about rock climbing and new trip planning has me thinking fondly of my first trip to Moab with Brent.  It was exciting and scary and amazing and chilly and wonderful.  There were many feelings involved, so many that I've included them all in bold.  Back in March 2011, about a week after we started dating, Brent suggested we go to Moab to try some routes he'd wanted to do for a while.  I hadn't been to Moab since I was 10 years old, but that was a great time so I thought it would be excellent to go again.  And it was.  But I was really new to trad climbing and multi-pitch climbing and camping with Brent...  Despite all the new-ness everything turned out to be awesome.

The weekend we went down it snowed in Moab, which made climbing difficult, so we hiked out to Morning Glory Arch in Negro Bill Canyon.  Morning Glory Arch is the 5th longest arch in the world and since it's not in the national park you can rappel off it.  The canyon itself is named after William Granstaff, a mixed-race cowboy who was eventually run out of town for bootlegging whiskey; until 1979 the canyon had a seedier name.  That night we camped along the River Road (an event that has only happened one other time since then) and I witnessed Brent's awesome fire starting skills.  Every gift I've gotten for him since then has involved starting fires or rock climbing and we've really gotten camping down to a very efficient routine.  Witnessing Brent's ability to adapt the plan according to weather and to start fires made Brent even more attractive in my eyes.

Negro Bill Canyon in the snow

The next day we headed out for the Kor-Ingalls route on Castleton Tower.  This is one of the first towers climbed in the region, ascended in 1961, and it's easy to see why.  Castleton is a 400-foot tower that sits on top of 1,400 feet of talus, so the the summit of the tower is 2,000 feet off the valley floor with 360° views.  It's position is enough to capture the imagination of adventurous types who couldn't ignore such a prominent tower, and the geology of the tower makes it particularly climbable.

Castleton Tower from the bottom

The geology of the region deserves some explanation here.  The Colorado Plateau is like a layer cake of sandstone layers that were deposited at different periods of time over the course of millions of years.  200 million years ago the Colorado Plateau was at the shores of a large ocean.  As the shoreline of this prehistoric ocean fluctuated it deposited sand on beaches and in sand dunes; all of this on top of a weaker layer of salty rock.  Each layer was eventually buried under newer strata of sand and compacted into sandstone.  Over time the salty layer cracked and warped, creating a rather jagged landscape; meanwhile the forces of wind and water were eroding bluffs and petrified sand dunes into canyons, towers, arches and the other amazing geologic features of the region.  Each layer of sandstone has different properties related to the grain size of the sediment (silt vs. sand, fine sand vs. course sand) and the density of the rock that make some better to climb than others because of the way they weather.  Castleton Tower  is composed of Wingate sandstone, which is the best.

Generalized diagram of Colorado Plateau sandstone (each layer is composed of multiple members).  

Wingate, Navajo, and Entrada sandstone are all derived from "aeolian" or wind blown sand.  These three layers form the towering cliffs and bluffs of the region and are particularly climbable because as they erode they form vertical cracks.  Vertical cracks provide an excellent route for getting from the bottom of a 400-foot block of stone to the top.  Other sandstones that are the result of deposition from rivers, oceans, and floodplains are weaker, tending to weather into horizontal cracks or large talus slopes.  Before actually getting to climb the route we had to make the 90-minute slog up the giant talus slope, making sure to stay on route (no easy task for me), then wait in line to climb the most popular route on the tower.   Eventually we did start climbing and the adventure really began.

Castle Valley - note the Wingate sandstone towers on top of Chinle and Moenkopi sandstone talus slopes.  

Guidebooks for the area often use terms like "character-building" to describe desert climbing because there are many things that can go wrong on long, dirty, windy routes with handholds that can break off if you look at them wrong, and dealing with adversity builds character.  Some of the things I struggled with were the multi-pitch aspect of tower climbing, the amount of protection required for trad-climbing, my inability to crack climb smoothly, and the fact that we had to wear helmets.  I'll discuss each of these "character-building" issues that came up the higher we climbed on this tower.  I'll also try to define some of the climbing terms I throw around, so hopefully it will be clear why I built so much character on this climbing trip.

Castleton is a four-pitch tower, which means it's broken up into four approximately 100-foot sections or pitches.  Up until this point I had only done single pitch climbs, where all he belaying is done from the bottom, on solid ground, with not need for anchors.  On a multi-pitch climb, the leader climbs a pitch, belays the second from the top of that pitch, then climbs again while the second belays from anchors that now hold them 100 feet off the ground.  Communication is important in tower climbing and a little more challenging because routes often wander around blocks and corners so you can't see the climber, while wind and distance make it difficult to hear.  Fortunately, Brent was prepared for this and we'd worked out what to shout when he'd reached the top of the pitch and was ready for me to start climbing; and despite my nervousness the anchors always held us and there weren't any accidents.
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Nervous and cold belaying at the bottom of pitch 2

The first pitch of the Kor-Ingalls route was no trouble for Brent (the leader), the more difficult climbing really started on the second pitch.  Most of the climbing in the desert is trad climbing, a style of climbing that I'd only tried once before and it drew significant laughter from my friends at the time.  Trad climbing is short for traditional climbing and is the original style of climbing, before people added fixed bolts to routes.  Trad climbers bring their own protection with them and place it as they climb.  Protection is the gear climbers use to catch (or "protect") them in case of a fall; most often gear is placed in cracks in the rock, so rocks with lots of cracks are excellent to trad climb.  It's important to bring the right size of gear for the cracks you'll be on and enough pieces to protect the distance you'll be climbing.

Brent and all his gears at the top of Castleton.  

Brent and I have different ideas about how many pieces of gear it takes to protect a route, this difference has become increasingly apparent in the last year as I have learned to lead trad routes myself.  While I tend to place protection every body length (~5.5 feet), Brent places protection more sparingly, tending to focus on where it would be needed to protect a fall and not in places he's very unlikely to fall.  I first noticed this difference between us on Castleton.  Before we hiked up to the tower Brent had chosen the gear he wanted to climb with and went up without large pieces of protection because they were heavy and he didn't think they'd be needed.  On the second pitch of the tower I noticed that Brent was going really long distances between pieces of protection, in part because he didn't bring those big pieces of gear, which meant that if he were to fall he could hit the ledge I was belaying from.  Fortunately, one of the other differences between us is that while I fret over the potential to fall all the time, Brent can calmly assess that while there is a potential to fall, it is unlikely if he just keeps moving.  It's probably not clear from that description, but Brent leads better than I do because he doesn't over-protect.

Perhaps the most nerve-wracking section of the route, Brent climbed it like I champ but I'd have liked to see at least three more pieces of gear in there.  

Getting to the top of a desert tower requires utilizing those beautiful cracks in the sandstone to get higher and higher off the ground, referred to as crack climbing.  Climbing a crack involves 'jamming' your hands (fingers, palms, fists) and feet into the cracks and generating enough friction for it act as a hand or foothold.  I got my start sport climbing, where climbers use bumps and ledges on the rock face as hand and footholds.  Crack climbing is awkward and clunky and was very difficult for me.  Lrge cracks can be especially difficult to climb because you must use whole limbs or your whole body to climb.  Pitch 3 of Castleton is the hardest section and includes a chimney (a crack big enough to fit your body in) and calcite; the guidebooks recommend "shimmying" up this section.

Obviously, I got the "shimmy" down.

As if crack climbing doesn't seem insecure enough, there is a unique feature of Castleton's sandstone called calcite that makes the rock seriously slick in places.  Calcite is a very stable form of calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) and is the white coating on the surface of many of the rocks in Castle Valley.  Calcite is formed when water that is rich in CaCO₃ evaporates, leaving all the minerals behind; here the water evaporated so fast (due to geothermal forces) that the CaCO₃ crystallized immediately into a very hard, slick coating.  I think it's difficult to climb on, but Brent didn't seem fazed by it at all.

Note all of calcite (it looks like white snot), and the tenacity with which Brent sticks to the rock.

One of the final challenges with desert tower climbing is the often breakable and dirty rock.  Wingate sandstone is pretty hard, but it can still break off when you step on it or pull too hard, sending rocks down on those below. This is a particular threat on busy routes like the Kor-Ingalls because there are always climbers above.  That's why we both wore helmets on this route, to protect our noggins from falling rocks.  The easily erodible nature of sandstone (think about how deep water has carved the canyons of the Colorado Plateau and the spectacular arches wind has carved), leaves lots of sand and small rocks in the cracks where climbers are trying to climb and place protection.  That extra grit makes things more difficult, but popular routes tend to be much cleaner, thank goodness.

Such stylish lids

Pitch 4 was an easy jump up to a beautiful, large summit. Sitting at the top of a tower is seriously awesome.  Castleton in particular is nice because it's actually quite a large summit (big enough to fit a car) and a view of Castle Valley is definitely not bad.

Excellent

Unfortunately, once you get to the top you have to get back down.  Rappelling is the second most common source of climbing injuries (after lead climbing falls) and the most nerve wracking part of the whole thing for me.  All the stress from a few hours of climbing just makes me a little delirious and more prone to making mistakes.  Good thing Brent is there to monitor everything.  On this particular trip down (and a few since then) I was so distracted by the exposure of the rappel route and trying to capture it on camera that I definitely got my hair caught in my belay device.

Views from the way down

After the excellent Castleton adventure we still had another day for climbing so we went into Arches National Park to climb some shorter towers.  The towers in Arches are composed of softer Entrada sandstone; there are still vertical cracks but the routes are dirtier and the cliff faces are lumpier than the sheer walls of Wingate sandstone.  Owl Rock is an 100 foot tower in the Garden of Eden area.  While it isn't the most spectacular climb around, it is fun and in full view of tourists so there were lots of people taking pictures of Brent's awesome climbing.  Even better, the sun finally came out so the climbing was warmer.

We finished this trip with a run up the Three Penguins.  This is 120-foot tower looks like three penguins clustered next to each other.  I like the idea of desert penguins.

The Penguins, note how different the lower layer of Chinle sandstone looks

Owl Rock was pretty easy going, but the Three Penguins was another story.  The first pitch was a difficult but manageable hand crack.  In fact, that was the first time I'd ever successfully managed a hand jam.  I felt great!

Smiles at the top of the first pitch.  

On the second pitch the crack went 'off-width', too big for hands and fists to properly jam, too small to fit a whole body in.  Off-width climbing is difficult and insanely awkward.  Brent slowed down climbing this section so I knew it would be difficult, I hadn't expected impossible.  I literally flailed; I think that term is used too much, but it's appropriate there because my limbs were literally flailing while I tried to dive as far into that crack as possible.  It might have been the two days of climbing or being able to hear the rode below or feel the wind whistling through the tower, but it was the most terrifying part of the whole trip, perhaps the most terrifying moment of my whole life.  

Brent managed to capture that moment with a camera, look at the terror on my face.

Eventually we both got to the top, celebrated, and started the long drive home.  I often look back on this trip very fondly and get excited every time we go back to Moab because the next trip will be just as fun as this first one.  While I am now more proficient at trad climbing, I still think Brent doesn't place enough gear when he leads, I get scared during off-width climbs and nervous belaying really far off the ground and occasionally my hair still gets caught in my ATC.  But it's a lot of fun and I can't wait for the sun to come out again so we can rock climb some more.

An additional bonus is that every time I watch Brent climb I find myself even more attracted to him.  It's pretty excellent dating someone who suggests we do adventurous, "character building" things.  It all makes me very happy and gives me something to day dream about during the bitter, inversion-plagued weeks we have during the winter.