Climbers are Like Lichens

Almost a month ago I finished another excellent trip to Saint George with my friends.  We spent the Valentine's Day weekend climbing and eating crepes; it was excellent.  Then came the punishment week(s) I might have deserved for having so much fun with my friends.  That's why the blog post about said fun is a little late.  But really, I had an excellent time.  St. George trips always make me nostalgic because it's where Karina and I really had a chance to climb and bond, and it's where I met the Emma-Brent half of our climbing group and it's also where I definitely figured out I was totally into Brent.  Great stuff has happened for me in St. George, just look at this progression of photos.

The southwestern corner of Utah (where St. George is located) is a peculiar place.  Here you can find sandstone, limestone, and basalt crags all within a few miles of town.   And even though you often drive through a subdivision or two before getting to the crag, the views are always excellent.  This trip we got the best of all the worlds, we climbed on a sandstone bluff with a view of the Virgin River Gorge (Zen Wall) and in a basalt canyon 3,000 feet above town (Pine Valley).  Plus we got to see one of the best sunsets ever.

I've got 20 pictures of this sunset because it just kept getting better.  The cherry on top was that I was hiking through the Zen Boulder Garden with my favorite friends.  

The desert is often characterized as a harsh, almost barren environment.  But really it's the best!  The plants and animals capable of surviving in the desert are the hardest of the hardcore.  The climbing guide we use has a list of objective hazards of desert climbing that include bugs, snakes, and cacti ("even the plants bite").  Unfortunately, there is no mention of lichens, not even when describing how excellent the rock is, but the desert is abundant in lichens and they're just fascinating.  Since I didn't take many pictures (due to the intensity of the climbing), and the pictures I did take were primarily of lichens, I've decided to tell this tale as a story about how climbers are like lichens: symbiotic, interesting and awesome.

Objective desert hazard - biting plants.  

A lichen is not a single organism, but an association between a fungus and an algae or cyanobacteria.  These two organisms form a symbiosis, the individual components do better working together, and in most cases cannot survive without the other.  The algae/cyanobacteria or "photobiont" component of the lichen performs photosynthesis, converting carbon dioxide and water into sugar that feeds both halves, while the fungal or "mycobiont" gathers water and minerals from the atmosphere that are used by both halves and anchors the entire lichen to a substrate.

Four species of lichen on basalt - what you see are the fungal parts, which encase the algae.

The belayer and the climber - the belayer feeds rope to the climber who "grows" up the wall.  Without the climber the belayer would just be standing around with a rope; without the belayer the climber is at risk of death.    

Lichens are estimated to cover 6-8% of the earth's surface and there are more than 15,000 identified species.  Capable of surviving and thriving in extreme environments, like the desert, tundra, and piles of toxic waste, lichens are often the first organisms to colonize a disturbed region and are long-lived enough to be used to determine the age of old growth forests.  Lichens are everywhere and they're awesome.

Pleopsidium chlorophanum - the lichen that makes all the awesome splashes of chartreuse on cliffs that can be seen from miles away.  This species is exceptionally tolerant of cold, dry, windy conditions and is quite common in Antarctica.

Much like lichens, climbers can be found attached to most available rock surfaces, favoring substrates with afternoon shade and short dispersal distances from parking areas.

About 80% of the lichen species in the desert southwest are crustose lichens: lichens that are thin and so tightly anchored to the rock they look like they're painted on.  Crustose lichens are actually capable of decomposing the rocks they are attached to, gradually turning stone into soil through both chemical and mechanical weathering.

Caloplaca trachyphylla - the common name for this species is the Desert Firedot Lichen.  

Much like the fungal hyphae that anchor lichens to rocks where plants could never survive, strong climber fingers can hold to the rock where it looks like they would never stick.  Brent on a slab route at Zen Wall.  

Lichens obtain water and mineral nutrients from the atmosphere or runoff through absoprtion.  Desert lichens are poikilohydric, this means they can tolerate severe desiccation by suspending most biological activity when there is no water, and then "resurrecting" when water is available.  Lichens can absorb 3-35 times their weight in water when it is available and they dry out slowly.  Obtaining most water and nutrients from the atmosphere makes lichens particularly sensitive to degraded air quality; the difference in pollution tolerance means that there are different lichens growing in polluted cities than in more pristine areas.

Xanthoria elegans - this lichen is particularly abundant around hunting perches and below rodent latrines because it is tolerant of nitrogenous compounds.  I'm going to start keeping my eye out for this one, because I hate touching rat scat. 

Some climbers live on a lichen-like starvation diet, but we don't.  Pictured here is the lovely Karina holding what turned out to be delicious climbing quesadillas with Jalapeno Cheetos and bean dip.  It doesn't get much better than that.  

Lichen's ability to gather water and nutrients from the atmosphere isn't their only adaptation to marginal environments, they also produce compounds (more than 600 have already been cataloged) that discourage herbivores and microbes from eating them and plants from growing nearby.  These compounds can also be used as pigments, antibiotics, perfumes, and as poisons for poison-tipped arrowheads. 

Lecanora garovaglli - a common sandstone lichen.   This genus of lichen is part of the group commonly called Viking dye-moss and was originally used to make litmus paper.

Climbers may not provide as many culturally valuable byproducts as lichens, but sometimes they make crags safer by removing dangerous rocks.  

Lichens are so hard core, they can live in the vacuum of space!  In 2005 the European Space Agency exposed two species of lichens to open space, where they were subject to huge fluctuations in temperature and bombarded with UV light and cosmic radiation for 14.6 days.  When the samples were returned to earth, analysis showed that not only did the lichens survive, their ability to photosynthesize was unchanged.  That's intense.

Xanthoparmelia coloradoensis - green parmelias like this are very abundant and responsible for greenish look most mountains have.  

Climbers too tend to prefer what might be called marginal environments - dry places with enough exposed rock to spend a whole day climbing.  Karina killin' it at Pine Valley. 

So, there you have it.  Lichens are awesome, and so are climbing friends.  Like the fungus/algae symbiosis that forms a lichen, climbers are a symbiosis between a climber and belayer.  Further, lichens and climbing friends prefer the same marginal environments where rock is plentiful and plants are rare.  Finally, climbing friends thrive on climbing opportunities when they are available, but are able to go relatively long periods of time without outdoor climbing (like the winters) living off the memory of good times past.  While climbers are not as extreme or ecologically valuable as lichens, they're still good to have in your life.  

Much like a lichen soaking up available water, my heart grew 30 sizes there in the warmth of St. George with my friends.  

Pine Valley - February 2013 - I love these people quite a lot.  

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.
.

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.

2013 In Review

The internet tells me that Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living."  I like that quote and I'm one of those who looks forward to the New Year as an opportunity to examine the last year and use what I learned to improve the next. It's been a pretty busy year and based on an examination of my top 13 moments of 2013 I've decided to go on more vacations in 2014 because those are the best times.  Here are the top 13 highlights of the last 12 months.

1.  I led Otto's Route up Independence Monument with some excellent encouragement from Brent.  The encouragement is important because it is a 400 foot route with several sections that were difficult to protect (read: scary).  That trip to Colorado National Monument made me especially happy to be dating Brent because he's the one who initiated this crazy tower climbing vacation strategy in the first place and taught me how to trad climb.  He's great.

2.  Completed the Hurt in the Dirt and other excellent mountain biking adventures.  More props to Brent, he was willing to get up at 6:00 in the morning for mountain biking rides, let me borrow his bike for four months, followed down trails at crawling Becka-speed, and came to take pictures like the one below.  This was the year I figured out mountain biking is definitely awesome (yet I have no blog posts about mountain biking, I will fix this soon), it was a major revelation for me.

3.  Ran 105 miles in organized races, most of which were excellent.  Top four running moments this year (because I can't pick just one) were 1) training trail run in September through Logan Canyon; 2) last six miles of the Ogden Marathon, lots of rain and downhill running and my family was just a few miles away; 3) last half of the Top of Utah Marathon, who knew a marathon could feel so good?; 4) even numbered miles of the Desert RATS trail half marathon, the views and emotions were usually at their highest points then.  More props to Brent for always being at the finish line, even when they were 400 miles from home.  And for the awesome running tights.

4.  Becka's Thursday Ski Day.  I bought my first season ski pass this last winter and used it primarily to ski by myself on Thursday mornings.  Why Thursday mornings?  Because the mountain was generally empty and I had put enough work in during the week to deserve a slacker break.  I could feel stress just melt away as soon as I jumped off at the top of the lift.  I had many moments of zen there by myself and I think I became a better skier for it.  This relaxing break in the week, which I've just reinstated for the coming year reinforces my idea that vacations, even if they only last for 4 hours, are good for my health.

5.  My Howling Great Salt Lake Spectacular.  After a few years off I decided in August to bring back the solitary adventure and spent three days hiking to various high points with views of the Great Salt Lake by myself.  I howled in the rain on Box Elder Peak, under the sun at Frary Peak, and fleeing from thunderstorms on Deseret Peak.  I also spent quieter times waiting for the sunset at the Spiral Jetty and Antelope Island.  It was a nice reset point on the year.

6. Phyllis the Forester and I celebrated her 150,000 mile anniversary together and spent an entire year out of the shop.   I love my little car now more than I did in January.  Since the beginning of the year we've traveled thousands of miles in the car and even camped inside it one trip.  There were some troubles with the tires and getting those bike racks up there, but on the whole she performed well.

7.  Several new wildlife encounters.  Kayaking with a flock of phalaropes was the most blissed out part of the year and running past a rattling rattlesnake was the most frightening moment.  Even cooler, when I told my friends on the Facebook about the rattlesnake encounter the overwhelming response was "Cool!" because my friends are cool.  I also spotted a cactus in a wetland, while not quite wildlife, it was wild.

8.  I grew a successful salsa garden.  Not every salsa making encounter was successful and I still ended up with a lot of wasted food (but nearly as much as all the zucchini I grew to hate last year).  I love pulling weeds and tending my little garden empire and I love salsa, so it was a winning situation all around.

9.  2,875 vertical feet climbed with Brent (at least, probably 3,000 feet).  We met rock climbing and got to know each other rock climbing and our best vacations are rock climbing.  This wasn't our most prolific climbing year, but I think it's great I still learn new things about him when we go on our trips.

10.  I was conquered by the Wellsville Mountains.  Those mountains have been staring me in the face everyday since I moved to Cache Valley and I found three opportunities to interact with them this year, first my hike to Box Elder Peak in August, then an intense ride all the way around the mountains in October and follow up hike across the ridge.  The Wellsvilles are a narrow, very steep range and any Wellsville-centered activity requires a lot of climbing (by foot or bike), which provides an excellent opportunity to look inside for sources of strength. Two of three times I had my great friend Karina to help out.  

11.  Completed another successful field season.  There was an airboat ride and I got to drive a boat with a mud motor.  I didn't break the rtk GPS I had to cart around for the month and the only thing I lost was a knife (but I loved that knife).  I also continued to cultivate my love for pickelweed, the best plant in the world.  I love the part of the year I can spend my days outside looking at plants, the data I get is a bonus.

12.  Took 4,875 pictures, posted 48 blog entries, and was an author on three peer-reviewed papers.  I put a lot of stuff out into the world.  While it feels a little self-indulgent, it also feels great to have some measurement of my productivity this year.  And you, thanks for reading this, all your views totally make me feel good.

13.  Got to spend time with the people I love the most.  Including this trip to City of Rocks where my family displayed bravery and skill in a trial-by-fire first climbing experience.  It's nice that the year ends with a series of family moments (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Liz's Birthday Shopping Spectacular) because it reminds of just how much I love those people and how excellent it is to hang out with them.