1258

[mknutson]

BASE 1258:

Tower Climb and BASE Jump

Names have been changed to protect the guilty. My girlfriend will be referred to as Dragon Lady and her fiancé will be referred to as Packmule.

Flash Forward to Saturday night. I’m huffing up the trail in the ever growing darkness, yelling at the tower. Dragon Lady! Are you OK? Dragon Lady! Was that a headlight? No, only stars. Did they decide to bivy at the top? Madness! Did they choose to descend the other side? Have they been swallowed up into an alternate universe, leaving me to wonder, panting like a fat kid crossing a playground, alone at the base of this once benign, now dreadful tower.

Two headlamps peak over the Tower summit. All I can do is croak encouraging words as the lamps descend, connected to the heads of my friends, in the methodical slow manner by which one rappels a route they have never been on in darkness. The topo of North Face lights up in my mind’s eye as I see each belay station, illuminated by the tiniest of lights. I strain to hear the calorie depleted dialogue between my two friends, patient and concerned, as they make their way to terra firma.

We had started some hours earlier, at 2pm. We considered this to be a logical start time, given the weather, particularly, the wind conditions. My idea was that, once we summitted, I would BASE jump away from the tower, leaving my two friends (did I mention they were engaged?) to shag on the summit. We hiked the talus cone to the base and found ourselves behind a party of three. They, like us, decided not to simul-second. We were a slow party behind a slow party. No matter! This was 5.8, how hard could it be? Dragon Lady took the lead on the first pitch. She hiked it until the last 15 feet. Upon reaching the crux, she took several valiant whippers, the second one wrecking her ankle. She gained the belay and Packmule commenced to ascend. Once Packmule reached his honey, I peed and tied in. It would be the last piss I would take for the next 18 hours. I slung my BASE rig on and started in. Holy Mother of God. My personal goal of refraining from profanity was broken immediately. You *&$# bloody son-of-a-dog-snatch! You &@! *%& whore! This was how the first 15 feet went down. The rig was positively ripping me off this otherwise aesthetic twin set of splitter cracks. It only got worse from there. Finally, with a “&#$@ slut bitch shit”, Dragon Lady hauled my heaving carcass over to the cozy belay. And by cozy, I mean having my ass in poor Packmule’s face while oozing up onto Dragon Lady. Were it not for the serious climbing, this may have been considered soft porn.

Ok, now I was up to bat for the next lead. Packmule, in his infinite kindness (or was he just weary of the profaning?), offered to take the BASE rig. Little did he know that the swears would not abate. As I led up the offwidth section, the rude words would be mixed with spoken introspections, pertaining mostly to fear and inadequacy. “I’m so scared, I’m just so scared. This piece of pro here? This is dog shit, see. It won’t hold shit. Gawd, I am just so fucking scared”. And so went the first 15 feet. It became apparent fairly quickly that I was a touch out of practice with lead climbing. Packmule hollers up, “how’s it lookin’ up there?”

“I’d rather not say”. Ah-hah, keep them in dark as to what’s to come. They don’t need to know how this offwidth/chimney makes one peer deep inside their soul, to the remote corners where folks prefer not to look. Progress was measured in geologic time. Inching ever upwards, skidding on calcite and cursing Moab, the Mormons, Layton Kor in particular, climbing in general, and that whore Mother Earth who made this lovely and awful tower which I so wanted to climb and jump from. But humorous too, that the suffering was not enough to slacken my desire to still do so. This was, how they say, fun. And I was with friends. And misery loves company. And Packmule and Dragon Lady get to boogie down on the summit while I had myself a good BASE jump. Things didn’t look so bad. I gained the belay noisily on the heels of the last fellow from the party ahead of us. “Someone has a potty mouth” he observed. “Her, it was her, the Asian!” Honestly, Mormons tend to get so bummed out when climbing in the vicinity of sailor mouthed freaks like us.

Packmule made his way to the belay, miraculously, with the anvil of a BASE rig clinging to him like an overbearing toddler, insistent on a piggy back ride. Dragon Lady too, appeared. We had no idea how bad that ankle had gotten. We decided I should take the rest of the leads as I was the fastest of the three toed sloths. If you can’t be fast, you have to be tenacious! Honestly, I would go on an arctic expedition with this team, and be honored to be eaten by them. If we ate Dragon Lady, we’d be hungry an hour later anyway. But I digress...

The third pitch was supposed to be cakewalk. I am yet to be on a cakewalk involving profound self deprecation to such an audible level. Dragon Lady and Packmule at this point had earned their honorary psychology degrees listening to the endless dribble that spewed out of my dry gaping maw. Lordy, a step across the void to gain the notch. Was I a good person? Would the gods smile on me? Did it matter? Was all my swearing negating any good intention I had? Were the Mormons right all along? No, the notch cannot lead to yet another offwidth. I professed to Packmule that I needed to bring them up. But wait, there is was, sparkling in front of me, the 5.7 final pitch. I had been eyeing the wrong line. What remained was a fun calcite face climb, leading to the summit. Dispensing with the final pitch, I notice the sun departing in the west. As Packmule came into view, I realized I had to pull the ultimate asshole move and grab my gear from him and go. I was running out of daylight.

I got geared up as Packmule belayed Dragon Lady. Knowing I was too dry to spit over the edge to test the winds, I uprooted a small bunch of grass. I headed out to the edge and dropped the wad, watching it float out and away from the wall. “Packmule, I can’t wait any longer, I gotta go!” No wind. The sun was almost gone.

“Jump!”

I took a breath and pushed off…I was gravity’s bitch now. I threw out my pilot chute and looked up to see my canopy snap open overhead. Looking down I spied my shadow racing along the talus cone, a twin scurrying along the red slopes hundreds of feet below. A quick glance behind me revealed the Tower drawing back and away, a quiet stone dog shaking the tick that was me. The view forward was the lights of Moab, quietly blinking on in the dusk. I stayed in full flight, wanting to outfly the cone. I was able to make a gentle right turn and land on the dirt road.

My canopy got a bit snagged in a juniper tree but otherwise, all was well. I wadded my canopy into the stash bag and proceeded to hoof it back toward the breakaway trail leading up to the tower. Stashing my gear beneath a juniper tree, I headed up the path to find my friends. I had seen Dragon Lady’s headlamp in the notch below Packmule and was hoping to catch the pair on their way down. I was saddened to learn that no shagging had occurred on the summit.

We made our way down to the car slowly. We would later find out that Dragon Lady had fractured her foot, then climbed 3 additional pitches, rapped the face, and hiked down the intense talus cone. We reached the car at 2:30AM.

Back at camp, we scarfed a bit of food and managed one beer apiece before turning in and sleeping the sleep of the dead. The sick, weird thing is that this trip was really fun. We accomplished a lot. We stood on top of a unique piece of earth and had gone through a hell of a lot to do it. I feel the deepest sense of thanks to Packmule and Dragon Lady for their selfless actions without which my jump would not have been possible. Perhaps I can convince them to do a second trip, so that they might get that summit shag.

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