The South Six Shooter

Our climbing guide, Eric, adjusts his electrical-tape-patched sun visor and consults the guide book with his boyish assistant Kevin. The sun rises higher over the plateaus and canyons surrounding us in the Utah desert, intensifying their reds, pinks, yellows, and browns. I peer up at the South Six Shooter tower rising a thousand feet out of the valley like a giant cowboy wedding cake. Three angled plateaus of shale and sandstone comprise the layers, and in place of a bride and groom, a pistol shaped rock formation points skyward, as if poised to trigger the start of an ultra-marathon.

Ever more macho than my abilities permit, I have enthusiastically signed on with three of my climbing partner friends, Maribeth, John and Greg, to hike and scramble to the base of this famous tower, then rock climb another hundred feet to the summit. Eric has guided for us in other western deserts, mostly degree of difficulty 5.7, 5.8 or 5.9 at the most – top-roping where at least you can be lowered down if you’re stuck. This is our first time following a lead climb at such an altitude. This is our first time climbing with Kevin.

Eric and Kevin head toward the Six Shooter, and we follow, shouldering our packs. We spread out and head up the first plateau, each taking our own path, careful not to stomp out any desert ecosystems that could take centuries to regenerate.

My pack grows heavier with each step. Running in a pool at sea level is hardly optimal training for climbs that originate at 6,000 feet. I fake photo opportunities for breath-catching pit stops, and eventually we reach the base.

The uneven rocky red outcroppings of the pistol’s barrels loom large, and I begin to rethink my overconfidence. "Of course I can do a tower," I had bragged to Eric. I'm not afraid of heights, I can leg press 365 pounds, I did Search and Rescue in high school and completed an eight day Outward Bound rockclimbing expedition a few years back. As I haul my thirty-five year-old butt up the loose boulders and scree, I realize that in actuality, I've probably completed twenty days of technical climbing in the past twenty years. Hardly a solid foundation. Thank God we have guides.

Then Eric, my beloved guide for whom I have traveled a thousand miles and the only person I'd feel safe climbing an eleven hundred foot tower behind, waves his hand at Maribeth and me and says, "You guys go up this 5.9 route with Kevin. I'll take Greg and John on the other side."

I’m supposed to follow Kevin? The new guy? Trust my life to someone I met a half hour ago? Kevin smiles nervously at us and starts organizing ropes. He will climb first, setting protection, or “pro” as it’s called. I will climb second because I have less experience than Maribeth and need the practice, he says. I will also remove the protection - or "clean” - as I follow, since by then Kevin will have the rope safely anchored in with him at the top.

Cleaning a 5.9. Great. Like being told to go off jumps on a black diamond ski slope, when you’ve only ever mastered the blue runs.

Kevin moves slowly, uttering encouraging words like "Whoops!", "Uh-oh," and "Damn!" before giving up, down-climbing, and starting over with a fresh route. My hands are beginning to sweat, and I've had to wrestle out of my harness and pee behind boulders three times in the past ten minutes. So much for the fragile ecosystem.

Kevin climbs swiftly and confidently now, and suddenly he's at the top. I take a deep breath and a hug from Maribeth.

"Climbing!" I yell up to Kevin as I start up the crack. Eight years my junior. How much experience can he have?

While I've practiced "cleaning" before, I had forgotten the difficulty of shoving your toe in a crack, wedging your hand in above, making a fist and twisting it so you can hang there, maintaining your balance, freeing up the piece of metal pro stuck in the rock, carefully attaching it to a sling around your neck, then detaching the pro from the rope. The climb itself can be challenging enough. Not to mention trying to remove protection and ascend. All at a thousand feet in the air, the wind whipping across your neck, your leg muscles quivering involuntarily.

I retrieve the first two pieces of pro smoothly, but I slip on my way to the third, and this fall on the rope wedges the pro tighter and further into the crack. I hold myself in place for hour-like minutes, finally abandoning it for Maribeth. My confidence ebbing, I move toward where Kevin sits, only to fall once more. Maribeth starts psyching me up.

I cling and claw and hang on the rope, silently cursing Eric and New Guy until Maribeth gives up on me in favor of her sandwich and the view. Kevin begins coaching me in a guide voice normally used on fourteen-year-olds and panic frozen housewives. "OK Champ," he says. "No, the northern route wouldn't have been better. It would have been too easy for you, Champ. You know you can do this, Champ."

Dick.

I wedge myself determinedly in a backwards chimney move: neck pressed against the face, feet pushing on an outcropping, butt flailing and jack-knifing in between.

"Oh...hey...I don't know about that..." Kevin's disembodied voice comes from above. I put my weight on my feet and wriggle my neck and shoulders upwards, before changing my footing and shifting up again. "What the...?" I hear. Then, "Wow."

Bleeding from both ankles and one elbow, I power up the rest of the pitch, collecting the remaining pieces of protection, and soaking in the spectacular vistas that surround me. Between the height, the adreneline rush, the colors, and the landscape, I feel vibrant and awake. I climb onto the postage stamp perch at the tower's apex, and grin at Kevin. My belayer. My new best friend.

I clip into the anchor, and he gives me a high-five. "Pretty stout," he says. "At least you're still smiling."

Kevin pulls in rope as Maribeth climbs, and we sit grinning in silence. Bracing against the wind, and watching the dark, smoky streams of snow drop from the clouds over the mountains in the distance, I sit cross-legged, poised on the muzzle of the South Six Shooter.

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