New Routing in Mexico
18 months of planning and research;
Endless days spent with experts learning how to bolt and how to start new routing;
10 days slogging up and down the same 1000m mountain – with the ropes, drills, gear –through cacti, poisoned ivy and up that heinous scree slope;
Hundreds of pounds invested…
… and there I was, with 36 hours left in La Huasteca in Northern Mexico watching the headtorches of my two friends as they jumared back up the 350m wall to join me. I was seriously contemplating convincing them to go cragging the next day – not to even attempt the first ascent of the route we had just bolted.
Originally my idea, it hadn’t taken long for my incredible team of Kai and Will to convert the objective into our shared goal: an adventurous multipitch new route bordering the limit of our current ability. Just like my carefully selected climbing partners, I enjoy hard work, do not give up easily and am incredibly optimistic.
So why did I feel this sudden doubt in purpose?
I was knackered from the previous long days of manual labour in harsh conditions and the constant problem solving. I was very uncomfortable from having belted my coccyx during a recce – an unexpected fall on an existing route had flipped me upside-down, sent me through a cactus, grazing a ledge and slamming into the wall when a handhold had exploded. I had also been on my own alone for the majority of the day – accompanied only by feelings of insignificance on this vast wall.
I was alone and under pressure for a few reasons. We had finally got round to testing some of the pitches the day before and subsequently realised that some of our bolt spacing was terrifyingly far apart. This was the first route any of us had bolted and we had tried to honour the local “adventurous” bolting ethic but had totally misjudged some sections. We only had one drill and were short on time, so it made sense for Kai and Will to keep descending to work the crux pitch at the start of the route while I made some necessary adjustments higher up.
Our potential line sat on a big black face that had called to us down in the valley. It was satisfyingly intimidating and had a key feature that we knew we would be able to access it from the top. This made cleaning and bolting on abseil possible with no need to do so on lead. So each day we hiked to the summit and abseiled in armed with all manner of hardware. We cleaned the route as thoroughly as we could, dislodging monster blocks, loose flakes and abundant cacti. The rock quality was even worse than we had anticipated and we had swiftly established that only the lowest person was allowed to clean as they quested into the unknown – the others above would test the moves and fix the bolts. At the start of this day, we had all considered the cleaning to be complete and Will had abseiled straight to the ledge at bottom of the route. As Kai and I discussed the best placements of extra bolts (I would add another 16 that day!) we dislodged some rocks. All of them seemed to be magnetically drawn towards Will. There was such a long delay after the second rock fall before Will called up that he was fine. So I had spent my day on the wall, alone, tired, uncomfortable and considering how easily we could have killed one of my best friends.
The boys arrived in a puddle of sweat almost 4 hours after we’d agreed to meet. Yet another miscalculation of the timings involved in the new routing process. As we sat on the summit we were all unusually quiet, particularly knackered and aware of how close we were to the route slipping away, and wondering if it was best to let it. We sat in silence in the dark for 10 minutes collecting our thoughts while we fuelled our brains with our staple peanut butter and jam tortillas. Working out how we were going to pull it out of the bag the following day was a practised fun part of the trip – the refining process each evening over dinner. However, every part of putting up a new route in the previous two weeks had taken five times longer than we had anticipated. There was no time to rest before our attempt. We knew some of the climbing was at our limit with some sections still untested and some bolting still scarily spaced. There was one day left and the Mexican weather was set to fry us on the south face. And once again the cliff had reminded us that despite our best cleaning efforts the face still held pockets of breakable, unpredictable rock.
There was no chance we could do the ascent with the plan we had walking in from the base – An unpractised approach through thick cactus forest, 4 pitches of climbing on lower crag and 150m of scrambling. Carrying everything. The water alone would bugger us in our current state. So as ever we worked out what we could do. We agreed we would hike for the 11th day in a row up the back of the mountain first and abseil in. Leaving the top 150m of rope fixed would speed the approach and if we stashed food and water during the descent we might just pull it off. A 4am alarm was in order and we agreed that only one of us would free each pitch. The rock had reminded us of the objective risks that we all verbally acknowledged again. We had to manage this by staying together as much as possible.
With a solid night of 3 hours of sleep we hit the ground running and got to the base of the route by 9am. I had the battle with Will’s techy 12b corner - the crux pitch. It was incredible. We had 9 pitches ahead of us in the unforgiving heat and it was right at my limit. I had no expectation or intention of leading it. It just didn’t make sense – I hadn’t seen it and it would definitely burn time we didn’t really have. But my companions were adamant for me to go for it and even better Will told me it wasn’t onsightable – “but don’t beat yourself up about it”. The time pressure, their desire for me to take it on and Will’s perfect pushing of my buttons meant I tried as hard as I ever have with such depleted physical reserves due to the two previous weeks of effort. It was a truly delightful, memorable pitch that Will had set perfectly.
Our creation then quested up a pocketed wall, technically easy but requiring so much concentration with inexperienced bolting and questionable rock quality. From there it goes into a vertical wall, another corner and then to an awesome finger crack that threw me back to Exasperator in Squamish. Very predictably my fight on pitch one meant that I was buggered by this point – the physical effort combined by the long time on small footholds on the black, south facing wall meant I was totally wasted and could barely stand on my feet let alone lead. I settled in to dragging myself up after Kai and Will. From there it eases for a short while up a fun wall with a hard bulge, before it gets back to techy face climbing up a scoop which leads to a ridiculous exposed traverse above. I had conflicting emotions about my feet preventing me leading – partial disappointment with secret relief following Will on the traverse and then Kai on his devastatingly bold technical slab climbing in the dark. Finally the climb eases and tops you out exactly on the summit of Pico Negro.
We finally stumbled into base camp 21 hours later with a comfortable(!) 6 hours to get to the airport. There was a strange feeling of numbness. A new level of exhaustion without real celebration. We forced ourselves to share a beer and instead of packing or hitting the sack for a couple of hours of sleep we stayed up to cook pancakes for each other in our zombie state. A few days later I realised how happy I was with our new route up Pico Negro and the style in which we’d worked out how to do it. It is a varied 350m 5.11d adventurous sport route with an optional 5.12b variation, with some sections of great climbing and a lot of scope for a good epic. We named the line “Eterno Optimista” due to our eternally optimistic team’s consistent ability to drastically underestimate just how long each element of the process would take, remaining relentlessly ambitious with our timings to the end! Yes, we did make it to the airport in the nick of time.
The size of physical and mental challenge carefully balanced against our ability and time constraints made the project wonderfully all consuming. However, as is ever the case for me, what made it special was the people I went with. With those two and the challenge we’d set, it was easily the best trip I have ever done. By far.
Kai and Will are spectacular partners. They are both hilarious and I could spend an incredibly long time locked in a room with them. They are also capable of saving me if the proverbial hits the fan. The key attributes for this trip though have to be that they care more about people than climbing, and are strongly opinionated!
