How to Climb
John Long: Nothing but Rubble
The never-ending pursuit of new routes, fame and glory
Lance “Golden” Rule and I motored an hour along Pacific Coast Highway, veered north into the Santa Monica Mountains and parked at the Sandstone Peak trailhead and the start of one of a dozen or so trails criss-crossing our local rock-climbing area, know loosely as “Echo Cliffs.” The plan was to scour the countryside for potential new climbs. If we were merely out for a trail run or a hike, I wouldn’t last an hour, but throw in the chance of finding new rock to climb and I’d jog to hell and gone. (Golden would slog to Ecuador for the fun of it.) We threw on light packs, laced up, and cast off.
As we all know, climbers are notorious and shameless liars about elapsed times and mileage covered. The Sandstone Peak Trail, the most popular in the entire range, is basically two miles of zigzagging up an old fire trail steep as the back side of Half Dome. It took me eight trips spread over two months before I broke 30 minutes to the actual “peak,” which is not an actual peak, but a clearing with a big sandstone boulder a ways off. One local climber claimed to have covered this ground in 16 minutes and change and I’m calling that a prodigious lie. Golden and I gained the “peak” in 32 minutes and started jogging out a rolling fire road leading south, hoping to find the next El Capitan.
A couple of miles down the fire road we passed a rusting reservoir tower and the stone and cement foundation of an old house. We weren’t exactly in Timbuktu, but 70 or 80 years ago (long before the area was designated as a State park), around when these digs first went up, the place was virtually off the map. Strange what you stumble across out in the toolies, and stranger still to imagine the folks who’d packed cement, steel pipe, etc., up that fire road. There was nothing more than a few mortared rocks and fragments of a cement slab to remind us that people had once lived here and now they were gone. What had they thought or felt or said when they gazed into the night sky? I’ll never know.
The fire road ended and we huffed out a thin trail. Then Golden wrenched his ankle in a chuck hole but was too proud to admit it. Fine by me, and I hoped it swelled up like a beach ball, which was my only chance of keeping pace with him. Better yet I hoped the ankle was broken in 10 places because Golden, a regular cardio animal, had repeatedly run me into the ground, and I relished the one chance I had of returning the favor.
Golden had spotted a few small cliffs on an earlier recon and we ran (or rather I ran and he hobbled) cross country toward a sweeping rock buttress. Over the last few hundred yards, a troublesome heath of sticker bushes separated us from the stone, but in my lust to burn Golden off I blindly churned on, my feet moving like bee’s wings till I collapsed onto a big flat boulder a few yards shy of the buttress. I looked down at my slashed legs and moaned, then started picking quills from my hide. Meanwhile Golden had pulled up 50 yards away, eyeballing the surrounding thicket.
“Yo, I think you just ran through a big patch of poison oak,” he yelled out.
“No, man, it just looks like oak,” I yelled back. It wasn’t the job or responsibility of Golden, that vain cripple, to question the leader’s route. Everyone knows there are countless plants that look like poison oak. “And since when does oak have thorns?” I added.
“Not the brambles, you fool,” he yelled. “The other stuff. And it is oak.”
Meanwhile I’d studied the rock wall for about three seconds and realized it was more of a vertical dirt clod than another El Capitan. I backtracked to Golden and we carried on toward another promising outcrop — a spectacular-looking monolith that would bring us fame and glory, if we could only find it. And finding it would be a task since, as usual, we carried no map and were exploring basically by dead-reckoning the twisting terrain and guessing our route toward an unseen goal.
The thin trail grew fiendishly overgrown, forcing us to stoop under low-hanging branches covering the path like trellis mesh. If we were to ever get a look at that superb cliff we’d spotted from below, this was the one and only way. We were certain of that much. Soon we were groveling on all fours.