Shock Treatment: another scrappy South Platte adventure

A sloppy ascent of Shock Treatment, III 5.12 C1
Big Rock Candy Mtn, South Platte CO

This spring my partner-in-crime Noah Gostout and I were looking for a proper South Platte adventure, something beyond the scope of our usual excursions to Turkey Rocks or Thunder Ridge.   The sheer size of the Big Rock Candy Mountain captured our imagination, and we picked a sunny Sunday in May to pursue the unknown, starting, as usual, with a bumble.  It was already 9:00 and we were in the Donut Mill, caffeinating and poring over approach descriptions printed off mountain project; we took our best guess at the road directions and took off in Noah’s Jeep, which had no doors as he had removed them for the lovely spring weather.  Following confusing and conflicting directions, we eventually spotted the broad flanks of the Big Rocky Candy Mountain, and used the nimble Jeep to bypass a gate and cross the steep, rutted road to the top of a gorge across from our objective.  With the sun high and daylight burning, we ran down open fields of grass and scree, forded the river, and raced up to the wall, searching frantically for our line.

By the time we’d identified the climb and roped up it was pushing 1:00.  Whoops.  Time to get business done.  The first pitch set the tone: “short, wide, 5.8” had me desperately squeezing up a smooth, flared chimney with only a questionable chockstone slung for pro.  Noah led the crux pitch, an overhanging corner with small finger pods in a seam, and he took it into 5.12 territory before resorting to aiding on tiny nuts.  I couldn’t free the .12+ seam either, so it will have to await another try (or not).  Next I led up an angling thin, flared, crumbly, vegetated 5.10+ pitch, and the situation became more and more heads-up as I found myself making committing moves to small plants well above “hopeful” placements.  Many broken footholds and several whips later, I’d gained the belay at the start of the “pterodactyl traverse,” which Noah styled, including the seriously runout transition to an offwidth which he could only protect with a small cam in a flared gash.  Next, with our bodies tiring and our nerves running thin, I led up into another overhanging corner, slung a healthy bush, and found myself utterly shut down by a downward-opening 4-5” crack.  In this shady, steep corner, the bomber South Platte granite had been altered over time by seeping water to its current mineral-rich, slick and crumbly state.  I tried stacking, jamming my feet, throwing to face crimps (they broke), and eventually resorted to aiding the crack with a single #4 camalot, which became the most strenuous french-freeing I’ve ever done.  I then had to leave the cam behind and smear up a widening slot which finally relented into a squeeze chimney.  Relief was short, however, as one side of the chimney was a hollow flake.  I took care not to knock rocks on Noah as I wriggled up the chimney, stemmed up a thinning corner, and made a final roof pull with horrendous rope drag to the next belay.  The final pitch was definitive of the style of the South Platte hardmen who put this route up: they are strong slab climbers.  With the sun gone and daylight fading, Noah launched onto a bullet-hard slab of sustained 5.11+ crystal pinching, which first ascentionist Kevin McLaughlin courageously bolted on lead.  Noah does not know what he was holding onto most of the time, but somehow Noah reached the summit as darkness descended, and I clawed my way up the slab with no small amount of help from the big guy. 

Standing atop the Big Rock Candy Mountain, bruised, bleeding and nerves frayed from 6 hours of heads-up climbing, we finally relaxed into the gathering dusk as the wild expanse of burn scars and granite spires of the South Platte lay spread out beyond us, sinking deeper and deeper into soft purple hues.  After honoring our tradition of naked summit yelps, we gathered our wits once more for a search for the rap anchors, then began a grueling descent through gravel-strewn slabs and thorn-chocked bushes that I try not to remember.  Midnight found us crossing the river and burning our last fumes up the scree slopes to the Jeep, where we cursed the yahooism that had taken the doors off on a sunny morning that felt like an eternity ago.  Luckily there was a tarp that we wrapped around ourselves to avoid freezing as we sped back across the South Platte under cold, bright stars, and luckily Taco Star is open till 3am.  I did not make it to class the next day.

fording the creek

sketchin on the veggies pitch

Carrots and Peanut Butter

This blog is a space to record and share the beautiful, silly, and absurd happenings in the lives of myself and my friends.  We always dream big, often make plans based on these dreams, seldom prepare enough when we put these plans into action, and pretty much never arrive at the outcomes we expect.  I'm learning to give up my attachments to these plans, because right in that "ehhhhh" moment when we can no longer deny that things are going screwball, just as we accept that situation is getting ridiculous, that is where we are finally free from the incessant grind of life's chores and schedules and we become urgently and unmistakenly alive.

Sorting through the ransacked storage unit of my memories, I find boxes of dull material punctuated by brilliant objects: these encounters with absurd reality: Straddling a granite spire in the Wind River Range watching the sun's last light spill over the mountains, then turning to the gaping icy chasm beneath us and wondering how we will get down. Standing on the road in Indian Creek as the tow truck turned around and drove off, with five miles and two swollen river crossings between me and my stranded car.  Post-holling through thigh-deep snow in tennis shoes and shorts in Kolob Canyon in march, searching for sport climbs, and watching plumes on snow and ice avalanche off the canyon walls and land in our path.  Hanging from my last good cam placement on a headwall in Zion, staring down 40 ft of pencil-thin crack with nothing but 6 small nuts, some tiny cams, a handfull of biners and slings, and an idea of how this is supposed to work.  Collapsing in exhaustion at high camp after summiting and descending from a mountain in Peru, then realizing that my partner and I had about 400 calories between us, and a ride to food lay 15 miles and 5,000 ft below us.  In all these experiences, what came before was more or less planned, what followed was scary, exhausting, or drudgery, but that one exquisite moment of realization that things are getting silly, and then embracing the silliness and plunging in, that moment makes the endless rambles, tanks of gas, weeks of going to sleep marinating in sweat and body odor, and countless meals of carrots and peanut butter worth it.