Blog

The Wild Backyard

• March 2008
• Dogs Uncategorized

I’ve been wanting to jump the Mineral Bottoms area–famous for the Meri’s Gash jump. The cliffs are about 400 feet tall, like most things in Moab, but since they sit on a high talus slope, you get to fly your canopy a little longer, like at Castleton.

The thing is, I never quite get around to organizing it. You need to drive out about a half hour to the cliff tops, but then you land down in the canyon, and someone drives quite a way down the steep Mineral Bottom switchbacks to pick you up. It always seems kind of inconvenient. I tend to like things where I can get where I need to be on my own, without having to organize pick ups, and shuttles, and what have you…..sheer laziness on my part, I know, but there you have it.

Then we realized, hey! We’re climbers! We have lots of static rope, and we know how to jumar! Obviously, all we had to do was drive out to the rim, find a nice steep cliff with a good landing spot, and drop a rope nearby. Make the jump with a jumar setup, hike up the hill to the fixed rope, and jug right up to the top again. How convenient! Suddenly it’s possible to jump anywhere along that massive expanse of canyon cliff region, even if the landing area is inaccessible by road down below. Except maybe try not to get hurt in the landing. Because that would be less convenient.

We headed out to a good looking spot that Dean found during a highline recon. You can literally drive off to the edge of the cliff, if you want. Fletchmama is getting a little slow, nowadays, and needs easy access to be part of the group.

I got to make the first couple of exits, so naturally they are named after our favorite dogs…..Fletch (a.k.a. the Little Lama) and Slack.

Slack is not actually my dog (unfortunately), but belongs to our friend Larry. He is my second favorite dog in the world, along with Fletch. He is not only a perfect running and climbing companion, but he is unbelievably cuddly, which is something Fletcher has never been very tolerant of, as she is a very independent creature. Slack and I have a little thing going, and we spend a lot of time together.

The first jump I made at the new spot was a running exit off the sloping top of a giant, hanging boulder that looks like it’s balanced half on and half off the edge of the cliff. It seems a little precarious, like if it didn’t weigh many tons, it would just trundle right off. (Probably it will eventually. I mean, all those massive slopes of talus down below the cliffs had to get there somehow.)

This is just the sort of environment that Slack seems to love, being a spectacular rock scrambler. He is a very adventurous little heeler, and loves to go running and leaping up all sorts of pretty difficult terrain. Though Slack seems to be pretty unconcerned about rock climbing, he hates it when I BASE jump, and cries and whines when I run off the cliff. I’m told he is very anxious and concerned for the entire time afterwards, until I show up again safe and sound. So we always put him on a leash right before I jump. We are SURE he would never jump off too, but you just never know what someone might decide to do, in the heat of the moment…. I decided to call the hanging rock exit point the Slackrock jump.

Slack nearly knocked me off the top of the cliff, when I had just gotten my jumars off the rope at the lip, because he was so happy I came back. It’s always nice when someone is that excited to see you! Fletch has always been a little less demonstrative–and now, being thirteen, she has become a very reserved little creature. And flat out refuses to participate in anything she deems frightening or potentially epic–she refuses to go within sixty feet of cliff edges nowadays, which is probably a good thing.

The next good-looking exit point was a textbook (well, if BASE jumping had textbooks), perfect, flat-top edge. Nothing sloping, nothing teetery or strange, just a nice little flat runway. That seems like the sort of thing that Fletch would prefer, if she were a BASE jumper. So the next exit was the Lama jump, in honor of Fletch.

On our next visit out, we were hoping to make more jumps with our local friends, Jimmy, Mario and Mick. It would be a great opportunity to show them a few jumaring tricks, and there are endless different exit points to be jumped.

Unfortunately, it was a windy day. Everyone was as patient as possible, spitting down the cliffs to check the wind, all geared up, waiting and waiting and waiting. BASE jumping requires an unbelievable amount of patience, in general. After a couple of hours, watching the wind switch from all directions, but never quite dying, we finally all gave up. It’s funny how every sport has its own special conditions problem. A little breeze is actually nice when rock climbing, but a shutdown when jumping short cliffs.

Yesterday turned out to be another perfect day, with gentle winds that ebbed enough to allow a few quick jumps, and I was sad that our friends had all shown up the day before when the winds didn’t permit.

Dean and I both made a couple of jumps, and moved the jugging line to a spot where the cliff is a little shorter, hoping it would be more user friendly for when the others come out again.

As always, I’m amazed at the endless expanse of backyard, here in Moab. You could jump off those cliffs every day, and never do the same exit twice. There are also miles and miles of untouched, perfect crack climbing, on the dark splitter Wingate sandstone, all down those canyons, a lifetime of first ascents….