Blog

Fairy Tales

• March 2009
• Climb Training

My friend Peewee, who has climbed most of the hard cracks around the desert, told me about a nice finger crack at the Pistol Whipped Wall. Peewee told me it was one of the harder splitters at the Creek, and he may have done the first ascent, and since I’ve been climbing finger cracks recently it might be a fun one to try. He named it Fairy Tales, and said “it’s real good!” He even sent me a picture 🙂 Merci Peewee!

As you know, I think that getting all fixated about rating climbs, especially cracks, beyond a very general range of difficulty is mostly wishful thinking. Fairy Tales is definitely in the roundup of harder cracks, and is pretty unique because it starts off fairly nice, and then gets suddenly in-your-face hard for the last fifteen feet, requiring some exciting go for it above a green alien to the final pod.

I thought things went pretty well until…..the crack pinches down to tips locks with no feet, and I had that irrational fear of falling above my alien and ripping my fingers off. Now we all know this would never happen.

But somehow there’s a certain moment when you’re up there in a thin crack with tight fingerlocks and no feet on a bulging wall, and you are sure, one hundred percent sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that you are going to fall. And when you fall, you are sure, one hundred percent sure, your fingers are going to rip off your hands and stay stuck there in the crack while the rest of you keeps on going…. But I mean, this would never happen, right? Right??

So I french freed the last few moves to the anchor with my fingers intact and then worked out the final moves really really well on top rope. Then I rested and came back a day later with my friend Jim for a good send effort.

It was really windy and really cold, and Jim and I had to suffer a bit as we “warmed up”. I was pretty psyched to give a good shot, so I took off my giant down parka, and started up in only three turtlenecks. I messed up the gear a little, but climbed up through the crux, trying not to notice how far below my feet that last alien was getting (!), ignored thoughts of feet slipping and fingers ripping off, yelled a little, dynoed a couple times, and made it through the hard moves to the hand jam at the very end. That’s when things got weird.

Clipping the anchor was perhaps the hardest thing I’ve ever done at Indian Creek. For some unguessable reason, the person who put the anchor bolts in (not Peewee!) put them just out of reach for a normal sized person (me) from the final hand jam. I spent about 5 minutes grunting and straining and reshifting, trying with all my might to get the biner in the rap anchor, always finding myself two inches short when I reached the highest I could possibly reach. I kept feeling totally annoyed, then totally exhausted, then totally surprised I was still on the wall, basically re-enacting a Cirque de Soleil routine up there with one hand levered deep in the pod and one pinky toe wedged against the sides of a parallel sided finger crack, wondering when my arm would finally just fall off and end this gong show.

I think the only reason I didn’t fall off was because I was so utterly annoyed. I was done with the climb but was apparently not going to be able to clip the anchor! I finally somehow got my foot a little higher in even less nothing, with a final desperate reach got the thing clipped and then had to hang there for about 5 minutes before I could even speak. Yeesh!! How can clipping the anchor be the crux of a crack climb?! I can only assume the person who put in those anchor bolts was confused. The crack gets 5 stars. The anchor placement gets -10 stars 🙂 Although in retrospect, it did add a lot of entertainment value.

Other than that, Fairy Tales is a really great splitter climb, which has been sadly neglected except by Peewee, and may even be worth risking a hernia to clip the anchor. Thanks to Peewee for another excellent recommendation, as well as a sweet name 🙂