Pena Blanca Pt.1-- Looming in the Darkness

Some few, special joys are diminished neither by time nor repetition. Homemade peanut-butter cookies and puppies are a couple of standout examples of this point. Another is arriving bleary-eyed in the long hours of the night at a place like Pena Blanca. This is a joy of anticipation and as such requires a kind of mild but protracted suffering that, in the end, is part and parcel to the enjoyment of the thing. Cutting down the rutted-out BLM roads with only the sickly glow of a pair of pre-millenial headlights to pierce the dark, drizzly night it is easy to give yourself over to imagination. In the darkness it is easy to feel the weight of all that rock and the massive power that shaped it and that, in some way, is still hidden inside. In the darkness, unbounded by the subtle, visual signifiers of black-on-black that you get even on a moonless night, the rock is free to swell in the imagination to such monstrous proportions that even the Very Strong and the Very Pure might find their hands sweating. Those of us who fall into neither category must simply find some reassuring mental image to cling to feverishly until the dawn.
This is how it happened for me, anyway, back in March when Team Tuesday took our all-singing, all-climbing ape-boy show on the road. Despite arriving at Pena Blanca well after midnight I was restless in my tent that night. It was my first proper climbing road trip in over three years and outside the drizzle continued to fall softly on the rain-fly. The prospect of being stuck in the middle of a two-day desert downpour after we'd finally gotten leave passes from our daily lives tortured me as much as the thought of climbing something new thrilled me. Anxiety and excitement make a bittersweet cocktail and with the powerful presence of the rock humming all us around it spiked my sleep with short tremulous dreams about climbing up beautiful, golden flakes of patina and then greasing off the huge holds on top and pitching backward into nothing but a startled wakefulness.
I was up early and the rain seemed to have declared an uneasy cease-fire over our particular location. To the east across the swaths of buffle-grass and creosote that stretched out toward El Paso I could see long, silky ribbons of rain unfurling from the gray skies. Joe and D slept late and I fried eggs and chorizo and gazed Westward at the Eastern tail of the Organ Mountains. Weird, gaping wormholes, caves, chutes and pillars stared back at me with a mottled orange, pink, gray, and rust-brown complexion. Put into their proper place and proportion the rocks looked as weirdly inviting as my imaginings of them in the night had been ominous.
It took more than the smell of chorizo and eggs to get the rest of Team Tuesday up and moving. I let Stella, the puppy, into the tent with D and then stood outside of Joe's tent with my guitar and made up a little good-morning song in Spanish which seemed to grease the wheels a little bit. Before long everyone was up. Joe brewed us tiny, Vietnamese-style espressos that somehow bridged the East/West taste gap and went perfectly with the enormous breakfast tacos that I had assembled from a pound and a half of chorizo and no less than one dozen eggs...

Here is a short slide-show chronicling what happens when you take a small group of dedicated climbers, send them to a top-secret and world-class bouldering destination, and feed them a breakfast of large quantities of highly unstable elements. Enjoy.

More on climbing Pena Blanca to follow.

-C-