Noah: Zen moment
We take advantage of our brief stop in the horizontal world by guzzling some water before trotting off to Rim Shot on Bridger Jack Butte, the castle-like endpoint of the fin that forms the spires. Rounding the north end of the mesa, we step into the shade and breathe a sigh of relief. The heat will now be bearable.
Rim Shot begins with a clean, two-inch, splitter crack. Making short work of the tight hands and wandering slabs of the first pitch, we are soon standing on a huge belay ledge, looking up at an unusual feature. A perfect hand crack splits the back of a four-foot-wide stem box, Devils Tower-like, but made of varnished, undulating sandstone. I can’t resist the urge to goof around, switching from comfortable hand jams to chimneying, to stems with a foot on either wall. On the last pitch I swim past another tight-hands section through a roof. Sand cascades from around my feet and onto Kennan until I pull up into better rock, slam home a cam, and wander up a beautiful, steep corner to the summit.
Tower summits, though unique as fingerprints, all feel like sculptures: hard, beautiful, proud. Mesas are different. They’re more like Japanese gardens, with hearty shrubs standing like bonsai trees and oddly balanced rocks forming natural pathways across their otherworldly surfaces. We take a moment to admire this little Zen retreat in silence, and then begin the rappels to the ground.

“I’ve got that half-time feeling,” I say as we dive into a mess of turkey, avocado, and cheese sandwiches waiting in our packs.
A few minutes later, Kennan begins a seventy-meter linkup of the first two pitches of the classic Vision Quest, on King of Pain North. When I first climbed this route in ’89 there was a little glass jar summit register on top, containing a note that the route should be re-named Dirt Fest. Kennan’s lead was smooth and casual, belying the sustained difficulty of the thin finger laybacks and knee-scraping wide sections. Only a trickle of dirt and a few pebbles descended on me as I steadily threw rope from my belay device.
Linking the final two pitches, I follow awkward offwidths and chimneys until I find myself stemming between the north and south towers with 300 feet of air between my legs. Kennan soon joins me, and as we walk the narrow summit towards the rap anchors I notice shards of broken glass from that first delicate summit register. I wonder if it had been dropped by an irate “dirt-fest” survivor or blown from its perch in a storm.
“What would you write if the register were still here?” Kennan asks me.
Without hesitation, I reply, “‘Thanks to all those struggling bodies who have helped clean up this route!’”