In Sharma’s Rampage, Wifebeater looks bad-ass. Cool slopers with little crawslies lead to a wild mantle. Scully does it campus in a few burns, utilizing none of our accrued Beta. The rest of us gangbang the line until a bearded Unabomber-looking local approaches. “Here we go,” somebody whispers, fearing a bugged-out tirade; our man’s surely seen the Spray, parked at the back entrance. Has he slashed the tires yet? I scan the hillsides, looking for a sniper. “Use the heel/toe… that’s the Beta,” he says, before getting on the line. He nearly “flashes” it (again) and then disappears. We give his Beta a shot, and then we continue, with reckless abandon, using our own. At day’s end, we walk back to the Spray through tall, dry buffalo grass, a quickly setting sun lighting our sore, red hands. Now, we rest. Tomorrow, it’s Gloria’s, a mountain-sized cluster of Hueco-stacked dacite blobs on the edge of town.
John Sherman used Gloria’s Flyswatter as a benchmark comparison for V8s in Hueco — for calibrating his Vermin scale. Another Hueco legend, Bob Murray, also developed here. On Jeremiah’s advice, we start in the Heart Cave and get familiar with dacite’s slick, bomber composition — a result of its slow emergence from Mount Elden, the dormant volcano on the northern edge of town. Among the Ponderosa and oak trees at the base of Elden, I bump into a friendly local who boulders with me up several pitches’ worth of slabs. Scrambling around, I notice that many of the larger blocs at the base extend up to 25-plus feet, and the landings often suck. Some could use bolts. Jeremiah tells me many have likely been toproped but not bouldered. None of us are eager to be the first — Gloria’s futuristic highballing is better left to the likes of Charles Fryberger or Jason Kehl. Instead, I tell Keith about the slab bouldering, with its softer landings and intermediate difficulty. He stops shooting immediately and shoes up. Keith loves slab climbing. He returns, equally as delighted, 15 minutes later.
Gloria’s is a paradoxical blend of nature and city. As at Hueco, it seems the non-climbing local slime come here to get piss drunk and spray paint profundities (e.g., “BILL-P WAS HERE”) on the rock, and the sounds of squirrels might be interrupted by the giggles of teenagers, bunched under an overhang, burning bowls. It’s all part of the experience, though. We end the day at sunset again, walking 10 minutes to the Spray, ready for ice, hand salve, cold beer, and friendlier stone.

The next day, skin red and fingers swollen, we meet up with Jeremiah’s friends, who take us on dusty dirt roads and past an automatic-weapon firing range to a steep, shadow-blanketed Coconino sandstone defile. Although we’d rather be lounging by a pool, we quickly realize Kelly’s mid-height cliffband problems pose no threat to our mending skin. We can’t shoe up fast enough. The tensiony movement, often with big holds and spiced with some highball exits, makes Kelly’s a favorite.