Sand Castles

The mysterious towers of the Ennedi

The fin of rock above me, Aloba Arch, was 300 feet wide, 50 feet thick, and stretched all the way across a sandstone canyon, 700 feet above our heads. Alex Honnold and I were discussing a possible route to its untouched summit when I noticed four young men emerge from the rocks in the back of the canyon. Clad in sandals, with scarves partly covering their faces, they wore large knives in their belts and were holding the hilts as they purposefully strode towards us.

Moments later, they began shouting at us in Arabic and gesticulating wildly. I had no idea what they were saying. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I yelled to the rest of our team, which included Jimmy Chin, Tim Kemple, Renan Ozturk, and James Pearson. We beelined through the sand toward our gear, stashed at the entrance to the canyon, but the assailants fanned out around us. One grabbed Renan’s pack, filled with about $10,000 worth of camera gear. When I arrived the guy had one hand on the pack and the other on his knife, but Renan also had a hold on the pack and, with a violent jerk, tore it from the guy’s hands—which seemed to really piss him off. Yelling, he unsheathed his knife and began lunging at Renan, while pounding his other fist into his chest. My instinct was to run, but as I turned around I saw Jimmy pick up a softball-sized rock. “Holy crap,” I thought, “Chin thinks he’s a caveman.” I looked down at my feet and spotted a gnarled tree branch, and the next thing I knew I was standing next to Jimmy, assuming the “batter up” position. If Chin was going Cro-Magnon, then so was I.

The Republic of Chad, an arid, impoverished, landlocked country, is sometimes called the “dead heart of Africa.” It is named after Lake Chad, on its southwest border, which was once Africa’s second-largest body of fresh water. Unfortunately, the magnificent lake, which supplies water to about 20 million people, is drying up. A United Nations report states that it shrunk by 95 percent from 1963 to 1998, although it has rebounded somewhat in recent years.

A former French colony, Chad gained independence in 1960, but has been ravaged by conflicts, and since 2005 has been engulfed in civil war. In 2008, rebels opposed to the presidency of Idriss Deby stormed the capital of N’Djamena and took over a large part of the city. Hundreds of people were killed before the coup attempt failed and the rebels retreated into the desert. Since 2003, Chad has been further destabilized by the Darfur crisis in Sudan. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have spilled over the border and are living in camps along the eastern border. A similar situation exists on the north border, due to the confl ict in Libya, and on the south border with Central African Republic. According to the U.S. State Department, the average life expectancy in Chad is 39 years.

I first became aware that Chad might have potential for unexplored rock climbing in 1999 during an expedition to the Mandara Mountains in the neighboring country of Cameroon. I knew that climbers had visited the Tibesti Mountains in northern Chad, but I wondered if there might be more climbing elsewhere in the country. Searching Google Earth, I found intriguing satellite imagery of the Ennedi Desert, a 60,000-square-kilometer area of canyonlands near Chad’s eastern border with Sudan.

Like a lot of sponsored expeditions, our team was split into two contingents, a climbing team and a media team. For the latter, we had the Camp Four Collective, a new video production company made up of Chin, Ozturk, and Kemple. The climbing team was myself, Honnold, and Pearson.

Most readers of this magazine are familiar with Honnold, who has become a household name with his free solos of routes like Moonlight Buttress, the Northwest Face of Half Dome, and Red Rock’s Rainbow Wall. James Pearson is not as well-known in the U.S., but in some ways is the British counterpart to Honnold. He first made a name for himself in 2005, at age 19, with a fast repeat of the infamous Equilibrium (E10), a gritstone arête that at the time was considered the hardest traditional route in the world. Three years later, Pearson proved it wasn’t a fluke when he solved one of the U.K.’s last great rock-climbing problems: The Groove (also E10) at Cratcliffe Tor. I barely knew him, but Pearson proved to be funny and easygoing. I’d end up learning a lot from watching him climb, and even more from his theories about women and dating, which kept us entertained for hours as we crossed the desert.