The Colossus

After two decades of tower-bagging, a desert rat faces an existential question on an unclimbed pinnacle: Is it still rock climbing if the stuff you’re climbing can’t be called rock?

"Fetch me a dickfour!" The old form-setter’s joke wasn’t sounding so funny now. Above my head was a tight circle of blue sky, framed by tall, crumbling banks of dirt. The soils engineer had OK’d the whole setup, so here we were, in a deep hole excavated in someone’s front yard, prepping to pour for the foundation of a house addition. Out of sight above, growling through a diesel haze, heavy trucks rumbled. Down at the bottom of our hole, we tied rebar and built forms, stumbling over nail bins, footing stakes, and stacks of oily lumber. Our heads bumped into twoby- four braces that held the walls in place. As I teetered atop a flimsy stepladder, my fingers reached out and touched bulging shale beds, each cantilevered a little farther out from the one below. Fragments fell out at the slightest touch. It was really hard to move around. The trucks got louder. The walls were grinding into me. I pushed back, choking, shoving, collapsing.

I woke to blackness. My shoulders were numb, my cracked fi ngers curled into useless claws. Aching limbs untwisted themselves from sweaty sheets. Something was glowing, off to my side. What was it? Where was I? Sleepy eyes squinted. It’s the motel clock; it’s 2 a.m.

There would, I knew, be no more sleep for me tonight. Okay, sit up, swallow more ibuprofen, lie back down and get comfortable. Then keep still—rest the muscles, even if the brain is revving up like those trucks in my dream.

Yesterday’s highlights: Chip had been belaying and laughing. “Yeah!” he had yelled, when it appeared we might finish. “Herd those Toucans!” After placing eight of the hook-shaped pitons in a row, I ran out of Toucans and ran into sugar. He wasn’t laughing—and nor was I—when it became obvious that we would not finish.

The day before that, at the hanging belay, I had drilled a belay anchor as the sun set. On the most solid-sounding stone within reach, the drill bit had bored its way three inches into the rock, then fallen into a void.

The previous night I had woken at 4 a.m. And the night before that. Five hours of sleep those nights. And now down to what, three? Oh well, might as well keep quiet and let Chip sleep.

My tired brain lurched back to 2005. Andy Donson had started it, showing me a photo of a mysterious rock formation lit by a fiery sunset. Christmas had been dry and warm, so my wife, Fran, and I went hiking around Escalante, searching for the tower in the photo. Finding it was not too hard, but oh, boy—in the flesh, it looked like nothing I’d ever seen.