The Wanker 101

The blood pulsing in your fingertips matches the beat of your racing heart. Your toes scream after climbing for eight hours nonstop, and as you pull onto the final summit, your arms have entered a state not unlike tetanus. Or rigor mortis. A feeling of pride and elation washes over your lactic-acid-tripped-out soul. Congratulations. You have just completed Hueco Tanks’ Wanker 101.

FORGET CARRYING AN AID RACK and climbing sketchy slab pitches by headlamp—far from Yosemite’s big walls, there existed an endurance challenge that even an un-savvy climber like me could tackle. I even owned the gear for it. And for training, I could skip the jumaring and short-fixing practice, and just hang out at my local Flagstaff, Arizona, gym. But, oh, how I would hang out. I’d traverse the gym’s entirety for as long as I could hold on—usually about an hour. Week after week. I felt like some old-school Olympian, sporting my Mad Rock Frenzies a size too big, worn with socks to keep my feet cushioned. I’m sure the bare-chested, buffed-out bouldering boys thought I had a few screws loose, but I let them speculate while I went about my business. After a month of preparation, I began to feel a true sense of urgency. My climbing ambitions had taken on a single-minded focus: I aspired to be a Wanker.

THE WANKER 101 is a one-hundred-and-one-problem bouldering circuit on the North Mountain of Hueco Tanks State Historic Park, outside of El Paso, Texas. It consists of problems ranging in difficulty up to V2— most in the V0 range—originally taken from the “Book of John,” John Sherman’s Hueco Tanks: A Climber’s and Boulderer’s Guide, and was first established in 2001 by five people dressed in costume, including a Santa suit that was discarded at problem 30. It is essentially a running/hiking/bouldering tour of North Mountain, the only one of Hueco’s three mountains still open to self-guided access. The Wanker is a sort of legend in Hueco, with legendary completions. For instance, rumor has it that Kim Lee did the entire Wanker 101 in two and a half hours, barefoot. There is a hard-to-find binder at the Hueco Rock Ranch that lists the problems and the story of the anonymous proto-Wankers. Their names have been lost, but the legend lives on.

The circuit was conceived before the closure, for archaeological reasons, of the main face of the Mushroom Boulder in 2008. The original Wanker included nine problems on the Mushroom. Two of these, Legal High and Busted, are on the backside of the boulder and are still open, but the closure left aspiring Wankers in need of seven new problems. The answer was soon found in the “Book of Matthew,” Matt Wilder’s Hueco Tanks: The Essential Guide to America’s Bouldering Mecca. The New Meadow and Term Boulder, plus one or two other nuevo classics, easily provided seven new V0 and V1 problems, thereby fi lling the gap and modernizing the Wanker.

The circuit includes many classics, but also numerous problems that are off the radar, seemingly included simply because they are sandbagged, hard to flash, or just plain scary and dangerous. It ain’t called the Wanker for nothing.

There are a few rules: In addition to the standard list are some problems marked optional. These can be substituted for any problem about which the aspiring Wanker has second thoughts. For example, Split Crack, a 20-foot hand (or arm) crack, may deter a climber not accustomed to crack climbing or reckless soloing. Other problems may be so reachy that they will always remain projects for shorter folk (like me). If an aspiring Wanker passes on a problem, he must go to the official list of optional problems, which at first glance appears to promise some relief, but in the end often yields a problem more costly in pump than the one for which it was subbed, possibly compromising the climber’s completion of the Wanker.

There is one problem that may not be substituted and must be done as the 101st problem: Ghetto Simulator. Ghetto is a classic endurance V2 that would be a 35-foot highball if it weren’t a “slot” problem, protected by a rock slab that rises underneath for the length of the climb. As is, it is safe but sadistically pumpy, forming a distinct crux finale in the circuit. One cannot be said to have completed the Wanker without doing this problem last.