The Big D

Gropius (5.13d)
Bauhaus Wall; FA: George Squibb, autumn 1996; equipped by Pete Zoller and Mike Pont

1993: Pete Zoller was having a bad day. High on the Bauhaus wall, where routes stretch for 100 feet up a headwall tacked onto an imposing lower swell, Zoller sweated in the July heat, finagling in bolts while his degenerate belayers/compadres heckled him from the ground. The drill weighed heavily as he lifted it overhead. Zoller, today a pharmacist and one of the prime early movers at Rifle, did so much drilling he in fact thinks it contributed to his blown-out left rotator cuff, which required surgery. And while Zoller and Gropius co-bolter Mike Pont soon abandoned the line as “too long,” George Squibb swapped them two six packs of “mid-shelf” beer for their proj, tagging the FA after four days. Gropius has since become a Rifle rite of endurance passage.

You begin on a fussy blue slab, wander left across an underbelly, through bushes and often seepy holes, and then it’s on like Donkey Kong: big moves to pockets, flat crimps, and incut underclings take you out a hanging bulge to a lip encounter. Then it’s a brief shake on two jizzler sidepulls, and on to the redpoint crux — a crimpy V5-ish boulder problem out a secondary bulge — before a long 5.12+ headwall.

So why is Gropius a mere 5.13d? Squibb says he redpointed too quickly for it to be 5.14a — plus, he was happy relaying to “people [he] didn’t like” the sandbag grade of 5.13c/d. And Squibb cites as additional factors the possibility for kneebars and the way grades condensed in the 1990s, when 5.14 was still a rarity. But, he adds, all Rifle 5.13d’s still only rank as such: “The new kids just don’t want to have to work for 5.13,” Squibb says. And there you have it. . . .