UTOPIAN VISTAS

If you haven’t been to Tres Piedras (“Three Rocks”; TP), perhaps you’ve driven past, zipping along, say, from Albuquerque to Penitente on Highway 285, slowing for the blinking light to glimpse granite immediately west. Or maybe noticing the little breadloaves, walls, and spires that dot the piñon, juniper, and ponderosa forest here along the eastern swell of the Brazos Range. Maybe you’ve even stopped the car, stretching your legs among the up-to-200-foot domes.

Tres Piedras looks like Vedauwoo — granite blobs spiking from a semi-forested plateau — but it’s probably lithically closer to the good stuff (Astro Domes) at Joshua Tree, or even Tuolumne. There are 80 climbs, few cracks, only a handful of “sport” routes, and about 10 distinct bouldering zones at or outlying the main rocks. Some of the original bolts, from the late 1970s/early 80s, have been updated, but other heady 5.10s and 5.11s still sport quarter-inchers. The granite quartzite is magical, patina’ed and chickenheaded, dotted with stance knobs, ripply crimps, and the occasional plugger horizontal. The walls mostly face south or west, but the wind kicks hard against the heat.

To get here, you drive 30 miles west from Taos along Highway 64, crossing the Gorge Bridge, 650 feet above the Rio Grande and the scene of Mickey and Mallory Knox’s wedding in Natural Born Killers, an epic aerial battle in Terminator: Salvation, and more than a few real-life suicides. It was also here in 1998 that two thugs launched their still-living victim over the guardrail after carjacking him. New Mexico can be heavy that way.

When Holthouse, Roybal, and Prandoni first started visiting, in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, there were, recalls Holthouse, only a couple obvious trad leads (the Dirty Diagonal and Serpent Crack), occasional topropers, and no bolts. The western nose of South Rock strikes an appealing pose, a slabby, grey skyline rising 200 feet. Some time around 1979, Holthouse climbed partway up a crack to where the buttress steepened, but then retreated in the face of a horrorshow runout. “So I phoned Peter and I said, ‘Bring up your drill and let’s finish this.’” Prandoni, the more experienced climber, came back with Holthouse and tapped in two bolts by hand (and one on runout terrain down below), and the climbers completed their Yike’s Dikes, Tres Piedras’ first bolted climb. “That summer I started putting in some bolts here and putting some routes up,” says Holthouse. Holthouse’s four TP masterpieces are Yike’s Dikes; Clean Green Dream (CGD; sporty 5.9), a stretcher single pitch on Mosaic Rock; Serpent Face (5.10d R), a zigzagging line reminiscent of Figures on a Landscape, just downhill from CGD; and Holthouse to Hell, a taxing 5.11 right of Serpent Crack, again on the same wall.

He tells me this on a nice May morning below CGD. CGD starts with a cranky overlap, moves up a crack, and then busts rightward onto burnished chickenheads. This climb is the Solid Gold of New Mexico, stacks of thin-face protected by bolts and sporadic gear placements. It’s immensely popular — a landmark lead — and when Holthouse himself added a bolt to the traverse a few years ago, an unknown vigilante immediately chopped it. (New Mexico can be heavy that way; see mountainproject.com for an ongoing discussion of TP ethics.)

Holthouse’s period of greatest activity was 1979 to 1988, the California transplant focussing on TP and El Salto. (Access to this area above the ski valley road is tricky, though Foley’s Mountain Skills — climbtaos.com — does have a guiding permit.) His style, like that of his peers on nearby Questa Dome — a brilliant 500-foot swath of Tahquitz-white granite in the Latir Peaks north of Taos — was ground-up, drilling by hand, placing quarter-inch split bolts. For most of his TP forays, Holthouse would teach non-climbing friends to belay, luring them out with a picnic lunch. “And so I’d have several different partners just on one one-pitch climb over the space of two months,” he says.

Holthouse is a bold climber. On his first trip up the 1,800-foot Gothic Arches Buttress, an 1,800-foot 5.8 on the Brazos Cliffs near Chama (access is tricky — don’t ask!), a falling rock halved his rope on the first pitch. Shit, Holthouse told his partner, let’s tie the ends together, go up a few pitches, and check things out. As the designated leader, Holthouse had to run out the first 75 feet on each pitch because of the knot. “I led the whole thing,” says Holthouse. “I said, ‘You know, we can always rap. … We’d leave a lot of gear, but if we get to one pitch or move we don’t like, we’ll just rappel.’”