UTOPIAN VISTAS

I don’t know about you, but I get a knot in my stomach when I pull into a crowded sport area these days. The dillbags, scenesters, and mouth-breathing frat boys spilling out of their sticker-plastered cars; the scorecard heroes, and wannabe gangstas — it all seems a bit antithetical to my reasons for climbing. But then again, I’m happiest playing XBox in a dark room…or climbing in places like Taos.

Here’s one thing you can still do in Taos: climb onsight. Not modern onsight — you know, holds so chalked you can Beta-map each move from the deck; Internet video-blog footage surreptitiously committed to memory; a “helpful” onlooker chiming in with a “That’s it!” when you stray into the correct sequence. No, Taos has old-school, figure-shit-out-yourself onsighting. On the lonely basalt, wind and rain quickly strip the chalk, and a fine silt washes through the cracks or over the crimps. All unchalked holds looking equally good (or bad) from below, you can incur a 5.13a pump trying to onsight 5.11+. Try it — you’ll see.

Drop into the gorge. Here are the known cliffs: Vista Verde, Dead Cholla, Utopian Vistas (a great zone upstream from Dead Cholla, many the work of Bob D’Antonio and the ER doc Mike Howard), the Arroyo Hondo Crags (The Solar Asylum, John’s Wall, River Wall, Old Stagecoach Road Wall, The New Buff Wall), Miners Crag, Wild and Scenic. But I’ve also excluded certain newer zones where the crew remains hard at work, sometimes rap bolting, sometimes coming from the ground, sometimes putting bolts near crack-like features, sometimes not — whatever works.

Vista Verde is the most appealing cliff. On a “crowded” weekend, you might see three other cars in the lot — hikers, there for the Vista Verde Trail. That’s it. The crag faces east and the rock is dark, so it’s suicide to slog up before noon if it’s hotter than 70 F. Once there, walk the cliff base north to south: the Bat Cave is a smaller Arsenal, dense with a dozen climbs (5.11 to 5.13) on bubbly rock, the best being Foley’s thuggy 5.12c/d Fang Shui. Around the corner is a newer spread of 5.10/5.11 corners, cracks, and arêtes — the Time Bandits and Gold Rush walls, both great places to warm up. Immediately adjacent is the tall, appealing Afterburner Face, home to rope-stretcher 5.12 faces — some of the original Vista Verde sport routes. Now pass a broken area, ambling south through the sagebrush and cacti to where the cliff picks up again at an intimidating amphitheater: Monster Wall, with tall, unrelenting 5.11+ and 5.12 face and arête climbs. At the far south end lies Wayne Manor, a concentration nonpareil of older crack routes and newer sport gems, the best being the headwall-splitting tips crack of Wrendezvous, a 5.11c. Close to 50 routes total, most barely chalked, the cliff base a bench of ancient, silent repose.

It’s also here that we should wrap up our Taos tour, because after the eye-opening Bat Cave, which inspired Foley to develop The Solar Asylum, it was at Vista Verde, only three years ago, that things truly took off. Because that’s when the personable Bob D’Antonio, 56, one of the most prolific first-ascentionists in America (1,500 or so FAs; thank him for his climbs at White Rock, Penitente, Shelf Road, Aspen, the New, and Boulder Canyon) and a man whom Howard calls the “Johnny Appleseed of sport climbing,” moved to town for year and a half to manage The Old Blinking Light restaurant. D’Antonio estimates he put up or helped put up about 100 climbs during his stay. Until then, not much went on at Vista Verde. Naylor, then a carpenter, and Freebourne, had done their Bat Cave thing in 2000/01, coming out on their “rest days,” after four-day pushes doing drywall work together, to install the routes. And they’d even put in the Afterburner Face’s first two climbs, the 5.12a/b’s Afterburner and Slow Burn. But the locals mostly ignored the crag, deterred by a 10-foot, mid-height choss band not uncommon in the gorge. Still, the cliff had been on Foley’s mind all along, and he’d installed the insta-classic Frankenstone (5.12), and with Naylor, the aesthetic Hefalump (5.12) and Cracula (5.11).

“I marched Bob right up to Vista Verde, and Bob was like, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God! This is the next Cactus Cliff! Holy shit!” recalls Foley. “It” — to borrow a line from the crappy sci-fi flick Ultraviolet — was “on.” (Says D’Antonio, “There were probably only eight routes there at the time. I think I have a decent eye for a line, but I was, like, ‘My God, there’s a lot to do here!’” He estimates there are 50 or 60 other Vista Verde-type crags yet to untapped in the gorge.) Foley, his mellow partner-in-crime Joel Tinl, Naylor, Howard, and D’Antonio now entered a full-bore, amicably competitive “Gold Rush.” D’Antonio could put up three routes a day, so efficient, says Foley, he chalk-dotted bolt placements his first time through on toprope. This, in turn, spurred Foley to pick up the pace. And Tinl, an Ohio transplant in Taos since 1987, and Dr. Mike Howard, a local ER doctor, also caught the bug, firing in climbs of their own. Three years, a handful of guys, 200 new routes — think about it. As D’Antonio, reflecting on a single day at Utopian Vistas during which four or five new climbs went in, says, “A lot of routes went up in a pretty short time.”

Naylor, who recently spent five days prepping the 5.11 Lode, at Miners Crag, details some of the drawbacks of basalt FA’ing: the rat droppings on the crack section of Vista Verde’s Rat Run (5.11a), so thick you “had to drive your fingers down into it”; the silky volcanic dust that rains onto the holds when you pull off a loose block; dead birds lodged in cracks or cactus stuffed there by the rats; the mesa-top dirt that can wash over during the rainy season. But nothing nearly as industrial as the multi-week cleaning/gluefests at, say, Rifle. No, because really what you have here is also a product of the environment. That is, with so few climbers in Taos, it’s often easier to come out solo and do bolting/cleaning work than to round up a partner.

Which is how it should be. This is New Mexico, after all, a state with only 16 people per square mile. When Foley and crew rock up to the crags, it’s in the spirit of fun, an iPod stereo often playing, everyone walking slowly, stopping frequently to point out blank spots on the lithic map.

“We like to come out here, and sometimes we won’t get much done. We’ll just trip out on the birds flying overhead, and look at the mountain, and go for a nice hike,” says Tinl. “Taos is pretty low key, and I think it always will be. Solitude — it’s a huge part of it, man.”

Matt Samet, raised in New Mexico, is editor-in-chief at Climbing.