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Tall Tales
An exclusive, online only, collection of climbing fiction compiled by Luke Laeser and the Climbing Magazine Team. To have your work in this department please contact luke.laeser at gmail.com
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 A Medicine Bow Peak Ritual
By Richard F. Fleck - Each Labor Day for ten years straight my family and I would climb to the sky from Lewis Lake following a winding trail through patches of willows hiding gurgling streams with clear and icy water feeding roots of marsh marigolds and patches of bright and shining glacier lilies.  Heavy Summer Snow Atop the San Francisco Peaks
By Richard F. Fleck - Two German climbers signed out on the log writing that the snow was too deep and they finally had to turn around. “But that was yesterday,” remarked one of my friends as we shouldered our packs hit the trail where we rapidly gained a view of the entire Snow Bowl with lesser crests of the ancient volcano comprising the sacred San Francisco Peaks that rose forever skyward in glistening whiteness.  Deep Down the Kaibab Trail
By Richard F. Fleck - Deep within the spruce and fir, I make my camp along the North Rim, but before I eat my supper, I walk over to the nighttime edge of the Grand Canyon to peer three or four thousand feet down to see a tiny flickering campfire way below that will lure me down very early the next day from a chilly forty degrees into heat of mid-summer and then some— from Canadian forest to Mexican desert with shoulder-high prickly pears and Spanish bayonets  CROSSING THE LINE - The Mexican Guide - Part 2
By Preston Tierradulce - Climbing isn't always about the crux, sometimes it is about the journey. At Lovers Leap, a Northern California crag, that trad climbers paradise, The Line is a three pitch 5.9 masterpiece. Steep, thin, often a first lead a testpiece of confidence for the apprentice - it's all technique, no technology here will save your ass. Or the first lead could be a noviates nightmare. At the U.S. Mexico Border, we climbed across The Line one night knowing we could be arrested.  Arizona High
By Richard F. Fleck - Thin gray cirrus clouds streak the sky as we amble through a meadow of purple lupine and black-eyed susans with dark and pyramidic Humphreys Peak rising upward another 3000 feet. We enter sweet pine forest floors springing forth with mushrooms of every shape and color, white columbines and purple penstemon.  Atop Kings Peak
By Richard F. Fleck - Once on the summit of King’s Peak, highest in Utah, we notice a scarcity of flowers but a richness in diversity of rocks from granites to shales to quartzites and sandstones, all of reddish-brown hue.  Haystack Ramble
By Richard F. Fleck - From Geyser Pass through the woods, we emerge into a bright green meadow covered with all sorts of alpine flowers high in the La Sal Mountains of Utah. We rest just beneath the rocky slabs of Haystack Peak and search the tundra for rayless daisies that are known to grow  The George Washington Chronicles - Part I: The Colonial Years
George Washington and the cherry tree is first presidential mythology. Fiction and fabrication. But the Revolutionary War stories, the Potomac, well, those are as true as Indian Creek Splitters. Ole George had quite a life. He worked as a surveyor at 17, inherited Mount Vernon at 20, and married Martha Dandridge Custis (a widow and a few months older) at age 26. Together they cultivated hemp and tobacco. They built a political career. They managed the affairs of their plantation. But - a little known fact - they were also gym rats.  A Mellethin Sunrise
By Richard F. Fleck - I crawl out of my sleeping bag at Geyser Pass high in the La Sals just before sunrise to walk out into the meadow and look across at Mellenthin Mountain, dark and gray, but with a tinge of light near its summit, and as the sun rises, the mountain’s north face turns into a fancy’s show box with  THE MEXICAN GUIDE at EL GRAN TRONO BLANCO
By Preston Tierradulce - If you want a climbing article, a pitch-by-pitch travelogue on this secluded place, this story ain't for you. I'd rather tell a saga of our encounter out there, with a saint of a man on this rugged section of Baja. This piece is a review of a fellow who jumped out of the chaparral and helped us survive. This tall tale is a tribute to our friend who taught us the meaning of a simple Spanish word that few north of the border really appreciate or understand: simpático.  Grandmother Spider Mountain
By Richard F. Fleck - Early in the morning we walk upwards through a slanted forest of aspen and fir and take delight in seeing a blue bird flutter in open meadows quite soft underfoot. We approach grassy hummocks reminding me of ever-so-green Ireland along the Irish Sea.  A Close Encounter in the Manzanos
By Richard F. Fleck - The sky remains cobalt blue and the pines barely whisper as I amble along the crest of the Manzanos overlooking Albuquerque’s tiny city streets, but I suddenly stop in my tracks when I almost stumble across a crude grave of cottonwood branches twisted into a circle  Turning Around on the Chisos Mountain Trail
By Richard F. Fleck - Through berried junipers and dry Scrub oak, we amble along a steadily Upward trail toward much higher Pinnacles with gliding ravens hoarsely Squawking like spirits of the mountains Overlooking agave, prickly pear and Yucca about to bloom, and from the Branches of pinon pines comes a Sprite-liken cheeping of white-breasted Nuthatches as volcanic Casa Grande Darkens in an approaching storm.  Ocotillo Sundown
By Richard F. Fleck - We stand in the desert and stare at the Chisos Mountains reddening in silence, each little rocky crag and slit given emphasis with nearby prickly pears brilliantly lit, but perhaps the most striking thing proves to be the way the setting sun illuminates spiked ocotillo plants with tiny red buds looking much like spirits emerging from thorny shells silhouetted by such ghostly mountains.  BUMMING IT WITH GARY HEMMING
When I started up the mountain as a twenty year old college student, I had no idea what dangers, toils, ("adventure" definition: to arrive, I am still arriving), and fantastic trips I would grasp hold of. I have a huge imagination, even back then in the 1970's I was prone to both level headed logic and ideas of grandeur that went half way up Nanda Devi, or in my case El Capitan. This sense of awe and wanting to be in these awesome environs propelled me up.  BUDDHA's CAVE in KINGMAN ARIZONA
Close your eyes. Can you picture Joshua Tree in the 1970's, before John Long and the Stonemasters moved in and scooped up many of the first accents? No traffic back then, just virgin rock. I'm nursing a hernia as I write this story. My elbow hurts and my two-wheeled aluminum mule is about to throw a shoe. Que lastima. I am in a world of hurt, temporarily camped out in Kingman, Arizona, elevation 3,300 feet, Memorial Day Weekend.  The Hillary Step
Rising sheer and forbidding, from a razor traverse that vanishes, like nerve, on the precipice; a drab rib of ancient sea floor, elevated, as if by destiny, in the grinding ascension of tectonic crust, to paramount significance - Mount Everest’s final impediment, protector of the crown - reserved, on the apex of earth, in the glorious panorama of the Himalaya massif on a clear day, for a gentleman of undaunted disposition, who perceives before him not the nemesis of mortal obsession, but instead, a possible way up.  Electric Peak
By Richard F. Fleck - I cannot resist staring at distant Electric Peak from the top of Mount Washburn as I am drawn to its dazzling white snowfields attracting stands of clouds no doubt the build-up of a summer thunderstorm such as the one Henry Gannett felt in 1872 when his entire body painfully tingled  The Climb
February 2009 - Three-fourths of the way through, she took a moment to take in her surroundings. It was before sunrise, so the early morning looked like a night sky taken from the pages of a storybook’s illustrations. Her dizziness made it feel like they were in a cave, but she could see each and every glossy star against the black curtain of a sky.  Spider Rock
By Richard F. Fleck - With what intensity the Anasazi must have had when they looked straight up from their ancient dwellings astride the base of Spider Rock rising eight hundred feet in massive redness above the valley floor in the midst of Canyon de Chelly. |
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