Where we left off, Brian had just led us to the summit of Peak 6328. It was 1:45 p.m. I was really excited to be there, after dreaming of it for so many years. Fatigue was setting in, though, and we still had to get off this thing. The most dangerous part of the climb now lay ahead. 

This next photo shows the Baboquivari campground, thousands of feet below, as seen from the summit.

This next photo shows something never seen before. There is a peak next to Peak 6328, immediately to the east, its summit a mere 700 feet away. This sister peak is a bit lower, at 6,300 feet. We had originally planned to climb it on this same trip. It sure looked ugly, so we called it the Ugly Sister.

The story continues in Brian’s words:

The bad news, of course is that we have spent a huge amount of our daylight hours just to get here. We take very little time on top. DM leaves a small summit register while I prepare the first rappel. Although we have rope enough for 60M rappels I opt for using the static line doubled and doing half rappels. I know that this will slow us down and eat up slings in a hurry, but one fear that has been nagging me since pitch one is the amount of brush and loose rock on the climb. In my opinion, tying the two ropes together is a recipe for disaster, as the knot will surely catch on the retrieves and will really put us in a tight situation.

So, we start the first of many rappels. It is a bit funky rapping on 7mm line, but an extra loop of cord around the leg and a prussic safety knot makes it doable. It is virtually impossible to throw the rope, so I have to rap and pay out the rope as I go. The line is thin like dental floss and gets tangled just looking at it. I always go first to test the anchor, straighten the line, and quickly set the next anchor, but it is a slow and frustrating business. DM has a straight shot down the rope, but has the nasty, unwelcome burden of wrestling the pack.

The first retrieve: The ultra skinny rope pulls well then snags. It’s stuck solid in both directions. Another omen? We give it a mighty two-man tug and it comes free. Unfortunately, also coming free is the breadbox-sized rock we dislodged. DM yells “Rock!” I instinctively flatten myself to the wall. The rock grazes my brain bucket, glances off of my hip, and continues crashing earthward, obeying only Newton. Stunned silence. I ask if DM is okay. He is and he simultaneously asks the same of me. Surprisingly, even though the block made contact with me twice, I am totally unscathed. The rap line also appears undamaged. Five more messy rappels bring us to the notch. DM sent a huge tree trunk crashing down on one of them, but it was somewhat controlled, and we avoid a second disaster. We are also reunited with the two missing sewn slings that were left at this belay.

The notch is a relative safe haven of horizontal terrain. The only problem is the fact that nightfall is an hour away. Again, like some sort of rookie, I am fixated on the ground. DM brings a calmer head and very quickly points out that there is no way possible for us to get down this thing before dark, or in the dark. We have no choice but to settle in for the long night. I have only a small handful of regular climbing partners and they all have their various strengths and weaknesses. But two things they all share in common is level-headedness and a stoic sense of humour that makes things like unplanned bivis go smoothly. This trip was no exception.

We have some liquids, but not in abundance. Likewise with food. We have enough to make it through the night. No one ever died of starvation in a day. The thing we lack is clothing. DM has a long-sleeved lightweight emergency jacket. I have a micro-fibre wind vest. It’s going to be a long night. I pose the question, suspecting the answer no, given our cavalier attitude towards the so-called 10 essentials. Hell, we can’t even remember what they all are, but I do know that matches are one of them. The answer from DM is a tentative maybe, and a thorough search of the small first aid kit reveals a small plastic container of them. Again he comes through. The other valuable resource of our little oasis, besides horizontality, is a rather large amount of dry dead wood. DM forages a goodly supply of sticks. I busy myself with building a fire pit that is within a little alcove under a boulder. Although we want a fire, we are very cognizant of the fact that the entire mountainside is littered with dry wood, and that it would only take a small errant ember to set the whole area ablaze. Not only would this be an environmental disaster, but it could also be lethal to us.

I take great care in building the best containment structure I can, and we plan to keep the fire as small as possible. We have the wood, we have the fireplace, we have the matches; but do they work? The first match lights then immediately goes out! The second one takes, and soon the little pile of sticks is ablaze. We while away the next 14 hours with me tending the small fire, DM supplying the fuel from his pile of wood, and us playing various word games. The fire itself, providing equal amounts of physical and emotional warmth.

We sit on the ropes and I wear the pack for some warmth on my back. We are dogged by winds. Although we appear to be hemmed in by rock walls and boulders, there are open ends and even holes in our floor that look out onto space through which the wind finds us.

As we rappelled into the notch, Brian seemed very concerned about getting off the mountain, at least all the way down to our gear at last night’s bivi site, if not all the way back down to the campground. I did some quick math, and figured there was no way we could get off this thing quickly. My biggest fear was getting benighted part-way down the huge face which still awaited us. By the time we reached the notch, we had maybe half an hour before darkness would overtake us. I knew that setting up rappels took a lot of time to do safely (and Brian is all about safety), and time was not on our side, so I was much relieved when Brian agreed that we should hunker down in the notch for the night.

The notch was not a fun place to be. The only spot where we could sit was barely big enough for the two of us. We huddled together, and for much of the night leaned against each other for warmth and support. It was November, after all, at almost 6,000 feet. To make matters worse, not five feet away was a hole down through the floor of our rocky den. If you looked down through the hole, you could see right down the face – this freaked me out. So much so that, as I nodded off in the night, I kept having a recurring dream. It was awful. In my dream, we were rappelling down the face in the sunlight but there was something ominous about our situation. I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong, but I was terrified. I woke up with a start, letting out a yelp, and shaking badly. Every time I nodded off, I had the same dream again and woke myself up, very scared. I mentioned it to Brian, in the hope that talking about it would make the dream stop. By the time it had repeated itself seven or eight times, my nerves were shot. It was one very long night. We had maybe a couple of granola bars for food, but that was no big deal. Much worse was the fact that we had almost nothing to drink. We rationed it all night long, allowing ourselves a tiny sip once in a while, just enough to stop our mouths from drying out completely. That feeling of cotton mouth was the worst part, and, to make matters worse, we had to ration it even more in order to leave some for the long unknown descent the next morning.  

So we spend the night huddled around our small blaze, contorted into awkward positions. DM has been a trooper and has resisted asking me the time all night long. Occasionally I sneak a glance at my watch. Eventually I can tell him that we need no more wood. Dawn arrives to find us both tired, cold and very cramped. We carefully extinguish the embers by a combination of crushing them, peeing on them, and then covering them with flat rocks.

I had thought we might have to down-climb some of the pitches to avoid difficult and convoluted rappels but the skinny cord actually worked well, and we evolved a good system in working the mechanics of the rigging. By this time I was pretty brain dead, however, and couldn’t recognize the terrain we had come up. I was more than a bit concerned that we would end up rapping into a cul de sac, where there would be no anchor points. I had lots of gear, but the whole lower section of the climb was not gear- friendly. An emotional high point was when I looked down and found a partial stick of chewing gum that must have fallen out of DM’s pocket on the ascent. We were on route at least. It took over 5 hours and 7 rappels, but we finally made the last one to the base, with only several dozen bouts of intense swearing at the brush and cactus.

Those rappels in the morning were really something. Brian’s experience really saved our asses. Most of the descent was over different ground than what we had climbed up. More than once, as I hung on the cliff face, I watched Brian rappel over a lip and disappear from sight. By the time I followed him, I found that we were going through an overhang. Sometimes, it was hard to stop spinning. Brian used terrific judgement in deciding when to stop and set up the next rappel. I remember a few times the pack was pulling me off balance, making me tilt backwards. Another memory is swearing in frustration – the air was blue with oaths. I was ecstatic when we finally touched down on terra firma at the base of the face.

I am sure that we looked like lepers at this point. My hands, arms and lower legs were tattooed with cuts, scabs, scratches, scrapes and dried blood. The East peak (the Ugly Sister) would have to wait for another day. We had used up virtually all of our sling material (about 225 feet of it) in the many rappel anchors we rigged, so there was no safe way for us to climb and descend. That, coupled with the fact that I was not really interested in thrashing up another vertical bushwhack for a long time, led us on our way back to the truck in a quick and uneventful hike out.

To this day, ten years later, I have never done a climb quite like this. There is no doubt I will remember it vividly as long as I live. Kudos to Brian for this one – few could lead a complex climb like this and do it in such style.

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