Remember the story I told you about the climb Brian Rundle led on Peak 6328? Well, you might also remember that there was a peak right next door to it, one we nicknamed “The Ugly Sister”. We didn’t have the time, the gear or the energy to attempt it after 6328, so we more or less wrote it off. As time passed, the mental and physical scars from 6328 faded, and I started to think of the Ugly Sister once again. Although I hadn’t set foot on it yet, I had a strong feeling it was going to live up to its name. At 6,300 feet elevation, it was not trivial.
Fast forward to November 24, 2005. My desire to get back to the peak had reached a fever pitch. I knew it would be a hellacious climb, way beyond the efforts of a solo climber like myself, so I put out a few feelers. Andy Bates, who now lived in Phoenix, stepped up and said “let’s go for it”. He was intrigued, I believe, by the serious challenge the climb would offer, and perhaps the fact that it would almost certainly be a first ascent. He was a strong, young climber with plenty of technical rock-climbing experience under his belt. When he said he could do it but only on the long Thanksgiving weekend, I jumped at his offer. It would be hard to give up the time with our families, but such a chance might not come again for a long time.
Day 1. Thanksgiving Day – Andy and I drove out to the reservation while it was still dark. We didn’t spend long at the Baboquivari campground getting our packs ready, and set out on foot at 8:00 a.m.. We headed up Baboquivari Canyon carrying huge packs. The reason they were so heavy was that we had to carry water for three days (there is none on the mountain), and we were carrying a huge bunch of climbing hardware, as we wanted to be prepared for all possibilities.
It is only 1.5 miles as the crow flies from the campground to where we wanted to set up camp for our climb, but it felt like a lot more. In that short distance, we climbed 1,800 vertical feet. En route, my backpack of 15 years broke, making the climb even more trying as I tried to hold it together just enough to climb to our campsite. I was never so glad to arrive anywhere as when we dropped our packs at a flat spot at about 5,300 feet. It was a great spot to use as a base, as it was very close to the start of the serious climbing. It had taken us 3 1/2 hours to get that far.
By 12:20 p.m., we had gathered our climbing gear and put it in a summit pack. We planned to drop extra water and hardware higher up, and to reconnoiter the route as much as possible this first day. Andy was carrying a huge rack of hardware, and the summit pack was way too heavy. It was only seven minutes’ walk over to the start of the real climbing. At the base of the rock, we set up and Andy started out. Here is the very beginning of the climb.
Pitch 1. I got off to a terrible start. Andy led out, over a bulge, a Class 5.6 move, with small flakes for holds. I tried repeatedly but couldn’t do the move. Andy rappelled back down to help me, setting me up with prussiks so I could get past the bulge. Sheesh, how embarrassing – literally the first move of the climb. Talk about getting off to a shaky start. Then straight up, tending right, on ledges, easy 5th class to a tree, up a vertical corner (good holds, low 5th), then 10 feet more to an alcove. Maybe 90 feet in total.
Pitch 2. Straight up, Class 4, to a brushy ledge, about 60 feet.
Pitch 3. Up to the right of a rock rib, Class 5.4, to a level ridge, about 50 feet. This is about 400 vertical feet above our campsite. Here is a view looking back down the face – our campsite is hidden from view below the bulge of the light-colored rock.
We stashed extra water and gear here. While I waited, Andy went on ahead to explore. This next photo is a view of Pitch 4. The route goes up the light-colored rock on the lower right side, angling up to the left to reach the Green Rock, which is slightly to the right of center of the photo. The Green Rock has a light-colored top part and sits just below three dark-green trees. The bowl sits above the Green Rock and is hidden from view. Andy went up by a series of steep ramps and made pretty quick time of it in his rock shoes. He disappeared past the Green Rock for a while and examined the route higher up. He finally down-climbed to where I was waiting. I was getting pretty anxious by then, as it was getting late.
Andy is meticulous when it comes to climbing safety. By the time he had set up three rappels, we finished in near-darkness at the base of the rock. By headlamp, we returned to our camp and spent a quiet night. It was clear but not cold. The first day had gone well and we had explored a lot of new ground, but there still remained many unanswered questions. What would we find when we pushed the route farther upward tomorrow?
Day 2. We rose early and by 7:10 a.m. we were at the base of the climb. The late hour of our start was due to the short days at that time of the year. We combined yesterday’s three pitches into two, and by 8:55 a.m. we were at the spot where we had stashed gear. From there we walked over to the base of the next part of the climb.
Pitch 4. Andy led a long pitch and ran out all 200 feet of rope to get just above the Green Rock. He belayed me up. I hated this pitch. While Andy sailed up the already-known pitch (know to him, at least, from the previous day), the soles of my hiking boots did not grip well and I found it rather harrowing to follow what he had led. I was really glad to be off-belay above the Green Rock.
We were now in the bowl. This is a steeply-inclined area (at least 30 degrees), rather brushy, littered with loose rocks. It was just a walk, but not a pleasant one. It does however gain you about 150 vertical feet and gets you to the base of the upper part of the climb. On the east side of the bowl we found a gully which looked like it would take us higher.
Pitch 5. Andy bouldered up past the start. He set up a rope and I had to prussik up in order to follow, for 40 or 50 feet. This was Class 4 or low Class 5 – once again, embarrassing. We went up the gully a bit more and then over to the left.
Pitch 6. We set up again and Andy led up some tricky ground. He said, as he continued, that there were several 5.7 moves and that it was sustained Class 5 climbing. In this next picture, Andy is visible just above the center, against a lone tree. You can see his white helmet as a tiny dot. The blue rope hangs down on the rock below him.
As I belayed him from below, I could see that, above him on what would be the next pitch, there were at least two and maybe three overhangs. The next photo shows the incredibly steep face that waited above Andy.
I told him that there was no way there was time for me to prussik up such ground without running out of daylight. Even with jumars, we would run out of time. It was a certainty that we would be benighted long before reaching the summit. He agreed, but only reluctantly – he was on a roll, and I knew that he would have happily climbed on into the night if I hadn’t been whining down at the other end of the rope. He came back down to me. Even though it was getting late, I had a strong urge to climb up to the top of the east-side gully. Andy agreed. This gully was very brushy but otherwise easy. This put us about 300 vertical feet below the summit. From near the top of this gully, yet another gully headed north and gained the summit ridge. We could see that the route to the summit was cut by two, and maybe three, steep gashes, each of which appeared to be 30 or 40 feet deep, or maybe even more. Possibly, ropes could be fixed at these spots. The next photo shows a small portion of the summit ridge.
Enough strategizing – we were burning daylight! I was a lot more concerned about the situation than Andy – for some reason, I become anxious when faced with the prospect of spending the night dangling from a rope on a cliff face. We descended the gully to the bowl, then down the amazingly loose crud to the Green Rock. It took a while to set up a safe rappel anchor. We purposely knocked down a bunch of the loosest stuff before starting down. I went first. The plan was for me to go down a different way than how we had come up Pitch 4. I rappelled down on a single rope, over two overhangs, and arrived at a place about even with the base of Pitch 4. It was 185 feet straight down. Andy hauled the rope back up. He then rappelled down the steep, loose ramp of Pitch 4, about half-way, retrieved the rope, then free-climbed down the second half to arrive at the base of Pitch 4.
We were fast running out of daylight. Truth be told, by the time we started to rappel down Pitch 3, it was dark. Andy would go first to suss out the route and pick the spot for the next rappel anchor – this was done by headlamp. On this pitch, the rope must have passed through a mess of prickly pear cactus, because when I descended the rope, my hands got full of their fine hair-like stickers. That was painful. Rappelling down Pitch 2, it was extra-dark. More stickers, too. By the time we started the last rappel, it was positively freaky. It was blacker than black, with no moon to help. Somehow it was decided that by hanging our headlamps from our harnesses, we might be better able to see down the face. It sort of worked, but it was still like dropping off the edge of the world into the abyss. We arrived at the base of the climb in utter darkness, and once again returned to camp by headlamp. I remember spending a long time picking cactus stickers out of my hands with a pair of tweezers before falling asleep.
Day 3. We had given it our best shot, but had run out of time – our third day had been reserved for the trip out. Much of that part of the mountain had been explored, but no definite route to the summit had been discovered. I needed this summit to finish a big mountaineering project, but wasn’t sure if I was any farther ahead than before this weekend had started. I say that because who knew if, in the future, Andy or any other skilled rock climber would come back here with me to try to push the route farther. The Ugly Sister had won this round.
The photo above shows the site where we camped both nights. We took one last look around before we packed up and headed back down the steep slopes to rejoin the canyon. When we arrived at the campground where my truck was parked, we met a large group of tribal members who had been there for the weekend – perhaps a Thanksgiving celebration of some sort. They kindly offered us some food. One woman asked us where we had been. When we pointed at the peak, she seemed excited. She said she had seen flickering lights high up on the mountain the night before, and now knew the reason. We loaded our gear in the truck and were back in Tucson by 12:30 PM. In retrospect, the climb went pretty well – we just ran out of time. We learned a lot about the mountain, and there will definitely be a follow-up attempt.
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