Back Road Adventure

posture, except that we were sitting, and there was no place to go. Below us the rock dropped straight down for a thousand feet; the terrain above was buried in ice and snow. We were on a small ledge high on Baboquivari Peak in early January in the middle of a very long night. Having planned on a quick jaunt up the southeast ridge, we were illprepared for a bivouac: no sleeping bags, no warm jackets, nothing but each other for insulation. "At least this time we have food," I'd said to my friend Steve Mathias, as our last match burned out. But that too had disappeared, snatched by some nocturnal critter while we tried to start a fire. An hour earlier we'd been on the summit, enjoying a view that stretched from northern Mexico to Picacho Peak. Now we were stranded on the side of a cliff in the dark. We'd burned through two books of matches (without lighting so much as a cigarette); a bag of tortillas and a block of cheese had vanished without a trace; and our rappel rope was hopelessly snagged on a horn of a rock far above us. Sunrise was 12 hours away. The wind sang through the canyon below us, and now and then rocks and ice came clattering down the mountainside. We were far too cold to sleep, and as we shivered away the long hours, I tried to fathom how we'd managed to get ourselves in such a mess. I knew the snow had been our undoing (it had obscured the descent trail, and we'd taken a wrong turn), but it was an eerie night, and I kept coming back to this: when I'd told a friend we were going to climb Baboquivari, she'd said, "I wouldn't. That's where l'itoi lives." Bordered by the Tohono O'odham (Papago) reservation on the west and wilderness area on the east, Baboquivari Peak erupts from Altar Valley like a giant abscessed tooth. In the lore of the O'odham, the mountain is the home of l'itoi, creator, Elder Brother, and protector of the O'odham. How exactly l'itoi feels about people scratching their way up his mountain is a question a lot of climbers have had occasion to ponder. As Steve and I dragged ourselves home the following morning, I felt I had a satisfactory answer. I was done with Baboquivari. But climbers are known for their forgetfulness, fulness, especially where bad memories are concerned. A few years later, I found myself eyeing a photo of Babo's east face, a thousand-foot sweep of crumbly granite. The east face is a much more daunting proposition than the southeast ridge, but I quickly managed to convince myself, and my girlfriend, Meryl Singer, that we were up for the task. Within a week, we were lugging 70-pound packs up to the base of the climb. Again it was January, with its short days and cold nights. We started up the face late in the morning. The rock was both overhanging and loose. All day we fiddled metal pitons into cracks and crevices, pulling ourselves from one piton to the next. This mode of ascent is called "aid climbing," and it's a delicate business when the rock is bad. By sunset we'd made only 100 feet. We tied off our ropes and rappelled down to our camp. The next day it was more of the same, and it might have been monotonous if it hadn't been so nerve-wracking. At one point, I was hanging from two steel hooks when the rock broke. I felt a moment of weightlessness, and then the rope stopped my fall. My head hurt, and I could feel blood trickling down my cheeks. I ran my fingers across my forehead. There were two "fang" marks where the hooks had hit me. I looked down at Meryl, who had locked off the rope when I fell. "It doesn't look too bad," she said. "We'll butterfly it tonight." I nodded and looked back up at the varnished rock. The summit seemed an impossible distance. I looked below me at the canyons and ridges and the flat plain of Altar Valley. There were no paved roads for 15 miles, no phones for another 20. Normally I liked the isolation out there, but now I felt vulnerable. I was grateful my climbing partner was a nurse. Meryl was supposed to be back in Tucson the following day, and as we ate our spaghetti that night I realized that her schedule might make a convenient excuse for abandoning our adventure. I was worn out, and I was beginning to get superstitious again. "If you need to get back," I said, "we could leave the ropes fixed and come back next week." "We're up here, we might as well finish it," she said. "Unless you don't want to." The next morning, we got up at 4 A.M. and made coffee. We stuffed our camping gear into our packs and carried them by headlamp down to the saddle, north of the peak. We stashed them by the main trail, where we would pick them up that evening when we came down the descent trail. By sunrise we were ascending our fixed ropes back to our high point. We brought a small pack with food and water and a single sleeping bag in case we couldn't reach the summit by nightfall. But it soon became apparent that dragging the pack up with us was slowing us down to the point that we were sure to get caught in the dark. So we decided to dump it. I tied two ropes together and lowered it 300 feet to the ledge we'd camped on. Then I let go of the rope. "Okay," I said. "Now we're committed." The climbing was much easier, less steep with more handholds. We eeked our way up cracks, wiggled up a long chimney in the rock, and clambered onto a long horizontal shelf. By noon we were within 400 feet of the summit. We felt relaxed enough to stop for a quick snack and a few photos. A rope length later, however, the rock turned vertical. Worse, there was nothing

The rock was smooth and slabby, offering almost no places to anchor chocks or pitons. Falling was not an option.

But a narrow, dirt-clogged fissure for purchase. An hour and a half later, we overcame this 80-foot section of rock, just in time to watch the sunset. Two hundred feet of climbing lay between us and the summit. I looked at Meryl.

"How's it going?" I asked.

"G-g-g-good," she said. "I'm a little cold." Her lips were blue. Ninety miles away burned the lights of Tucson, and I could see a police helicopter hovering over the city like a firefly. I remembered the view vividly from the last night I'd spent on this cliff, and it made my stomach turn. I simply couldn't face another night like that. Out came the headlamps, and up we went. Slowly. The climbing wasn't too hard, but the rock was smooth and slabby, offering almost no places to anchor chocks or pitons. Falling was not an option.

We made the summit around 10 P.M., which didn't make us as happy as it might have: we still had to find the way down. We spotted a cairn above a rocky escarpment and trundled down a gully of loose rocks. Climbing gear jingled rhythmically with each tired step. Down through a tunnel of oaks and pines, we came upon the rusty remains of a ladder that had been pounded into the rock 50 years earlier. We were on the right track. Three rappels later, we stumbled upon a sleeping camper. He stood up abruptly.

"Who is it?" he asked in a startled voice.

"Just climbers," I said. I couldn't believe we'd made it.

"Oh," he said. "Sorry to yell, but this place is weird. Know what I mean?" I nodded and asked him how to get to the saddle. "Just down there and to the left," he said. We thanked him and plodded on, stopping to suck on a few icicles that were hanging from a boulder. It was now 2 A.M. We were within minutes of our sleeping bags. But the trail just kept going, down, down, down. We hiked for nearly an hour, stupid with exhaustion. We hadn't eaten or drunk for 12 hours, and our climbing shoes were destroying our feet. We were lost. We made a fire, lay down on a bed of dried up leaves, and chalked up another one for l'itoi.

Four long hours later, the sun came up. We didn't recognize any of the landmarks, couldn't even see Baboquivari. Then we noticed the shadows. "Meryl," I said, "where does the sun rise?" We'd dropped into the west canyon instead of the east one and hiked for an hour in the wrong direction. We trudged back up to the saddle and I felt giddy with delight. Not only had we survived the ascent, but we were going to spend a night on Babo without shivering.

quickly found our packs. The only food left was a can of tuna and some peanut butter, which we quickly devoured.

Three hours later we were at our truck, which had a dead battery. Too dead, it turned out, to push-start. We'd hit the camper light switch pulling our packs out three days earlier, and hadn't noticed.

There was a new jeep parked next to us, and luckily its driver showed up an hour later. Unluckily, she wasn't much help. "My boyfriend will be back pretty soon," she said. "He'll know where the jumper cables are." Hours passed, but no boyfriend.

Late that afternoon, three cars came bouncing up the dirt track: my parents in one, my sister in another, my roommates in a third. My mother was in tears, adding guilt to the smorgasbord of emotions I'd experienced in the last 24 hours. But they'd brought cookies instead of body bags, jumper cables instead of stretchers, and for that I was relieved.

Again I swore off Baboquivari, but eight months later, my friend Peter Noebels suggested we climb another route on Babo's east face — a harder one, named Dreams of l'itoi. To my dismay, I agreed immediately, and so did Meryl. This time we returned to the mountain with more than the summit as a goal. We wanted to get off in a reasonable fashion as well.

At sunset on the fourth day of our ascent we reached the summit. We were exhausted, and we'd had some close calls while climbing, but we'd made it. The mountain was bathed in alpenglow, and the view was stunning. But we wanted down, and it was already dark.

As we neared the saddle (where friends had brought our packs that morning from the base of the climb), I felt giddy with delight. Not only had we survived the ascent, but we were going to spend a night on Babo without shivering.

Only the packs weren't where we thought they'd be. We searched the area for half an hour. "Maybe they decided it was too much stuff to move," Meryl said.

We hiked up to the ledge where we had been camped out. Nothing. We drank water from a spring and headed back to the saddle. A hundred yards in front of us a small avalanche of rocks tumbled off the face, echoing down the canyon. We stopped in our tracks.

"This place is weird," I said.

We searched for another hour, but then our headlamps began to fade. We'd have to find the packs in the morning. Back at the saddle we sat dumbfounded around a fire, speculating about the location of our packs, and about l'itoi's sense of humor. We were still alive, after all, and not in any danger — which was no small comfort, considering the way the past days had gone. But as the night wore on it got colder.

By 4 A.M., I could take it no longer. Those packs had to be somewhere nearby.

We followed the trail to a drainage and combed the terrain with our dim lights. I spotted a side trail going through some trees, one I hadn't seen before. I followed it with my light. Twenty feet away, our packs hung from a tree. I was jubilant. Ten minutes later, we were curled inside our sleeping bags, eating salami and cheese, and celebrating our tremendous luck. We had been bone-cold, and now we were warm. It was amazing. Maybe, I thought, l'itoi doesn't mind climbers so much after all.