the cover

CLIMBING THE ROCK CALLED LEVIATHAN

"I JUST WANT TO BE ON TOP OF THIS THING," SAID ERIC. "MY FEET HURT."

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 16 AND 17) The 1,000-foot-high granite dome Leviathan rises above the Pusch Ridge Wilderness in the Santa Catalina Mountains.

(BELOW) Author Jim Boyer places a climbing device in a crack during the ascent of Leviathan Dome.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) Boyer, top left, and Eric Scully belay while Matt Bunz makes one of the most difficult moves on the climb.

Eric was only 11, but these did not strike me as childish complaints. We were 700 feet up a huge spike of rock, and to get to this point we'd spent most of the day poking our climbing shoes into narrow cracks and stepping onto sharp granite edges. Now we were perched in a small alcove that would make a nice roost for buzzards but didn't do so well by people.

I squatted on a rounded ledge the size of a car bumper; Eric leaned away from the rock like a water-skier, suspended by a rope tied off to a cluster of climbing anchors stuffed in a fist-size crack.

Beneath us the rock dropped straight down for 200 feet, then sloped gradually outward like built-up wax at the base of a candle. We could see our campsite far below in Alamo Canyon and cars like ants moving along north of Tucson. The sky, to our relief, was cloudless (it had rained the afternoon before). It was a nice view but did little for our sore feet and tired limbs.

"What do you think of the climbing?" I asked Eric.

"I don't think while I'm climbing," he said. "I sing. I've been singing all day. But I'm running out of songs."

I knew what he meant. The biggest rocks are always the most alluring, especially when you're at home on the couch flipping through picture books and saying things like, "Wouldn't it be neat to climb that one?" Actually climbing them, however, is another story altogether, full of blistered toes, scraped knees, and sunburn and that's if things go well.

We'd been making good time so far, but it was midafternoon, and some of the hardest terrain was still above us. I looked at the sun's position, and then I looked down at 13-year-old Matt, who was moving meticulously up a steep pillar of rock.

"Nice work, Matt!" I shouteded. "Just keep moving."

Climbers have been called by a famous climber, no less - "Conquistadores of the Useless," but a few weeks earlier the idea of scaling this 1,000-foot obelisk of metamorphosed granite had seemed worthy enough. Leviathan offers one of the longest climbs in Arizona, and if we made it up, Eric Scully and Matt Bunz would become the youngest climbers ever to scale its north face.

The boys had been climbing only a couple of years, but were already floating their way up hard climbs with such ease that it left us older climbers dumbfounded. We had all met at the indoor climbing gym in Tucson, where the boys could usually be found afternoons after school.

Eric was talkative and at ease among adults, as happy to discuss movies like Schindler's List as he was his latest climbing exploits (which included a second-place finish for his age group at the North American Junior Climbing Championships).

Matt kept a lower profile. He revealed his ambitions mostly through questions, like, "Have you climbed El Capitan in Yosemite? What sort of gear do you need for that?" Then he would listen intently, nodding his head and filing all pertinent information in memory. He wouldn't say that he was going to climb it, but I knew that someday he would. In the meantime, I'd said, how about Leviathan?

When I began climbing, a decade earlier, Leviathan held for me a nearly mythical aura. I had never seen this big chunk of rock, but it existed vividly in the stories I heard from veteran climbers. It had taken numerous attempts over a five-year period (1972-1977) to establish a route up its north face, the details of which were tersely recorded in a loose-leaf binder (called "The Book") at the Summit Hut outdoor shop. One friend gave me a wide-eyed account of the 40-foot pendulum-fall his partner had taken on the traverse pitch; another told me of the night he and two pals were caught by darkness and spent the night on a cramped ledge 200 feet below the summit.

Over the years, as climbing techniques and equipment improved, Leviathan became more of a classic climb than a terrifying one, but it still is an arduous undertaking. We left Tucson on a Friday afternoon in March, accompanied by photographer Peter Noebels (who had done Leviathan's only one-man ascent 10 years earlier) and Jason Janesky, an instructor from the climbing gym.

We parked at Catalina State Park, 10 miles north of Tucson, and thrashed our way up Alamo Canyon for nearly three hours. There was no trail, and each forward step seemed to involve one of three choices: clamber over a boulder, rake through a stand of catclaw, or plunge your feet into

THE HANDHOLD WAS WELL OUT OF HIS REACH AND TINY — BUT BEFORE I COULD WARN HIM, HE'D SCRUNCHED HIS BODY UP LIKE A COILING SNAKE, AND LUNGED.

the shallow but cold stream. Most of us tried to stay dry, but Eric kept a gleeful tally of his sock-soaking missteps. "That's twice," he would say. "That's 12 times," and so on.

We made camp in a clearing a mile below Leviathan. The ground was rocky and not very flat, but there were nice oak trees and running water 20 feet away. Earlier, when we'd reminded the boys to bring only the bare necessities (to save weight), they had nodded earnestly, but now Matt opened his pack and pulled out two two-liter bottles of Dr. Pepper, which he quickly began to consume. A gallon of soda weighed roughly the same as Matt's climbing rope (which I'd carried for him), but he offered me a sip before I could object. Over a dinner of bean burritos and fig newtons, we had a sort of pre-game pep talk-not that there was any lack of enthusiasm. Mostly we needed to remember that Leviathan is a serious rock, and that climbing it would be a sane and safe undertaking only to the extent that we were excruciatingly careful.

By 7:30 the next morning we were at the base of the climb, sorting through gear, pulling on our harnesses and shoes. Leviathan loomed over us like a giant tombstone, varnished with water streaks from years of runoff. The four of us would be joined by three ropes, and our plan was to move up the rock like a giant inchworm: First I would climb until I ran out of rope, then Eric would follow, then Matt. As Matt belayed Jason up (the belayer controls the amount of slack in the climber's rope), I would start up again. Ten repetitions of this process would get us to the top. In the meantime, Peter would rappel down from the summit (which was easily attainable from the back side) to take photos.

The first crux came 100 feet up. The rock wasn't very steep, but the only holds were credit-card thin and slick with lichen. I was familiar with the moves - I'd done the climb before - but it still took me 10 minutes to commit myself to those ballbearing footholds. I stood there with my calves burning, dipping my sweaty fingers into my chalk bag. Next came Eric, moving up the rock as casually as if he were walking along a sidewalk - until the holds disappeared.I watched him run his hands over the smooth rock, searching for an edge or nubbin to grab. Then he glanced up and saw a hold I'd left coated with chalk, making it look bigger than it was. The handhold was well out of his reach - and tiny - but before I could warn him, he'd scrunched his body up like a coiling snake, and lunged. Eric had mastered this technique for difficult reaches, but he was used to climbing on steeper terrain with bigger holds. Now his fingers slapped the rock, groped for purchase, and slid down. I locked off the rope, and he came to an abrupt stop.

"Oh, flip," he said.Even short falls can be terrifying when you're a hundred feet off the ground, but Eric hardly noticed. He simply felt around for closer holds, planted his climbing shoes on a couple of pea-size nubs, and moved on up. As did Matt and Jason, and soon we were on our way up a jagged crack, contorting our hands and fingers until they fit snugly between the plates of cold rock. We worked our way around an overhanging brow of rock, then fought past a big tuft of bear grass growing from the crevice. By noon we were squatting on a bushy ledge nearly 500 feet off the deck.

Eric was humming the tune to a Jack-InThe-Box commercial, and Matt was scanning the canyon below us for our campsite (which he quickly spotted). It occurred to me that most of their friends were probably off playing little-league baseball, but they seemed to think their present surroundingswere perfectly normal. Later I asked Eric why he thought he had taken to climbing when most of his friends who had tried it hadn't.

"I guess it's just something you're born with," he said. "You do it once, and you just realize this is what you want to do."

I posed the same question to Matt, whose quiet intensity on the rock reminded me of great climbers I'd read about. He responded with an awkward, prolonged silence, and then said, "I have no idea." Both answers struck me as perfect.

Which is more than I could say about the way I felt on the upper sections of the climb. I grunted through moves that had flowed easily in the past, only to watch Eric and Matt and Jason waltz right up the rock. True, they didn't have to worry about falling because they were always belayed from above (only the lead climber is ever in a position to take a significant fall), but I was reminded for the umpteenth time that no climbing route can be taken for granted.

The penultimate pitch (rope length) fol-lowed a bizarre watermelon-wide hollow up the inside of a 90-degree corner. Eric fought his way up impatiently and report-ed: "It was like this overhanging off-width, and I couldn't hand-jam it, and I was stick-ing my elbow in the crack and pushing my butt against the rockman!" Matt took longer, but climbed smoothly and seemed to revel in the complexity of the climbing. "I liked it," he said. "It was challenging."

We hauled our tired bodies up the final chimney-pitch backs on one wall, feet on another and soon found ourselves standing on the summit. We paused to rub our toes and admire the sunset, then rap-pelled off a tree back down into the waning light. We'd brought a cellular phone up the route, just in case, but now we used it to report our success. The buttons glowed in the darkness as Eric dialed home.

"Hi, Mom," he said. There was a pause as she spoke.

"We're back at the base of the climb," Eric said.

"I'm still alive . . . Yep . . . I gotta go. I love you. 'Bye."

And down the steep slope we trundled, ropes coiled in our packs and waiting for the next big climb.