Catching Up
Before we jump into this story, I’d like to bring to your attention that this is the first post I’ve written in a month regarding my climbing adventures. I originally tried to write the recounts of The Three Musketeers’ Texas trip on June 2nd. In light of the George Floyd protests, I didn’t feel comfortable sharing my thoughts on the fun adventures I’ve had in the past. When I write, I get an escape from reality for a moment. But I felt it was more appropriate to live in this present moment. To absorb what’s going on in this world, to try to make sense of it. I’ve debated whether I would post something on this blog regarding politics but ended deciding against it. There are other venues that I will be pursuing for that. Without further ado, here is a reflective piece on the Colorado-Texas trip that took place this past Winter.
Chapter 7: Giving Back to Jack
For the first time in the young history of Nikou’s blog, I’m having to introduce someone that I’ve known for a while. I don’t do well with having a lot of information and anecdotes to choose from. The short of it is, Jack and I know each other from the Atlanta International School (AIS). He attended this school for pretty much his entire life, while I only attended AIS for high school. We were friends for a while but grew closer near the end of senior year. He left the state to study at Duke, whereas I stayed in Georgia for my studies. So we spent most of our summers together, my birthday marking the beginning of summer break and his birthday marking the end thereof.
Jack has always been very athletic and involved in school. He also grew up spending a lot of his time in the outdoors. I was the complete opposite for most of my life. At some point, I wanted to change that. I had gotten into weight lifting and wanted to grow both physically and mentally as a person. I think that’s a trait that we shared which helped us grow closer in our friendship. We pushed one another, which is something I’ve always sought out in a friend. He’s taught me quite a lot. This trip, the plan was to go skiing and climbing. While this trip was a good chance for me to give back and be the teacher for once, I got the chance to snowboard for the first time. He was the one to teach me that. He also took me tubing and wakeboarding for the first time, got me into running… The list goes on. Be it land or water, Jack is gifted and he likes to share those gifts with others. For this trip, I wanted to give back to my good friend.
Jack and I graduated university at the same time but I took a gap year while he set off to obtain his master’s degree. I had already taken Jack to the climbing gym a couple times before. He eventually took a job at the Duke climbing wall, so I knew he must enjoy climbing enough to divert some of his time to it, which is not easy for a graduate student. For his winter break, I spoke to another AIS student about potentially visiting them in Colorado for some skiing. The plan was then to get a rental car and drive down to El Paso, to meet my buddy Pat (mentioned in the Foster Falls post).
First, we flew out of the Atlanta airport with our overweight baggage. It was packed full of skiing and climbing gear. It took some puppy eyes and a little bit of a pity party from the two of us, before the flight attendant actually waived the $100 fee for the 10 lbs overage we had. We get through security and eventually board the plane. We didn’t get seated next to each other but I simply sat next to Jack and waited for someone to claim their seat on what was supposed to be a full plane. People kept walking up and I would say, ok it’s this person clearly. And we’d watch them pass. By some crazy luck, no one claimed the seat. I had asked for a change of seats before the flight and they would not do it because apparently they couldn’t. We were well entertained by the amount of luck we had coming our way already. We enjoyed ourselves in Telluride, skiing with our buddy AJ. His family hosted us and helped us get a rental car from the Telluride regional airport. This all happened right after Christmas so it was pretty difficult to obtain a car and rates were high. AJ’s family had to leave before we did, which is when Jack and I rented snowboards and he taught me how to snowboard, on our last half day of ski in Telluride. After spending a good bit on a rental car, we decided to go for a motel in Durango. We were told that the mountain road might be shutdown in Telluride and that we would be able to tell once we reached the gate, whether conditions were safe for driving or not. We drove for about 3 hours at night until we reached our destination, the Budget Inn in Durango. We enjoyed some Imperial Stouts and watched Valley Uprising for the nth time. I told Jack that I feel more “at home” that way.
We grabbed some breakfast in Durango that morning before driving 8 hours to El Paso, TX. It was there that we met up with Pat, who drove out from Austin. Originally, we were going to boulder at Hueco Tanks, the mecca of US bouldering. However, Texas takes stewardship of its public land pretty seriously. Hueco Tanks requires 3 months notice to give a permit, so we were unable to go there. Instead, we visited the Franklin Mountains nearby. The skiing portion of the trip was over and it was now time to climb!
This is our first time visiting the Franklin Mountains. We follow a gulley and cross through a field of cacti. We presume that it’s completely normal to play Minesweeper on our way to the crag, as we’re all still relatively new to Outdoor climbing and have no clue what a visit to the lesser travelled crags should entail. I remember Pat a.k.a Wylie Coyote, getting on a climb and realizing that the spines of a cactus still remained in his leg. He pulled them out before jumping on an old sport route that had a couple of spinning bolts or spinners. Spines and spinners! That’s what you get in the Wild West. Wylin Out in the Wild West!
We taught Jack how to clean a route while on the ground, teaching him the theory of cleaning an anchor, which took him no longer than 5 minutes to fully absorb. He then put the theory to the test on a short and easy lead route, keeping his composure all throughout. It’s a little bit of a strange feeling, your first time undoing your knot 50ft off the ground!
It was nice to be able to give back for once and I felt like Jack enjoyed himself out there. He learned rather quickly and it wasn’t long before he was more comfortable on the rock than I was. It took me quite some time to get over my fears of leading and I still have my moments.
We returned to the crag the next day, visiting the McKelligon Canyon instead. The approach was pretty straightforward and the quality of the rock was not as chossy. We climbed through the entire day, finishing up in the dark with some night climbing. We brought our weary souls home for New Year’s Eve as we tried to muster up the strength to go out and celebrate the New Year. Jack couldn’t find his wallet as we called the Uber and I was just exhausted, as I was still jet lagged from my trip to Europe and overall beat up from a long day’s worth of climbing. We all ended up going to bed, preparing to leave to Austin the next day.
From El Paso to Austin, it normally takes 8h30min by car. We made a detour to visit Big Bend National Park. The goal was to visit the hot springs that Pat and I had long discussed since the moment we first set foot in Jeju Korean spa, back when I first met him in Atlanta. I’d always wanted to go to a hot spring, so it was well worth the detour for me. On our way to Big Bend, we stopped at a coffee shop in Marfa, TX. I usually don’t drink coffee so I wanted to sit in the car, but I saw a carabiner on the restaurant sign. As I looked closer, I saw that the name of this coffee shop was: “The Choss Shop”. Intrigued, all 3 of us entered the coffee shop. As Pat ordered his drink, we talked to the owner. We talked about climbing with this guy who reminded me of an older Alex Honnold with his awkward demeanor, sausage fingers and a certain je ne sais quoi. We told him about our plans and he told us that we just had to make a stop at the Closed Canyon. He gave us some change for a 20, so that we could pay the 5 dollar parking fee. We ran to the Closed Canyon when we got there and explored this narrow slot canyon, the likes of which I had never experienced before.
We eventually made our way to the hot spring, which was situated right next to the Rio Grande. The Rio Grande was surprisingly not that wide at this particular section of the river. For reference, I’d say it would take less than a minute to cross over from the American side to Mexico. The river was, however, cold and swift. Going from the 100+ degree water to 40 degrees or less, made for quite the wake-up call. Once we got our fill on super hot and super cold water, we decided to continue onwards to Austin.
We got to Austin around midnight. We had trouble finding our Airbnb originally, as the GPS gave us the wrong address. We went to sleep rather quickly and visited the Barton Creek Greenbelt, where it takes 5 minutes to reach the Limestone crag and start climbing some sport routes. We climbed until 7pm or so. We could certainly start feeling the trip wearing us down little by little, so our sessions wouldn’t last quite as long as they did at the start. We celebrated by getting some In-N-Out, one of my favorite fast food restaurants, which we unfortunately don’t have in Georgia.
We finished off the climbing trip with Reimers Ranch, which is another limestone crag. We met up with one of Pat’s friends who showed us around and at this point, I don’t really remember much other than trying a 5.10b/c on Top Rope. The route had quite the overhang and was overall hard for me to do. I struggled through it and that was probably the last thing we did before heading off to Dallas, TX.
We stayed at Patrick’s dad’s house. I say that but we actually just dropped off our stuff and went to King’s Spa and ended up sleeping in a sauna for an hour before I eventually called it and asked Pat where we could sleep for the rest of the night. We were all clearly very exhausted. We woke up around 4am, on some floor mats at King Spa. I quickly realized that we had about 2 hours to catch our flight back home, so we drove to Pat’s dad’s house and quickly grabbed our stuff. We went to the airport and as I was about to drop off the luggage, I saw that the line for check-in was through the door! I eventually called Pat who wasn’t too far away, and I asked him if he could just bring the luggage with him, on his drive back to Atlanta. We were able to check in online and get through security in time to catch our flight. Again, we were able to somehow make everything work out perfectly for this trip. I couldn’t believe our luck. What a wild, wild west.
P.S: Look up carabiner in French. What does it have to do with a Musketeer?