[audio: http://www.jakecast.com/wp-music/takeawalk.mp3|titles=Take A Walk|artists=Masta Ace]

Here on the JCDC (I’m not going to explain this acronym, I’m just going to use it over and over and act like every but you knows what it stands for) I tend to focus on media like pictures and videos. It’s a rare day that there is an actual write-up on something outdoorsy for a couple of reasons: a) words are boring b) writing is hard and if I manage to come up with one clever line of dialogue a month, it is a good month (I know you’re still in stitches about the ‘hanging on for snow’ remark) c) lastly and more importantly, programming all day has left me with zero writing skills as it turns out computer science is not four years of writing essays on why computers are cool (I definitely feel mislead about my major…)-

Long before the sketchy.

However, sometimes I’m just too lazy to bring a camera and an essay style write-up is necessary, so here goes:

Last Friday (the 17th), JCDC self-proclaimed star athlete Nik Aksamit and I sat outside the Student Union pondering the prospects of dropping out of school and living out of our Subarus making hacky sacks out of our own dreadlocks and selling them to pay for food. After I realized that my hair was way to curly for dreadlocks and the concept of willingly going to a Phish concert made us both want to stab ourselves in the ears we came up with a new plan: blitzkrieg to Castle Rocks in Idaho in one day and climb something cool. This quickly changed into a plan to drive south of Salt Lake and climb something in Utah. After that we became progressively lazier and decided to stay close to the Whole Foods in Sugarhouse so that we could get Turkey Paninis at some point and that’s how are plan to climb the West Slabs of Mt. Olympus was born.
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At 8:00a we arrived at Fern Groove Forest Court Drive Plaza Garden (or some weird suburban street) and departed upwards toward the rock face of Mt. Olympus. We managed to beat our record time and got lost within 20 minutes (our previous record was getting lost in 30m and was set the week before hiking up the north wall of Little Cottonwood Canyon). It was quickly pointed out to me that both these situations were my fault as I have a propensity to say, “I dunno. It looks like a trail to me” anytime there is an empty patch of dirt wider than 2′. After an hour and a half of bushwhacking through trees that had apparently been planted by Satan in order to stab you directly in the shins we found the trail we had wanted to be on the whole time. About half-way through this hike I realized that I had left my head lamp in the car, but said, “Screw it, we started at 8am and there is now way will be out here until dark…right?!?!”

Not the trail you’re looking for.

After thirty more minutes of hiking and one incident where I lost a headbutting match with a car-sized boulder we were at the base of the West Slabs. Currently stationed two pitches up the climb was a couple who had apparently made it their goal to exfoliate the face of the rock by kicking off as many loose stones as they could. Not wanting to die from head trauma Nik and I proceeded away from the main climbing area and found a much dirtier arete/crack climb that we thought we be fun. Unfortunately, a father/son team that arrived after us also decided that would be fun and proceeded to hike above us and place gear in the climb we were headed up.

I hope these trees will hold a fall…

After debating on whether or not we would get more peace and quiet turning around and climbing in a gym downtown, Nik decided to charge on and climb up the dirty blank face where gear placement was minimal.

I will now summarize the experience of climbing 7 pitches of 5.boring rock.
Pitch 1: Having to scramble upwards on a crappy slope while belaying because we don’t have enough rope sucks.
Pitch 2: Girth hitching trees is the only type of protection that should be allowed for rock climbing. Period.
Pitch 3: This belay station hurts my ass.
Pitch 4: This view would be more rad if this belay station was not hurting my ass.
Pitch 5: I was a little disappointed when I found out 5.6 was the only grade for ten pitches of climbing, but I was still excited to learn how to place gear and see how belay stations were set up with trad equipment. However, I was quickly let down again when I discovered that Nik wanted to play the ‘How Far Can I Run This Climb Out’ game.
Pitch 6: Nik just won. 60% of the rope used and he’s placing his first piece of protection. If he falls that’s ~200′ x Nik’s Weight vs. the world’s smallest micro-nut that is holding me on this face. I’m not the math major of this group, but this seems dumb.
Pitch 7: Alright. This climb is officially boring. I forgot why people climb up stuff without the prospect of being able to ski down it.

We should have planned how we were going to get down before we climbed up…

It was at this point we saw a group of people 40 feet to our right beginning to rappel down the climb. At that point Nik and I thought, ‘Okay, screw it. We’ll rappel with these people out of here, we will hike down with them and cheers Nalgene bottles with them and call it a day. These people are our new friends.’
Before realizing we were very hungry and tired we free climbed over and began to follow them down. Shortly after setting up the first rappel down I noticed that group below us had to unhook from their rope and begin free climbing downwards to the second rappel station.
“Crap!” I thought, they did not realize that these were 70m rappels and we are also screwed because we have a 60m rope just like them. I shouted down to them asking how far up they had to unhook off their 60m rope. They were quick to inform me that they had a 70m rope. This was news I was not happy about. This meant we had to down-climb off the rope even further than they did. Good thing I’m too tired to realize this is a bad idea…
I quickly run out the first rappel, unhook and begin down-climbing in the slowest safest manner possible. Nik is following me from above. As I was about 10′ away from the second rappel station I hear Nik exclaim a profound, “Oh. Fuck.”
I didn’t need to look up to know what happened. He had begun to pull the rope without untying the safety knot we had put in the end so our rappel didn’t finish with a 1000′ death cartwheel to the bottom of the mountain. I look up to see he has already pulled the rope 20′ or so above his head and well over a roof that looked nothing like the 5.6 climbing we had been bored on all day.
“You got this?” I ask hesitantly from below.
“We’ll found out quick” Nik responds, clearly pissed off.
This was Nik’s only freakout of the day and it was a pretty mellow one at that.
I honestly did not want to watch him free-solo for the rope and concentrated entirely on getting to the webbing at the next belay station. After making it there I began watching the people we are following chain their runners and webbing together so that they can make it from the 2nd to the 3rd belay station which is a considerably sketchier down-climb.
As this is going on Nik manages to grab the rope. He described the last move as a 1-foot and 1-hand off the rock reach over a roof to grab the rope and bite it to hang on as he swayed for balance. Nice dude, I think you can safely chalk that maneuver up there with your ‘Enron Air in Flat Light‘ and ‘The High School Football Line.’

Sunny climbing is only cool in theory.

As we scramble for ideas on how we are going to make it to this next station (I decided that we were not going to try and do their sketchy down climb with no webbing from 15-20 feet further away) we decide to roll the dice and rappel off the healthiest looking tree we can find in between the second and third belay area. I quickly zip down the rope and begin looking at trees and I notice one of the trees has webbing and rings on it. “Awesome!” I thought, but I then quickly realized that if the group below us skipped that tree they clearly have no idea where they are or where they’re going. Definitely bad.

This adventure has gone from, ‘Hey, let’s climb Olympus on Saturday and sign the summit post and skip across the nice trail on the frontside through a field of gilly flowers as the sun goes down’ to ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here before it gets dark and we get eaten by god-knows-what’ real fast.

Our extra rappel station ensured that the people we were following disappeared into the sunset like old hippies on Alta’s High-T after the first chair of a powder day. We quickly slide down from tree to tree (one of which was only 8″ in diameter and only 2′ tall and had Nik un-clipping his runners from it as I lowered down) until there are no more rappel stations. We are still ~200′ up the wall. Shit.

See those water tanks way down in the valley? That’s where my car (and headlamp) is.

As Nik began looking for the best way off this hell hole (or slab as it were) I am wrapping the rope up and hoping I can manage to hook it to my backpack better than I did on the hike up. It is at this point, stretching the rope across my shoulders, standing in the sun, that I managed to go from tired and hungry to straight delirious and dizzy. Real bad timing.

After working my way down the rock to Nik, I do my best to keep my balance and eat what remains of our food. At the beginning of the day this was one bagel, one clif bar, one granola bar and some week-old strawberry flavored shot blocks. At this point we are down to a clif bar and some shot blocks and we are also running dangerously low on water, which wasn’t exactly plentiful to begin with.

Either 2 minutes or one hour later (I can’t be sure as my perception of time at this point was loopy at best) we make it to the bottom of the rock face. The sun has now passed behind the Oquirrh mountains and streaks of orange and red are fading in the sky. After another half hour of scrambling down a loose rock field we make it to roughly the same place we started climbing at in the morning. It is now dark. There is no more ambient light from the sun. No more multicolored sky. It’s dark except for Salt Lake City in the distance, miles below us.

It is at this point I choose to have a personal crisis moment that involved nothing but really awesome swearing at the top of my lungs. Not swearing used to embellish a story or a statement, just loud shouts of “Fuck, this is so fucking fucked. We shouldn’t fucking be here. What the fuck.” I’m not entirely sure what ran through Nik’s head at this point, I’m just glad glad he didn’t call me a crazy nut job, smack me over the head with a rock, grab the car keys and bolt.

It is then that I notice two people are still rappelling off the face. This was quite startling because up until this point I had felt we were quite alone up there. There was something disturbingly comforting about realizing that there were two people even worse off than we were.

We then began to hike out using Nik’s headlamp to guide the way through some sketchy boulder problems that we had climbed up in the morning, but now had to do in reverse in the dark. It is hard to describe how happy I was at that moment that my Nike 6.0 skate shoes have traction that wouldn’t stick to a cheese grater. After stemming down a few 10 to 15′ tall rocks in the tight couloir that leads away from the West Slabs we finally hit a mellow section of dry riverbed/trail. We’re psyched. We know that the crappy parts of the hike and climb are behind us and while we aren’t exactly sure where the real trail is, we are going to follow this riverbed until we hit something that resembles a trail or a cairn or a Wal-Mart. It is also at this point that we can here people shouting in the distance. We are unable to make out what they’re saying, but it’s pretty loud. I turn around a notice a lone headlamp in the middle of the West Slab face (or what I’m guessing is the middle as it was far too dark to tell) and I think, “Whoa, summiting at night, that’s gnarly and I feel like a pussy now.”

Easy part of the hike out in the daylight.

Thirty minutes of relatively easy hiking later I hear more shouting and turn around to see the headlamp has not moved. Nik and I begin doing the math. If it was a couple climbers that were practicing sleeping on a port-o-ledge, we’d see two headlamps and they wouldn’t be shouting. If it was two climbers summiting, they would have moved upwards by now. We realize that we never saw the group rappelling as we hiked away from the wall make it down and we begin to think that they got stuck and their rope fell or got jammed. We make the decision to inform Utah Search & Rescue that there might be a couple climbers stuck on the wall. Unfortunately, I am using my cell as a flash light at this point (thank god for LED camera phone flashes) and don’t want to blow my battery trying to look up the number so Nik proceeds to call a few different people and finally gets through to Utah S&R who then precede to play the weirdest game of 20 questions with us as we descend (What race were they? What car were they driving? What does your gut tell you is happening up there?). We’ve now been hiking down the river bed for an hour and half and we are hauling ass. The cold of the night and lack of the bright sun has helped us regain some of our wits and I actually manage to spot a trail correctly for once.

Easy part of the hike out at night.

As we hike away from the riverbed we realize we are now traversing above houses. We can hear cars and dogs barking in the distance. We are super stoked until we can here one particularly looney dog barking louder and louder. We can’t figure out if we are getting closer to the dog or the dog is getting closer to us. It was then that Nik picked up a giant rock and gave me my 87th awesome mountaineering tip of the day, ‘It’s never a bad idea to have a big rock.’

Not long after that we see a 10′ tall black wrought iron fence that we passed 5 minutes into the hike that morning.
YES! We’re out! We run up to the fence and are dumbfounded when we see it is wrapped up and padlocked. We don’t want to go exploring for a way around and especially don’t want to stumble upon that damn dog that won’t stop barking. I make the executive decision and begin climbing up over the fence. Nik hands me his back pack and just before I jump to the ground on the other side I ask, “Wait…does that dog sound like it’s closer to you or closer to me?” Nik responds with an unsure, “uhhh…closer to me I think.” I sigh and remind Nik to bring his rock over with him when he hops the fence.

After he jumps over we begin looking for the turnoff trail to the street where my car is parked. We hike thirty feet and cannot find it. This is unsettling because we both remember it being very close to the fence when we hiked up that morning. It is then that I looked up and saw something I was really hoping would not be there. Another 10′ wrought iron fence. I didn’t say a word as I realized we had not cross over to the side of trail we had been on that morning, but rather we jumped into a giant fenced in area that I can only think cages in the worlds biggest, angriest dog. I cover the distance to the second fence with speed that would have impressed Usain Bolt and began vaulting over the much less solid gate that wobbled back and forth as I climbed. Apparently, half a day with little food and water had gotten the best of Nik’s paranoia as well as he told me that this caged in area had to be part of some psycho rednecks backyard and he is playing ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ and hunting stray hikers that get trapped in there. He throws his bag over the fence and gets to the other side faster than I can blink and we exchange the same, ‘what the hell was that?!’ look. Thirty feet later we find the cut off trail, hike down some stairs and arrive on the street we had departed from 13 and a half hours earlier. I look up and can still see a lone headlamp in the middle of the climb and notice that the car I parked behind that morning is still sitting there. We double check and hope that search and rescue will look into the matter as we high-five, load up my car and head for the nearest place with food and free water.

Things I learned after this adventure:
1) Never follow anyone for any reason, ever.
2) If Nik decides to place a hex nut or tri cam you will be able to hang a 747 off of it without worrying. While removing a few of the anchors he built I was pretty sure I was going to need a lightsaber to get them out of the wall.
3) Steve Jobs should have advertised the iPhone 4s LED Camera Flashlight feature way better. That would have more than made up for all the signal hoopla.
4) Trips based around the location of food (or Red Bull) never go according to plan.
5) The burrito you have after being stuck hiking around and climbing all day will be the best burrito you ever have.

On a side note, I would like to apologize the couple at Chipotle that had to watch me knock half the Wasatch Cache National Forest out of my shoes as I stood barefoot on 21st South. I realize you guys were on a date or something and the guy covered in dirt wheezing under the streetlight with a bloody big toe probably ruined the romantic mood of the evening.

But in all seriousness. That was the best burrito. Ever.
Jake