I’m sitting in a motel room on Main Street in Moab, Utah, the sun just beginning to peek over the La Sal Mountains. Moab sits smack dab in the middle of the canyon country, a red land of soaring sandstone cliffs and towers, sharp canyons incised by the Colorado River and its tributaries, and dusty outwash plains dotted with sagebrush. It’s a place where I’ve climbed since 1970 when I made my first desert pilgrimage with Jimmy Dunn. The following year Jimmy and I made the sixth ascent of Castleton Tower, a sheer 450-foot-high sandstone monolith that now has over 40,000 ascents. Back in the early 70s few folks climbed in the canyon country. Moab itself was a recovering uranium town; there were no mountain bikers and, like climbers, only a few intrepid jeepers. Things have changed with Moab now being a huge recreation complex.

Last Friday, Brian Shelton with Front Range Climbing Company and Texas surgeon Bill Springer and I, escaping snow and cold, drove over from Colorado’s Front Range for a week of climbing and adventure in the canyonlands. We haven’t been disappointed. It was busy over the holiday weekend with jeepers, pedalheads, and other climbers getting a last hurrah before winter really sets in, but we picked lonely cliffs, sharing them only with ravens, sand, and sun.

Our plan is climb a bunch of desert towers, some I’ve done before and some I haven’t. Bill has never been here before so we want to show him a good time and get him on a few high summits. Yesterday was a brilliant day. We climbed a handful of fun routes at the Sunshine Wall north of Arches National Park and then hiked 50 minutes up a sandstone bench to a hidden valley filled with fins and pinnacles. We climbed an obvious small tower called Tezcatlipoca, named for the Aztec god of the night sky by the late Mike Baker who did the first ascent in 1998 under a full moon. It was relatively easy (5.7) and had a cool summit. We chilled on top for ten minutes, then rappelled down and made the long hike back to the truck. In the distance I could see a long string of cars on U.S. 191 heading back to Salt Lake City and Denver. The end of a long weekend…but the beginning of another desert week.

Read More About Canyon Country Climbing:
Owl Rock: An Arches National Park Adventure
Classic Desert Climbing Photos by Ed Webster.
John Otto & The First Ascent of Independence Monument
Climbing Otto’s Route

Photo above: Bill rappels off Tezcatlipoca, while Brian does a “Captain Morgan” jig.
Photograph © Stewart M. Green

Last Wednesday afternoon, November 18 , Nathanael Hansen made the first free ascent of Ryan’s Inferno on the Middle Tower of the Tower of Babel in the Garden of the Gods, Colorado. The route, the first pitch of an old aid climb called The Inferno, rises sharply above a ramp to anchors below a small roof 60 feet up. Back in 1999 a group of local climbers— the late Ryan Sayers, Dan Russell, Jeff Russell, and Brian Shelton—thought the overhanging prow would go all free so they rebolted it and worked on it. After Sayers was killed by double lightning strikes in the Wind Rivers in 2004, the project sat untouched until this year when another gang of young Colorado Springs climbers began working the moves.

Than Hansen was the first to dial the beta out after working on the route for four days. On the fifth day he went for the complete free ascent. On his first attempt he plummeted off the first crux, a long dyno from tiny crimpers to a sloping rail, and lowered to the ground. After a short rest he then climbed the route all the way to the last move—clipping the anchors—but his strength failed and again he fell. Than took a long rest and on his next try hiked the route and casually clipped the anchors. Ryan’s Inferno was a project no longer and is now the hardest route in the Garden of the Gods with a possible grade of 5.13a. Great send, Than!

Photo left: Than Hansen crimps the final moves on the first free ascent of “Ryan’s Inferno.”
Photograph © Stewart M. Green

The great French alpinist and rock climber Gaston Rébuffat, born in Marseille, France in 1921 and died of cancer in Paris in 1985, was one of the best French climbers in the mid-20th century. He began to climb at age 14 on his home crags, the soaring limestone cliffs at the Calenques along the Mediterranean shore and Mont Sainte-Victoire, a limestone mountain often painted by Cezanne. Every summer he migrated north to climb in the Alps above Chamonix. Rébuffat became the first climber to ascend the six great north faces—Grandes Jorasses, Piz Badile, Petit Dru, Matterhorn, Eiger, and Cima Grande di Lavaredo—of the Alps. He was also a key member on the 1950 French expedition that climbed Annapurna, the first 8,000-meter peak ever climbed. Over his 50-year climbing career, he made over a thousand first ascents, including many in the Mont Blanc massif.

Besides being a prolific climber, Gaston Rébuffat, who had no education beyond high school, became a foremost mountaineering writer. He penned 20 books, which were translated into many languages; wrote a climbing column for the Paris newspaper Le Monde, started his own publishing house in Geneva; and wrote and narrated several award-winning films. I first read Rébuffat’s classic book Between Heaven and Earth in 1970, the year it was first published in English. His elegant lyrical prose thrilled my imagination with its reverant and lucid description of the mountains and climbing, while the stylish and excellent photographs of Rébuffat let me experience granite heights rising above glaciers, the ring of a steel piton pounded in a thin crack, and the swirl of snow and cloud on an alpine face. Lastly, part of Rebuffat’s legacy is a photograph of his lean figure standing atop a thin spire and silhouetted against his beloved Mont Blanc; a photograph that is currently racing into far-off outer space on Voyager I, where perhaps some distant alien will see that fragment of the human spirit.

This quote comes from Rébuffat’s excellent book Starlight and Storm, a recollection of his adventures on the great north faces in the Alps.

In this modern age, very little remains that is real. Night has been banished, so have the cold, the wind and the stars. They have all been neutralized: the rhythm of life itself is obscured. Everything goes so fast and makes so much noise, and men hurry by without heeding the grass by the roadside, its colour, its smell and the way it shimmers when the wind caresses it. What a strange encounter then is that between man and the high places of his planet! Up there he is surrounded by the silence of forgetfulness. If there is a slope of snow steep as a glass window, he climbs it, leaving behind him a strange trail. If there is a rock perfect as an obelisk, he defies gravity and proves that he can get up anywhere.

Buy Gaston Rébuffat’s books:
Starlight and Storm Classic Rébuffat with stylish prose and enough adventure and excitement to keep your palms sweaty and your ice axe sharp.
The Mont Blanc Massif: The 100 Finest Routes This is more than a mere guidebook to climbing the Mont Blanc Massif. It's an inspiring compilation of words and photos celebrating the joy of alpine climbing.
Men and the Matterhorn An informative historical book about the history of climbing on the Matterhorn.
On Ice and Snow and Rock Another classic book about alpine climbing.

Photo above: Gaston Rebuffat aid climbing near Mont Blanc, France.
Photograph courtesy Pierre Tairraz: Between Heaven and Earth

You’re planning a big mountaineering trip, maybe up Orizaba or Kilimanjaro or even one of the 8,000-meter peaks. You’re going down the equipment list: Stove, check. Ice axe, check. Sleeping bag, check. You reach Music, but your buddy scratched a line through it. “Hey man, I gotta take my music!” “Can’t,” she says. “Can’t take your IPod above 10,000 feet. It’ll get altitude sickness.”

Yep, that’s what Apple and the experts say. If you do, there is the possibility your IPod will not only stop working but can be irrevocably damaged. Don’t believe me? Then check your IPod specs: “Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m).”

We never think we can’t take our IPod everywhere we go since they're part of us. Here in Colorado, lots of climbers I know regularly tote their IPods up Fourteeners or on alpine faces like The Diamond on Long’s Peak. The technies, however, say it’s just not a good idea and it’s probably a matter of time before it has a high-altitude hiccup. An IPod’s hard drive heads use air pressure to float on a cushion of air about 5 millionths of an inch thick with the platters spinning at 53.55 miles per hour. Since air pressure decreases the higher you go, the greater is the possibility that the air pressure is too low to produce the air cushion, resulting in the hard drive head smacking against the spinning platter, leaving gouges and you without tunes. This also applies to laptop computers.

If you need the sound of music in the mountains, then you’re better off taking a Nano or a Shuffle since they’re solid-state like a flash drive and are unaffected by altitude. Oh, extreme temperatures also affect IPods. A stored unit can sustain temps from -4F to 115F but if you operate it, then its optimal temps are between 32F and 95F.

I never listen to music when I’m climbing, but I do carry a little 1G Sandisk player in my pack so I can listen at a bivouac or laying in the tent on a long winter night. I use it because it holds plenty of music and it’s cheap so I don’t worry about losing it or breaking it. What do you think? Does your IPod work at high altitudes? Or does it get what I call IPAS (IPod Altitude Sickness)? Let me know what your IPod’s high point is.

Photo above: You would be waving your arms too if your IPod stopped working on top of Mount Everest.
Photograph courtesy Miura Qomolangma 2008