I've been following the adventures of North Face sponsored climber Renan Ozturk and his cohorts--Tim Kemple, Jimmy Chin, Alex Honnold, James Pearson, Mark Synott--on their trip to the remote Ennedi desert in Chad, Africa. After flying to Paris and then N'djamena in Chad, the party trekked across the desert for two days in four-wheel-drive vehicles. Renan wrote on his North Face blog: "We've seen a lot of camels, a lot of nomads, a TON of sand. Let's just say we're all a bit dusty."
Their goal is to climb lots of desert towers and the Ennedi, out in the middle of the Saharan nowhere in northeastern Chad, is stacked with towers. It's also a lawless area with bandits, poverty, no facilities, and, along with Arches National Park in Utah, has a huge collection of sandstone arches.
Yesterday Renan and James Pearson did the first ascent of a slender 300-foot-high tower that they dubbed the Wine Bottle because, duh, it looks like a wine bottle. Fat bottom to a thin neck. Renan called it "one of the coolest towers I've ever climbed." After finding it a couple days earlier, Renan writes, "There was pretty much no discussion - it was such a stunning objective that everyone took it for granted that we had to climb it. There was one little problem, namely that the neck looked super sketchy: steep, loose, chossy and distinctly lacking in cracks or any obvious lines."
After finding a possible line up the spire, Alex Honnold bailed, "not inspired by the choss factor," so Renan and James Pearson geared up. James led pitch one, "a 60m rope stretcher on bad rock with very little in the way of good gear" to a belay ledge.
Renan started up the second pitch, finding there was "a line of holds, but as I soon found out, the rock was dangerously loose and virtually every hand and foothold was removable." He started aiding after 10 feet and higher, drilled a bolt, which promptly fell out so he hammered a piton in the hole and decided to lower.
James went up and aided higher and placed another sketchy piton in a drilled hole. After more bad gear he free-climbed a final crack up good rock to the tiny summit, "about the size of two dinner tables, " and, Renan says, "when he topped out, his yell of triumph reverberated across the desert."
This is what rock climbing is all about--getting out to wild and remote places and doing wild and spectacular climbs. It's fun to go to the local crags and wire all the routes and get a great work out but if you want real adventure, then you take those climbing skills out into the world and crank new routes (at least for you) on hidden mountains and at back-of-beyond deserts like the Ennedi.
My Petzl helmet's off to these guys for getting out there and climbing the stuff that inspires the rest of us. I look forward to reading more of Renan's adventures in Chad at his North Face blog.
Photograph above: Base camp below the Wine Bottle in the Ennedi Desert in Chad. Photograph courtesy Renan Ozturk/North Face.
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