Looking up Juniper Canyon at Rainbow Wall (center)

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW
October 1-4, 1997

Prologue

April 1997 - After a horrendous week, I drove to Vegas to meet up with a bunch of friends. I hooked up with them at Bonnie Springs Hotel, just beyond the entrance to the Red Rocks loop road and we had a few beers and caught up. I was set to go climb the Rainbow Wall with Jeff and Marty. The weather had been bad enough that Jeff and Inez had lugged some water up and dropped it off at the start of the slabs leading up to the base of the wall. That night, Jeff and I got down to the serious business of packing. The food, clothes, gear, water bottles, and rope were tossed in a pile for packing. We started filling the haulbag and got a big surprise. By the time we finished packing everything, we had my 10,000ci  El Cap haulbag completely filled, and Jeff's slightly smaller Half Dome haulbag also standing there filled. I looked at Jeff and said, "Out of the stuff that's in that smaller haulbag, what is going to come out of it to be used during the climbing?" He replied, "Probably just a pair of pants." So we're stitting there with between 15,000 and 18,000 cubic inches of haulbags for three people on a two-day wall? And there was a catch to the whole thing. We hadn't put one stitch of water in either bag at that point. We planned for three quarts per day per person, so at the very least, we had to have room for 18 quarts of water (4.5 gallons) in there somewhere. We didn't have it. Jeff suggested filling his even smaller haulbag as well, at which point I balked. How many walls have ended for a party because of having Too Much Stuff (tm)?? Too damn many. We did some rearranging and discussed what gear we had in the bags. The big problem was that it was still DAMN cold there at night, so the pile of clothes, and the sleeping bags were all taking up some serious room. We smashed and stood in the bags, but couldn't get much improvement. I'm sitting there thinking, two huge pigs for a short two-day wall and we don't even have water in them? I decided to wait for another day. We rearranged the stuff so that they could get their gear (Jeff and Marty's) into my big haulbag. Between that and a small backpack, they could get everything in. Jeff was kind of disappointed, but it wasn't that hard to comprehend how slow you're going to be dragging up a wall with two heavy bags and a lot of hanging belays. I knew their chances were improved 100% if they only had one bag to deal with, and I ain't that far from Red Rocks, so it seemed the only thing to do.

Sunday morning came about 10 degrees warmer than Saturday. Nice day out. We had breakfast and said our goodbyes to Inez, Ken and Allen. Although I wasn't going to do the wall, I wanted to see the approach to the slabs for later (I'd done a couple of routes up there, but had never seen the approach to the wall). I also wanted to help the guys out and offered to help carry stuff into the wall for them. As it turned out, I hoofed the haulbag all the way into the base of the slabs. I figured it didn't matter how trashed that made me and it would help if they were fresher so that they would have a better attitude to get on the climb with. The first hour and a half of aproach wasn't too bad, just hiking. The next hour got steep as we went into Juniper Canyon. There was some interesting bouldering with the bag as well, to get up to the slabs. I was pretty shelled when we got there, but just getting the pig off me was enough to recover for the hike out (my butt muscles and my knees were sore the next morning).

After dropping off Jeff and Marty, I hoofed it on back to the lot and headed for Phoenix. Rainbow Wall 1, me 0.

Marty jugging the haulbag up the fixed rope
leading to the huge slabs below the Rainbow Wall

Flash forward to September of 1997...

I'm an old married man now and the only "adventure" climbing I've done is in the body mass category. A mail message to Bill Wright in Boulder and one to Tim Schneider here in Phoenix and all of a sudden, the second attempt on the Rainbow Wall was in motion!! We picked a weekend and Bill booked a flight in from Colorado. We would launch on the first of October. This would be only two weeks past the fifth anniversary of our first climb with Bill, the Chouinard-Herbert (5.9 A2) route on Sentinel Rock in Yosemite. For Tim and I, that trip also marked our first trip to the Valley, our first big wall, and an adventure of humongous proportion. If you could consider life as a sphere of experiences, the Chouinard-Herbert trip had driven a spike straight through the balloon that Tim and I took to Yosemite with us. I was in the Twilight Zone for days after that trip, coming to grips with the enormity of the experience. People at work would ask, "Did you have fun?" and I would sit there thinking about it and finally reply "Yeah...I think so..." Anyways...that's old news. Now that we had about a thousand routes more under out belts, Tim and I were ready to partner up with Bill for another climb.

Wednesday, October 1st

We arrived in Las Vegas about 6:30pm Wednesday night. We had to be at the airport to pick Bill up by 7:20pm, so we had plenty of time. The decision that we had plenty of time followed a short discussion as to which time-zone Las Vegas was running on, and a minute of panic that we'd totally missed the boat. We got it right and found Bill just outside the gate. We cruised by the baggage area and dropped a few coins in the slot machines. Bill won a quarter.

Thursday, October 2nd

We got up with the sun the next morning, around 6:30 or so. Luckily, we starting final assembly on gear and packing for the wall. Some mountain bikers met in the parking lot we'd camped at (only yards from the "No Camping" sign), so we talked to them while we packed and they waited on a friend. A ranger showed up when we had nearly everything packed and in the truck. He was pretty cool and didn't make assumptions about where we'd slept that night. We helped with a few choicely aimed lines about how we were just in early and finishing up some packing before heading over to the Visitor's Center to pick up a permit for the wall. Nice guy for a ranger. :)

I heard some bad news from a few people who'd done the Rainbow about only getting a one-night permit for the wall. We were hoping to get two nights. We got to the VC early and waited for the doors to open at 8:30am. When we could go in, I talked to the lady ranger at the desk about a permit for the Rainbow Wall.

            "Oh...I think someone already has that." she exclaims.
            "Excuse me??? 'already has it?' I say, "What does that mean?"

We're trying to figure all this out when she goes to her little book at the desk and comes back with:

            "Yes, they called two weeks ago and reserved it." Another double take...
            "Uh...what do you mean 'reserved it' ??? You can't reserve a climb!"

At this point we got into a conversation about "reserving" a wall and related what-the-hell-is-this regulations that the lady was tossing at us. Her associate woman ranger came over to consult and Bill got involved in the conversation, which was obviously getting a little more excited and high-pitched from our perspective. Her original argument was something along the lines of:

            "You would be above this other party on the wall and we can't take
            liability for any rocks you might drop on them, so one party only!
            Isn't there another route up there you can do??"

We continued our pressing questions on why they would enact such stupidity. The second ranger said that this wasn't all that strange, at which point Bill very forcefully told her, "If someone can call two weeks in advance to 'reserve' a wall or a climb, I can tell you this is the ONLY place in the world where that can be done!!!" She took off to talk to the lead ranger while we milled around the lobby in confusion about what we were going to climb if we were denied. The permit is really only for parking purposes (so you don't get a ticket for being in the lot after hours, so we could still just park outside the loop after dropping the gear off and then hike in from there. That wouldn't have been our first choice.

The second lady comes back sporting a "you guys are really lucky" attitude and they give us a permit for the Oak Creek Trailhead for two days. We blast off down the loop road so we can get started. Sigh...bureaucrats.

At 9:47am, we start hiking out the trail into Juniper Canyon. The weather has been hot longer than usual this year, so even mid-morning it's pretty warm. I offer to take the haulbag out of the parking lot and it's like carrying a pregnant hippo, swaying back and forth and pounding into my hips. The only real benefit to having it on my back was that the damn thing was so big, I could take advantage of it as a source of shade. We cross-countried into the rocky section below Juniper and we did a "Chinese fire drill" to swap loads. Tim got the pig and despite the pig-to-body-weight ratio he was dealing with, he gamely hoofed up the rocks into the mouth of the canyon. We were passing a short uphill rocky section when a familiar noise came out of the ground in front of Tim. Rattler! In this case, the threat was actually in full retreat back into the bushes while rattling a warning for us. I'd never seen a snake at Red Rocks, but that morning, we saw two of them; one crossing the loop road and this one on the hike in...gives us something new to think about on the way into the canyon.

We got Tim with his load through the boulders and up the dirt ramp into the canyon proper in decent shape. Once we started up the dirt ramp, Bill disappeared up the faint trail. He dumped his pack near the chute leading to the slabs below the climb and then returned to pick up the pack I was carrying and I suggested he run up and string a jug rope in the chute leading to the slabs below the climb. He took the gear and ran off while I helped Tim through the tricky sections of the last part of the approach. The work was pounding on him, so I took the haulbag for the last bit of thrashing to the base of the chute. By the time we got there, Bill had strung the haul line down the chute and taken one pack to the top. He took on the pig and started up the line with a jumar while Tim and I took a second to recover. Figuring we would catch up to him on the slabs, Bill just starting moving slowly up the slabs to the base of the wall. The book refers to this section as "600 lung-searing yards", but we changed this to be more appropriate for us, deciding on "young searing lards" for us. We thought we were pretty funny. :)

The chute was pretty easy, just hand-over-handing up the old rope running down the middle. Someone had tied knots in it since the last time I was there, as well as adding about 10 feet of old sling on the end of it. We coiled up the ropes, packed, and got moving up the slabs after Bill. The trip to the  bottom of the wall was very much a grunt. Bill slipped and shoved his hand in a cactus just to break up the monotony. We shot a bit too far left, initially, and had to correct near the base of the wall. We headed way right and up an easy ramp to the pool-table bivy  ledge below the climb. We arrived at the ledge three hours and six minutes after leaving the parking lot. The dihedral system the route follows soared above us, incredibly steep, but hardly difficult to identify. The path was there, we just had to get up it.

We pulled out gear and I racked up for the first pitch. Easy 5.6 climbing led to a pair of bolts on a nice small ledge at the base of the main dihedral. I set up house and brought Tim up to lead the second pitch. Pitch two is rated 5.7 A2+. The free climbing comes right off the pitch one belay ledge, but is really awkward and probably harder than 5.7. Tim grunted up that blocky section to find a really pinched off corner above. Three bolts are liberally spaced along the lefthand wall of the dihedral, but s ome dicey aid moves from funky gear are required to span the gaps between bolts. I sat below and couldn't see what Tim was up to, but I could tell from various comments he emitted that the climbing wasn't any piece of cake. When I jugged up the ropes past this pitch later in the day, I found out why he was lightly tapping camhooks into the corner and commenting on the lack of aid options the pitch provided. Nice work Tim!!

Pitch four is rated 5.9 A2. I made one aid move off the small, sloping belay stance and I was able to follow that up with a quick few feet of free climbing before settling into my aiders for a while. The first half of the pitch fell to mostly ok placements, which sometimes had to be reached via top-stepping. This wasn't scary top-stepping as there were usually handholds there to make the move pretty casual. Reaching a wide crack, I placed a bomber #5 Camalot and made another couple of moves off of some interesting stopper placements. I hit a dead spot just when I thought I was home free, so out came the skyhook. The placement was pretty good and I wasn't really too worried about blowing, so I got high in the aiders and managed to clip the one bolt on my pitch. From there, I looked up and discovered I'd made a mistake leaving the #5. The last fifteen feet of the pitch was offwidth!! The process of retrieving the #5 was pretty quick and painless. Bill lowered me back off the bolt down to get the piece, and I pulled myself back up the route (like climbing in the gym!). I was moving again
in short order. I moved off two small cams in the corner, making sure not to mess with a particularly loose-looking block hanging right over Bill's head. I don't think it would have fallen, but I didn't want to take chances. The last TCU put me on a ledge in the corner below the offwidth. Using the #5, I made the belay in no time. The offwidth climbing was pretty casual for the most part, made easier by edges and flakes leading to the bolts. A long arm and I grabbed the rap chain and clipped myself into
the anchors. The day was over for us. I fixed the rope and rapped off the pitch, cleaning my gear. I passed Bill and continued down to the pitch two anchors where I swapped ropes and rapped back to the ground (we had two 200-foot ropes!!!). Bill was soon down as well. We were off the wall by 6pm on day one.