MEXICAN ROCK, PART 1

Ricky went climbing in sunny Mexico a couple of weeks ago, so here's a tale from the trip to warm our spirits:

Although Ihad been vaguely planning on going there for years, my trip to Hidalgo, Mexico, happened on very short notice. The closest I had come was the big blowout that was to have been held for New Year's 2000. Many of my fellow itinerant climbing friends all said they were going to be there, so we planned a big reunion. But one by one they started to flake and that soon snowballed into a general decision not to go. In fact, the guy hosting the party wasn’t even there since he had just left the country after losing a land dispute in the local court. Ever since, I kept saying that I would go soon, but, well, it is a long way to drive down there, and I’ve not much liked flying in these days of institutionalized stupidity and hysteria.

At New Year's this year, T called me and said that she had just landed a cool new job so she had promptly quit her sucky old one. This gave her the only extended block of time off she was like to see for maybe the whole year, so she wanted to go climbing in Mexico. I certainly hadn’t planned to take my long postponed trip this year, but why not? The prospects for climbing inCalifornia in the middle of January are iffy. She had already been searching out the best deals on airfare which is something I don’t like to do. Even better, she was e-mailing the places that might have lodging. For one of the best reasons to say yes to this trip was that T could speak some Spanish. She said she wasn’t very good with it, but that is still infinitely better than I can do. If somebody says something to me in Spanish, I might, a minute or so later, think of something in French that might be relevant but certainly not be useful. Not having to arrange for my airfare, for my lodging, or even for my speaking, the deal was sold.

We were after the holiday rush, but we were still flying on short notice. If we had wanted to travel at civilized times of the day, we would have had to pay about $200 more each. So we didn’t and left Oakland about 10 p.m. The other dubious virtue of our relatively cheap tickets was that our plane went to Guadalajara, which is much farther south than we wanted to be and near the wrong coast. Our goal was up near Texas. After several hours in that airport, we got on a rather skinny plane and flew back north to Monterrey. T had arranged for us to stay at “Rancho Cerro Gordo,” run by a guy named Mel. Mel was very friendly, and as a result, had learned a bit of English. But the office side of his business was run by his wife, who was reserved and had no usable English. One of the services that Mel offers is pick-up and return to the airport. We had hoped to do this, but didn’t get a reply to our e-mail asking for it. Instead, we took a taxi. Hidalgo is about a 45-minute drive from the airport, so $40 for a cab seemed liked a good price. The problem was the queue at the taxi stand at the airport. I think we stood in line for an hour to get our ticket for that 45-minute ride. It was near noon when we finally got to the rancho. The first close-up view of the mountain with its towering limestone pinnacles is impressive, but we were bonking. After a quick look, we said that’s um, nice, let’s go to sleep.



When T told me she had set up our lodging, I was imagining that we were going tohave a bedroom in some sort of hostel-like set up. But instead, it turns out we got a house. The reason Mel didn’t pick us up at the airport was that he thought we were not coming until the next day. He also intended to put us in a one-room cabin, but it was still occupied. So he put us in a much larger house. A round house. A pink round house. It was kind of cute from the outside, but was in need of several kinds of repairs. Since the climate is warm, they use low-pressure butane instead of the high-pressure propane that we use.



When he let us into the house, Mel said that he had to take the tanks down to town to be refilled. This was a good break for us since we wanted to buy some groceries. Mel dropped us off at the store and picked us up on the way back. The stove worked as soon as the butane was attached, but the hot water heater was in an exposed spot behind the house where the wind kept blowing the pilot out. Finally Mel built a teetering wind shield out of the various plastic lawn furniture and some clay tiles. Soon the bathroom had hot water, which pleased T since she was itching for a shower. But the kitchen sink didn’t seem to have hot water no matter how long you let the tap run. I was about to go fetch Mel yet again when I had an off hand thought. I closed the hot tap and opened the cold tap. Sure enough, after a couple minutes the water was running nice and hot: nothing wrong but some switched pipes. The final plumbing problem was a slow leak from behind the toilet. The water would trickle out across the tile and go down a drain in the middle of the floor. Since a prior tenant had left a large bath towel, we used it as a floor mat to wipe our shoes so as to not track water all over the house.



The house had two doors diametrically opposed. The key to the back door was long lost. The key to the front door worked the deadbolt. Both doors were sheet metal welded into steel frames. They looked secure, but were also giant gongs that could not be opened or closed quietly. The lock unit was welded to the door. Besides the deadbolt, this also had a latch that looks like the kind you expect to be attached to a doorknob except there were no doorknobs anywhere on or in this house. Instead this latch was operated by a lever on the inside unit. A few days later we came home and discovered that this latch had engaged and was not operated by the key. The windows all had bars, so now what? We went looking for Mel. We found his son who quickly understood our problem. He grabbed a roll of tape and followed us up. When he arrived he took off the screen and reached through the bars and opened the window. I wasn’t sure what was up since you would need to be the size of a cat to crawl in and not his ample 170 or 180 pounds. But as soon as he had the window open, he went over and pulled out a long pole that probably once had a swimming pool net on the end of it. Since the wall of the house was round, there was just enough curvature that he was able to reach the latch with the pole and push it back open. He finished up by applying several layers of tape to the offending latch to prevent the problem from re-occurring.

On the window sill above the kitchen sink there was a rusty old screwdriver. I got to wondering what little tweak it was used for. I never found out, which, in an odd way, was a bit of a disappointment. These guys were clearly masters at jury rigging, but I find that to be kind of a dubious skill since they got so good because they did it all the time. If they had valued their own labor more highly, they would have replaced all this stuff so that they didn’t have to waste time stringing it along. Perhaps they just didn’t understand their clientel. We were paying only 30 dollars a night for a nearly one-thousand square foot house. They needed to realize that Americans would readily pay for the upgrades at the place.

In the United States, climbing has always had links to the environmental movement. In its early days, the Sierra Club would run summer climbing camps in the high country and also publish accounts of first ascents in its journal. The most prominent leader of the Club, David Brower, was a famous mountaineer in his youth. And while of course contemporary climbers vary a lot in their environmental sensitivities, in the U.S. the environment is usually taken seriously if for no other reason than preserving access often hinges on minimizing impact. Mexico turned out to be different. One of the first things I noticed when we arrived at our lodging was that all these rocks were painted bright colors.



Each of the various “ranchos” had their own color scheme just like the color branding of a big retail corporation. Rancho Cerro Gordo was yellow. Besides all the yellow rocks that marked the road into the rancho, our little house was surrounded by painted rock in all kinds of color schemes. The other ranchos had done likewise. When we got up to the climbing crags, we discovered that the Mexican climbers were also fond of painting rocks. American climbers will sometimes mark an approach by making small stacks of rocks called cairns. The Mexicans just take a big can of paint and a large brush and paint their way up to the climb. They never used spray paint though. Once at the crag, they identify each of the various climbs by painting its name right on the wall. This makes it much easier to figure out which climb is which, but if you were to start painting names on American rock, you would soon get beat up by a mob of angry climbers.


(This is T climbing)

The climbing itself was also different. Over the years I’ve climbed on a lot of different limestone cliffs, but they have rarely been much over a hundred feet high, and are sometimes much shorter. This is because limestone gets laid down in horizontial layers that are often not so thick. And when it is thick enough, it might not erode into a single big cliff but form a staircase or have bands of bad rock. The big cliffs at Hidalgo have a novel origin: the entire bed of limestone layers got rotated by geologic forces until it stood almost exactly on end. Limestone almost never has good vertical cracks, but can have horizontal cracks between layers that go on for miles. Since it is stood on end, this Mexican stone had those same cracks soaring up more than a thousand feet. And by rotating not quite ninety degrees, this rock yielded matching faces. On one side you could do climbs that were not quite vertical, or you could go around to the other side and do hard climbs that overhung just past vertical. In climbing in theU.S. and Canada, I’ve encountered a lot of trees growing on ledges or even right out of the face of the rock. Some of these have been oaks or the like, but most of them have been cedars and particularly pines. Climbing this rock in Mexico was the first time I have found palm trees growing out of the face. One particularly nice climb finished at a high point on a ridge with a palm growing right at the summit.