ONE MOON AT THE CREEK

Yay! Rick is back from his climbing sojourn in the land of the Latter-Day Saints. "The ropes are washed and now drying on the shower rod," he says, offering this glimpse of his adventure:

One Moon at The Creek

A few of North America’s renowned climbing areas are known by surprisingly generic geographic terms. Yosemite National Park boasts two such: The Valley is the home of soaring granite walls such as El Capitan and the iconic Half Dome while the high alpine country of domes and peaks in the north of the park is known simply as The Meadows. In California at least, The Gorge means Owens River Gorge. And somewhere in New England or thereabouts is a placed called The Ledge. Ask climbers anywhere in the world where is The Creek, and most will tell you that it is in the American desert southwest and might even be able to tell you that it is about an hour or so from Moab, Utah.

I wandered through Moab in the very early ‘90s just as I was starting to climb. It wasn’t well known to climbers or most anyone else in those days, and it showed. After heady days for uranium in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Moab followed the usual path of mining boom towns and sank into a tattered funk once the U.S. military had heaped up a stockpile of tens of thousands of nuclear bombs and the civilian power industry decided it wouldn’t bother trying to build hundreds more nuclear power plants after all. But I went through just as mountain biking was taking off and the bikers were discovering that the Moab area had hundreds of miles of great rides. Climbing, too, was a growing sport and the '90s saw a renewed interest in climbing cracks after a decade of infatuation with the Euro-style climbing of overhanging limestone pockets. And somewhere in there, the practitioners of mechanized recreation discovered the area as well.

These days Moab suffers from the same cancer that inflicts a lot of popular spots in the West. The relentless poison of money has caused a sprawling tumor on the south side of the town where people who pay far too little in taxes and are thereby perplexed about what to do with their heaps of cash build gargantuan monstrosities carefully designed to destroy as much desert as they can afford. Meanwhile, the people who actually work in Moab get modest wages and cannot afford the high rents so they live in garages, closets, or old buses parked in back yards or the remnants of orchards that haven’t yet been plowed under.

But the climbing at The Creek is as good as ever. Or even better since, with miles of cliffs, people are always establishing new climbs. The number of climbers has kept going up, of course, but if you climb the harder stuff or are willing to hike even a bit, you can easily get away from the crowds. There are some new restrictions on camping, but the scene is still a lot more laid back than you find at many other places. This year I didn’t make arrangements to meet anybody, figuring that I would run into plenty of old friends anyway. I did. But I camped in a nice large spot that had a slowly changing set of inhabitants who were mostly people I had not met before.

Over the years I’ve noticed that many of my friends are adherents to New Age religions and enthusiasts for New Age comodification. While their ideas are sheer bunk, these people are often very friendly and the sort of relaxed, quasi-hippy types that I like. True to form, we had quite a collection of New Agers. Foremost among them was Swiss Miss, a very tall, very blonde woman in her early 30s who was originally from Switzerland but now lives in L.A. She was a decided social butterfly. Although she had been going to The Creek for only two years, she must have known three times more people there than I did. She was sharp and very observant, but completely snowed over by the New Age hucksters. She had recently paid some guy in L.A. 400 and some dollars to take a class to learn to tell people to lie on their backs and blow on small rocks. The point of doing so, it seems, is that this somehow rids the body of bad thoughts, bad habits, bad patterns, or even bad holograms — the allegories were flexible and included a smattering of Eastern mysticism as well. Like me, she was at The Creek for a month. But she took a week off and drove all the way to Pine Ridge, South Dakota, to hang out with a shaman she thought she would learn something from. I doubt she got much in line of that, but she did learn about the stark poverty and hopelessness on the reservation.

For the first part of my trip, the campsite also had Cat Woman and Runaway. These two had driven a very long time to get out from under the snowy conditions in Canada to climb in the desert. Cat Woman had a large long-haired cat she kept on a leash and took to the crags with her. Amazingly, the cat seemed cool with this. She said the cat was part Maine Coon Cat. Maybe so; it sure was big. Everyone else said that when Cat Woman was down last fall, she seemed reasonably cool. But on that trip she had brought her boyfriend. I never met the sad sack, but we can only call him Whipping Boy. The story was that he would stand quietly and belay Cat Woman for hours on end on climbs that were too hard for her. As she became more and more frustrated, she would let loose a torrent of abuse on poor Whipping Boy. In this way she was able to be nice to everyone else. This spring, Whipping Boy stayed up north, so Cat Woman attacked one partner after another. First up was Runaway, an unassuming recent college grad. Runaway quickly decided the situation was totally fucked and talked the Brit into ferrying her off to Moab early one morning while Cat Woman was still asleep. From there she took a bus to Salt Lake to catch a plane back home. Cat Woman soon ran through her other possible belayers and then left herself. But before she left, she screamed at most of the dog owners around. There are no regulations about dogs at The Creek, so, of course, everybody lets their dogs run loose. The idea of tying up their dog because some nut case was worried about her cat didn’t make sense to anybody.

One of the liveliest members of our group was Owl Girl. She had only been climbing two years, but was pretty good since she was both energetic and motivated. She had a flexible work schedule that consisted of intermittent contracts to do field observations of Spotted Owls. Owl Girl was rather small, but she managed to put away most of a gallon of wine and a fair bit of whiskey one night. She was even up and about the next day. I had not met Owl Girl before, but I knew her good friend Crash. I gave him a ride back to camp a few years ago when he was looking for somebody with a four-wheel drive that could pull him out of a ditch. He has done in every car or truck that he has owned. This year he was driving an old work truck with the side bins like, say, the ones the phone company uses. He pedaled back to camp late one afternoon on his bike. He had been driving fast down one of the dirt roads and caught more air off a rise than he was expecting. When he came down, he blew out two tires. For the next week he was juggling trying to climb with arranging rides to and from town with his tires. You should never ever ride with Crash. He reduced Swiss Miss to tears one time.

Springtime is peak snowbird season and there were Canadians from many parts of that country. One that hung out with us while not actually living in our camp was Donut Boy. He had a very simple concept of good food. To be good, food had to have lots and lots of fat. And there was no food as good as a donut. He would go on at great length about the ideal donut and was a firm believer that glazed donuts are sometimes ruined by a glaze that has too much sugar. The superior glaze is mostly butter with just a modest amount of sugar. He had plenty of time for donuts since he wasn’t climbing. His shoulder was bothering him, apparently as a consequence of a very difficult to explain attempt at break dancing a few weeks earlier while In Joshua Tree.

So there you have the main cast of characters. The plan was to also have a lot of photos of people, dogs and climbing. Sadly, though, my cheap, aging camera didn’t comply. What had been an occasional bit of weirdness has become a permanent freakout and the camera now only takes pictures of its own demented digital mind. You don’t want see that psychotic place.

But all is not lost. Other people take pictures and post them to the Internet. So if you would like to see a photo illustrated account of one of the fine towers we climbed, click on this thread.