How Many Times Can You Cheat Death?
This story, originally titled “The Learning Curve,” appeared in our 2024 print edition of Ascent. You can buy a copy of the magazine here.
The three-story house blasted out of the limestone cliff had been built by a mad doctor, said someone in our group. “This is where he experimented on people and took drugs,” someone else said. I peered down a hole I imagined was a trapdoor and into the black of a concrete room.
We were there to climb Independencia, a thousand-foot limestone fin adjacent to the doctor’s abandoned home. Independencia is the most prominent wall in Cañón de la Huasteca on the outskirts of Monterrey, Mexico, notably not only because it soars well over 1,000 feet from the desert floor but also because it features a cyclops eye piercing straight through it. You could fly a Cessna through the Cueva de la Virgen, so named because it casts a silhouette resembling the Virgin of Guadalupe, though we never saw it, nor would we witness any miracles.
A few members of the Texas Sierra Club had recently been to Huasteca and had returned with tales of massive limestone walls. Climbing’s coconut telephone spread the word, and that’s how we found ourselves in the good doctor’s lair sometime around 1979.
Our headlamps sliced back and forth in the night, revealing more ruins. Doors and windows were missing, rebar protruded, and broken glass made walking noisy. Some of the windows had bars. Up on the cliffside, their only purpose could have been to keep someone inside. Should we be here? I stuck my head out a window. A draft of cold desert air blew my hair straight up.
“We should probably get out of here,” I said.
“Let’s check out the next room,” said Bill.
I was 18. Bill Thomas was a couple of years older and an artist in Dallas. He was a grown-up to me, worldly. Job. Wife, Vicki. I had yet to graduate from high school, and when I boarded the train in Oklahoma City to meet Bill in Dallas for the drive down to Mexico, I’d yet to have a full glass of beer.
We kicked around in the bunker on the cliff, scaring ourselves with imagined stories of dissections, then scrambled down the backside on an old mule and cut to our dusty campsite in the canyon bottom.
Decades later, I learned that the concrete bunker, built over five years beginning in 1955, had been the refuge of the famed Mexican scientist and physician Dr. Eduardo Aguirre Pequeño. In the 1930s, Dr. Pequeño put himself through medical school by preparing bodies for a morgue. Later, he contributed to the study of mal del pinto, a tropical disease exclusive to the Americas that is similar to syphilis. Part of his contribution included testing inoculations on himself. It is said that when the doctor was injecting himself, you could hear his screams echoing off the canyon walls.
Back in camp, Vicki had fired up a pot of ramen. Vicki didn’t climb, and I don’t think she even liked the idea of it. She was there to soak up Northern Mexico and monitor Bill. She always seemed to worry when he climbed, always telling me to “keep an eye on him,” not let anything happen. Bill would wave that off, and I didn’t really let it absorb into me, either.
Bill dropped an egg in the ramen.
Vicki handed us mugs of noodles. “What did you find up there?” she asked.
“Not much,” said Bill. “Just bones.”
“Really?”
Ignoring Vicki’s worried glance at the cliff we were to climb the next day, Bill pulled the top off a Carta Blanca and took a big drink, foam sticking to his thick mustache.
In the morning, we jammed our packs heavy with gear and ropes and did a loose and sweaty scramble to the base of Independencia’s north face, the steepest and tallest wall as far as we could see. The Sierra Club crew had noted a route somewhere on the face, and we hoped to climb it if we could locate it.
On the approach, we pulled off small holds and larger blocks of brittle limestone, which bounced and broke like jars below us.
“Hey, guys,” yelled a voice from below, “I’m down here.”
Bill and I paused. A few minutes later, a scrawny guy with a patched-up pack, buzz cut, knickers, and a thrift-store shirt pulled up to us.
It was The Roach.
That wasn’t his real name, but he worked for the government and had security clearance and never wanted to be mentioned in any story or have his picture taken. Some climber had coined The Roach’s nickname for his habit of traveling the country and snagging choice FAs out from under the noses of the locals, who weren’t always appreciative.
The Roach was a New Englander, a sergeant in the Army stationed at Fort Sill on the edge of the Wichita Mountains in southern Oklahoma, where I’d learned to climb and where I’d met him after he’d poached one of the best lines at the best crag. The Roach had a souped-up Volkswagen Rabbit that he drove fast, sometimes visiting a distant state over a weekend just to tag it. With a tail-light cutoff switch, CB, radar jammer, and Recaro race car seat, his car was tricked out to evade. With this, The Roach hadn’t thought anything of driving through the night down from Fort Sill to find us. That was fun.
“Yeah,” said The Roach in his shrill Yankee voice. “Heard you guys were here. Figured I’d climb with you, if you don’t mind.”
With The Roach now setting the pace, we quickly arrived at the base of the wall and threaded our way among limestone blocks and plants that either had thorns like barbed wire or spikes like icepicks—the Huasteca Giant agave can infamously grow to six feet across.
The start of the climb was obvious: rusty bolts and pins resembling an artist’s found-object work. They dotted a line into a fog soup that had settled on the wall. The pins were strap iron twisted sideways on the end and fixed with a clipping ring. The bolts seemed stolen from a mechanic’s junk bin. The gear had indeed been made locally, and the route, first climbed in the late 1960s, was a turning point regionally and even nationally—the dawn of a new age, the beginning of the Huastequismo Golden Era. It was, says Paul Vera, one of Huasteca’s current developers, “the first time a wall of such scale and steepness had been tried, and even the first time a modern dynamic rope had been employed.”
Mexican climbing legend Juan de Dios de Leon Camero had led the difficulties during the pioneering ascent, toiling on the gray limestone weekend after weekend. The group—Carlos Rangel, Adolfo Garcia, and Jose Reyes—descended on Sunday to be back at their blue-collar jobs on Monday. When the workweek was over, or on holidays, they’d return and advance the line, Prusiking frayed fixed ropes or hand-over-handing up electrical cable they’d strung between gear.
As de Leon Camero and team neared the top of the wall, news of a tragedy reached them. Two climbers had been killed in a crevasse on one of Mexico’s big mountains. One of the Independencia climbers would need to attend the funeral and represent the climbing community to pay respects to the families. As team leader, de Leon Camero quit the wall to attend the services. Now just an easy scramble from the summit, the remaining crew pressed on, completing an ascent as revolutionary in Mexico as the first ascent of El Cap was in the United States.
They named their route La Norte Independencia, but de Leon Camero would, says Vera, also christen it La Checoslovaca, after a certain Czech lady climber who had visited during the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.
Pitches went by uneventfully, with Bill, The Roach, and I yarding on suspect pieces and swinging leads. At times, spicy free moves connected stretches of aid. For the first-ascent team, busting those moves in work boots, with no fixed pro ahead and not knowing what would come next, must have caused a few anxious moments.
Near the midsection, we encountered a stretch of the electrical wire tied between the bolts. Aside from not getting tangled in the wire, one of the greater challenges on the climb was avoiding the agave and yucca bristling from the wall like porcupine quills. A fall was unthinkable—you’d rather close yourself in an iron maiden than slam into one of those plants.
The climbing itself was simple aid, but the north face was the steepest, tallest, and airiest situation I’d been in, and I was relieved when we pulled onto the summit of Pico Independencia and kissed the wooden cross planted in the capstone.
The market in Monterrey the next day smelled of peppers, grease, and engine fumes. We—now including Texans James Crump and John Sanders—shouldered through the crowds around the stalls, and I bought a silver ring with a brown stone in it. Turned out, years later, when the glue failed and the stone fell out, that it was plastic, and the ring wasn’t silver, either.
We hammed it up, posing for photos; I donned a sombrero while a shop owner held a butcher knife to my throat.
Escaping the heat, we ducked into a dim street-side bar that reeked like a men’s room.
Bill and I ordered beers. They came out warm, and when my eyes adjusted I noticed a metal trough at our feet running parallel to and the length of the bar, terminating at a drain.
“Urinal,” said Bill. “Convenient.”
We spent a few more days in Huasteca, kicking around, climbing several easy free routes up long backbones of limestone. I was amazed by the abundance and scale of the rock. Walls and peaks rose as far as you could see, almost all of them unclimbed. If I’d moved there and spent the next 45 years putting up routes every day, you still wouldn’t be able to say the place was developed.
Huasteca Canyon was quiet. Just us and a few vaqueros on horseback, blanket rolls and bags of grain tied to the saddle horns, passing along the dry creek bottom. They never acknowledged us. We never acknowledged them.
We broke camp after about a week and began the 10-hour haul to Dallas. Late at night, I spelled Bill, taking a turn at the helm of his Volkswagen bus. Around midnight on the narrow Texas road, my mind was wandering, when a deer ran onto the highway. I hit the brakes, leaving two stripes of rubber on the road. Our piles of gear flew forward, and then there was a thump.
The deer had caved in the front end of the van.
“What was that?” Bill asked.
“I hit a deer.”
“Is it dead?”
The deer was still alive on the road, lying on its side, chest heaving, soft eyes scared.
“It’s suffering,” I said. “We have to finish it off.”
But how? We didn’t have a gun.
“Use this,” said Bill, handing me a hammer we’d used on the wall.
I aimed at the delicate spot between the deer’s eyes, raised the hammer, then slowly lowered it.
“Can’t do it,” I told Bill.
“You have to.”
“I’ll run over it.”
The van was still drivable, so we got in, and that’s what I did.
It was morning before anyone said a word.
Bill Thomas wasn’t my first climbing partner. Donnie Hunt was.
On Christmas Eve in 1975, when Donnie and I were 15, we rode our bikes 30 miles down I-40 to Red Rock Canyon State Park. Red Rock was the nearest thing we had to a real cliff. The walls there were 50 feet high at best, but it was rock, and a step up from the clay creek banks that we practiced on almost every day after school.
Arriving in Red Rock around noon, we hammered framing nails into seams on one sandstone wall, a checkerboard streaked with blue. As the winter sun began to dip behind the cedars, we clawed over the top, grabbing fistfuls of dirt as holds. An ice storm blew in during the ride home, and by nightfall our bikes were so glazed in ice, the chains wouldn’t turn. We dismounted and walked.
Around 11 p.m. that night, after about 25 miles of slow going, we topped a slight rise where we could see the glow of town up in the clouds.
A highway patrol car pulled alongside us, its red and blue lights turning.
The policeman leaned across to the passenger’s seat and rolled down the window.
“You the Hunt and Raleigh boys? Your folks called. They’re looking for you.”
“Found ’em,” he said into his radio. “Out by Hydro.”
The patrolman drove off, and when we got home, we were both threatened with grounding, but that didn’t stick.
Donnie’s stepdad, Virgil, distributed beef down in the southwestern corner of the state, about an hour and a half away. Part of his route took him to Lawton and the nearby Wichita Mountains, a small upheaval of rugged granite hills, a natural attraction, being the only topographical relief for hundreds of miles. The last Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, and the Apache leader Geronimo are buried there. Coronado and the conquistadors passed by in 1541. Jesse James stashed gold somewhere.
We were too young to drive, but Virgil let us ride along. For us, the Wichitas were an X on the treasure map.
Virgil dropped us off at Mount Scott; at 2,464 feet above sea level, it’s the second-highest peak in the area. “Pick you up here this evening,” he said, then waved and headed south in the station wagon.
We explored Mount Scott’s boulder fields, roping up to cross the larger gaps.
On another trip we found the Narrows, a deep canyon that, from a distance, looks like a stone gate. With us, we carried a copy of a 1974 National Geographic with the article “Climbing Half Dome the Hard Way,” about the first piton-less ascent of Yosemite’s Half Dome by Doug Robinson, Galen Rowell, and Dennis Hennek. The article was our instruction manual, and at the base of a climb, we’d review the pictures. We didn’t always get it right, belaying by wrapping the rope around a gloved hand.
Hiking to the Narrows, we skirted a herd of bison grazing on Indian grass, ditched our camp gear under a tree, and scouted for cliffs. We scraped through woodlands, dense oak and blackjack raking our arms like hay hooks.
West Cache Creek bubbled cold and clear in the Narrows. Sunfish darted after minnows. Golden eagles screamed from the granite cliffs. Donnie and I would swim as much as we’d climb, favoring a cold, dark pool upstream where the canyon pinched down.
Once we were old enough to drive, we’d cut from school on Friday and spend all weekend in the mountains, climbing routes that today would hardly qualify as technical, our sneakers holding us back from making any difficult moves, but the climbs were real to us.
We climbed there for over two years, yet still, we hadn’t seen another climber or even a sign of one: no fixed pins, no bolts, no chalk, no sling around a tree. We figured we were the first and only climbers from there to Colorado until we saw a long-haired guy with a pack and a rope tied to the top. A dark-haired woman followed him, and they hopscotched boulders in the creek.
We observed from the woods, anxious to finally meet another climber.
Donnie and I wore knickers and jackets we’d sewn ourselves. Donnie had even made his pack; he was good about seeing flat pieces of fabric and imagining them into shapes that could do things like hold gear. He was straight A and had long red hair that the girls loved. He married just out of high school, and later, after his kids had grown and left, he went back to school and got a degree in electrical engineering.
When Donnie and I finally stepped out of the trees, Bill gave us the once-over.
“You climb?” he asked.
We roped up with Bill, and again every weekend after that, until Donnie graduated and left small-town Oklahoma, and then it was just Bill and me and Vicki, who by now usually stayed in camp, read paperbacks, and worried about her husband.
Bill had real gear and had climbed with others in Texas, usually at Enchanted Rock, a granite slab near Austin. His belay device was a marvel to me. He even had rock shoes, and I saved up, spending $50 on a pair of EBs just like his. I treasured those shoes, checking the soles after each outing, examining them for wear, calculating how many more routes they had in them before I’d have to shell out another $50.
The Lichen Wall is 250 feet high and the tallest cliff in the Wichitas. A few routes skirted its edges in the late 1970s, but nothing went up the center, a spoon of gray-green stone with water streaks like war paint.
Bill and I plotted a potential route that rambled up the king line. Two, three pitches? Bill wound webbing around his waist like a cummerbund, making a swami belt, tied in and shouldered a rack of slung nuts and hexes that clanged like cowbells.
Thirty feet up, Bill placed a small nut into a slot, the only pro so far, and climbed past, polishing off the crux moves and getting onto terrain that looked 5.7 or so. Easy for him—still no pro, though.
I fidgeted at the belay in the gravel by the creek and ran calculations—he was now so high that the nut wouldn’t do any good.
Bill’s progression was smooth, and with just 30 easy feet to go to the belay, it looked like he had it in the bag. From there, a series of horizontal overlaps would get us to a large ledge at the end of the second pitch. Above that, we didn’t know. It was too far away to tell much.
The jangling of bells got my attention. I looked up to see Bill rag-dolling down the wall. With rope stretch, he just brushed the ground, then rebounded, hanging from his swami belt, looking like he’d been broken in two.
I lowered him a couple of feet to the ground.
He wasn’t moving, and his eyes were rolled up in his head.
He’s dead.
I’d seen dead people before at funerals but had never touched any, and the thought of it spooked me. I didn’t have any training and didn’t know if I should try CPR or get help.
Another climber I’d recently met, Terry Andrews, was climbing around the corner out of sight with a friend. I ran over for help.
“Bill fell,” I screamed.
“How is he?”
“He’s dead!”
I ran back to Bill to wait for Terry.
When you sit next to a dead person, you feel dread. Dread about what comes next, what you’ll say, what your fate will ultimately be. At my age, though, it was just a flat dread. The other feelings wouldn’t come up until decades later when I’d help carry the body of a friend down from an ice climb and deliver him to his family. There was nothing to say, just the dread that pulled like a new gravity.
Terry came at a sprint. “What happened?” he said, gasping.
“Bill fell from up there.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Don’t know.”
We looked at Bill crumpled on the ground, the rope slack around him.
Then Bill sat up and rubbed his head.
“Sheeett!” he said. “What happened?”
Bill stumbled for words, looking up at the route, then looking down, then up. I still don’t know how he fell. Maybe a foot just slipped. Maybe a hold broke.
Once Bill’s mind cleared and he grasped the situation, he wobbled to his feet. We thought he might collapse, that we’d have to carry him out, but he straightened up and untied from the rope, no doubt considering the consequence that could have been and the one that might yet lie ahead.
“Hey guys,” he said, “don’t tell Vicki.”
On the hike out, Terry told us of a crag not an hour away with beautiful pink stone, just a few routes and loads of potential. “That’s the place to go,” he said.
“Lead the way,” we said and followed his tail lights west toward a promised land.
Baldy Point, also called Quartz Mountain, is an extension of the Wichitas and near its westernmost end, although you wouldn’t know it because they disappear under the farmlands for dozens of miles, then spring back up like warts as you near the town of Altus. From afar, Baldy looks a bit like the Loch Ness monster without the neck. This peak and others nearby may be a part of the Wichitas, but quartz granite is much better, fine-grained and clean as a tombstone—the smaller peaks around it are cut up with monumental quarries.
When Bill and I first pulled up, heavy fog hung over Baldy Point (known to climbers as just “Quartz”), and the stone seemed to reach forever into the sky. I think I actually gasped when I saw it.
Conditions were damp, but Bill and I couldn’t wait and jumped on a recent route—they were all recent, all seven of them. Bourbon Street was the obvious choice, a rusty streak over knobs and shallow potholes to a belay below a gaping offwidth that swallows you and eats your clothes on the second pitch. Greg Schooley and Bernie Wire established this 5.8 in 1978 and nabbed many other gems, notably The Hobbit, Three Bolt, and Pacific Route.
Climbing Bourbon Street was like hearing music for the first time. That climb showed us that seemingly blank faces were possible—as long as you had a hand drill. Quartz had no shortage of blank faces, and Bill had bolts.
The difficulties on Quartz rock are like the weather: If you don’t like it, come back tomorrow. On a cool day, your hands and feet stick anywhere. On a hot day, which was more often, hands and feet hardly stick at all—5.8 doesn’t just feel like 5.10, it becomes 5.10. Wind can also be a factor. Exposed to endless miles of flat wheatfields to the west, the face of Quartz is a giant windscreen taking the brunt of the pressure that builds on the flats down in Mexico and boils across the plains like the pressure wave from a thermonuclear blast. Quartz is the first obstacle in its way. If you are on the wall trying to rappel, your ropes blow straight up, and you can’t get them down.
But we had yet to learn any of that. Many lessons lay ahead, like the one taught on lead, trying to stance in a bolt or wrestling with the mental gyration of whether it’s better to keep climbing with no pro. One time I broke a drill before a hole was finished, and I was actually relieved because the decision just to go up had been made for me.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but on most routes there it’s easy to fall in your head but difficult to fall in practice. Gravity and texture hook onto you. You could pull out all the bolts and remove fear from your mind, and the outcome would be the same as if nothing changed, but it would be dangerous to know that in advance.
I climbed my first 5.9 and 5.10 with Bill at Quartz, learning curves that were more like ramps because they never curved down.
At nights, we’d crowd in a cave formed by semi-sized boulders that had rolled together, leaving a room that was high enough to walk upright in. I imagined that we weren’t the first to hole up here, that the Wichita or Commanche who ruled the grasslands had ducked into the cave during immoderate weather. And years earlier, during the Vietnam War, most likely, someone had spray-painted a peace sign on the back wall of the cave. Farmer Ted Johnson, who owned the crag and the surrounding wheat fields, didn’t know what it was and called it a “turkey track.” I don’t think anyone ever corrected him, but he could have actually been right.
A small gang of climbers soon formed, and evenings became social. We drilled a brass rivet into the cave ceiling to hang a lantern, and we’d stuff the fire ring so full of mesquite the heat would take the wrinkles out of our clothes. When the fire died down, we’d hitch a sling to the rivet and do pull-ups. Beverages were Brown Derby, and we’d puzzle out the pictograms on the insides of the caps that were so stupidly easy we sometimes couldn’t get them.
Once a few bottles had been drained, we’d play the bottle game, where you’d take an empty bottle in each hand, plant your feet, and walk out on your hands until you were fully extended, body parallel to the ground, then set a bottle out as far as you could reach. Whoever got the most distance out on a bottle won. We were competitive, stoking up for a turn. I think some of us even secretly trained at home and then would show up as if we’d never heard of the game: “Now, how do you play this …?”
Honestly, I don’t recall many specifics about the climbing except the time Herndie fell 100 feet and the time James fell 75 feet. (I know I said it was hard to fall on this rock, but there are exceptions.)
I do vividly remember worming through a natural tunnel maybe 100 feet long below the base of the headwall. We’d drop in there at night and belly crawl. One constriction was so tight I’d had to exhale to get through it. I didn’t know it then, but a naturalist from the Oklahoma City Zoo had investigated the tube and said the wall had been worn smooth by the writhing of thousands of rattlesnakes.
Those evenings in the Turkey Track Cave cemented lifelong friends, although I’ve lost touch with most of them.
I saw Bill at Quartz about 15 years ago. He was there with Vicky. They looked exactly like I remembered; hadn’t changed. It was as if we were still in Huasteca. But changes there had been. Bill didn’t climb much now. He was deep into endurance racing his boat down in the Gulf, getting way out there on the water.
“You should come out and crew,” he said. “Could use a hand.”
I thought about it, but Jaws really ruined the water for me.
“Well, maybe,” I said, knowing I’d never do it.
“You should go,” said Vicky, poking me in the ribs. “Bill, all the way out there on the water … You could keep an eye on him.”
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