A Rough Day on Rocky "Racoon"

“It’s a great beginner trad climb,” my friend Adam had said. “Mountain Project has so many good things to say about it.”

“But it’s spelled wrong,” I said. “‘Raccoon’ has two ‘c’s.”

“That doesn’t affect the climb. Come on. It’s a classic. It’ll be fun.”

Ah, hindsight.

~

The day doesn’t start out badly.

It’s 2011, and the Albuquerque sky is blue as turquoise and filled with nothing but promise. Adam and I have worked together at a local climbing gym for the past few months, and we’ve finally managed to wrangle a day off together so we can climb a route on the Sandia mountains outside the city.

The monsoon season is nearing its end. The air is warm.

It’s going to be perfect.

We step lightly along the trail at the top, breathing in the aspens, the ponderosas, and the mellow scents of altitude and summer. I’ve been humming the Beatles song since we left the car.

Rocky Raccoon checked into his room

Only to find Gideon's Bible

The climb is on a pillar called the Chimney, and it's made up of two pitches of deliciously sticky granite with holds you can sink your teeth into. (Not that you’d want to. But if you did, they’re there, and they’re chompable.) Described as ‘a fun, burly old-school 5.7,’ it sounds just easy enough for my beginner trad-climbing fingers and an ideal way to spend a long afternoon.

We come to a fork in the trail. Adam gives it a thoughtful ‘Hmm.’

“This is the way,” he says, and starts down one path.

After about half an hour, we discover it is not, in fact, the way. We turn around and head for the junction.

I’m still humming, though it’s a bit fatigued. A bit nervous too, because this isn’t exactly an auspicious beginning to the adventure I’d ramped up in my mind.

It’ll be great! I think to myself. It’s going to be so great!

This time, we travel down the correct path and soon arrive at a small aspen grove. We plan to stash whatever gear we don’t need in the grove before we descend down a couloir and then snag it on the way back up at the end of the day.

The forest around us gives a cheery rustle. Adam starts to sort the rack and unpack the rope, but as I’m stepping into my harness, I hear another rustle. Not quite as cheery, it comes from the forest past the edge of the aspen grove.

“Do you hear that?” I say, and Adam stops to listen. I’m hoping he doesn’t hear it, and that it’s just my imagination.

“Yeah,” he says. “It sounds big. I think it’s coming closer.”

It’s the wrong answer. Those are all of the wrong answers. I try to stay optimistic and laugh, though it comes out as more of a whimper.

“Maybe it’s a squirrel,” I say.

Adam stares at the forest, eyes narrowed. “A really big squirrel,” he says. The sound keeps approaching without any animal revealing itself. Although Adam goes a few feet into the trees to see if we’re being pranked by a bored hiker, he can’t see anything that would create such a noise.

I’m about to joke about ghosts when I hear another rustle.

“Adam,” I say. “There’s something behind us.”

He hasn’t stopped staring at the forest. “There can’t be.”

I know he has a point. Behind us is a ten-foot swath of evergreen trees, immediately beyond which is a sheer cliff that drops a hundred feet to some other prickly, rocky place in the Sandias. But something must be there, because I hear another rustle. I try not to pee myself.

“No, seriously,” I say, “there’s rustling coming behind us, and I think—”

A cry interrupts me.

“OooOOOOOP!”

It’s like nothing I’d ever heard before: too high to be a bear, too loud to be a bird, too creepy to be a human. It rings out over the aspen grove and the steep mountainside, sounding like the demented spawn of a slide whistle and a humpack whale. It comes from behind us, of course. From the un-scaleable cliff.

“WHAT THE #*&@ WAS THAT??” I shriek.

Adam, seemingly disturbed as well, chooses to respond to my explosive panic by calmly picking up the heavy rack of climbing gear, hefting it in one hand, and saying, “Get ready to make a weapon out of something. Mountain lions usually go for the neck.”

I’m actively trying not to dissolve into a weeping puddle of fear sweat and pee, but I pick up the rope bag anyway. The rope isn’t even in it. I’m not sure what I expect the empty sack to provide in defense against a massive carnivore.

After a few seconds of silence, Adam and I share a look, and without another word uttered between us, we grab our gear and sprint down the trail and into the couloir.

It’s tricky going, what with the choss and the weeds and the frequent glances over my shoulder to make sure some monstrous thing isn’t about to pounce. Although we keep hearing that odd ‘OooOOP’ing, it thankfully doesn’t move from the aspen grove. We allow ourselves to relax, and I notice a large worm fossil on one of the rocks. Several hundred million years ago, this mountain was the bottom of an ancient seabed, and such curiosities are common in the limestone swatches.

So taken am I with the worm—it must be as thick as a Sharpie and almost three times as long, so we name it ‘Wormasaurus’—that I trip over the rock and fall into a clump of stinging nettle. My forearm is quick to erupt into an angry rash.

I hum to myself again, moving more carefully now, though the song has lost some of its pizzaz.

Rocky had come, equipped with a gun

To shoot off the legs of his rival

Thankfully, we arrive at the base of the climb without any other issue and run into two people. One is an acquaintance of Adam’s, coincidentally: a skilled climber whose name in this story shall be ‘Chad.’ Accompanying Chad on what is to be a most memorable first date is a woman whose name shall be ‘Trixie.’ She has never before climbed, yet Chad somehow expects her to give him a lead belay up two pitches. We share small talk as Adam and I hastily teach her how to belay, since it appears as if Chad has forgotten to do so.

The goal was to finish climbing by two o’clock at the latest, since the monsoons usually arrive around four, but because we need to wait for Chad and Trixie to finish climbing the route (Trixie’s technique is more of the ‘scream and flail’ approach, and it’s not efficient), we don’t get on the wall until one-thirty.

This is fine, I think to myself as I begin to belay Adam up the first pitch. Totally fine.

He’s maybe ten feet off the ground when a cloud rolls across the sun. Thunder rumbles. I look up, dreading what is to come—it is still monsoon season, and the forecast did hint at storms today—only to see the cloud drift away and the sky return to its clear, perfect blue.

I forget about it and soon discover ‘Rocky Racoon’ is a fun climb. After the moss and lichen-covered first pitch, dihedrals and aretes abound, and what isn’t covered in crumbling granite is a bomber hand or foot hold. The second pitch goes smoothly, and soon we’re high-fiving at the top.

That’s when the thunder comes back. We don’t just hear thunder, though; there’s the faint sound of shouting, and we look across the canyon to see two climbers, as small as insects, waving at us from the top of their own granite slab.

It’s difficult to convey exactly how much adrenaline surges into my chest when the distant climbers yell, “There’s a storm coming! You have to get down!” Such a shout is not the sort of shout one would prefer to hear, especially while standing on a stone pillar at the top of a mountain.

I quickly rappel to the top of the first pitch and anchor into a sketchy-looking boulder next to Trixie. She’s looking a bit pale, as she and Chad have only brought a single bottle of water to this adventure, and it’s now nearing four in the afternoon.

Adam arrives at the ledge, anchors, and tugs on the rope so we can return to the base.

The rope is stuck.

Because of course it would be stuck.

I'm starting to wonder if this day is a gigantic experiment for someone testing the validity of Murphy's law.

As Adam ascends to try and un-stick the rope, I rappel down Chad’s extra rope (seemingly the first good luck we’ve had all day) and begin to pack up the gear.

I hear the first raindrops before I see them. They plop on the gear tarp and splatter on the surrounding rock.

I shout for Adam, but he’s either too high or too busy to respond.

The raindrops fall faster and harder. I'm rushing to cram the gear into our backpacks, cinching straps and shoving my feet into my hiking boots, looking up every few seconds through the rain in the hope that I’ll see my friend rappelling down the climb.

I shout again. The storm seems to take it as a challenge and brings on the hail, hurling down pebbles the size of corn kernels that smack on my helmet and collide with my shoulders, stinging my skin like a cloud of angry bees. I’m doubly grateful for my helmet right now, because although my old rain jacket doesn’t seem to be doing much and my socks are already soaked, at least my head doesn’t hurt.

Right as I’m cowering against the rock wall in an attempt to shield myself from further hail damage, I see Adam making his way through the mud at the base of the climb.

He shouts something, but I can’t hear it over the rattling pound of hail on the resonant piece of plastic over my head.

“What?” I shout back.

Adam’s now close enough that I can hear what he’s saying.

“I had to leave the rope!” he shouts. “There’s a downclimb from the second pitch. If we’d looked a little farther over, we would have seen it.”

Ever the (okay, he’s still my friend, and I don’t want to say ‘doofus,’ but I kind of want to say ‘doofus’) carefree adventurer, Adam doesn’t like to wear a climbing helmet, so his dark hair is plastered to his head, and he winces with every piece of hail that strikes his unprotected skull.

The lightning is getting brighter, the thunder louder.

There’s no way we can return up the couloir. It’s a hotbed for rockfall at any time, but a flooding downpour isn’t going to help keep rocks together on a steep slope. (Something something, physics and geology, something.)

So instead, Adam and myself, plus Chad and Trixie, go up the side of the mountain, over downed trees and forest detritus. Where once I was able to count the seconds between flash and sound, now there is no gap between the blinding bolts of lightning and the thunder that cracks against my eardrums. The slope is so steep, I’m crawling. I use my fingers like claws and dig them into the dirt in an attempt to pull myself higher, even though that’s where the lightning is, even though every cell in my body screams, No, go AWAY from the danger, not TOWARD it, you DARWINIAN FAILURE.

It’s not hailing as much as it was before, which would be a relief if the hail weren’t mixed with raindrops the size of pomeranians. My clothes are cold and clammy and heavy. They’re less like clothes and more like portable collections of rainwater. The ascent isn’t gentle on my legs, either; I am pushing them beyond their limits, and it feels as if at any moment they’re going to dissolve into the dirt.

But I look at Adam’s feet in front of me, about eye-level because of the steepness, and think to myself that if he can trudge up this barbarically steep slope wearing his favorite flimsy canvas slide ‘approach shoes,’ soaked to the skin because he left his jacket in the car under the impression we would be back long before the afternoon storm, then I can keep moving.

He said, “Rocky, you met your match”

And Rocky said, “Doc, it’s only a scratch

And I'll be better, I'll be better, Doc, as soon as I am able”

I do not hum. The song has become a cacophonous screech in my head. Someone more optimistic might say it all combines into a symphony: the clash of thunder, the rhythmic clatter of hailstones on my helmet, the rain, the wind, and the Beatles. But I’m not feeling especially optimistic at the moment.

My fingers are becoming numb. I’m breathing so hard my lungs ache. The air I do manage to suck in is frigid and only succeeds in making me colder. And I have a rain jacket. If I’m feeling like crap, the other three must be feeling like so much more crap. Trixie’s lips are blue and she’s starting to shiver. Her hypoglycemia looks like it’s going to be soon accompanied by hypothermia.

This is it, I think. This is how we’re all going to die: struck by lightning as we cower in fear from thunder while dragging our abused muscles up the side of a mountain.

But I did tell my parents where I was going today, where in the forest I would be, and when I would return.

Across Albuquerque, my father looks out his office window at the Sandia mountains. Black clouds sit like judges over the summit, and heavy rain forms curtains that sweep through every canyon.

“Huh,” he says to himself, “I hope they’re not still out there.”

And then my father, a twenty-year veteran of Search and Rescue, returns to his computer.

Back in the mountains, Adam, Chad, Trixie, and I have crawled through the mud and made it to a section of trail below where we’d originally taken the fork. Between us and the car is a twenty-five-foot section of limestone referred to as the ‘limestone band,’ as it runs horizontally across the Sandias. We have to climb up it to reach the trail that leads to the parking lot.

But alas, it’s too steep and too wet for any of us to climb it, especially Trixie, who is starting to lose her ability to speak coherently.

Adam and Chad decide we should all head toward the towers, since that’s the quickest way to the cars. On Sandia crest, there is a large stand of radio antennas and communications towers visible from nearly anywhere in Albuquerque. We parked down the road from the antennas. The antennas mean safety. The antennas mean done.

A bolt of lightning zips through the sky and connects with one of them.

I spin about, unable to further battle with my deep-rooted sense of self-preservation, and head the opposite direction with the others following. We’ll be able to make it to the parking lot along this other trail, yet by choosing the safer route, we’ve chosen the longer route—putting more time between ourselves and the cars.

Trixie isn’t looking great. Chad drops his gear in case he has to carry her, and Adam takes her backpack.

After a hefty dose of cold, wet trudging, we reach a section of the limestone band crumbled enough to climb. Chad gives Trixie a belay up to the top, and they continue along the trail to the visitor center at the trail’s terminus.

Adam scales the twenty-five-foot band easily in his slippers. I’m starting to think he isn’t entirely human.

When it’s my turn, I put one hand on the rock and realize I can’t actually feel the rock. I can’t feel my feet, either. I’m so cold, my fingers have gone white.

“Uh…” I say. “I think I need a belay too.” I’ve forgotten our rope is several hundred feet down the mountain, swinging in the storm and soaked; Chad and Trixie have very helpfully taken their own rope with them.

It doesn’t really seem like a good idea for Adam to belay me with a piece of 6mm cordelette, yet in the grand scheme of this day, it doesn’t really seem like a bad idea, either.

And then we step onto the trail. It’s as if we’ve emerged from the ravenous clutches of the jungle and walked into a five-star resort. The straight, even swath of dirt with minimal grade and very few rocks makes me want to cry in relief.

Right then, as Adam is gathering his gear from the hasty belay and the rain droplets are stubbornly gathering inside my ears, one last cord within me snaps.

I am cold, and soaked, and my limbs feel like they’re about to turn into pudding while also somehow being on fire. I cannot be any more finished with this day.

After everything that has just happened, my feet now stand upon the trail that will return me to the car, which will return me home.

And so, with no regard to Adam frantically reassembling his rack in the bitter cold while burdened by an acre’s worth of rainwater, his own trad gear, and Trixie’s backpack, I follow that trail, leaving my friend behind. (I know it took a recent conversation to remember this, but Adam—I’m sorry for what I did when I was panicked and delirious.)

I wish there was a more climactic conclusion to this story than Adam catching up to me at the visitor center on the top of the mountain, where I treated him to an ‘Oops-didn’t-mean-to-desert-you’ hot chocolate before we drove back.

There isn’t. That was it.

The day ended with shared laughter in Adam’s Subaru—the uncomfortable, soggy kind of laugh that only comes with realizing how much you appreciate heated seats, and suburban housing, and friendship, and not dying after a climb that was, in all honesty, not worth dying for.

~

Note: Adam did manage to eventually get his rope back, but we never found out what creature had made the ‘OoooOOOP.’ A few weeks after this trip (and hours of listening to audio clips of southwestern creatures), I ran into a local park ranger and asked what animal she thought the sound might have come from.

She thought for a moment and then said, dumbfounded, “I’ve never heard anything like that.”

The only other mystery from that day Adam and I wish we could solve was if Chad and Trixie ever had a second date.