Outdoor Adventures 
Social Climbers
Every winter, adventurous nomads from around the world spend months hanging out at Hueco Tanks state park near El Paso—for the friend-ship, the weather, and the best boulders anywhere.
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Back in the parking lot, I saw Luis Delgado climbing a lamppost. He gripped it with his hands, put his feet on the pole, and started crawling up it until the pole began to sway back and forth under his weight. When he got down, Luis explained that Thomas had found the weather so tempting that he had blown off our appointment and gone climbing instead. Luis offered to help me look for him, and we set off down one of the park’s trails. Luis had been up until three o’clock the night before and was a little under the weather, but he turned off the trail we were following and sprinted up a steep incline like a little goat. I had a hard time keeping up. Eventually we arrived at a wall known as Kid’s Stuff, a popular place to warm up. I began to see that we weren’t in a hurry to find Thomas. Luis was eager to climb, so he sat down to wrap black tape around his left wrist and the fingers of his left hand. “I screwed up my tendon about a week and a half ago,” he explained. “I don’t like using tape, but I don’t want to screw it up anymore.” Strained tendons and joints are common afflictions among climbers who have taken to bouldering; Hueco Tanks includes such brutal challenges that they sometimes blow a finger tendon. It sounds like a gunshot when it happens. Most climbers rely on crash pads and spotters—friends who help them land safely—to avoid more-serious injuries. Luis, however, took off his shoes and began going up the wall barefoot, without anybody or anything to break his fall.
After Luis finished warming up, he scurried from one rock face to another like a kid on a jungle gym while I stuck to the trails. Often we would arrive at a boulder just as another group converged on it, and we would pause and observe as they tackled the climb first. Watching bouldering is like watching a chess game—it is a slow, almost static sport. A particular path up a boulder is known as a route or problem, and climbers scour the park for the hardest problems they can handle, trying the same one over and over until they have it “wired,” or down cold. By the time Luis and I arrived at Mushroom Boulder, one of the most popular rocks in the park, it was midafternoon and there were lines of people waiting to take their turn. We met up with Pete Peacock, and the three of us watched as other climbers tried a route known as Mushroom Roof. According to a guidebook about Hueco Tanks written by climber John Sherman, there are 28 ways to get to the top of Mushroom Boulder, but Mushroom Roof is one of the hardest: Routes are graded by difficulty depending on the amount of strength they require and the holds involved—whether there are small ledges in the rock to grab or merely thin cracks, for instance. Sherman ranks Mushroom Roof as a V8. (The bouldering rating system goes from V0 to V14, and anybody who can master a V8 is considered a pretty serious climber.)
Mushroom Boulder is a large, top-heavy rock that sits on a slender base; it didn’t look like a mushroom to me, but Pete Peacock said that when he squinted and the light was right, he could see how somebody might think it did. Each climber began by sitting under a big overhang, with the bulk of Mushroom Boulder directly above him. (There were many women climbers in the park, but none in the group I was watching.) Then he would reach up with both hands for a hold known as a rail—it was a long, horizontal crack in the rock face. He would pull himself up to the rock, stick his left foot into a hueco, and prepare to lunge with his left hand to grab a shallow edge with a little lip on it. That early move is one of the hardest in Mushroom Roof because it requires such a long reach across the rock face, and as we watched, several climbers tried the lunge and fell. Finally one made it. He continued, bringing his right foot up beside his right hand and sticking his heel into the rail there—the move is known as a heel hook, and it looked incredibly uncomfortable. Then he reached up to a little edge with his right hand and stretched even farther with his left hand, crossing his arms in the process. Many people fall at this point too, but this climber went on, sticking his left toe into the edge where his left hand had been before, and moving higher up in the process. After several other difficult moves, he was just at the edge of the overhang—about ten feet off the ground—and he was about to “top out,” or go up onto the flat, slablike side of the boulder. Once you make it onto the side of the boulder, it’s an easy climb, as there are plenty of huecos and other holds to use, but getting around the overhang is the hardest part of Mushroom Roof. It’s known as the red-point crux—the biggest hurdle in the climb. The climber inched higher and was trying to move his right foot up to stand on a knoblike protrusion when his strength gave out and he dropped to the ground. It was a good try, and everyone else who had attempted the problem congratulated him.
Luis and Pete got fed up with the long lines at Mushroom Boulder and decided to tackle various other rocks in the park. At one point we stopped to take a break, and I asked Pete if he had gone to college. He said he had finished one semester at Western State College in Colorado. “Just wasn’t too impressed with it,” he said. He wasn’t sure what to do with his life and wasn’t in a hurry to decide. “My mom wonders when I’m going to take part in what you’d call the norm of society. Go to school, get a job, fall into this sense of false security, just because you have a degree and a title. I don’t know, I might end up moving to Latin America. There’s a lot of wisdom down there.”
Late in the afternoon, I left Luis and Pete (we never did find Thomas) and drove to Todd Skinner’s house. At the New Map of Hell, Todd had invited me to join him and some fellow climbers for dinner at his house, just outside the park’s entrance. When I pulled up, there were nine cars in the yard. Todd wasn’t there yet, but sitting around the house were climbers from South Africa, Canada, Switzerland, England, and Texas. They were talking in the large common area on the ground floor of the house, which had several sofas, a dining room table, and an indoor climbing space. They were all full-time climbers, and none of them had permanent addresses. “We follow the seasons,” said Scott Milton, who is originally from Alberta, Canada. “We’re nomadic.”
Most of Todd’s guests were about ten years older than the crowd at Pete’s, and they made their living by endorsing athletic goods, teaching outdoor education, or delivering motivational lectures. Scott Milton, who is lanky and has a mop of dark hair, was the most talkative of the group and its de facto spokesman. Scott explained that the boulders at Hueco Tanks have such steep faces and such tiny crevices that they require extraordinary strength to climb. “You gain so much power here,” he said. The visitors, who regard the park as a national treasure, could not believe how uninterested Texans are in the place. “I was down buying groceries in El Paso, and the woman at the checkout counter said, ‘Oh, are you here climbing?’” recounted Paul Higginson, the British climber. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’m here for a month.’ And she said, ‘Oh, I didn’t think it was that special.’”
After Todd came in, we all sat down to a dinner of tuna casserole and salad. The conversation revolved entirely around climbing. Todd asked Sandra Studer, a Swiss climber, if it was true that she had managed to “flash” a rock—climb it cold, without much study or any trial runs. She had. An entire lexicon has grown up around the sport, and over the course of the meal, I learned that “dirt me” means you want help getting down from a tricky spot and that asking for “beta” means you want some information about the next move to make. (“Beta” is short for “Betamax”—ideally, the information is so clear that it’s like watching a video of the climb.)
THE FOLLOWING DAY, I DROVE OVER TO THE PARK with Sandra; Amy Whisler, who is from Wyoming; Kirk Billings, who is from Midland; John and Carol Gogas, who are also from Midland; and Dale Childers, who is from Odessa. We hiked over to an easy rock, where the group warmed up. Next they attempted nearby problems, including one called Assault of the Killer Bimbos. Around noon, everybody pulled Power Bars out of their backpacks for lunch and then we set off on a hike through Comanche Canyon—so-named for a Comanche battle scene of ghostly white figures found on the wall of a cave in the area.
“Are we going to the secret place?” John asked.
“Yeah,” Kirk said.
I asked why it was a secret.
“I’d rather nobody knew about it, so I can get it cleaned up and done before anybody else finds it,” Kirk replied. The week before, he had found a route that had never been climbed before—though hundreds of the park’s well-known problems have been catalogued in Sherman’s guidebook, visitors still find dozens of new routes every year. “The first person to do a route is always connected to it,” Scott Milton had explained the night before. “The first person owns it, in a weird way.” At the far end of the canyon we started climbing a set of deep huecos set into the rock like a ladder. About five hundred feet up, we came to an odd formation: Underneath a giant boulder was a vast cave with a ceiling from two to five feet high. The boulder rested on top of a flat granite table, but it was shaped like an overturned bowl, and you could walk or crawl all the way underneath it. The underside of the boulder was honeycombed with huecos, making it a perfect place to practice moves known as body-tension holds, in which a climber braces himself into position by pushing in opposing directions with his feet and hands. “God, that’s a real butt-dragger,” John said when he saw the confined space.
“I think I’m going to call it Near Birth Experience,” said Kirk.
We all crawled into the hollow under the giant boulder. It was cool and shady under there, offering welcome relief from the hot sun. As Kirk started brushing dirt off the ceiling, the others fanned out to explore. Eventually Paul Higginson appeared with two other British climbers. One of Paul’s friends peered at Kirk, who was clinging to the underside of the boulder like a spider. “It could get a bit claustrophobic in there,” he muttered. There was a thud as Kirk fell off the ceiling. He kicked at the honeycombs above him, then slid back to begin the problem again. Another thud. “Oh, f—,” he said this time. “I keep whacking my elbow.”
After several hours, Kirk showed the route to John. “Here,” Kirk said, coaching John as he took his turn clinging to the ceiling. “Now, heel, toe. Reach with your left hand. You want your right hand in that undercling, so you can pull yourself over. Reach a little farther—”
“Holy cow!” yelped John.
“Yeah, it’s really complicated,” said Kirk.
“God, this is brutal,” John said admiringly while he hung upside down. He thought the problem Kirk had found would prove to be one of the park’s more challenging climbs. “Very good, Kirk.”
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