The trip began with the impending weight of a spring blizzard, which descended on Colorado with typical ferocity and suddenness. Friday morning dawned, and what had on Thursday been an awakening landscape of green grass and radiant sun had morphed back into snowy sleep, covered in blowing drifts and gray clouds. We waited out our initial start date at Lin's house in north Boulder that evening, packing and making excited plans for the upcoming week in Arizona. Lin made pesto pasta and I brought wine and a salad, that was the deal. I suppose we seem so comically mismatched at first, her, a retired geologist, librarian, and attorney, 66 and with a climbing resume few of her generation and gender can boast, in one corner. In the other corner, see me, Philip Persson, 23 year old perpetual undergraduate, restless wanderer of the vast Western landscape, climber, skier, dreamer. We shared so many things though; the drive to climb, the inability to control our mouths or our political correctness, a non-traditional orientation on life and relationships, and a deep love of the outdoors. We drank too much cheap wine, argued politics and denounced religious nuts and conservatives till the dawn came up again, and constantly made excuses about why we weren't climbing as hard as this or that. We bickered, laughed, smiled, and made fun of everything and everyone under the sun. It was thus I suppose that this road trip materialized.
Saturday morning came sooner than I'd hoped, and we loaded Lin's little Jetta TDI wagon with the weeks provisions and gear. The drive was daunting and immediate, something I dreaded and anticipated, because I knew it led to a magic landscape of warm granite and towering domes in the Sonoran Desert to the south. Conditions got exponentially better as we made our way south, and save the hairy initial descent from the driveway and some snowpacked spots between Denver and Colorado Springs, the roads were fine and the sun did shine. Santa Fe came around and we stopped at a Trader Joe's to stock up on some last minute supplies for the backcountry. Needless to say, while I am not a man of religious inclinations, I may have found god in Trader Joes. 3 overflowing bags and sixty dollars later I was a solid convert. The drive from Boulder to Tucson is largely forgettable, the monotonous New Mexico desert fading into a greenish-brown blur at 80 miles an hour, with occasional bony, stubborn mountains poking through the vast alluvial plains. The landscape does change though, in way subtle at first ands then glaring and beautiful. Slowly, the arid high plains are replaced by the lower, more lush Sonoran desert, it's Century Plants and Saguaro's decorating green hills and sweeping valley's between the endless basin and range ridges that fill the burning horizon line, the highway always about to crest some hill.
We rolled into our destination around midnight, Cochise Stronghold, a vast a magnificent landscape of sweeping granite domes and canyons filled with verdant trees and wildlife, which empty out onto a African-like Savanna, which is spotted with oak trees, giving in a slightly surreal, coastal quality. Dead tired, I somehow rigged the tent as Lin attended to the important task of ridding the back of the car of enough of our shit so she could sleep in it, and in the process, opening a bottle of wine. The almost full moon radiated cool white haze across the valley as we sipped cheap Pinot Grigio and speculated on what a beautiful morning tomorrow would hold, and how it was still 30 degrees warmer at midnight in southern Arizona than it had been in Boulder yesterday. The next day was indeed beautiful, and we set out across the savanna to the base of the Sheepshead, a towering 700 foot granite dome, to climb Peacemaker, a 7 pitch bolted 5.10 outing I had traveled up once before. The first pitch was a bit stiffer than I remembered, and as Lin made fun of my poor footwork, I cursed the delicate slab climbing. As we made our way up the wall though, grumbles of "motherfucker!' were slowly replaced my smiles and even the occasional hoot and holler. At the summit, we sat and drank lukewarm water and ate old granola bars, and admired the singularly otherworldly, monolithic granite landscape that lay below us, deep rounded chasms where Coatimundi's and Ring Tailed Cat's nibbled on berries and hawks nested high in cliff nooks.
The next day, we ventured back up towards the Sheepshead, but today our agenda was a bit different, as the fond memories I has of the beautiful upper half of "Mystery of the Desert" on the nearby Muttonhead Dome had precluded any memory of the awful first pitch. Well, it wasn't that awful I suppose, save chossy cracks and 3 pieces of gear in 100 feet of climbing. I wretched up a nasty, shallow corner from the ground, fumbled in a little orange TCU, and decided it was better to traverse left out onto the face. 30 feet higher up, Lin politely reminded me I was facing a definite grounder, and thoughts of decking on hard gravel in the Southern Arizona backcountry clouded things a bit as I fumbled with an awkward nut placement overhead. After finally getting a decent piece in, I continued upward and was relieved to find a nice bolted belay on a comfortable stance on a dike. The rest of the climb was beautiful and fluid, save a little scary bolted face climbing up a leaning arete I did to avoid to infamous "wedge', a blood loss-inducing offwidth on pitch 2. The experience climbing on this perfect backcountry Arizona granite in March is hard to describe, and we milked a good 3 or 4 more pitches into the rest of the afternoon, returning to camp weary and worn, but not warn enough to fill the rest of the camping area with talk of "dumb, ignorant conservatives" and "intolerant Christian neo-con's", Lin's recent topics of choice. I of course followed along enthusiastically, and our opinions are now well known to the oak trees and cows that inhabit the meadow below Sheepshead rock.
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