Rancho Cerro Gordo - our home away from home

I'll never make a good alpine climber. I'm always cold and I can't travel light, the two being not completely unrelated. Prior to taking up climbing I figured that the convenience of having my things was worth the extra weight and limited my luggage only to what I was capable of carrying myself. Not much has changed except that my definition of carrying has expanded to include dragging.

But I'm the one who insists that we leave the big packs behind for this trip - one checked bag and one carry-on each. So it's no one's fault but mine that I'm struggling to decide whether to pack my pillow or my winter coat. Visions of 80 degree Mexican days and nasty wads of clothing in a stuff sack to sleep on dance in my head. The coat stays, the pillow goes.

We've been planning this trip for over a month. We've bought a supply of Pringles and beef jerky in case we can't figure out how to feed ourselves without a nearby McDonald's. We've been through the Mexico Rock guidebook looking for routes in our range. We've asked friends for beta (mostly on how to feed ourselves). Somehow it doesn't occur to me until two days before we leave that I should brush up on my high-school Spanish.

I'm complacent. The story of the climbers taken hostage in Kyrgyzstan exemplifies my attitude - "We're Americans! We're Americans!" Surely the airport personnel, the customs and immigration officers, the locals in Hidalgo accustomed to climbers, the staff at Rancho Cerro Gordo, will all speak English. We're Americans. Accommodation is owed to us.

The first hint that I am wrong comes in the taxi. How can a taxi driver in Monterrey not speak English? Why doesn't he know where Potrero Chico is? Todd puts me up front next to the driver. I'm the one who speaks Spanish after all. I'm glad for the Spanish directions I printed off of the Ranch's website. Though it becomes increasingly apparent that our driver's ability to read is pretty limited, between the directions, my few words of Spanish and his few words of English we finally turn a corner and see Potrero Chico spread out in front of us. Imposing, stunning, dramatic, it rises from the mist to greet us. It looks like someone took Seneca, stretched it in all directions, replicated it repeatedly, and then fanned out the results like a deck of cards.

"Las montañas!" I say excitedly, pointing at the formations, trying to explain to our driver why we have come to this backwater town. He laughs. I hope that he's responding to the enthusiasm in my voice, not laughing at my Spanish, but the laugh restrains me. We bump slowly down the rocky driveway and arrive at a tidy, freshly-painted pavilion. The bright, clean building is a welcome change from the dirty, half-built neighborhoods we've been driving through.

A woman approaches us. She is warm, welcoming, and speaks no English at all. Todd backs up and points at me in what is to become a familiar gesture. I'm our official ambassador and I'm wholly unprepared for the task. I remember my high-school Spanish teacher telling us how friendly Mexicans are.

"If you even try to speak Spanish, they'll fall over backwards to help you," she'd tell us, tacitly comparing the experience to trying to speak French in France. If the taxi driver worried me, Mercedes reassures me. We limp through the check-in procedure with good will and only minimal frustration.

Todd leading the first pitch of Joe's Garage (5.9)

"Ask her about the other guidebook," Todd says. He has a higher estimation of my ability to communicate in Spanish than is warranted.

"Hay un libro?" I manage (there's a book?).

"Sí," she answers, adding "guidebook" in heavily accented English. What do you know? One word of English and it's "guidebook."

That night, after a walk into town to procure groceries and toilet paper (not supplied, bring it), we meet our fellow inmates at Kurt's ranch and are introduced to the saga of Rich. The airline has lost one of Rich's bags. Unfortunately, it's the bag that contained his rock shoes and harness in addition to his tent. He and his two traveling companions slept three in a two-person tent the night before. None of them got much sleep but tonight, with a loaner tent from Kurt, Rich is feeling optimistic. They'll climb single-pitch stuff tomorrow, swapping out their two harnesses. Todd lends him a pair of shoes. We feel rich with two pairs each and lucky to have arrived with all our baggage. Although we carried shoes and harnesses on the plane, both our ropes were checked through. And the tent, of course.

The next morning we start our first day of climbing on a 5.8 called, portentously, Old Bolts. The rusted bolts with homemade hangers are widely spaced. The rock feels weird, sharp and yet without edges. I lead the route nervously but cleanly. Then Todd leads the first pitch of Joe's Garage. The first pitch is 5.9, the second is 5.11a. We stop with the first pitch. New areas are always a little scary. As we prepare to move along, Rich's two traveling companions show up. Rich isn't with them. He's decided to walk into town and call the airline again.

Todd and I knock off a few more routes. I venture into leading 5.9 and he tries a 5.10+. These routes have shiny new bolts, spaced much more closely, at least where it counts. The holds are so positive that even the smallest lip feels like a jug. I stop worrying about finding edges for my feet and just count on them sticking. It's not just sticky rubber on high-friction rock; it feels like dozens of little razors are embedding themselves right into the sole of my shoe with each step. We finish the day with the first four pitches of the classic route Space Boyz. I lead pitch three, rated at 5.9+, with no trouble at all and we rap off with daylight on our hands.

Me at a belay on Space Boyz (5.10d)

The pavilion at the Ranch is a congenial place to hang out and even more so tonight. Kurt and Elena are celebrating their engagement with free beans for everyone. The Mexican version of beans is nothing like a can of Campbell's Pork and Beans. It's a chunky soup with meat, beans, vegetables, and plenty of spice, especially if you get the ladle with the jalapeño in it. With the last slurp of bean juice finished, we throw steaks on the grill and socialize.

Rich is back at the ranch with news of his bag. It's been delivered to Monterrey. Unfortunately, it's been delivered to Monterrey, California. It's hard not to laugh and in fact we don't succeed.

"You should have just climbed today," I tell him.

"I think that's what I'll do tomorrow," he says, disgusted with another wasted day.

The slack line is a popular diversion and the night is punctuated with the sound of feet hitting the gravel underneath it. I'm chatting with a French-Canadian whose English is excellent. Here at the Rancho, amongst the climbers, is the "everyone-speaks-English" atmosphere I was expecting. But following our recent ordeal purchasing steaks from a cut-to-order butcher shop ("Tell him to cut it this thick," Todd whispers. I just roll my eyes.), I'm sensitive to how hard it is to communicate in a foreign language. I speak carefully and slowly to the French-Canadian.

Frank checking out the centipede

We are interrupted by shouts from the showers. Someone has discovered a centipede in one of the stalls. People rush to get a look.

"What is 'centipede'?" the French-Canadian asks. This word has stumped him.

"Um, a long bug with lots of legs," I answer helplessly, knowing how inadequately that describes the creature I've just seen in the shower. "Go look at it" is a better answer. If ever an insect's appearance said "back off or I'll hurt you," it's this one's.

"If you get stung on the finger, your whole hand swells up for days," someone tells me. We are cowardly standing on the far side of the center island as a group of Real Men (TM) tries to wrestle the thing out in a towel.

"They bite with the back end, not the front end," someone else warns me as we gather round the centipede, now in the dirt outside the pavilion. No one wants to walk away from it. It seems best to know where it is.

"They're not really aggressive, just defensive," I'm told as I watch the group of Real Men (TM) tease the thing into becoming aggressive. It's twisting like crazy, trying to find something to sting. Eventually everyone gets tired of playing with the centipede and forgets about it. But Todd and I don't take showers that night and we inspect the vestibule closely before crawling into our tent.

The beauty of Potrero Chico is multi-pitch bolted routes. Now on day two we decide to try one, picking, for some reason, the newly opened Estrellita rather than one of the classics. With twelve pitches at a maximum required difficulty of 5.10b, and with an optional 5.11a section, it seems about right for us. We see Rich as we head out for the day.

"Going climbing?" we ask. He shakes his head. He's been sick all night with vomiting and diarrhea. It's all he can do to stumble back to his tent and try to get some sleep.

"Just remember," I tell Todd, "if we never climb another thing this whole trip, we've already done better than Rich."

With both my health and my gear at hand, I lead the first pitch. Todd follows wearing the pack.

"We're never going to get through 12 pitches carrying this thing," he says in disgust as he arrives at the belay. He insists on leaving it. My extra layers! The first aid kit! The headlamp! The camera! Not to mention the water. We take a bit to eat stuffed in Todd's pockets, the topo for the route, and our street shoes for the walk back down the other side of the canyon. We gulp as much water as we can and leave the rest behind. Suddenly I'm traveling light after all.

The route goes without incident. Todd leads the 5.11a variation and I follow with a bit of struggling. We swing leads all the way and I sail through the two 5.10b pitches that fall to me. The rap down is more of an adventure as the rumors of rope-stretching raps even with two 60m ropes prove to be true, but we arrive safely on the ground, two canyons over from where we started. Still no water until we walk back to our starting point and Todd re-leads the first pitch to retrieve our pack, but it's a cool day and we've moved quickly so no one is suffering.

Rich is up and feeling better when we get back to the Ranch. He's been given a magic single-dose antibiotic and is optimistic about tomorrow.

"They're supposed to deliver my bag tonight," he says, jumping up to look every time a taxi bumps down the road. But that isn't exactly how it works out.

"Feeling better?" we ask him the next morning. He nods and holds up a strip of baggage routing tags.

"They brought my bag last night," he says.

"You see?" I say cheerfully, patting him on the shoulder. "I told you things were looking up."

"You don't understand," he says mournfully. "They brought it, but they didn't leave it." Apparently they tried to deliver the bag to Kurt's house but, not finding anyone home to accept delivery, ended up bringing it back to the airport. This small strip of adhesive paper is all that Rich has to show for their attempt.

Today is market day. Hidalgo is peppered with depositos (small stores often called Super-Mini) but they all carry the same few items - Coke, beer, and chips. There's also a grocery store where you can buy meat, fruit, vegetables and a few canned goods but overall your shopping selections are pretty limited. There's nothing like a Wal-Mart there. But on Tuesdays and Fridays, market comes to Hidalgo.

Todd walking the slack line at the Rancho

We hitch a ride into market and feast ourselves on fair-type food while we shop for staples. We sample small, round things stuffed with what looks like shredded beef.

"Ask what it is," Todd says, poking me, but I decline. I can come up with the words for "meat" and "chicken" and nothing more. I wouldn't understand it if they told me and perhaps we don't want to know. Whatever it is, we eat it and enjoy it. Next is a sort of fruit sundae, like an ice cream sundae piled high with whipped cream and covered in sprinkles but containing fresh fruit rather than ice cream. Good also. Then the ever-present corn-on-a-cob-on-a-stick. But we make a mistake by going with the boiled rather than the grilled and by not getting the chili powder.

We are just buying fried chicken from a fried-everything (don't want to know) stall when our ride hurries us along. We have to wait to eat the chicken until we're back at the Ranch, which is too bad because it's delicious and now we wish we'd bought more to keep in the shared refrigerator for later.

After all that food it's time for a siesta. We stagger back out of our tent, groggy, some time in the afternoon and decide to get some climbing in. And lo and behold! Rich's bag has arrived. Rich is also going to get some climbing in. He has two days left before his flight back home.

Todd and I end up at Black Cat Bone (5.10d, 9 pitches). At first we only intend to do the first four pitches - it's already afternoon - but the fourth pitch is actually a 3rd class scramble and we aren't ready to quit after three pitches so we keep going. At the end of the sixth pitch we're through the crux and I assume we'll be heading down.

"I want to go to the top," Todd says. Once again we've left our pack at the first belay. That means we have three pitches to get up, not gimmes at 5.10b, 5.10b and 5.9, and then eight pitches to get down before we're back at our headlamp. I eye the sky. There's no sign of impending darkness yet so I give in. We go to the top.

The top is beautiful, with a summit register and everything. We have a grand view of Hidalgo and the whole valley, but we can't enjoy it long. The first tinges of color can be seen in the west as we start rapping down. The raps are a nightmare - rap down 10 feet, pull up 190 feet of two strands of rope and heave them for all you're worth. Watch them catch on the next Yucca plant 10 feet farther down. Repeat. Eventually the two strands of rope tie themselves into a knot which must be painstakingly separated, while hanging, before you can continue.

We hold our breath on every pull but the pulls go easier than the raps themselves.

"Plenty of time," Todd says, as we walk into camp in darkness. "We even had time to deal with one stuck rope."

"You think so?" I ask.

"One," he says. I'm glad to have done the route, which turns out to be our favorite.

As the last ones out of the Potrero Chico park that night, we inherit the small dog that haunts the place. Todd has named it Benji, although he usually calls it Pero. Todd means to say 'perro', Spanish for dog, but he hasn't quite got the hang of the double-r and it comes out as 'pero' which means 'but'. I happen to the think that 'but' (I haven't got the hang of the double-t) is not a bad name for this dog. It's scruffy but cute, somewhere between puppy and dog, completely friendly and clearly addicted to climbers.

Benji Pero follows us to the Ranch. He belongs to Homero's in a "I'm not taking him; you take him" sort of way but he's ours for now. One of the other climbers cuddles him in his lap.

"He'll never survive here," someone says.

"He will if he keeps hanging around climbers," someone else answers. Benji has been fed tonight. "They just can't afford to keep pets here. Pets are a luxury." He sleeps in the vestibule of our tent that night. It's a cold night and windy, as it almost always seems to be here. Todd and I are snug in our sleeping bags and over-engineered four-season tent with expedition fly. The dog snores, but we haven't got the heart to evict it.

We think we're getting an early start the next morning but find that all the classic long routes are taken so we fritter the morning away on harder, single-pitch stuff. Todd leads Motavation (5.11a) cleanly and I follow it cleanly. Then he leads Fat Boy Slim (5.11b) with one fall while I take two on TR. We want to warn a Spanish-speaking leader on the route next to us that we're about to pull our rope down but I don't know the Spanish word for rope. We wait until he clips a bolt before we pull.

"Ropa!" Todd shouts.

"Ropa means clothes," I tell him flatly. The Spainards are unconcerned.

We look across the way and see a party bailing from the top pitch of Jungle Mountaineering (4 pitches, 5.10-). One of their members can't pull the crux moves. Seeing that the Jungle area is now free, we head over and start with Jungle Boys. The first pitch, a roof rated at 5.9, disappoints us. The roofs here just can't touch our Gunks souls. We rap down without doing the second pitch.

Todd leading Motavation (5.11a)

Jungle Mountaineering is another thing altogether. This is one of those old routes with sporty bolting that they warn you about. We pause beneath the final, crux pitch.

"It's OK if you don't want to do it," I tell Todd, whose lead it is. Easy 5.10 hasn't stopped us yet, but Todd's first lead on this route was a 5.9 with four bolts. I topped that on the next pitch - a 5.9+ with 3 bolts. He shrugs me off. The pitch has more bolts than its predecessors and isn't a problem for either of us. Although Potrero Chico is sport climbing there are many, many places where you don't want to fall. Luckily, we're finding the ratings pretty soft.

We beg a ride into town from Frank that night. He takes us to his favorite truck stop taquería. Frank seems to speak no Spanish at all and never carries any Mexican money, but he does alright somehow.

"The french fries here are great," he says, ordering something called "café con leche" from the menu. I'm pretty sure that he's ordered coffee with milk and tell him so. He de-orders it. I scan the menu for something that looks like french fries but don't see anything remotely similar. Finally I attempt some free-style ordering.

"Zapatas fritos?" I ask. The clerk repeats my order. I can tell he's corrected me slightly but don't catch the nuance. Later I check the dictionary and find that the word for potatoes is "patatas". What I've ordered is fried shoes. Luckily it is french fries, and not fried shoes, that arrive at our table and they're as delicious as Frank said they would be.

Back at the ranch we've become popular for beta on long routes. Frank and his group of three are after Black Cat Bone for the following day and are planning an early start.

"We did it in a few hours," we tell them.

"Yeah, but I've heard you guys are hard and fast," another climber confides to me. I'm flattered and amused.

"It's just that we're used to trad climbing," I tell him. Sport climbing is a kind of luxury. What's to dally with? Clip the bolt and move on. No route finding, no dickering around with gear, no anchor building. Belay changeovers involve handing over the few draws that weren't used on the last pitch. The climber doesn't even bother to anchor in at the belays but simply grabs the rest of the draws and climbs on. The softer ratings and perceived safety inherent in sport climbing allow me to lead very close to Todd's level. We calculate from the bottom so that Todd will get the crux pitch and then swing leads all the way. It doesn't seem hard to be fast here.

"There really isn't any trad where I live," someone sighs. I think how we're blessed to be trad climbers first and sport climbers second. It's easy for a trad climber to take a fun-in-the-sun sport climbing vacation. Not so easy the other way around.

We wake up Thanksgiving morning to the first really nice weather we've seen. We'd like to get on another long classic but don't expect to be that lucky. Climbers have been arriving with the holiday. Amazingly, Space Boyz (11 pitches, 5.10d) is completely open.

Me on the summit of Space Boyz (5.10d)

In deference to the heat, we actually bring along a Nalgene bottle half full of water this time. We take one swallow each at the fourth belay, the seventh belay, and the summit. We seem to be moving more slowly today. Perhaps it's the heat, or the flattery from the night before. It's afternoon before we're back on the ground. Today, our last day, we've finally gotten a rope stuck. Todd has to re-lead and then downclimb four bolts to deal with it. One stuck rope in more than 50 pitches of climbing - not bad for a place with such a bad reputation.

Although there is daylight left, we're more than satisfied with the sum total of our trip and settle in to the chore of eating Thanksgiving dinner at both Homero's and Kurt's. Homero's wins for us meat eaters but Kurt's wins for the vegetarians who would be dining on nothing but tortillas at Homero's.

"I don't think there's even a word for it in Spanish," Mike says over dinner, referring to the fact that he's not just a vegetarian but a vegan. "It's a luxury really, to be able to be vegan. I realize that it's just not possible for the people here."

We fly home the next morning, somehow negotiating our way through the airport and onto the correct plane, then off the plane and through the maze that is customs and immigration. Todd is suddenly enamored of speaking Spanish, now that there's no one here but me to hear it. For my part, I hesitate between 'thank you' and 'gracias', even when speaking to him. It seems I've become bilingual in my very small way.

"A qué parte de Mexico?" the immigration officer asks me and I answer "Monterrey" automatically without noticing the incongruity of being asked a question in Spanish by an employee of the US government in Atlanta, Georgia. She congratulates me on understanding Spanish and I think to myself that she's wasted here in the US-Citizen's line. She should be handling the Visitor's line. I worry about the Mexican man I noticed on the plane whose only English seemed to consist of "Bud Light" and "Thank you."

How did we manage to get there and back? How will he manage? But Todd and I are safe now, through immigration and officially back on American soil. We can handle anything that happens from here. We are Americans after all.