“Forget your hands. Trust your shoes…”
The climbing shoe advert comes back to me as I balance awkwardly on the rockface, a hundred and twenty feet above the valley floor. If I were more comfortable, I could look behind me to see the towering limestone cliffs on the other side of the pass that forms the entrance to El Potrero Chico, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. To my left, the mountains a mile or two away are still shrouded in haze, but the sun is just peeking over the hills behind me.
My feet are on two small ledges, enough to hold me but far from reassuring. My left thumb and right forefinger are buried deep within small pockets around chest height, and the rest of my fingers are clinging to the smooth rock, more for psychological than physical support. In the back of my mind, though, is the vague thought that if my feet slip, I could break both digits quite easily.
There’s what I hope is a big hold is about four feet above me, and I should be able to clip into the next bolt when I reach it. But I’m already five feet above the last bolt, which will catch the rope if I fall, and there’s enough slack to ensure that I’ll drop about twelve feet before swinging into the rock. Even on ‘safe’ sports climbs, where the bolt is permanently fixed into the rock, I’ve never quite got over my fear of falling. As I feel my arms tiring, I try not to imagine the scraping impact onto the sharp, water-shaped stone. Why didn’t I wear a long-sleeved top, despite the thirty-degree heat?
I’ve been stood here for perhaps fifteen minutes, trying to figure out how to make the next moves. My feet are throbbing, and I shift position slightly, looking for better holds. These rock boots are tight at the best of times and the heat here is making my feet swell, so that taking them off is blissful relief. But I’m glad of the friction that’s keeping me on the rock. There’s a hint of a pocket about eight inches above my left foot. I plant my toe into it and stand up, scrabbling for any slight purchase with my right. Pulling hard on my right finger, I pull out my left thumb and reach up, curling the tips of my fingers over the illusion of a ledge, then bring my right foot up to a sloping hold underneath my hand. I’m off-balance now, and my left hand aches as I cling to the hold, carefully extract my right index finger and reach up for something more positive. My short stature is suddenly a blessing as I rock my weight onto my right foot, leg folded beneath me, pull myself over the slight bulge and gasp with relief as I sink my left hand into the hold I’d seen earlier, mercifully deep enough to hang from. After a moment’s pause to catch my breath and clip my rope to the bolt, I move on – my position isn’t quite comfortable enough to actually rest. The sun’s out properly now, and I can feel the back of my neck warming up. I go through similar moments of
anguish twice more before I reach the top of the route and relax. I can just summon the energy to smile in weary achievement before I head back down.
Now, repeat that entire process two, three or more times a day for three weeks (apart from when it rains, at which point the rock turns dangerously slick). Add in basic but pleasant camping, spectacular scenery, spicy food, cold beer, linguistic difficulties, a limited supply of books and many, many games of Hearts, and you’re not too far away from a climbing expedition. In this case, we were in Mexico, so our list of pleasures also included tequila, aggressive invertebrates and cacti. Big, spiky, painful cacti that infested the higher slopes – but more of them later.
Sound like fun? It should be pointed out that rock climbers are a strange breed, and the Imperial College Mountaineering Club are stranger than most (we are Imperial students, after all). Unless you’ve tried it, there’s no way that I can convince you that good climbing makes all incidental hardships fade into the background, and the inherent risk only adds to the exhilaration.
And the climbing was great. El Potrero Chico is a ring of limestone peaks, thrust up among the Sierra Madre Oriental, a few miles down the road from Monterrey, Mexico’s third city and industrial heartland. The northern edge of the Potrero (Spanish for corral – a ring of mountains) is split by a steep-sided pass, where most of the existing climbing has been done. Vast slabs of limestone, hundreds of feet high and ranked like sharks teeth, form small valleys and canyons on both sides of the pass. There are literally hundreds of routes on the various rock faces, and their varied orientations mean that even in the fierce afternoon sun, there’s always something in the shade. The rock itself is mainly hard carbonates, especially limestone, and is covered with cracks, pockets, flakes and imperfections that make for varied and challenging climbing. Best of all, the surface of the rock is rough, without the ‘polished’ feel of more popular areas.
With financial help from the Imperial College Exploration Board and the University of London Union, nine students set off on the long flight to Mexico City at the start of September. Our mission: to develop new routes in one of the world’s most exciting climbing areas.
Mexico City is impossibly huge, and located in arguably the worst possible place to put twenty million people. On a high plateau, surrounded by a ring of volcanoes (some of which are still active), the city’s air is a thick smog of exhaust fumes from its crowded streets and heavy industry. There’s little in the way of a sewer system, and the whole place stinks. It may be a lively, vibrant
metropolis, but we left without regret on an overnight bus for the long journey north to Monterrey.
Although Monterrey turned out to be fairly nice, we wasted little time there, making instead for the town of Hidalgo and El Potrero Chico. We spent much of our time staying at the Rancho Cerro Gordo, a campsite ten minutes walk outside the Potrero that catered to the growing numbers of climbers who come from all over the world to visit the area. The ranch was quiet – September is just outside the peak winter season – so we more or less took over the tin-roofed pavilion, where the traditional shower block and kitchen area were joined by some old sofas, a pull-up bar and a tightrope. There were a couple of spare helmets we could borrow, too.
The ranch was to become our base for the rest of our time there, but we spent a few nights camping in the Potrero, looking for new crags to develop. We all spent the next two weeks there, before some people drifted off to see more of the country, specifically the Pacific coast. After the bustle and grime of the cities, it was great to be out in the country. People were friendly and relaxed, living was easy, if not spectacularly cheap, and the rock was gorgeous. Even the events of September 11th seemed a world away – our only contact with the outside world was a Texan radio station and the occasional trip into Monterrey for a cybercafe.
After a few days acclimatising to the heat and remembering how to climb, we set off into the wilderness to look for new routes. We camped at the opposite side of the Potrero from the pass, and set out in small groups to find fresh, unconquered rock. Unfortunately, it looked like said rock was going to remain unconquered for a while longer. Despite several trips into the bush, towards the tantalising rock faces we could see in the distance, we never quite managed to find anything.
The problems were twofold. For starters, the approaches to the actual rock were up steep slopes, covered with vegetation. While this was not at first a problem, the higher we went, the more cacti we found. I used to think that cacti looked quite nice, but I now regard them with the kind of venomous hatred usually reserved for the Student Loans Company. Fighting every step of your way up an often loose slope, and being repeatedly impaled on sharp thorns which are thrust at you from every direction is not my idea of a pleasant walk in the desert. Clearing a path wasn’t an option either – uprooting cacti is illegal in Mexico. We eventually decided that the pain and blood loss were too severe, especially since no-one in their right mind would want to make their own way up to repeat any routes we did manage.
The other trouble was the rock. We had decided before we left to avoid drilling into the rock to
place bolts, so would be relying on ’traditional’, hand-placed protection. Although riskier, this avoids leaving unsightly metal bolts in the rock face, and is generally preferred in Britain. Unfortunately, limestone does not always lend itself to such practices, and we found few possible lines which would be safe to climb. A further problem was that the rock was quite loose in places, and had various plants growing in it elsewhere. At the start of one potential route, the first hold came away as soon as it was tried. On reflection, we decided that our initial plan was not feasible, and since we had no bolting equipment to set up sports routes we resigned ourselves to enjoying the climbs already there.
Those climbs were spectacular, though. As well as scores of short routes, the Potrero has spectacular long routes, which can take an entire day to get up and down. One of these is Yankee Clipper, which climbs up almost a thousand feet to a summit on the west side of the pass. Our glorious leaders, club President Kevin and Vice President Phil had three attempts on this monster – twice, they were forced by darkness and rain to abseil down from about halfway. Other memorable experiences included a rope getting stuck two hundred feet up in the dark, and a thunderstorm that flooded our sleeping area at one in the morning. We left the Potrero with mixed feelings. It was a shame to travel halfway across the world and not achieve our main goal, but we’d had a great time, and the experience of fantastic climbing in a new country had been great. Given the opportunity, I’d go back there, but unless you happen to live in the States it’s a long, long way to get there. But the people are nice, the rock’s great and Mexico’s pretty civilised by South American standards, so it’s well worth considering. For more information, or to see more photos, check out: http://www.su.ic.ac.uk/mountaineering