Hueco is calling and I must go...
even if it's just a trip into my memory vault
I’m in the mood for Hueco. I’m always in the mood for Hueco. As I have posted here before, I’m writing a book on rock climbing and motherhood and there are some Hueco Tanks years. I’m in the process of culling some way-too-long essays about those years, and so I’ve decided to share some outtakes— sections that won’t make it into the final version of my so-called book.
This one is timely since, here in 2025, we just celebrated Fat Tuesday last week and Lent has officially begun. We forced this spring trip to Hueco in 2017, even though I was still rehabbing a shoulder injury. Hueco was calling… I had to go with my family One More Time. That was the justification for it at the time, anyway. It ended up not being The Last Time.
Since this is an outtake, it’s a little self indulgent and doesn’t have a theme or any sort of message. It’s just a bit of Hueco Tanks for y’all.
28 February 2017, Fat Tuesday at Hueco Tanks, TX
Today was Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras— a day to go wild before the Christian holy day, Ash Wednesday and the start of the Lent. During this season we meditate soberly on our mortality for forty days: “From dust you came and to dust you shall return.” The weather is supposed to contribute fifty-mile-an-hour wind gusts after one o’clock this afternoon. Sounds like a party.
We started low on North Mountain in order to easily escape to ground level when the wind kicked up. This time both boys climbed with Brian and me on the Look Sharp boulder. I love it when we’re all climbing together as a family, taking turns on the same routes, which doesn’t happen very often. At first, I only watched while I neurotically went through each of my shoulder exercises with the Theraband— it takes me forever to warm up enough just to get on the warm up climbs. Oren topped out the short V2 called A Minor which we all celebrated with cheers and fist bumps and promises of pizza later. What would Fat Tuesday be without a feast at our favorite El Paso restaurant? Seb, never content with trying the easy problem first, threw himself at Be Flat, the stout V4 just to the left of A Minor. When I finally felt limber, I joined him and was eventually able to repeat it.
After Look Sharp, we crawled and then walked through the narrow corridor to Power of Silence, V10, a beautiful, classic problem, and a truly elegant line. This is Brian’s dream climb. We first encountered it, like many of the boulders here, watching the 1990s climbing video Free Hueco! Brian, a man who appreciates silence, has been lured to this problem every year we have come to Hueco since 2010, but it continues to stymie him. Today, he couldn’t make the big move off of the teeny tiny edges. He has big fingers, which means they are strong, but it also means that it’s hard for him to use those miniscule, greasy edges— although he still manages to pull on smaller holds than I can with my little fingers.
His hands engulf mine. If we press our hands together, his fingers are more than an inch longer than mine and twice as wide. He has big, wide palms. He is best at using slopers or pinches. He also has trouble fitting his long limbs in the polished concave scoop of rock where the Power of Silence begins, using only tiny hand holds and tiny, slippery feet.
Once he’d had enough of failure, we hiked down to Sign of the Choss. Before driving away from Pittsburgh, I watched a video of a woman climbing Sign of the Choss, and she made it look fun. To be honest, she made it look smooth and easy, so I thought maybe it would be those things for me too. But first, I had to consider its name— sometimes the name holds a warning. While Urban Dictionary Dot Com makes it seem like the word choss could mean just about anything or anyone— in a certain community in England, for instance, it means penis— choss has a very specific meaning for a person concerned with rocks. Of course, for all I really know, choss could have meant penis in this case too, if other Hueco boulder problem names like Daily Dick Dose, or The Devil’s Butthole set any sort of precedence.
But choss really means junky, crumbly, breakable rock, and Sign of the Choss must have been a chossy mess at one time to have earned this title. On some boulders at Hueco the brown-red patina is thinner and scabbier, more friable than on other boulders where it is tough-as-nails. Much of the patina, that once may have been better hand holds, has broken off of Sign of the Choss leaving muddy colored scars along the slightly overhanging face. The scars are the hand holds now and they aren’t great. I wouldn’t call Choss a pretty climb.
Five tries and I was toast: fingers, core, skin, brain, everything. Why, why, why does this climb feel so hard? I pulled onto the shallow, barely-there holds of Choss carefully, holding my breath and moving slowly till I let go for a split-second to grab the next wrinkle or dish. The feet are equally bad and not where I wanted them or the direction I’d prefer them to be facing. I moved in slo-mo because if I made a sudden movement, whichever foot held most of my weight would pop off. Every try, I was always off balance, always fighting my body weight sagging the wrong way, always finding myself sprawled on the pads. This climb does not flow, and it never feels easier.
The V4 grade at Hueco is deceiving. Generally, V4 is a moderate grade and by no means easy, but I can usually figure it out and send a climb with this rating in a handful of tries— in one day, surely. For some reason, here in this park I have found that some of the hardest climbs for me are rated V4. Some take days and days and days to send (Bloody Flapper). Some even feel impossible (Greasy Kids Stuff), and I have given up on them. Instead of just accepting that Choss is another hard V4, I tell myself that Choss has shed all its good holds over the years, and maybe it’s actually harder now. I tell myself, maybe it’s V5 or V6 now, which is the grade it feels like to me— maybe even harder than one benchmark V6 here, See Spot Run, which I have done before. The question is, can I even trust my judgment, since I’m nursing a shoulder injury?
I made a smidge of progress on the thing today though— one move higher than the first day I worked on it. One move higher is not nothing, so I slap myself an internal high-five. Now I have to allow the work to sink into my brain and muscles so that the next time I can go another move higher again. As long as I make progress, I’ll keep coming back to it. That is how this problem will get done, with some dogged determination, one move at a time, even if it is “just a V4.”
As we hung around Sign of the Choss, we could see the brown wall of the windstorm heading for us from the direction of Fort Bliss across the desert basin. Before it hit, we packed up and booked it down the slabs to ground level. By the time we were there, it had enveloped us in dusty, swirling air, and our bodies were being buffeted to and fro by the wind. Desert grime flew into our eyes and up our noses. Dust to dust indeed. The boys scrambled around, and Oren tried standing on top of a boulder. He looked like a surfer up there with his knees bent and his arms flailing around for balance so he wouldn't get knocked down. His shirt flapped around his torso. His limbs are so long and lanky now, and the wind almost blew him over a couple of times. Seb stood behind him, sheltered, in a lower spot, holding up an old phone to take a video, bundled in a heavy red and black checkered flannel shirt, blue Hueco Tanks hat, sunglasses.
