Touchstone Wall on Cerberus Gendarme is not the most impressive rock face in Zion, but what it lacks in height it makes up for with steepness. This photo makes Touchstone look short, gradual, and fat. This is not true. The route climbs up the light colored seams just right of center (actually nice cracks) to the tree (60 or 80 feet high, which gives a sense of scale) and then left up that funky summit prow. Photo credit goes to Phil Wortmann. I stole this from mountain project because we never got on or off the climb in the daylight aside from the first morning (when I was feeling seriously ambivalent).
Here's another pic from mountain project that better illustrates the nature of the route. Look for the trees and funky summit prow and then follow the lightened cracks downwards. Once again, photo credit goes to Phil Wortmann.
The wall is a little over 800 feet long. People usually climb it as a mostly-free route. Robert and I climbed it as a mostly-aid route. We did this because a) by the fourth day of the trip neither of us felt like climbing sand-bagged desert 5.9 and b) both of us were enjoying aid climbing. Anyways, I was expecting the first pitch to be a pretty mellow introduction to big wall climbing, since it follows a bolt ladder (or drilled pins, the desert equivalent of bolts) for half its length. I was wrong. At my height, the ladder mandates top-stepping on steep terrain. Nothing mellow about it.
After that pitch, it's time to traverse under and then pull a roof on sketchy, old, fixed gear. The second pitch is rated C2 (the scale goes from 1-5 in order of increasing difficulty for the non-climbers who might read this far), but it looked a lot more like C3 to me. Here's a photo of Robert trying to figure out a placement while hanging on a cracked piton. Seconding this wasn't as terrible as I was afraid it would be.
Long hanging belays (pictured) and leads followed. For some reason, I didn't bring out the camera very often. Oh well. We made pretty good progress throughout the day and, perhaps more importantly, my attitude improved dramatically. I was having tons of fun on my first big wall. By the end of day one, we'd fixed the first three pitches. We had planned on fixing the first four. Both of us realized that not getting to the top of pitch four would make for a longer second day. Completing the route still seemed possible, but we'd likely be descending in the dark after a full day.Day two started much more smoothly than day one. The aid sections were quicker. I didn't have to think too hard about setting up the anchor and haul systems. The ropes didn't get tangled as much. The sun wasn't as brutal. Robert even seemed to cruise the first set of nasty four-inch cracks!
I got a little thrashed by my first free climbing pitch of the day. It's supposed to go at 5.9 (like everything else on the route), but with the exhaustion and the gigantic rack it felt as though it were in the 5.10 range. I ended up french-freeing a lot of the thing. Sadly, I even yarded on gear through parts of an incredibly sweet hand crack. Possibly one of the best I've ever been on. You can make it out in this photo. It's directly above Robert's head where the big slab of orange sandstone that sticks out to the left meets the paler rock on the right. Fairly steep and really exposed.After this, Robert cruised another nasty wide crack followed by a nasty squeeze chimney. That brought us up to the big tree. Then, I got to lead my favorite free pitch of the day -- 5.9 face climbing! This pitch was really well protected with drilled pins. It had relatively large holds to yard on. I was smiling before I got on the thing and my grin only got wider as I went up. This is not the best picture of the face, but I was so excited to get on it that I neglected to snap a picture from below. This pic does a decent just of showing how nice and steep it was.
We only had one more pitch to go and the route description made it sound easy. It was a good thing, too, because we only had about 45 minutes of daylight left by the time Robert got ready to lead. Both of us were feeling the time crunch, but it was hard to ignore the spectacular scenery.
After some route finding issues and a little gentle swearing, Robert knocked off the last pitch. I jugged up the rope and guided the haul bag over the last roof of the route. We immediately started sorting our gear in anticipation of a heinous gully descent with something like eight rappels. Anyone who has rappelled an unknown route in the dark will understand our desire to get going as quickly as possible. The descriptions we had of the descent conflicted with one another and with what we found in the gully. Oftentimes we knotted the ends of our rope to insure against rapping off them. All in all, the descent wasn't as bad as advertised. We made it down in about 2 hours and 20 minutes. I reached the ground around 10pm, Robert followed soon thereafter. We were really tired, but excited to have met our objectives.
The first day took 11 hours. The second was 14.5. Total time of 25.5 hours. Would have been much longer if we'd slept on the route. All in all we only lost two pieces of gear (even though we dropped three and left one at a rappel station), which is reasonable. I had a ton of fun on this route and on this trip. Less than a year ago I told Robert that big walls held little or no appeal for me. Now they hold tons. Can't wait until the next adventure.
