A Desert Rose: Devil's Tower and what we didn't climb...

so, it rained at Devil's Tower, Wyoming. all weekend, in fact. boo! liz and i drove 9.5 hours to the middle of nowhere wyoming to climb this impressive rock mountain, only to have it rain the whole time! we woke up saturday morning to rain. so we decided to drive over to south dakota to get a bowl of warm soup. if you've ever been to Devil's Tower, you know there is nothing around it. there is no back up plan, there is nothing else to climb. there is mt rushmore and the black hills or the badlands but they are all probably 2 hours away, and you can't really climb there anyway. Devil's Tower is about 50 miles from S. Dakota, so we drove over there to warm up and dry out. it was still raining. so we went into a thrift store we drove by. that was pretty entertaining for about an hour. then we entertained ourselves with ice cream and then drove back to Devil's Tower. by this time it had stopped raining so we got our gear together and ran up to the base of the mountain. it was about 4 pm. liz lead the first pitch of El Cracko Diablo, a wide two pitch classic climb on the tower. by the time i got to the belay ledge it was well on its way to dusk, but liz convinced me to do the second pitch anyway. it was the longest 5.8 i've ever done and it was hard!! we ended up rappelling down in pitch darkness, but at least we had climbed!!!

we had plans to wake up early the next day and climb the Durrance Route, one of the North American 50 Classic Climbs.it is rated at 5.6-5.7, so very easy and about 500 feet tall- you get to the very top of the tower from this route. we woke up to rain. so we slept in some more. when we finally woke up it had stopped raining and we thought we could go for the climb. this climb is very popular, and many new climbers get guided up it. when we arrived at the base of the climb a party of 4 climbers was already on it. one of the climbers was very new to climbing, and it took her a very long time to make it up the second pitch. liz and i started to realize we could never follow this party at that pace and still beat the omminous drizzle cloud making its way toward us. sure enough, 45 minutes later we were engulfed in a drizzle cloud again. bummed out, we decided to just drive home. we only had the next morning left to climb anyway and the forcast was for rain all night. so we packed up the wet tent and drove part of the way home, staying over night at liz's sister's house in southern wyoming. we were pretty bummed out, having driven that far only to hit the only rain storm in the entire west! we did get to climb a little, spent a lot of quality time driving across wyoming, and it ended up an adventure in the end. i am thinking that the odds are, if you are climbing this much, you are bound to get rained out a few times. i had perfect weather last week in the tetons, so maybe i was making up for that! here are a couple pics from Liz's camera. more to follow.