Spire Five
May 26, 2006
Somewhere along the way, Angela and I decided it would be cool to climb all nine of the numbered spires in the Cathedrals. Indeed, the Cathedral Spires are probably our favorite place to climb, as they hold many traits that appeal to us--relative solitude, a rich climbing history, easy but convoluted routes, lots of unknowns, and plenty of summits! So it seems only natural that we would set into motion a mission that would have us return year after year to our favorite playground.
By the end of 2005 we were well on our way having completed climbs of Spires One through Four. It would seem that things should get easier from here on out as Spires One and Three held the most technically demanding routes. However, things are not always as they seem. The reason we had already bagged the first four Spires had more to do with they amount of information we had about the routes than the actually difficulty of the climbing. The first four Spires are indeed quite popular and there is much written about them in numerous guidebooks for the area. On top of that, they are all rather distinctive and simple to find (at least by Black Hills standards).
Ah, but then there are Spires Five through Nine... These five Spires seem to have been forgotten by time, not making it into any of the more recent guidebooks. I imagine part of this is due to the "easy" nature of the routes. Only Spire Five requires 5th class climbing to reach it's summit. The rest are either class 3 or 4 climbs, and I suppose summiting a class 3 Spire doesn't stroke the ego sufficiently for most rock climbers to even bother. Add to that the vacuum of information regarding these Spires and I suppose most figure they can't possibly be worth the effort to find.
Now to Angela and I this all just sounds like loads of fun! This sense of adventure and finding your own way to the summit of a Spire where the only route description says, "Scramble up the obvious route," is rewarding--when you step into these Spires you soon realize that nothing is "obvious"!
So,
in May of 2006, we stood below the Five-Six gully trying to make sense of
Piana's description of the Conn's Goat Route. From where we stood we
couldn't even be sure that we were actually looking at Spire Five--we
figured that it was probably hidden out of sight from this vantage point.
From our experiences on the previous Spires, it seemed logical that we
should venture up the gully as far as possible in hopes to spot some sort of
route or line to the top. We figured if it's called "Goat Route" it
must be pretty darn easy and obvious!
After a few difficult moves up wet rock and steep slippery grass under
the burden of our climbing packs (always fun), we made it to the head of the gully. Now we've
seen mountain goats climb some amazing stuff over the years, but we hadn't
spotted a line yet that looked goat
friendly. There were, however, two
or three chimneys leading up to what we assumed must be Spire Five, so we
decided to just try out the one that looked easiest.
So, after a bit of a snack, I racked up, Angela arranged the ropes, and up
the chimney I went!
The climbing that ensued wasn't the most difficult I've ever done, but it
sure was interesting! It started out easy enough and after
15
feet or so of chimneying
I found my butt in a very comfortable rest stance.
After that things looked kind of bleak. It turned out that none of the
climbing was too difficult, but the protection was certainly not great.
I remember repeating this sequence several times: I would think that the
climbing was going to get tricky ahead, wiggle in some crappy psychological
gear, psyche myself up to move onward, and then find that the moves
weren't really hard at all! The best protection I got on the whole
pitch came from a chockstone around which there was already some lichen-encrusted webbing--perhaps decades old!
I persevered and eventually came
to the logical conclusion of the first pitch in a notch between Spire Five
and some unnamed slightly shorter spire. Angela quickly followed the
pitch commenting on how the climbing wasn't hard at all. I thought, "Well,
Sweety, the next pitch is all yours!"
Indeed,
I did somehow talk Angela into leading the next pitch. I didn't want
to steal all the fun of not knowing where the hell we were going! We
decided the
best route would be to follow a narrow chimney that headed up
from the notch, but we couldn't really tell where it led. When Angela
headed out and looked into the chimney, she was met by the sun directly in
her eyes--so she couldn't see a damn thing ahead! Nevertheless, she
headed upwards, and when the climbing got steep and unprotectable, she made
a delicate downward traverse to the right where she could get in more gear
before heading on up to the summit. I followed behind and soon we were
on the summit of Spire Five! Or were we?
The Spire Five massif actually has six independent summits, and it's hard
to say which is actually the highpoint, though it appeared that the one we
had climbed
was perhaps a foot or two short of top honors. The true summit appeared to
be only 15 or 20 feet away,
but we had a feeling that our remarkably nice
day was going to turn wet quite soon and we were still unsure how the heck
we were going to get down. We agreed that for now we were close
enough. We also agreed that couldn't possibly have been the Goat
Route! There was indeed a lack of poop on the route we had chosen. We
snapped some summit
photos (and yes, I know the sky looks nice and blue in
all of them, but trust me--rain was building in the west), and then we
discussed our options for descending.
Perhaps,
psychologically,
the easy way to get down would have been to reverse our route since we could
easily ascertain what that would entail. There were however no fixed
anchors (other than that crusty old sling) so we would have to make do tying
off boulders and chockstones with our own webbing.
There also seemed a
high likelihood that our rope might get stuck somewhere in the chimney when
we tried to retrieve it. So we chose instead to rap into a chimney of
unknown origin from an obvious descent anchor that Angela had found just
below the top.
This rappel was actually quite short and led to a hidden corridor which
we could scramble down without even roping up. We continued downward
and eventually came to a more difficult section that seemed to warrant some
sort of rope work--we probably could have down-climbed it but figured it's
better to be safe than sorry. Instead we rigged up a simul-rappel
around a rock horn and rappelled 25 feet or so over the difficult area to
more easy ground. This came back to bite us in the butt when the rope
wouldn't budge around the horn when we tried to retrieve it! I ended
up climbing back up about half of what we had rappelled in order to get the
rope free. At
any rate, we were back on easy ground and continued downward to the head of
another gaping chimney. As luck would have it, a rappel
anchor
appeared out of nowhere. Though the bolts weren't awe-inspiring, the
webbing seemed to be in relatively good shape (people must actually climb
this spire after all). As we had predicted, the weather was definitely
starting to change and finding an anchor to speed up the descent put a smile
on Angela's face even though she became the guinea pig to test it out and
find out where it led.
Where did it lead? Well, after about 100 feet it deposited us on the ground and at what we now believe to be the beginning of the Goat Route! It seems that stumbling upon things is our most successful "method" for finding things in the Black Hills! Indeed, the start of this climb is hidden from view from below the Spire--it's no wonder that we didn't gravitate towards it earlier in the day. At any rate, we've now got two good reasons to go back and climb Spire Five again--we can actually climb the Goat Route (which looked like a lot of fun for a 5.0 route) and we can try to reach the true summit.
Will it ever end? Do we really want it to? It seems like there is always one or two more things to climb in the Cathedral Spires!
