Canyon Tajo

Canyon Tajo: ›Photos ›Video ›Reports

Canyon Tajo Report:
El Gran Trono Blanco (The Great White Throne) – East Face
(Oct. 7-10, 1999)

By JKVawter

I climbed two walls in 1978: the Giraffe on El Gran Trono Blanco in northern Baja, and the Direct on Half Dome. After Half Dome I spent a month on the road in the Tetons and the Banff/ Jasper area culminating with what we thought was a first ascent of the North Face of Edith Cavell via the East Summit. As it happened, another party had climbed it a month earlier, though in much better conditions, and named it the McKeith Spur in honor of Bugs McKeith.

That was the last big thing I did. I took one more long trip in 1979, spending several weeks at Lover's Leap and the Lake Tahoe area, Tuolumne and in the Valley. When I turned my attention to finishing school, settling on an occupation, getting married, buying a house and having kids, I got weak and flabby in a hurry. In recall that in late fall of 1979, I looked up from my books one afternoon and said to my girlfriend Riley (now my wife), "I don't think I'll ever do another wall. I'll never be in that kind of shape physically or mentally again."

So I was apprehensive in September when Werner Landry invited me to join him on the first continuous ascent of his new route on the East Face of El Gran Trono Blanco in October. He and Mark Richards spent several weekends last spring establishing a pitch or two at a time, connecting the natural features by traversing blank stretches using hooks, holes, rivets, bolts and all other manner of aid jiggery pokery. Each had taken long (30+ feet) falls in the process: Werner sprained an ankle and ripped the stitching out of an aider; Mark tore a knifeblade in half.

These misadventures and the fact that there was hooking, and lots of it, on all but the first and last two pitches (all free), were the seeds of anxiety in the fertile ground of my mind: that and the nagging apprehension that I might flame out somewhere on the route. I wondered if I could get my "head" back before succumbing to the pressure of runouts above bad gear and the relentless stress of living on a wall. If it was as hard as they made it sound, I could imagine backing off a lead and being unable to muster the guts to get back on the horse. In the days before the climb, I found myself more and more emotionally distant from my family and coworkers and increasingly preoccupied with mundane preparations in the daytime, and moments of mortal dread at night.

Canyon Tajo is one of the largest and most pristine of the many canyons that cut into the escarpment that runs from eastern San Diego County 200 miles south into Northern Baja. It drops into the desert as steeply as the Sierra drops into Owen's Valley. The canyon rim tops out at 5500 feet, about 5000 feet above the desert floor. Further south, the peaks along the rim top 10,000 feet.

El Gran Trono Blanco, or the Throne as most call it, is a huge outcropping of granite perched high on the west wall of Canyon Tajo. Its summit is just above the surrounding countryside. The rolling hills and tableland west of the escarpment covered by pinyon-juniper woodland, is dotted with remote ranchos and small settlements and is perfect for weekend camping.

The immense canyon below is hotter and drier, though a year-round stream flows through huge groves of Washingtonia palms in the bottom. The oasis-like quality of the canyon bottom makes it a desirable backpacking destination. But the logistics of finding your way in to this essentially trackless wilderness and then climbing out again make it rarely visited. From the Throne, the canyon winds down another 12 miles into the desert. There the flat, mostly featureless expanse of desert floor runs nearly uninterrupted for fifty miles to the mountains southwest of Mexicali.

About two-thirds of the way across these flats is the Laguna Salada, a gigantic silt plain covered with a few inches of water for a few weeks after desert thundershowers. At dawn the red-orange horizon a hundred miles distant is reflected in this huge, shallow pond creating an eerie, spectacular sight. From high up on the face, the view of the canyon and desert floor is stupendous. So is the sense of utter isolation. Forget YOSAR, helicopters, or mountain rescue. If you fuck up here, you get yourself out or you don't get out.

The Throne's 1000-foot southern face sports a number of high quality free climbs, and at least two mixed free and aid climbs. The lichen-yellow ramparts of the north face are broken by many ledges and vegetated areas, unattractive to climbers. The east face is "the wall" and tops 1600 feet. On the right side is the El Progresso Ramp, a relatively easy, vegetated, way to get high up in a hurry. Several routes take off to the left from various points along the ramp. By all accounts, none are aesthetic.

In the middle of the east face is a huge cleft that separates the relatively broken right side from the shield-like left side. The Pan American Route takes the cleft. It took Karl Karlstrom and Scott Baxter four tries, but they knew "this was a first worth suffering for". Baxter, one of the pioneering Arizona climbers known as the Syndicato Granitico who developed several big routes on the Throne in the early seventies said:

"The feeling of walking up to an El Gran Trono Blanco and knowing that no one else has set foot on it is just indescribable. On the Pan Am route, you get an exotic, little big wall adventure without having to go halfway around the world. It could easily bump others in a revised edition of Fifty Classic Climbs of North America".

The Giraffe, climbed by Hugh Burton and John Long in 1975, takes an audacious diagonal line following shallow incipient cracks and corners left to right up the middle of the bulging shield, exiting via the right side of a huge roof. Werner and I made the second ascent in 1978. Werner's route is between the two.

Werner likes an audience so his first idea was to invite a bunch of people, gather a bunch of ledges and lead the whole group up as one party. I told him I wouldn't have any part of it. If there were more than four in one party, I'd wait to do it with someone else. Also, I didn't want anyone up there who didn't know what he was doing, except David Raum.

David is one of those people who can do anything he puts his mind to. Run a marathon? No problem: He does the Catalina, one of the hilliest courses anywhere, every year, without training, just for fun. Swim the Alcatraz Sharkfest Swim? 64 minutes: Slow but steady. Hike from South Rim to North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and back (46miles), in a day? Did it last weekend. He's also done Ama Dablam with Werner, a couple of trans-Sierra ski trips, including the High Route, and the Sonora Death Ride (Sonora to Leavitt Meadow, to Tuolumne, to Sonora, in three days.) The guy is tough. He goes from novice to competent in one step. He is a decent rock climber though he doesn't care much for leading. Mechanically oriented, jumaring and hauling would be easy for him to pick up. But he hates exposure and falling and swinging: following traverses was going to be interesting.

As it turned out, only David and Alejandro, a climber from Tijuana, agreed to go with us. Three wall newbies wisely smelled a clusterfuck and backed out. That meant I was in. We decided that David would jumar behind Werner and Mark, and that Alejandro and I would climb as a separate team. David would be the only novice and he would be sandwiched between the two parties at all times.

Although I would have preferred to be on another route and not directly under another party, I was satisfied with this arrangement. I took a helmet as a concession to my increasing concern about "the odds". The older I get, the more I look back on my formative years as a climber and wonder how I survived with such a cavalier attitude. Dumb luck, I guess.

Although I had never climbed with Alex, I knew from Mark that he was solid. He had climbed the Pan Am with a novice, Giraffe with Mark, leading some of the A4 and a good deal of the A3, and was an extremely personable and intelligent guy with a love for all things mechanical.

Like the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, you have to hike down into the canyon to begin a climb on the Throne. The usual approach for the east face is the north gully, longer but less steep than the south gully. With food and water for four days, a portaledge, a big wall rack, and the other assorted wall gear, our bags topped 100 pounds, how much more than a hundred I don't know.

I'd never carried a bag too heavy to dead lift off the ground and wrestle onto my back, until this one. I dragged it to a rock and coaxed it to a rest on the rock about two feet off the ground. Then I positioned myself under it and strapped myself in. As I straightened my legs, my morale nose-dived. I knew that what was coming would severely test me.

The usual three hour hike over rocky outcroppings, through dense thickets of saw grass, scrub oak and manzanita, down steep ravines and dry water courses, over house size boulders, and around and through patches of catclaw, cactus and spear-like agave leaves, swelled to four-and-a-half brutal hours under the monstrous loads. The exertion of moving and remaining balanced was so intense, there were moments when I took the pack off (or rather parked it on a rock and got out from under it) and felt that I would puke. Strangely, getting back under the load quelled the nausea. About one p.m., with swollen ankles, sore knees, and bleeding or scabbing scratches on every exposed area of skin, we arrived at the base of the route.

Mark and Werner had already begun leading the second pitch by the time Alex and I arrived at the base. David was busy practicing jumaring on a line fixed at the first belay. Alex and I unloaded our climbing gear at the base and started climbing.

I took the first pitch, a free one up steep flakes, ramps and a little 5.9 face near the top. A large sloping ledge served as the belay point. The next pitch was quite blank and steep with a few bolts widely spaced leading up and right. Alejandro jumped on it to allay his rising anxiety: nothing like taking the bull by the horns to chase the fear back into its cage.

Alex sweated every hook move until he snagged the first bolt with a draw, about 15 feet up. After another couple of dicey hooks he was again in danger of hitting the ledge. A second bolt a bit higher quelled his "dios mios", and he finished off the pitch. Mark and Werner were through for the day and on their way down. With a mixture of relief and foreboding, I decided to put off the next lead until the morning. I'd heard Werner grousing about A4 hooks and calling out "Watch me!" so I was reluctant to get on anything that might take me more than an hour to lead. It was time to rest and rehydrate.

We ferried sleeping gear and food and water for one night over to the campsite below a large pinyon a hundred yards downslope from the rock. Mark broke out his margarita mix loosening our tongues and blunting the sense of apprehension. I choked down a can of chicken and a can of three-bean salad, still a little nauseous and exhausted form the hike down. I didn't want to start the trip by puking up dinner. As the Margarita bottle was drained, the tales told, and darkness descended, we relaxed.

For me, not being able to see the wall was a relief. Our world shrank to what we could see by the light of the little fire. A cool breeze rustled and moaned through the branches above us and picked up ashes that glowed then disappeared in the dark. Jupiter rose off the eastern horizon, the lights of a little Mexican settlement beyond Laguna Salada came into view, and the glow of the lights of Mexicali, hidden behind the mountains, drowned out the stars above the northeast horizon. Directly above us, the Milky Way filled the sky just east of the hard, black outline of the wall.

The red horizon the next morning silhouetted peaks a hundred miles away in western Arizona and mainland Mexico. The sky was cloudless and held no portent of bad weather. It wasn't going to be hot, as we had feared. The Santa Ana that was developing would make it uncomfortably hot along the coast and inland, but not in the mountains 70 miles inland.

At breakfast, David announced that he had thought it over all night and had decided not to go with us. The wall was too big, too intimidating and his skills too rudimentary to take on such a thing. We encouraged him to reconsider, gently. But his quiet resolve was unshakable. We accepted his decision without argument or teasing.

We moved everything back to the base and repacked the haul bags. I readied the haul line and water and food for the day. Werner and Mark jugged our line and were soon out of our way. Alex jugged up to the ledge atop the first pitch and began to haul. David loaned me his brand new aiders and took my old second pair to carry out. He also loaned me his Ropeman, which I thought might be of some comfort following the radical traverses midway up.

Alex completed the haul and took off up our fixed climbing rope to the belay atop pitch two. We'd already been warned not to haul to there, but to wait until the top of 3, a straight, relatively short haul because pitch 3 was a 90 foot diagonal back left after 2's swerve to the right. I lit out aggressively from the belay at 2, anxious to get into the hard hooking. A couple of free moves across a ledge brought me to the blank area. A bolt beckoned from several feet away and up. I was deliberate and slow, looking at a long pendulum over an ankle-eating ledge if I blew. After the first bolt I relaxed a bit. I fell once between the bolts when a hook popped and immediately felt better. Though I was using two aiders on each biner, daisy chains and aggressive testing all for the first time, the basic procedure came back automatically, like riding a bike, something that once learned you never forget. The pitch ended with a few feet of free climbing up steep flakes to the belay at the base of a right-facing corner.

Alex racked all of our cams for the next lead, the double dihedrals. The first stretch off the belay looks like a moderate .9/.10 hand crack. But there is no place to go at its end and you might as well be in your aiders when you get there. Some hooks, bolts and holes lead left to the base of another dihedral, longer and wider than the first. Two bolts near the bottom of the second dihedral could be used for a belay, but Werner suggested that Alex just lower off, clean the gear from the first dihedral then finish the lead on the second. That gave him just enough rope to get top the next belay, the top of the 5th.

While belaying Alex on the dihedrals, I was level with and about 80 feet left of the base of the huge left-facing dihedral on the right side of the big blank face. A wide crack, and the thousands of birds that enter and exit this crack every day make it an uninviting climbing goal (unless you're Brutus). I had a ringside seat for the exodus of the swifts and swallows that make this 300-foot fissure their home.

I noticed movement in the crack: they appeared at first like hundreds of dirty ping pong balls jiggling and moving together in the crack. Suddenly twenty of them "fell" out of the crack and took flight. Five seconds later another wave left the crack. This continued for the hour of so that I was at the belay.

Werner and I had seen the birds before when we climbed Giraffe. In the evening, thousands of them gathered and flew in a clockwise circle, like a spinning galaxy. The birds furthest from the center and closest to the rock flew into the fissure at top speed. This went on for 30 to 40 minutes until they were all ensconced in their high rise bird house.

The 6th is one of two "moaners" in a row. It begins with a series of hook moves above another ledge to a bolt. As I began the lead, Werner called out to me from the belay above: "Have you gotten to the bolt yet?" "NO!" I was in no mood to chitchat until I clipped that first bolt. "Say no more, I know exactly where you are". Beyond this, another couple of hooks on shallow but solid flakes got me to a second bolt. This was the end of the diagonaling. Now a long, very blank stretch appeared directly above me. I set a hook and tested it aggressively. Why not? I was at a bolt.

Another move or two took me into the blankest area yet. I began to look for holes. Not finding any, I set a hook on a questionable flake. I tested it as aggressively as I could considering that I was well above the last bolt and on a marginal hook. Then I weighted it with one leg then two and finally I stood up gingerly. Something subtle changed as I moved up. I didn't hear anything or feel shifting, but I had the feeling that all was not well.

I looked down again to check my landing zone. Seeing nothing to run into, there was nothing else to do but step up into the next rung. Ping! I was off. Pain shot through my right knee. I hung motionless and groaned in agony for a few moments, waiting for the pain to subside.

"You alright?" Werner and Alex asked simultaneously. I felt my knee for damage. "Yeah. Bruised the shit out of my knee. I don't know what I hit." I batmanned back up to the bolt and started the process again. This time I got one move higher and ran out of flakes. I saw several patches of raw, gritty rock where other bad flakes had been sheared off.

I tried and tested another one and sheared it off but managed to remain on my hook. I was about 12 feet above the bolt here. I tried another one, desperate for a hole but not seeing one. I tested, moved onto and up two stirrups before this one popped. I dropped twenty-five feet in an instant and looked at Alex. "You ok?", I said to him. "Yeah, no problem". He had me on a gri-gri and had barely felt the impact.

I didn't hit anything that time and was just pissed that I'd come off twice. I stormed back up and got a little higher in the aider on the last good hook. I was about to try another questionable flake when I spotted a hole. "Damn!" It was inches from the flake I'd just pulled off. This led me up and left into an incipient crack and higher, a subtle, shallow corner. This was the scene of Mark's long fall. I passed the remnant of the knifeblade he left in the crack, neatly sheared off at the rock. Werner had showed me the eye end months earlier. It looked like a piece of taffy torn in half.

Two rivets had been added to this stretch, making it a much safer affair. Still, I got a chance here to nest some knifeblades, something I'd been wanting to do since seeing the photo of the third pitch of the NA Wall in Robbins' Basic Rock Craft when I started climbing in 1971. I continued to an overhang with a rotten crack underneath. Cams fit here pretty well but the rock was so crumbly inside the crack that I was nervous all the way up. A few free moves above the overhang got me to another bolt and some easy ground to the belay. Big, bad pitch 6 was history.

Alex raced up the line, which puzzled me. I knew we were through for the day. Though there was "an hour" of daylight left, if he started the steep and difficult 7th, he would have to finish it in the dark and we'd be sharing bolts with Werner and Mark. I talked him out of it gently, but allowed that it would be good for him to start the pitch and at least reach and clip the first two bolts on the headwall above at 15 and 25 feet. Then we'd have four instead of two bolts to hang everything on for the night. He got this done in minutes, and we were soon setting up his "double" portaledge.

Alex started climbing about seven years ago at age 19. He'd take the trolley up from Tijuana to San Diego, about an hour-and-a-half one-way, to buy one cam. He built a rack this way, and climbed whenever he could. Everything he couldn't afford, he made. His wall hauler was similar in design to the Petzl, but twice as heavy. The rope ratchet was a bit loose and the rope had a tendency to slip out, which left all the weight on the man hauling.

His portaledge was strictly homemade: aluminum conduit strung together with shock cord; a deck sewed at home; buckles and cinch straps he'd salvaged from old packs and others' discarded gear. It went together pretty well, but the curved reinforcing crossbar was made from three pieces and the joints took a lot of stress. This piece was folding at its loose joints and the result was that the deck was more of an hourglass shape than a rectangle. So we were squeezed in the middle where we needed it most. It wasn't much wider than the average single anyway so calling it a double was really a stretch.

But this was the first ledge I'd ever been on and the idea of sitting on a ledge rather than being compressed in a hammock was very appealing. We ate and drank like orphans at a church supper and collapsed back foot to head as night closed in. Alex is an amateur astronomer and I used the opportunity to pick his brain about the constellations.

I'd never been sure of much more than Orion, Ursa Major, Minor, the north star, Venus, Mars (my first guess at anything low on the horizon in the evening) and Jupiter. He pointed out Cassiopeia, the Pleaides, Saturn, Andromeda, and a dozen others that I can't remember. A few things whistled by in the dark and we called out in mock anger to our friends above us, well within earshot but hidden by the huge overhanging bulge we were sleeping under.

I also asked him about some Spanish phrases I was unsure of how to use. I learned that "Orale, pinche pendejo" is a warm greeting to a new friend. "Chupa mi ..." similar but even more familiar. And of course, we explored the many uses of "chinga" when referring to a rival's girlfriend or mother. "How about 'Si se puedes?'", I asked. "That means 'you can do it', or really 'It can be done'". This became the rallying cry after each fall and, in general, whenever things looked dicey.

After a long, warm, buggy, uncomfortable night, we were eating by headlamp as the horizon and the Laguna Salada began to glow red. As we repacked the haulbag and sorted gear, I realized that I had never clipped the haul bag to the anchor. Its weight was suspended from the unreliable ratchet on Alex's homemade wall hauler. I hadn't even backed it up with a jumar, as I had at every other station.

I shuddered as I pictured a hundred and fifty pounds in two bags plummeting to the end of the unfettered haul line and shock loading the anchor. Though many of the skills involved in climbing a wall are like riding a bicycle, there are a million other things to keep track of and things to think about, and these don't come back so easily. This oversight could have killed us. I pointed it out to Alex, who shrugged and clipped the bag in. I didn't make that mistake again. Alex powered up to the last bolt clipped and began the dicey traverse in the incipient crack above the alcove.

The crumbling, shallow horizontal crack above the alcove took tied-off pins, hooks and the occasional tiny cam. This is where Werner ripped his aider and sprained his ankle in a long fall when a Loweball popped. Alex whistled, whined and swore in Spanish all the way across. Above this, he fell once when a hook popped on the long blank stretch up to the next belay.

Cleaning the horizontal part where the first two bolts and the next piece are separated by several feet of blank rock was a puzzle. I figured out a way to clean the draws from the first two bolts without leaving a biner. I attached an aider to a fifi hook, put the fifi hook through the bolt hanger behind the biner, then stood in the aider. With my weight on the fifi hook, I unclipped the draw. With a long runner attached to the sling tied to the top hole of the fifi hook and the other end clipped to a daisy chain, I began to transfer my weight back onto the jumars. As I swung left, my weight pulled the fifi hook with the aider out of the hanger. Voila! Werner had left biners on both bolts. We cleaned them and left nothing.

I never used David's Ropeman. It just seemed too much trouble to take off the rope and put back on every time I wanted to pass a piece before unclipping. I regularly tied in short instead.

Pitch 8 is notable for a creaking, temporary flake/pinnacle directly below a long series of hook moves. I put a sling on it but wondered if a fall would just break it off as I went by. I just hoped I wouldn't catch an ankle on it. The pitch ends on Pancho's Villa, a nice, flat belay ledge shared with Giraffe, suitable for standing on.

The next pitch went up and right across some of the blankest rock yet. This is the only pitch that feels somewhat contrived because it simply connects the ledge with the beginning of the crack system that pitches 10, 11 and 12 follow. But it goes with many hook moves between a few bolts. I used the fifi hook again to clean this steeply traversing pitch.

10 starts on a ramp that could be easily free climbed. I whined to Werner about the lack of protection bolts. Two or three would have made this really fun. Instead, you aid it because there are so few A0/1 placements. Eventually, someone will free this in spite of the poor pro. At the end of the ramp, the flared crack narrows to knifeblade width on a sheer face. Several tied off pins lead to a small roof. Above the roof a perfect fixed head beckons, just one or two scary hook moves away, then a hole, then a bolt. A few free moves to the belay end this one.

Mark and Werner already had their hammocks set up. Werner added a bolt on the right for us. (Take a wrench to tighten this. They dropped theirs.) Alex had a tough time setting up the ledge. We were just a few feet under Mark and Werner's ledges and accessibility to the anchor was a bit of a problem. The ledge never felt level, but we were too tired to care. After dinner, we all talked about names for the route.

All spring and summer I'd been trying to get Werner to come up with something imaginative, something that would evoke some of the spirit of such an awesome place. When we were all together at the last bivvy, we discussed names. I suggested all kinds of things: Birdland for the show the swifts and swallows put on every day; Cascabel, a Mexican rattlesnake; Javelina, a wild boar; Coyote; Desert Shield; Start Me Up, The Big Top, Ferro Carril; Si Se Puedes; Manos Arriba. But it wasn't our call. Mark had a plane to catch at 8:00 p.m. the next night, and getting to the top as quickly as possible was the driving theme of their ascent. So when "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" popped into their heads, and Alex with his strong accent began to sing "Well my bags are packed, I'm ready to go, ..." we gave up.

The last day was a race to the top. The route follows the diagonal crack system for two more pitches, neither of which had been climbed before, nearly to its end. A squirrelly, low-angle aid pitch led to a sloping ledge and some scary free moves. The next was all free, but scary .9 for about 15 feet above bad pro. The last pitch is a beauty: a steep, clean 5.9 face protected by four bolts and a couple of cams under a flake. Alex was so driven to reach the top that he climbed right past a platform on the left with four belay bolts.

On top by noon, we stripped off our gear and clothes and bathed in the stagnant water of a nearby rock tank. We had so much extra drinking water we poured that over our heads too. The sun was bright, the air warm, the canyon and the desert at our feet, the hard work behind us. The freedom to walk about unencumbered was delicious. "Si se puedes", we laughed. It can be done.

El Gran Trono Blanco, Leaving on a Jet Plane, VI 5.9 A3/4. FA Werner Landry and Mark Richards, Octber 7-10, 1999.

‹ back to trip report index