Queen Creek Sport Climbing: Return from the Great Mormon Experience

Yesterday, Charlie Brown and I went out to The Pond in Queen Creek. The Pond is one of Queen Creek’s two uber-popular climbing areas, along with Atlantis. Both have some beginner-friendly routes, though Atlantis is by far the better for newcomers, while The Pond is great if you can climb 5.10.

The area is dacite, and the rock feels similar in density to Smith Rock.

Charlie has been working on Desert Devil, one of the local test pieces. He had plans to go up later in the day, but I finished guiding a trip around 11:30 a.m. at Atlantis, and was able to convince him to come up an hour early so we could get on Return From the Great Mormon Experience, a 12.b that I’d heard him talking about.

But we decided to turn it into a volume day and climb the routes to the left of it. We warmed up on The Crosses are Free, which was a fun face climb with varied movement that ascends a face with a large diagonal weakness. We both did two laps on The Crosses are Free then moved to our right and got on Youth is Beauty 10.b, which was a good quality climb. After two laps on that each it was time to get down to business.

Return from the Great Mormon Experience sits just outside of a corner, and to start it you climb into the dihedral, stem out onto the face, and start swinging up through small but deep pockets.

I had high hopes of onsighting, but blew those almost immediately when i followed some chalk that went up and right through the route then dissapeared after the second bolt. I was stranded, just where someone else had gotten stranded, and I didn’t bother trying to reverse the moves. I asked for Charlie to tension the line and I hung at the second bolt, holding my throbbing fingers. I had been perched in two very sharp pockets, and had tried to pull myself up out of them. Now the first pads of my index and middle finger on my left hand were numb.

“You gotta go left there,” Charlie said. I could see a faint trail of chalk leading up a kind of rail onto a knob that stuck out where the climb met the arete. After a rest, so i could regain feeling in my fingers, I had Charlie lower me and I tried the route again on redpoint, hoping for redemption. But the route was far more stout than I had expected. I was able to cut left out the bulge that Charlie had pointed out, and I’d rested on the corner, perched around the arete like a gargoyle for 10 minutes or so, but I’d only made it another bolt or two before I fell again.

Charlie taking a toprope lap on Return from the Great Mormon Experience.

The route has a full-on dyno (if you don’t know what that is, it’s climber slang for a dynamic movement, in which all or most of your body comes off the route before finding the next hold. Here’s a video of Chris Sharma dynoing during a deep water solo route) or at least a very extended deadpoint halfway up it. The move involves setting your left toe in a relatively high position underneath you, dangling your leg in a downward flag, and hopping up and slapping for the sloping lip of a hueco.

But the route isn’t over after that. It continues for four more bolts of pumpy but much simpler climbing before granting access to the chains.

At the time I was climbing it, I thought the name was “Escape from the Great Mormon Experience” — something that a few of my friends who grew up in Mormon culture had to do. The climb was relentless, and every time I thought it was over, there was another pumpy section. Which I thought was an apt comparison for extricating yourself from an entire childhood social circle and belief system.

We toproped it three more times each, and Charlie gave me a bunch of good advice, which allowed me to work the moves to the point where, maybe in the next session or two, I could possibly redpoint it.

It was a great example of how wonderful a teacher climbing is. On my first attempt I thought “well, probably not going to get this this season.” And by the end of my next go on toprope, I thought “maybe next session it will go down.”

Something can go from feeling absolutely impossible to feeling within reach in just an hour of work. It’s probably the most readily available lesson that climbing has to offer, and it shows it much more clearly than so many other activities.

The sunset that evening painted the cliffs a flourescent orange, and a few minutes after the light had faded, we started heading back down the trail toward the parking area. Not a bad day. We did something like nine pitches each. I got 11 on the day because of my guiding that morning.