Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  In 1878, the French Alpine Club hung thick metal cables on the route to safeguard the more exposed passages (they were gone by 1984). As late as 1899 the climb was still earmarked in the guidebooks as “for experts only.” The second recorded ascent had taken place only in 1834, although Peter Hansen, in his erudite The Summits of Modern Man, cites an obscure French source from 1729 that supposedly argues that the peak “had been climbed frequently by local shepherds in the 1530s.” That source, however, is so thirdhand, with an axe to grind against previous authorities, that it is itself suspect. It hinges on the absurd claim that the 1530 peasants discovered an easy “secret” route that no subsequent suitors could find, A walk around the base of Mont Aiguille quickly dispels such a fancy.

  That second documented ascent was an epic in its own right. It was undertaken by locals—“peasants,” according to historians—who filed their own procès-verbal to certify the deed. The route they tackled was apparently a different one from de Ville’s. The team of five, wielding “ropes, ladders, and a mason’s hammer,” failed on two attempts to get higher than a quarter of the way up the thousand-foot redoubt, whereupon the party’s daredevil, twenty-six-year-old Jean Liotard, pushed on solo. Unhappy with his nailed boots, Liotard took them off to climb barefoot “with remarkable strength and hardiness.” Zigzagging up and down and right and left, Liotard disappeared from sight of the anxious watchers below, only to re-emerge just below the summit. Celebrating his triumph from the rim of the meadow, he bellowed in a “thunderous voice” as he pushed off big rocks whose chute produced “a horrible noise.”

  On top, Liotard found no chamois, but detected “some debris very much resembling the remains of a stone wall”—possibly the ruins of de Ville’s hut. Before starting his descent, Liotard prayed to God to give him confidence. “Tortured by the most painful anxiety,” his friends watched him “now hanging on the face of precipices, now going off in a wrong direction, and presently recovering his original track.” At last Liotard reached the base of the cliff, not without having abandoned his waistcoat, “which he had lost among the rocks by trying to use it to help him to grip hold of the sharp edges of the stones” (a technique hard for the modern climber to imagine).

  Climbing historians hail the 1492 ascent of Mont Aiguille as a pivotal landmark. As Andrew Finkelstein writes, “Prehistoric man surely engaged in some low fifth class to reach a sacred summit or hunting vantage. . . . [But] really it was in 1492 . . . that technical climbing began.”

  Yet de Ville’s daring exploit inspired no immediate imitators, made no dent in Western culture’s abhorrence of wilderness, which would span another two and a half centuries. It stands rather as a truly anomalous deed, inspired by quixotic motivations. In the last sentence of his procès-verbal, however, de Ville himself strikes a modern note, as he claims that Mont Aiguille “is the most beautiful place that I have ever visited.”

  “It was in 1492 that technical climbing began.” Such blanket statements proliferate in books that discuss the ever-changing relationship between man and nature (as critics framed the subject before the rubric “man” was deemed sexist). Like Marjorie Nicolson, these cultural historians plumbed references not only in English literature dating back to Beowulf, but in biblical texts from Genesis to Revelation. Few if any of these scholars acknowledged that their inquiries might be bound by a focus on the Western tradition, to the exclusion of the rest of human history.

  In what is today southeastern Utah, more than 250 years before de Ville concocted his bold ascent, men and women, climbing in yucca sandals or barefoot, routinely scaled sandstone cliffs far more difficult than Mont Aiguille. The fact that we know not a scrap about the identities of these pioneers in no way diminishes the brilliance of their achievement.

  As a kid growing up in Colorado, I visited Mesa Verde on a family vacation. Traipsing through the long-abandoned mud-and-stone villages of Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House, I was captivated by the idiosyncratic architecture of the ancients, with their rectangular dwellings up to four stories tall and their circular underground kivas. My brother Alan and I climbed down a modern ladder through the roof-hole of one reconstructed kiva, then hunkered in the gloom as we pretended we were sorcerers or spies.

  The National Park Service saluted the vanished residents of these towns as the Cliff Dwellers. Later I would learn to call them by their archaeological tag, Anasazi. Laminated placards and ranger spiels explained that the settlements had been built inside deep natural alcoves in the cliffs for defense against an unknown enemy. But I had grown up playing at war in the vacant lot, where the neighbor kids and I threw rocks at one another and took cover in the lee of dirt piles, and Spruce Tree House, whose approach trail was navigated by oldsters hobbling along with canes, struck me as pitifully easy to attack. It was not surprising, then, to learn that the defensive strategy must have failed, for all the residents had fled for good by the year 1300.

  The Cliff Dwellers stayed on my back burner for decades. In my twenties and thirties, as the pursuit of first ascents and new routes in Alaska became an all-consuming passion, the Southwest as a region registered only dimly among my loci desiderabiles. After all, I thought, there were no “real” mountains there, and how could a canyon hike, with no definite goal, compare to the quest for a summit?

  But in 1987 I took a three-day backpack trip into Bullet Canyon, a tributary of Grand Gulch in southeast Utah. What I was looking for, I cannot remember. The ruins called Perfect Kiva and Jailhouse, I discovered, possessed a blithe, airy grace. What stunned me, however, was to find corn cobs and potsherds strewn in the dirt inside the small, dark rooms, left there since the thirteenth century. So this is what Cliff Palace looked like, I mused, before the Park Service rebuilt and sterilized everything. And both nights, as I camped under piñon trees in a canyon bend, I watched the stars wheel overhead as I conjured up the ancients, and marveled at the realization that I drank from the same spring that had sustained them seven hundred years before.

  To reach the second level at Jailhouse, you had to crawl on your belly along a tight ledge with a certain exposure. That the Anasazi had chosen that ledge to adorn with a blank mortared wall looming over the void, and with a pair of spooky white shield- or facelike pictographs (Polly Schaafsma, the leading expert on Anasazi rock art, would surmise that the images were “hex” signs left to curse intruders), hinted at ancient terrors. As I had not on Mesa Verde, I got a visceral sense of lives shaped by defense against a lurking enemy.

  Later I would return to Jailhouse ruin with friends who quailed at the crawl along the second-story ledge. But for a climber, it was child’s play. Nor did I doubt that for the Anasazi—even their children and grandparents—a visit to that ledge amounted to a task in the daily routine.

  That excursion into Bullet set some kind of hook. During the next few years, I headed off on other trips into the canyon country. At first, I sought out ruins indicated by marks on maps or recommended by rangers, but I soon found that it was more rewarding to push down a canyon with no a priori idea of what was there. Hiking from bend to bend, I learned to spot from afar the “signature” stamp of an Anasazi refuge (often an alcove facing south), or the kind of sandstone cliff that was likely to bear petroglyphs or pictographs; but the ancients frequently fooled and surprised me. Each find, no matter how mundane, provoked a spasm of delight, and of something deeper—awe at the strangeness of the site, laced with the unquenchable itch to fathom the unknown.

  The rock art especially beguiled me. What had those chimerical figures once meant? The humanoids with what looked like ducks for heads, the spirals that turned into snakes, the beasts (apparently bighorn sheep) with conjoined bodies or double heads . . . ?

  On my second or third trip, I discovered ruins that, without a rope or a partner, I couldn’t get to. Some lay on ledges as high as a hundred feet above the foot of the cliff. Standing below several, I could see how smaller ledges at different intervals offered possible routes of access, and here and the
re gatherings of stones hinted at “platforms” where the butt-ends of log ladders must have been propped. But to imagine trusting such devices on nearly vertical passages far off the deck was scarifying. (Later, in more remote canyons, I came across several of these wooden ladders in place, small niches carved in the sides, leaning against the walls. They looked too spindly for humans.)

  But the truly inaccessible ruins were inside alcoves enclosing small granaries in which the Anasazi stored corn and beans and squash, staples of their spartan diet. Some of those were 200 or 300 feet above the ground, and almost as far below the canyon rims. When I finally got to some of these eyries, sometimes by rappelling (a technique almost certainly not in the Anasazi arsenal), I was dumbfounded. In almost every case, the granaries were empty. Either the inhabitants had taken all the precious grain with them when they left, or later visitors had pillaged the stuff.

  At first, in the face of these prehistoric wonders, I was preoccupied with the question of how. As a climber, I was confronted with the sheer technical improbability of the Anasazi achievement. Simply to get to the more difficult alcoves must have required a countless succession of life-risking ascents; to build granaries made of heavy stone and wet mud in them, then to fill those storage chambers with the precious grain and retrieve it when necessary, seemed mind-boggling. The question of whether the ancients used rope, and for what, has been woefully underposed by archaeologists. In 2003, I would lead a mini-forum published in National Geographic to kick the question around.

  We hired an expert to fabricate some “Anasazi rope” out of narrow-leaf yucca, the most likely material. The process was messy, strenuous, and time-consuming, and by the end the man had produced two short sections of rope whose breaking strength was a fraction of that of modern nylon lines. Meanwhile, I canvassed archaeologists to ask them about the question and to probe for the largest and longest artifactual specimens they remembered seeing. Most were surprised that they had never before considered the question.

  The verdict was ambiguous. I ended up skeptical, because so few viable pieces of rope had ended up in collections or excavations. My friend Greg Child, who was equally involved in the forum, ridiculed my doubts: how could they have done it without ropes, he parried?

  Long before our rope debate, when I had first been struck by the severity of the climbing it took to get to the inaccessible alcoves, I had thought, The archaeologists must have an explanation for this. But when I ransacked the professional literature I found precious little discussion of this topic. Already I had found many examples of carved hand-and-toe trails that breached nearly vertical cliffs. The climber in me was stunned to find out how difficult these were to follow today, and more than once I backed off rather than risk my life. To my astonishment, I couldn’t find a single published paper about hand-and-toe trails (or Moqui steps, as the cowboys called them). When I asked several archaeologists to direct me to the relevant literature, they misunderstood, citing analyses of trail networks like the Chacoan road system instead. One paper, by the great pioneering scholar Samuel Guernsey, shocked me with a photograph of the author using a metal axe to enlarge Anasazi hand- and footholds so that he could climb to some ruin. Evidently the same man who set new standards in the preservation of dwellings and artifacts regarded Moqui steps as of no interest whatsoever!

  When I asked some of today’s leading experts about the vertiginous ruins I had discovered, they tended to dismiss the challenge these locations had posed for the ancients. “Most likely the access ramps have collapsed during the last several hundred years,” one would say, or, “The only reason the hand-and-toe trails are scary today is because the rock has eroded so much.” Well, I silently countered, that’s just plain nonsense. Often my fingertips had found the hollows that had been precisely carved to receive each digit within a handhold. And more than once, a ruin a hundred feet up a featureless cliff loomed straight above a contemporary structure at its base, proof that no collapsing ramp had turned the access from a piece of cake into a perilous climb.

  The better I got to know these archaeologists, who were only too glad to entertain my curiosity, the more I realized that because they were not climbers they completely underestimated the difficulty and danger these prehistoric refuges embodied. Not coincidentally, they also tended to dismiss the “cliff dwellings” as utterly marginal to Anasazi culture, freakish aberrations in an otherwise orderly civilization.

  All the while I puzzled over the how, the why was peering over my shoulder. There was no indication that the Anasazi were interested in summits: the tops of buttes and pinnacles were more often than not devoid of human remains. In this respect, there seemed to be no common ground between the Western climbers who began exploring the Alps in the 1830s and the inhabitants of the canyons of the Southwest before 1300. The motives of the Anasazi seemed primarily utilitarian—to get to ledges and nooks in the sandstone where they could build dwellings and granaries that would be fiendishly difficult for others (enemies, invaders) to approach. Although the Anasazi were first celebrated by Anglo-American explorers as the Cliff Dwellers, only a small fraction of their settlements over some two thousand years of human occupation were lodged in cliffs. By far the majority of Anasazi villages were built on open plains and plateaus, like Lowry Ruin, Yellowjacket, and Yucca House in southwestern Colorado.

  Once tree-ring dating allowed archaeologists to locate Anasazi structures precisely in time, it became evident that nearly all the cliff-hung redoubts were built between 1150 and 1300. On the Colorado Plateau (where most of the cliff dwellings are located), those years spanned a desperate era of famine, drought, and environmental deterioration. And after 1300, the ancients abandoned those settlements en masse, never to return. The obvious conclusion—that the dwellings and granaries lodged high in the cliffs were defensive—became scientific orthodoxy, though a handful of scholars held out with ingenious counterexplanations.

  To me, as a climber, the beauty and daring of the Anasazi achievement in the cliffs posed a beguiling conundrum. It is a perilous business to project motivation upon vanished peoples who left no written record, but it seemed completely unlikely that the Old Ones had been driven by the aesthetic passions of the men who made the first ascents of the Matterhorn, the Eiger, and the Chamonix aiguilles. Instead, it was survival that drove the Anasazi to such extremes.

  For me, almost from the first time I stared up at a distant granary, wondering how to get to it, the challenge gave birth to a maxim that would become a personal touchstone whenever I prowled through the canyon country: Fear is the mother of beauty. I knew, of course, that my own notions of beauty were entirely culture-bound, but I doubted that fear was equally subjective across the ages.

  We Westerners tend to measure our lives in terms of deeds that leave their lasting marks upon posterity. Edward Whymper, making the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, believed that his triumph would be celebrated long after his death—as indeed it is. The novelist and the poet expend their deepest thoughts and feelings on combinations of words that they hope will achieve a certain immortality. (The mournful epitaph that Keats assigned himself betrays that hopeless desire: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.) The painters of the Renaissance believed their masterpieces would hang in palaces and churches long after they died. The composer’s immortality lies not on the written page, but in the strophes and antistrophes that linger in the ear centuries after musicians have packed up their instruments.

  This Western ambition harks back all the way to the Egyptians and their pyramids, those grandiose monuments to the purported immortality of the pharaohs. It is the same vain boast that speaks in Ozymandias’s proclamation from the desert sands in Shelley’s poem: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  After the summer of 2015, when cancer became the central reality in my life, I too began to wonder whether anything I had created in the previous fifty years would last. How long might my books be read, and by whom? Althoug
h rationally I could look askance at the vanity of my wishes, the terror of the abyss loomed larger than it had before. What if no one remembered anything I had done? What if no one cared?

  Did the Anasazi cherish kindred ambitions? There is no way to know. Yet their works have lasted. In 2005, with Greg Child and archaeologist Renee Barlow, I explored the wildest of all the granaries in the Southwest I had ever been able to get to. The ruin—actually a substantial double granary, whose storage capacity Barlow later calculated at an extraordinary fifty-seven bushels of corn, which would weigh a ton and a half—was perched on a tiny ledge 70 feet up a nearly vertical wall, with 90 feet of overhanging precipice arching above it. Incredibly well preserved, its rooftop door slabs still in place, the double granary looked inaccessible even to top modern climbers. Only an incipient crack split the otherwise featureless sandstone wall beneath it. On first glance, Greg blurted out in climber’s jargon, “It’s gotta be at least 5.11, on crumbly rock.” Yet a rickety, 25-foot Douglas fir ladder still leaned against the bottom of the cliff.

  After one failed attempt, we were able to get to the granary, thanks to Greg’s ingenious rigging of an overhanging rappel from the brow of the cliff above. As I had so often before, I found myself thinking, It would be hard enough for the Old Ones just to climb to the ledge. How the hell did they build those massive storage chambers on the skimpy ledge, then haul all the grain to fill them?