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Outside Magazine July 2002
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The Hard Way
The Stone Mirage
For two credulous seekers, dreaming of the lost big-wall treasure of the Sierra Madre Occidental is better than the real thing

By Mark Jenkins

(Illustration by Rob Clayton)
"SO THIS IS THE LEGEND," Todd says, after we've finally chased it down. He sets another stick on our tiny campfire, slouches onto the tangle of climbing ropes, and begins rubbing the dried blood from his knuckles...

Out of the swirling dust devils of antiquity, the legend had gripped our imaginations and possessed us. Once upon a time, Fred Beckey, the ur-dirtbag of climbers, lit out for Mexico. He dragged his partners from their beds and gunned across the moonlit desert in a low-slung station wagon. Infamous Fred Beckey, an eat-from-the-can vagabond, had put up more first ascents than any man in America, so perhaps he was simply widening his search for more montañas.

It is unclear how long Fred and his friends were down there, banging along mule-cart tracks between the cacti, living on tortillas and frijoles, roaming a labyrin- thine dreamscape streaked with sunlight.

Eventually, the gringos stumbled upon a gleaming mountain of white granite that rose up out of the desert. The stone was as clean as Yosemite, but with the rugosity of the rock at Joshua Tree. Beckey and his compadres purportedly climbed a chimney system on the southwest face. Then found their way back across the border, elated, exhausted, and sworn to secrecy...

And now, two decades later, Todd and I have rediscovered this El Dorado of rock in the hidden corazón of Mexico, and we've climbed its apocryphal face. We're curled up close to the fire. We have no sleeping bags. We're out of water, out of food. Our eyes are so bloodshot they've hemorrhaged. But we have followed the legend and now we're here, lucky to be alive.


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Mark Jenkin's first collection of Outside columns, The Hard Way, will be published in the summer of 2002 by Simon & Schuster.