The Maze

One of the first times I noticed Standing Rock of the Maze was when Bill, Matt and I climbed Candlestick Tower.  The Maze however is not easy to get to and it took 7 years before I made it over there.  

I piled into Trevor and Emily's truck at the turn off for the Maze.  It was 40ish miles from the pavement to the towers we wanted to climb.  That 40 miles took 4 hours because the driving was at a snails pace for 10 of those miles.  Those 10 miles we rough and required getting out of the truck to scout the line over and over.  We finally made it to camp which was literally at the base of Standing Rock and decided to climb the first of the 2 pitches.  Trevor lead pitch one and fixed the rope for the next day.  Emily lead pitch 2 the next day and then we had to figure out what to climb.  We scoped out the Plug but decided it was too big of an objective for the afternoon so we headed over to a smaller feature called Chimney Rock.

Standing Rock of the Maze

Chimney Rock doesn't have a published route on it and new bolts are not allowed so we scoped for a while before deciding to give it a go.  I started up the obvious weakness and at about 5.9-5.10 was able to make it up.  On top, as expected there were no bolts so we counter balanced to get down.  Later we found out that the route had been climbed in the past by Ralph Ferrara. 

Chimney Rock

After getting down from Chimney Rock we packed up camp and drove out to the Mother and Child to camp.  As Emily set up camp, Trevor and I headed up to the tower to check it out.  We could see a drilled pin near the top and I found a line up to it that looked the most straight forward.  As I approached the pin I noticed that there were in fact 3 pins.  The first was in about a centimeter and pulled out easily with my finger, the second moved when I lightly weighted it, and the 3rd was about halfway in.  I was able to get a sling over the 3rd pin and gingerly aid past it to a mantle onto the summit.  This summit was also missing an anchor so again we had to do a counter balance to retreat.

The Mother and Child

The next morning as we started down the rough road back to the pavement we lost the 4wd in the truck.  This was unfortunate since we had a lot of burly driving ahead of us.  Luckily Trevor and Emily were able to rally the truck out to pavement where my vehicle was parked.  The truck however needed to be towed to Blanding, and Trevor and Emily came with me to Durango.  The next day a mechanic in Blanding took off the CV joint so it was drivable to Flagstaff.  They got a rental car, picked it up, and got it fixed in Flagstaff.