I am lying in a large four-poster bed hung with the finest muslin. Beside me the long languorous form of a spectacularly beautiful Finnish woman stirs from sleep. She turns her gorgeous face to me and with the smoldering gaze of unbridled lust says …

“Dude. Get your ass out of my car.”

Oh, God she’s got John Peterson’s voice.

“Wstfgl?” I replied as the scene abruptly changes to the inside of a dusty subaru. Oh, right, I was dreaming. JP’s hauled my sleepy butt into the neighbouring state of New York to go climbing at the gunks. We’re parked somewhere in the Mohonk Preserve just outside of what appears to be a large barn. We are here to pay a visit before hitting the cliffs.

The Barn is a small weekender within the Mohonk Preserve owned by none other than John Reppy. John Reppy is a climber of some repute and is the first ascender of more climbing routes than even he can count. JP explained the complicated series of friendships through which he has availed himself occasional contact with this climbing legend. Although I have to say, upon meeting the man and shaking his hand, I found nothing that was obviously demi-godlike about him except perhaps the little golden halo thing (shaped like an old choinard biner) glowing faintly just above and behind his head. After meeting with him and another (equally pleasant) fellow, John announced that we were leaving and would catch up with Mr Reppy and company in about an hour … somewhere around Guide’s Wall.

On the way John decided that we had enough time for a quick run up something in the Nears, after which we would continue onto the Trapps (where Guide’s Wall was situated). So we parked in the overlook carpark. Eight year old Jay (along for the trip under mild protest), explained that the Nears were beneath him and he preferred to stay in the car playing Nintendo until his brains fell out. It was a hot day, so we left the windows down and told him to “stay cool little dude”. With that John and I fairly ran along the footpath under the Nears cliff-line, him firing off the names of three-star routes as we swept by looking for one uncluttered with climbers. It was a slightly busy day so we didn’t find anything good until Grease Gun Groove (5.6), where a young bloke was rapping down to the base. He and his girlfriend said that they were done with the route and we were welcome to it. Actually, the lass did all the talking as the boy was somewhat taciturn. She was quite friendly and upon learning that I was Australian (John cannot miss an opportunity to slander my country of origin, some sort of inferiority complex I guess) regailed us with stories of her travels in that wide brown land.

John had already climbed up about twenty feet before I was ready to belay him, but for him this is standard behaviour. John just cannot wait and will solo until he notices his belayer is ready. Therefor, he doesn’t bother putting in pro until there’s some point to it. So his first piece was quite high. I was still talking to the girl about what she thought of the Whitsunday Islands (a paradise unparalled anywhere else on earth, apparently) when John reached the top. By the time he rapped back down they had left, but only just. I top-roped the route myself and found that it was pretty cool, not too hard on top-rope and good for a warm-up run. Deserving of its single star classic-ness. We got back to the car about 35 minutes after we left it. Have I said before that John is fast? He’s fast.

We moved the car to the lower parking lot, where (unlike the overlook) you can park for more than an hour. We took my rack (supplemented with a very small selection of John’s and leaving my #3.5 camalot), two 60m ropes and the three of us hiked it up the stairs to the main carriage-way beneath the cliffs. There were lots of people, but nowhere near the crowds I had imagined there would be on what was a gorgeously bright and not overhot Saturday morning. John said that climbing would actually get pretty hot until about 2pm when the sun no longer shone on the rockfaces. We wandered along until we got to the Minty tree (the first conifer on the carriage-way) and turning up to follow a walking track immediately beneath the walls. We passed many groups, including an earnest guide who was instructing his nervous charges with a clear and ringing voice. John, knowing this fellow … and apparantly anyone who climbs with regularity at the gunks comes to know him … asked if he had seen Reppy about. No, he hadn’t.

We passed along the full length of the area known as Guide’s Wall without seeing neither hide nor hair of the reputable Reppy. Well, perhaps he’ll show up later. In the meantime, John picked out a two star classic for us to do. The climb is called Son of a Bitchy Virgin, and it’s an original Reppy (i.e. he made the first ascent sometime back in the Holocene). It’s a variation of another just to its right called Bitchy Virgin, both of them carry a 5.6 rating. John preferred the heretical progeny to its parent, thinking it a more interesting line.

John raced back to the voluble guide and left a message for Reppy if he showed up. While he was gone Jay playfully threw a large rock at my head. Kids. Not being a parent and unpractised in child-behaviour interpretation I reacted perhaps inappropriately with dire threats of heavy penalty slack and a sour demeanour. This quietened him considerably and for a time he looked at me with genuine apprehension, disbelieving that an adult could be so cruelly intentioned.

John returned and with blurring speed enshoed and harnessed himself for the ascent. Once again it was a race to see if I could be ready enough to belay him before he got too high up. John went up the first slightly overhung bulge and pretty soon he was out of sight and moving. Mere seconds later I heard him call “off-belay”. Good lord he’s really fast.

My climbing shoes are a wreck. Last weekend on Whitehorse Ledge up in New Hampshire had finally seen my toes poke through the ends of both. John said they were too far gone to be repaired, looks like I’m going to have to shell out some dosh for a fresh pair of taps. Sigh.

I tied a sullen Jay into the end of the rope I was to trail and admonished him to put his shoes on. This was met with thin-lipped silence and a steely glare. Hostilities looked about to begin. Nevertheless, satisfied that he was tied in securely and his feet were ensheathed in miniture sticky rubber shoes I started up after John.

It was a cool start under the trees, but when I got up into the sun I found the going pretty hot. The climb itself was not difficult and I enjoyed the short romp up to John’s comfortable perch. He passed the rack to me and sent me up the second pitch on lead. A momentary sensation of gripitude washed over me. This was not going to be like last weekend, this is going to be the real thing. I looked up and saw what from a distance looked to be a relatively unfeatured face. But the gunks are famous for the make-up of these cliffs. Composed principally of layers of Silurian quartz pebble conglomerate, the most common features are narrow but frequent horizontal ledges and shallow horizontal cracks. So there really was a lot to use for a climber. With a little more encouragement from John I trusted to his good judgement and sent the pitch as best I could. It was a slow climb, and I looked down once or twice to see if John had passed out from boredom. I found my tri-cam set to be almost invaluable in those shallow horizontal cracks (too shallow for my camalots) and used all but one of them on this single pitch. There was only one short section that really had my heart pumping, the cracks and ledges seemed to fade and I was left with nubbins and the ghosts of thin ledges to move up about five feet to the next positive handhold. But I made it ok. Near the top I stopped to look at the view.

It was gorgeous. The sky was a light duck-egg blue with a handful of small whispy clouds. The air was so clear that the horizon, dozens of miles away, appeared crisp and sharp. Buzzards and other birds of prey floated lazily over the forests beneath the cliffs. Just perfect. But it was getting a little warm. At the top of the pitch, however, there was a well-shaded ledge. So once I got myself secured and called down “off-belay” to John I settled back under a low tree to stare out across the improbably beautiful vista before me.

Down below Jay was being belayed up to his Dad. I’ll bet he was relieved to find that it was John bringing him up and not me. Poor kid, maybe I overdid it with the penalty slack thing. As he approached his Dad I shifted for a better view and dislodged some leaves and dust from my ledge. Unfortunately I had also dislodged a small stone which I did not see until it richocheted of the cliff six inches to Jay’s left. The little guy was unhurt, indeed unruffled, by the near miss and continued up. Phew.

John secured Jay into the anchors and then followed my lead. He evidently scratched his head at a couple of my placements, but was good enough to make judicious comment without appearing to overtly diss my technical expertise (or lack thereof). He got up beside me and immediately set about bringing his son up here as well.

“You got Jay pretty gripped about the penalty slack thing.” He said.

Ok, I still have a lot to learn about kid-wrangling … I admit it. So I leaned over the top and called down some encouragement to the dude as he made his way upward, in the process making it abundantly clear that I was not belaying him – his Dad was. Even as I listened to John explaining Jay’s straight-arrow technique I watched the little guy motoring directly upward, preferring the line of the rope to any wanderings left or right. If this reduced his available features it didn’t show. In no time he was on the ledge with us. John organized the descent and went first with Jay hanging beneath his harness like a strange fruit.

Musical fruit. Jay was (and had been) singing as many Weird Al Yankovic tunes as he could remember and he’s got quite a repertoire. Ever heard “La-la-la-la-lasagna … “ sung to the tune of La Bamba?

Anyway, after JP and son finished rapping down another party was coming up and were taking the Bitchy Virgin alternative. Somehow, in shifting position to start the rap, I dislodged another stone and it bounced by them only a few feet distant. Ouch. The leader calmly suggested that I should quickly call “rock” next time. I apologized and explained (perhaps uselessly) that I had missed it. He said not to worry, aware that by now I would probably be a bit more careful. Argh, that was embarrassing and potentially disasterous.

At the bottom Jay stated that he was hungry and John, finding that Reppy was still nowhere in sight, decided that we would put into action a strategic manouver. This manouver is called … go to lunch and come back when the sun is no longer going to fry you dry on the wall … sounded like a good plan to me. We hiked back down the trail to the car and then drove to nearby New Paltz and descended upon the local McDonalds. Oh god. Sometimes there’s no option but to run on diesel for a day. If I really wanted to I guess I could have asked John to drop me off at some other alternative, but my brains had been baked.

We headed back to the Gunks and stopped off at the Visitor’s Center so John could show me the new Fritz and Hans T-shirt they had on sale there. But I didn’t buy it, I got enough T-shirts for now. Perhaps next time. I was more interested in the guidebook, but it had been priced by a rapacious criminal and at $25 was out of my range. Hey, I’m a biosciences post-doc not a millionaire. We headed back to park at the overlook carpark again, John wanted to find me a three star classic. Jay again opted for an hour in an oven-like car under the merciless sun instead of climbing, that Nintendo must be incredibly good.

John and I raced in and found that Disneyland (5.6) was clear. There were excitingly spaced pins along the length of the route, and John said that one could climb this with draws alone. He sent me up with the words “Dude, if you place any gear you’re a wuss.” The first pin is about 25 feet off the ground.

Oddly I had almost no trouble at all, mostly because John was giving me beta for much of it. It was a truly great climb and I did manage it without placing any more gear than the draws, which magnified my enjoyment several-fold. Although, at a critical turn I used a short sling draw instead of a long one that would have lessened the rope-drag I hauled myself through on the last third.

After much yelling John and I eventually got our acts together and he was, after a time, belayed up to the top. I worked out a satisfactory way to use the gigi and managed to keep up to speed and not get too tired at the same time. We hiked off from the top and got back to the car. Jay was still alive, having slurped down the last cubes of ice from his McBeverage. We headed back down to the main car park.

Once the subaru was stowed we headed back up to the Trapps again. John stops us at the base of a Hans Kraus classic (two stars) called V-3 (5.7). He sent me up without beta and I found it pretty challenging. I took a wrong turn on a short overhanging section under the roof (going right instead of left) and spent desperate moments trying to adequately protect the line I had chosen. I placed a #1 camalot in a horizontal space (almost) too large for it and then, out of gas, asked John to take as I found my arms giving way. I could almost hear the crystals snapping off under my weight. Back up to the same spot I placed my giant blue tri-cam to no better effect, the effort draining me once more. So I hung from two dodgy pieces trying to shake some life back into my arms. John then told me the error of my way.

“Go left dude, look for the high jug just under the roof. Get a big nut ready to place in the notch before you go up. When you get up into that flaring chimney, you’re going to have to put your back against the left face and your toes against the right.”

Of course he was right. It was still hard work though and I had to hang from the nut beneath the notch and rest before the final push over the crux (at least it gave me time to remove those stupid pieces down on the right). Up in the chimney it was way less secure than I had hoped and it was only desperation that took me high enough to employ a pin with one of my draws. Climbing left out of the chimney at the top put me on very secure territory and within sight of the huge double-bolt belay station at the top of the pitch. John got me to place draws and feed the rope through the biners before lowering off so he and Jay could top-rope this one.

On my way down I found that I couldn’t remove the nut that I had weighted under the notch. John said not to sweat it, that he would remove the thing no problem.

Jay went up next and he climbed it like a master. It was an absolutely awesome effort by the little guy. He did say that he was a little scared at the roof, but just asked his Dad to keep the rope tight. Really cool. John also climbed it on top-rope, raced up it like a rat up a drainpipe, hammering out the recalcitrant nut when I lowered him.

We moved left along the wall and found that Middle Earth (5.7^-) – two stars – was being abandoned by a young couple. Jay did NOT want to climb anymore and he made lots of noise to that effect. So we left him with his Nintendo. While I set up John walked a ways further down the track and bumped into someone who said that Reppy was currently leading a climb very close by. John returned to tell us this and we expected to finally meet the man quite soon. In the meantime we resolved to climb Middle Earth. I led the first long pitch, and it was probably my longest single pitch ever (almost 180 feet), which in itself was way cool. Places to rest everywhere, just let go and lean forward. I was able to run it out quite a lot as I got near the top.

For almost all of the route I noticed deliberate little chalk marks along the way. They weren't the light smears of dust rubbed from the fingers of a passing climber, they were the concentrated dabs of stuff left behind by someone deliberately marking EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE FEATURE for any gumby making his or her way up the cliff. John knows who does this, so do most of the Gunks regulars, but I shall remain silent.

John followed rapidly and at the top hinted that I may want to rethink my tri-cam strategy, it being different to his own approach with them. I am. We then organized for him to do the next pitch, the start of which has a hard-looking overhang crux. I yanked on the rope and managed to dislodge a big stone so that it tumbled down towards where Jay was waiting. John and I bellowed “ROCK ROCK ROCK” as loudly as possible (and John can shout really loud) until Jay piped up that he was ok and could we please stop yelling now.

John did the overhang crux very carefully, he placed four pieces within six feet of each other and said “watch me.” at the critical point.

This scared the bejesus out of me and I wondered if I could follow it. The pitch was short and so it wasn’t long before I had my chance. It actually turned out pretty easy on second, but on lead … I think not. Not this year anyway. I continued, passing a couple more thoughtful moves, and reach JP at the very top. The afternoon sun is casting long shadows across the forest and we find ourselves being buzzed once or twice by the curious pilot of a small plane.

We took three raps to get down to the bottom. I’m stuffed and Jay needs the bathroom. So John admits that perhaps it’s best to call it quits and head home. We never did catch up with Reppy (it turned out that he forgot which trail leads to Guide's Wall), so I felt a little sorry for John about that. For me, I was well and truly satisfied, a day in the company of JP is always a great day indeed.