National Outdoor Leadership School - Index

National Outdoor Leadership School - Summer2008 - Index

Ifirst came to Ethiopia in October 2006 to write about
a rare coffee bean, Geisha, that was thought to be from
the Horn of Africa but had never been found there. A
relative of this coffee bean, grown in Panama, now garners
more than $100 a pound on the market. While the expedition
I had joined to cover the story didn’t find Geisha, I
found Ethiopia.
In gathering further background information on the
country, I contacted British climber Pat Littlejohn, who
had been there before. Following our discussions, he sent me
eight photos of striking sandstone towers in the northern
province of Tigray. When I told Ethiopian friends of my
plans to climb and showed them photos of the north, of
shocks of sanguine stone piercing an azure sky, I was met
with blank stares. This is not the Himalayas, Patagonia,
or the poles. Exploration has occurred in Ethiopia, but
not at the level of its potential due to politics and safety—
government sanctions, war, and persistent international
restrictions, to name a few. The result is a country twice
the size of France that is just now being understood for its full
geographical diversity, which is how I put it to potential
partners when I was assembling my team. I would then
go on to explain recent kidnappings, religious violence,
and wrap up the conversation with my assuring them that
despite all of this I felt safer in Ethiopia than I did in most
places in the United States. I’d end with the following tidbit
that sealed the deal: “Where else in the world are you
going to find unclimbed sandstone spires anymore?”
By March 2007, I had a team assembled. Kristie Arend,
Helen Dudley, Caroline George, and photographer Gabe
Rogel. Guided by overly digitized versions of the images
Littlejohn had sent me, we headed off to a handful of
rock faces outside of Hawzien, a small town in the Tigray
province. Our main objective was the Gheralta, the last in
a series of sandstone upthrusts covering much of Tigray.
The largest of these is three kilometers long and 450 meters
tall. The rock folds over itself and turns sharp and smooth
corners to form buttresses and isolated towers with pinnacles
and faces repeating in every direction. Once we saw Gheralta
up close I knew it could take a lifetime to explore these
faces. Eager to start climbing, we picked our way through
terraces to the base from the road within an hour. Twenty
meters of climbing later, we were duly humbled.
Sandstone is not known for its solidity. Sandstone
in Ethiopia even less so. Perfect cracks became fissures
on a suspended panel; gear bit into the rock and left an
impression when removed. Not having expected things
to be easy is one thing, realizing just how hard they might
be is another. It quickly became clear that when rock
climbing in Ethiopia, following is definitely the desired
position. Freed of such worries as wondering if the anchor
you are being belayed on is strong enough or how
much rock you are knocking off below, the climbing is
sublime. You can dance over edges and flirt with jamming
and laybacking. You can be in Ethiopia. If you are leading,
sometimes all you want is to be somewhere else.
Northern Ethiopia is resplendent with vertical terrain and
vistas. Locals often climb third, fourth, and, in some cases,
even easy fifth class terrain to simply get to church—
attending services still held in ancient sanctuaries hewn
from the rock 1,000 years ago. We went to visit the most
vertically famous of these, Abuna Yemata, and used sandstone
foot and hand holds worn into the soft rock and polished
from centuries of use. While no one in the region is
climbing beyond this, the very fact that these churches
exist created an understanding of our desires as climbers
to explore these faces. Everywhere we went we had local
SUMMER 2008
h Side of The Horn of Africa:
ition Behind Vertical Ethiopia
support and interest, which meant that everywhere we
went, we were with other people.
We climbed on escarpments in plain view of a town
that was made into a town by forced relocation of people
into a centralized area in the name of safety. Off in the distance
lay Hawzien, the village where we stayed and the site
of one of the bloodiest massacres of the Derg, a communistic
regime that controlled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991.
Hawzien is the area’s center and on its market day, a
Wednesday, in 1988, when people from the surrounding
towns and villages came to trade wares, a low flying plane
dropped a napalm bomb and killed 2,500 people. There
is a monument to the dead in the middle of Hawzien,
placed just so that traffic circles around it; each day, on the
way to and from climbing, we rounded this memorial.
In Tigray, terraces extend in every direction as a result
of a food-for-work program that targets preservation of
the fragile landscape. We were climbing in the very region
of Ethiopia that was flashed across every television screen
and radio in the 1980s for the famine that killed more
than one million people and affected six million more.
To scout out climbing lines we hiked over and
through these endless terraces to get close to walls and
peer inside cracks and chimneys for a way up. The rock
undulates deep orange and red with ochre bands up high.
It quickly became clear that we wanted nothing to do
with the ochre bands and the horizontal striations they
signified in the rock. Even from the ground, this porous
upper band, more than a hundred meters above us, looked
like a bad idea. But the rock underneath is ever mysterious
with potential. We spent countless hours scurrying up
and down terraces to get to these faces, taking binoculars
to the sandstone cracks and estimating the size and safety
of various objectives. We were not there to climb to one
specific summit, but rather to see how much we could
find to climb.
Our first tower was a five-pitch experience of short
sections of perfection followed by long scary choices on
questionable rock. Gheralta does not give itself easily to a
climber, but then again, that was what we were there for.
Deep in the middle of the Nebelet Towers, we climbed
150 meters to the rounded mushroom summit of orange
sand and reveled, briefly, in our success before realizing
that our only way down was to down-lead. We did this
for one pitch and then found gulleys to take us the rest of
the way. We drove back to Hawzien that night while the
sunset silhouetted acacia trees against the deepening sky.
Driving away from that first ascent, I wondered both if I
was up for another Ethiopian climb and how that climb
mattered in the face of other similar exploits in the world.
I’m 31. I did not grow up in the golden era of rock climbing
and cut my teeth on first ascents waiting to be
plucked around the world, but I have always wanted to be
that type of adventurer. Ethiopia represented that chance
to me, and it did so in a new way that I did not fully understand
until now, a year later.
When I was young, I believed adventure had to be
removed from daily reality. I grew up paddling the waters
of Northern Minnesota, Canada, and the Arctic.
Nothing would upset me more than to have an interruption
in this perceived sanctuary—be it a plane, a cabin, a
trace of anything human but me. I wanted purity in exploration.
Now, what I want most is the integration of the
11
BY MAJKA BURHARDT, NOLS GRAD
extreme and the everyday. I would rather go towards the
world than escape from it, which is good because in
Ethiopia there is little option of anything else. When you’re
adventuring in Ethiopia, this is what you are in the midst of:
• Half of the country’s population earns less than a dollar
a day and the country is one of the top ten recipients
of foreign aid money in the world. The country is
awash in contrast. In Mekele, the capital of the Tigray
region where we were climbing, new glass buildings
stand regal and complete with signs advertising office
space and Internet access. Next door, another building
is in mid-construction—the scaffolding is branches
bound together with twine leaning lazily against concrete
walls with edges bubbling over wooden frames.
• Ethiopia is the only country in Africa to have maintained
Locals often climb third, fourth, and, in some cases,
even easy fifth class terrain to simply get to church...
independence against the era of European colonialism.
Italy occupied the country in the 1940s in retaliation
for a vendetta Mussolini had as a result of an Ethiopian
victory against his country in the late 1800s. The
United Nations helped Ethiopia drive the Italians out,
but not before several roads were built and the country
got hooked on pasta. As a result, everywhere you go,
even in the small villages we climbed out of in the
north, spaghetti is readily available.
• Rated one of Frommer’s top 12 adventure destinations
last year, Ethiopia has ten national parks with another
dozen in the making. The country has emerged from a
dark veil of war into a world of opportunity with its natural
resources. Is the country safe? It depends on whom
you ask. Caught in the middle of a global war on terror,
Ethiopia is 60 percent Christian and 40 percent Muslim.
The two faiths have largely lived in harmony up
until this point. Ethiopia has a contentious border with
Eritrea to the north and recently invaded Somalia to its
east. An aid darling of the United States, Europe, and
Israel, Ethiopia’s stability is seen as crucial for East Africa’s
stability. It houses American military and intelligence installations
a mere 400 kilometers from Saudi Arabia.
And this is where we were climbing. This is where sport
and life and history and culture all converged in an elusive
search for summits. We established several beautiful
lines; many that I would go back and climb again, many
others that I would never want to again attempt. What
drove us was the knowledge that we were only seeing part
of what there was to see in the area. The sheer density of
rock, the consistency of the formations layering out after
each other far into the horizon, the sight of another massif
just around the corner—all of this created both an urgency
and a peace during our trip. There was no way we
were going to fully explore the potential of these cliffs,
but the mere taste provided inspiration for more.
This article is reprinted with permission of The Explorers
Journal, a quarterly magazine published by The Explorers
Club. For more information, please visit www.explorers.org.
Majka Burhardt (pictured at left) is a Boulder, Colorado-based
writer, climber, and certified guide and a NOLS
Wind River Wilderness grad from 1992. She is currently on
a speaking tour with her book, Vertical Ethiopia: Climbing
Toward Possibility in the Horn of Africa. See our review of
it on page 12 and find a copy at www.verticalethiopia.com.
Gabe Rogel is a “wannabe cowboy, former mountain
guide, ardent skier, and photographer” who is based in
Driggs, Idaho. More of his spectacular photography can be
found at www.rogelphoto.com.