A Day of High Exposure
On to Safe Harbor
It was dark by the time we reached the bottom of the climb. We had made a twilight dash across the top of the cliff to the Uberfall, downclimbing the Uberfall descent gully in darkness, then running down the Carriage Road again to the base of High-E. Moonlight marbled the shadows of trees across the rock, and transformed the buttress into a ghostly pylon. We drank water and mused on the climb.
All too soon it was time to go... to dinner, then off to Safe Harbor, in Pennsylvania, to meet Eric, and have a completely different kind of day.
Safe Harbor - Getting there and a night in the car
We drove for hours after dinner, heading for Safe Harbor, with no more information than an article from a magazine. The hardest thing on a trip like this is finding something to talk about, but that wasn't hard for Mike and I.
In Lancaster, at one in the morning, we got the bad news. There wasn't a hotel room in the area. At our second stop, they told us we might get a room down in Virginia, a mere fifty or hundred miles away, but, for obvious reasons our exhaustion we weren't enthusiastic.
Finally we opted to try a camp that was supposedly near the climbing area. The roads wound like worms through a nearly deserted countryside. There were no towns, or stores, and very few streetlights.
"It's like driving through the intestines of a cow," I muttered, and then laughed, a little drunk with exhaustion. Mike laughed too.
We were lost, then found, and finally, we reached the area of the campground. We drove across a final covered bridge, by now looking forward to a cramped night of sleeping in the car no tent, no sleeping bags. Until we saw the gate. And the sign. The one that said the campground closed at 10PM.
I think we screamed, then.
Half an hour later, it was three in the morning. We were supposed to meet Eric by nine. And my climbing is terrible when I'm tired.
I pulled over to the side of the road. "Enough. We're going to have to sleep somewhere."
We leaned the seats back and tried to sleep. It was hard and cold, and before morning, it started to rain again.
Meeting Eric
We drove through intermittent rain, looking for a place to get breakfast. Every muscle had been stiff and cramped, at first. We had stepped out of the car onto a moist road, and my eyes were so tired I could hardly see. It was a struggle to change in the woods beside the road. Then the rain had come again as we started driving.
Unbelievably, after we had passed a closed store, and a post office, and several churches, and then an auto repair garage, we finally came to a pizza restaurant. It had rained several times and everything was pretty wet. Eight o'clock, after four hours sleep, and even pizza would have been fine, but they served breakfast and coffee, and the eggs were tender and excellent. Probably, we thought, the only reward we were going to get on a wet rock day.
The climbing area was an old railway cut at the end of a dirt road that sloped down among stands of trees. We pulled up on the rattling trackbed and skidded to a stop. The clouds were separating and there was the beginning of sun.
With the article in hand we walked along, picking out the climbs, while we waited for Eric.
He's a tall thin guy, with a compact chest, a smooth jaw, and hot blue eyes. He's one of my best friends ever. I owe him my start in climbing. When he pulled up and rolled down the window of his rented car, we grinned at each other. "Hungry?" I asked.
We piled into his car and drove back to the restaurant. He told us about the big mountains, while we shared coffee.