FINISH HOLD - #22 > APRIL/MAY 2008 - The Fence on Carter Lake

Sometimes they blow up the boulders quietly, sneaking in at night to unroll their fences. And sometimes the heavy machinery moves under your nose, the dynamite seated by expert, brutish hands. Since matter can neither be created nor destroyed, lamenting lost rocks is a cosmic mistake. A two-foot hunk of stone has neither more nor less intrinsic value than a 20-foot one. Tell yourself that, no matter what might come.

Tell yourselves these things during those unsettling 3 a.m. wake-ups, when the warmest mug of tea fails to calm a chattering psyche and you grasp shock-handed for the light switch. Bathe in anodyne each solipsistic regret and the stale ache of friends rendered damaged or lost, baseline existence askew in a way naked only to your knowing. Steal a glimpse into the past, before the fences went up and the rocks toppled or were brought there dustward by human touch.

The first time I lost a bouldering area was a half- lifetime ago, when I was 18. Really, they weren’t my boulders to lose, but I felt pain that spoke otherwise. For once you’ve touched a rock, you own it, and it a part of you. You try to forget the bad climbs, but even those have a haunting.

The bastards threw up the barriers quickly, taut against a high-seated swell in the guts of Tijeras Canyon, a piñon-lined gulf dividing the Sandia and Manzano mountains east of Albuquerque. We’d steal away to different foothills clusters throughout the week to test tendons and tips. Maybe these blocks were called the Carnuel Boulders, after the little neighborhood nearby, split by Highway 333. Maybe they were the Tijeras Boulders. Maybe they were nothing. Jon Duran, an ahead-of-his-time hardman, established the bulk of the problems. B2, some merited — V-damnably-hard, I’m sure.

But the point is moot.

Because what were once arching bulges streaked vibrant green, the ancient lichens embedded in the granite skin...what were once white plaques of wind- weathered stone studded with improbable xenoliths...what were once slabs and incipient cracks and odd little hobbit roofs...what were once facets and corridors and sit-starts and crimp-swings...what once comprised a granite jungle gym in a sunny nook beside the highway, was now fenced off and laid bare with explosives, to be carted away as quarry stone. I found this out after I parked my car beside the highway, certain I’d nosed into the wrong pull-off. I drove home sick at the gut, as if I’d stumbled upon a mutilated corpse.

2008: a half-lifetime later. The fences are up again. This time, they’ve come for Carter Lake.

Ten years ago, as the Dakota blocks at Carter came back on the map during a Colorado highballing renaissance, we’d head out in small groups, drumming up courage with cheap beer and zoning out iriely through sandstone finger pain. The best and highest blocks — the Monster Boulder, Kahuna Boulder, Little Debbies, Extension Rock — lie on the north end of the hill, against the dam. After 9/11, they closed the dam. It’s stayed closed, and last year construction began on this tower.

To me, it looks like a guard post, a snipers’ turret lording over, say, the Carter Lake Processing, Relocation, and Reassignment Center. (Drain the reservoir, fence it in, sequester the undesirables, patrol the perimeter.) That end of the ridge is blocked for construction, a roadbed etched into the raw, yellow soil of the desiccated reservoir to transport machinery and concrete slabs. You still can’t park by the dam, though the best boulders, above and south of the tower, remain open.

Craig DeMartino went out and snapped this photo on a grey February Tuesday. We’d bouldered there that Sunday, on the south end of the ridge, and Craig told me to look at the tower. Because I have a dark turn of mind, I see things that are not there: I saw a guard post. Craig says construction workers told him it was a “gravity-feed water intake,” to move the water under the dam to a processing plant. Look at this photo and tell me what you see. When fences go up, and construction starts near the boulders, I grow nervous now. Thirty-six years have taught me this. UC

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