Bear Lodge is the indigenous name for the iconic 867 foot free-standing igneous monolith commonly known as Devils Tower. The Durrance (5.8, II) is the easiest route up Bear Lodge, with pitch after pitch of slippery, old-school, wide crack climbing.
As mentioned in the header, Bear Lodge is the original game given to Devils Tower by the native populations surrounding the now National Monument, so for the sake of this article and respect for those that came before, I will refer to the Tower as Bear Lodge from here forward. On a distilled note, I think Bear Lodge is a cooler name anyways. For the backstory on the Bear Lodge naming story, check out this article. The staggering igneous tower is a mythical crack climbing paradise, with vertical splitter columns every ten to twenty feet, sporting climbs from 5.8 to 5.13. The tower was first free-climbed by Jack Durrance and Harrison Buttersworth in 1938 by what is now known as the “Durrance” route, covering about 500 feet of technical terrain in anywhere from three to six pitches, and difficulties up to 5.8. Bobbi Clemmer and I have had Bear Lodge and specifically the renowned Durrance pinned for years, but our travels never take us to the remote northeastern corner of Wyoming. But then we serendipitously found ourselves in Rushmore and The Needles of South Dakota reuniting with friends for a short climbing trip… and then we realized Bear Lodge was a flat two hours from our campsite… and then an alpine start was conceived for a Durrance speed climb amidst a ten hour Sunday commute home for work on Monday morning. As it turns out, the Durrance is a little more than your average 5.8, and we never made it out of the National Monument lot that evening – but boy did we enjoy a seminal experience.
Blasting across the endless rolling plains of Eastern Wyoming pre-dawn, I pondered how soon we would catch Bear Lodge on the horizon. What began as a thimble 30 miles away slowly swelled to a staggering gravitational mass of slanting black columns, and from the parking lot I marveled that there was even a 5.8 path up the tower at all. We hung around the van and meticulously packed while waiting for the temperatures to slide above the mid 30’s, departing the confines of our warm metal box criminally overdressed around 8:00AM. There’s two approaches for the Durrance – one by way of endless fourth class slabs curling in from the West Face, and another involving a pitch of 5.4 directly beneath the start of the first pitch. In hindsight, the direct “Bowling Alley” approach is the way to go. The “Durrance Slabs”, lest we botched the route finding, were a time suck of polished slabs that felt a little dicy for ropeless shenanigans – we broke out the cord twice for two mini pitches. We reached the base of the ever obvious Leaning Column marking the start of pitch one, right in time for sunrise and the inspiring sight of watching two locals blaze up the first two pitches at record pace.
The first pitch set the tone for what would be a quite challenging climb, with some degree of polished wide crack climbing on each of the first five pitches. The tower gets climbed 4,000 to 5,000 times per year, and I’d have to imagine at least 50% of those by the Durrance, leaving the face holds and cracks greasy beyond belief. I’ve never been to Yosemite, but I must imagine the Durrance matches grease thresholds of the valley classics. Pitch one, the Leaning Column Pitch, began with a stellar splitter hand crack to an alcove and squeeze chimney with a wide crack in the back. It took me a good five minutes to figure out a strategy for ascending the squeeze, which eventually stretched to a routine back-to-the-wall chimney leading to an excellent bolted belay ledge. In the name of time I clipped the chains and continued up pitch two, the definitive crux Durrance Crack. For the life of me I cannot believe this pitch is graded 5.8. I exuded solid 5.10 effort cranking up the vertical hand and fingers crack on slick jams and soapy edges, and reached the belay a sweaty mess of cramped calves and cortisol after a final heady runout above a #5 Camalot left me frayed, frantically craving an Indian Creek trip to hone my splitter crack technique. The fact both Bobbi and I managed to free this pitch in the now blazing sun was a miracle. I’d say the Durrance Crack was more difficult than any of the alpine Teton 5.10 I led this summer.
Above the Durrance came the Cussin’ and Flake Cracks, which we seamlessly linked with a 70M rope. The Cussin’ featured a brutal ass-width fissure that left me flopping like a beached Tuna, but the Flake was a welcomed reprieve from the wide, with straightforward crack climbing and abundant face holds. Our third pitch was the short but testy Chockstone Crack, another sweater of a squeeze off-width capped by a boulder-problem chockstone requiring blue-collar overhanging climbing to another immaculate ledge and bolted belay. By now we’d been on the wall for four hours, and already accepted that our road-trip would be extended another day.
Above the chockstone Durrance climbers have two options. Straight above is more wide cracks of similar difficulties known as the Bailey Direct – or, the original 1938 route features the Jump Pitch (more on this later), a long horizontal walking traverse across “The Meadows” and a final low-fifth class chimney near the East Face. We opted for the original in the name of history, and to experience the famed Jump Pitch. A precarious six to eight foot gap stands between the bolted belay and easier ground, and apparently the first ascent long-jumped the divide, protected by a single angle piton which remains fixed today. At first I thought I’d take to the sky like Carl Lewis, but then rationale kicked in. The jumping stance began from a strange overhanging bulge on a sloping ledge, and if I greased a foot or caught a cam lobe on the protruding wall I would be taking a reckless plunge into a virgin chimney. Instead I took the time to figure out a thin hand traverse below the jump, and eventually a neat Honnold-ish karate kick to the opposite side of the gap, which Bobbi echoed – so much for airborne glory. We coiled the rope here and proceeded to walk through an interesting tunnel and into The Meadows, a miraculous grassy lawn suspended 400 feet off the ground. We second classed our way to the eastern edge of The Meadows and back onto rock, where we found a final easy chimney pitch to the summit. I turned over the lead to Bobbi here, and proudly watched as she marched up the jumbled 5.3-ish terrain with poise. We topped out Bear Lodge around 3:00PM.
In a daze of heat exhaustion I was momentarily surprised there weren’t groves of tourists taking pictures, until I remembered the heinously old-school 5.8 sufferfest we just thieved up is the “easiest” way up the free standing tower. In fact, we had the whole enchilada to ourselves. The summit is a circular flat mass of about one acre, and vegetated much like the valley floor – sun bleached grass, cakey dirt and wind hardened bushes. A clever summit sign that read “No Climbing Above This Point” brought chuckles. Together we called our respective bosses and clients to warn them of our impending Monday absence, and enjoyed a care-free hour lounging atop the tower, soaking in the staggering views and topping off glycogen stores. We returned to the ground in four double rope rappels. We found the first standard rappel station but wandered askew thereafter, though there seemed to be a pair of bolts at stone’s throw every moment, to facilitate a safe descent a million different ways. We reached the van around 6:30 – beaten and battered, just the way we like it.
We awoke at 6:00AM Monday and began our ten hour pilgrimage home. We caught the sunrise on Bear Lodge and enjoyed sips of morning coffee while watching golden glow overcome shadow. The Leaning Tower and entire Durrance was perfectly visible – we snapped many photos. I can understand the spiritual significance and folklore around the Lodge. The monolith rises from seemingly nowhere – there’s nothing else remotely like it in the vicinity. For the crack climber the Lodge is heaven, and I’ve heard the grease factor diminishes exponentially with difficulty. The rock is unique, a softer igneous composite that fractures clean like basalt, but much less sharp. The Durrance itself was a bear at the grade, and I’m glad we had a beefy rack including many big cams. Possessing even a modicum of off-width technique would’ve made the route twice as efficient, for we cruised everything from fingers through fists and the chimneys, but sacrificed our bodies where a better man could’ve chicken-winged and heel-toe cammed. If I were to run the Durrance a second time I would bring exactly the same rack – a single set of cams from fingers to five inches and a standard set of nuts – and if I owned a #6 I’d probably throw it on there too. All in all the route was a marvelous way to reach the summit, but I look forward to returning when I can confidently climb 5.10 in the requisite style, if only to enjoy some rock with less than 85 years of compacted human skin oil – you know, with some crimps and edges I can actually use. To the contrary, I can already hear the elitist crack climbers whispering “quit looking for face holds, just jam the crack”, and to them I say… touche’.
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Ski mountaineering, rock climbing, ice climbing and all other forms of mountain recreation are inherently dangerous. Should you decide to attempt anything you read about in this article, you are doing so at your own risk! This article is written to the best possible level of accuracy and detail, but I am only human – information could be presented wrong. Furthermore, conditions in the mountains are subject to change at any time. Ten Thousand Too Far and Brandon Wanthal are not liable for any actions or repercussions acted upon or suffered from the result of this article’s reading.
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