The Enchanted Tower
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Tom Grundy's Enchanted Tower Page
Enchanted tower is a formation of welded tuff near Datil NM. It is a tower that overhangs on three sides with the fourth sort of attached to the canyon wall. It is over 100 feet tall on its tallest side. The climbing is reminiscent of Smith Rock, except steeper and more pocketed, and with very few nubbins. I first went to Enchanted Tower early in my climbing career, around 2003 or so. I had just spent a week at Hueco Tanks getting completely worn out, and the Tower was way over my head (I led 5.10 at the time). Needless to say, I didn't climb a whole lot at the Tower, and nothing on the actual tower formation, but I wanted to go back. In 2006, I nearly went there, but they closed the forest because of fire danger.
Finally in 2007 I got back to Enchanted Tower for about a week. It would have been nice to have a lot more endurance there, but I climbed fairly well, thrashing my way up a few 5.11 (not always thrashing I am pleased to report) and 5.12 routes (definitely some wailing and gnashing of teeth). I spent a lot of energy trying to redpoint "technowitch". By the time I finally figured out the beta so that I could do the crux moves at the end, I was too weak to link them all together. It was fun climbing and good training though even if the tower put the smack down on me. Since the climbing was so brutal, we needed to rest a lot. We spent our rest days looking for fossils and other interesting rocks as well as visiting the VLA (Very Large Array - a huge radio antenna array), cooking and eating (always a favorite), and watching the sports action of other people climbing. It was also nice to watch the waxing moon cruise past Venus, Saturn, and some stars over the course of a few days.
There were a number of interesting animals in the area, these included cute mini-cows (really just calves) and other cattle, a ringtailed cat that lived in a hollow in an oak tree at our camp (it only came out at night, and none of the photo attempts were worthy), and some hawks and other birds. We also saw plenty of pronghorn antelope while driving.
Holly starts up "Golden Staircase"
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More of Holly
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Holly takes a break on "Golden Staircase"
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one arm of the VLA points east
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The VLA scans the sky
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One of the "A" team lowers off
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The Enchanted Tower again
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Fossils from near Socorro
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Hungry dinosaurs in Holbrook
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for further reading check out the start of this report from a
2007 Enchanted Tower and Arkansas trip
or my 2008 Enchanted Tower trip report