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Show taken were gone over, discussions held, and the work of the surveyors put into a computer. It was then the final figure of 310 feet emerged. "The remarkable thing, I think, is the 310 figure is what Eyres and Cres-well told us it was-and they were using a compass, a tape measure, and a rope with a rock tied to its end," Blake exclaims. He is referring to crude measurements made in 1953 by the only known climbers to scale the arch, Fred A. Ayres, a professor of chemistry at Reed College (Ore.), an avid mountain climber who had made first climbs in the Tetons, Peru, Mexico, and Canada, and A. E. Cres-well, a high school science and mathematics teacher in Oakland, Ore., who often climbed with Prof. Ayres. It was August when Ayres and Creswell went to Kolob. Ayres reported they spent considerable time "in exploring and trying various approaches [to scale the canyon wall], each of which eventually defeated us. Finally, about noon on; the second day, we pushed up a gully which we had previously rejected because of its wild appearance and began to make real progress." Part way up the wall, as Ayres called the mountain face, they discovered four expansion bolts and realized they had independently put themselves upon a route taken by two Philadelphians in an earlier, but futile, attempt to gain the arch. By some complex maneuvers, the two went up the face whose major obstacle was a formation Ayres called the chockstone, which at one point forced the two climbers "into a veritable cave." But slowly they made their way skyward, finally conquering an overhanging shelf and emerging on top. |
