Had I known better, Mike's evil grin all the way from Aspen to Moab would have been all the warning I needed. "Desert climbing will be more fun than anything you've ever done before," he explained as our high beams bounced off the smooth asphalt of the Castle Valley road onto a rough bedrock wash saddled between wind-stunted junipers. Stars illuminated the nipple top of Castleton Tower, an imposing but manageable-looking vertical projection atop its thousand-foot cone. The scale was deceiving. "Unless, of course, you've been spelunking," he added.

It's convenient that the preeminent introductory route to desert rock is on one of the most aesthetically intriguing formations in a 100-mile radius. Layton Kor and Huntley Ingalls thought so when they first scaled its 400-foot vertical chimneys in 1961, and Roper and Steck agreed when they enthroned the infamous 5.9 Kor-Ingalls Route as one of North America's 50 Classic Climbs. It had to be good, I thought.

Dawn found us partway up the hour approach - a winding trail that steepened considerably as it picked its way through the narrow cliff bands and exfoliated rubble from the tower's Windgate flanks hundreds of feet above. From our new vantage above the valley floor, the tower proper stood imposingly tall, and by the time I reached the final unroped 5.2 scramble before pitch one, my intimidation thermometer was soaring.

Above us a dark mass of red rock split open at a right-facing dihedral. That gaping gash was our avenue of opportunity, supposedly the easiest way to the top of this beast. I turned around, trying to medicate my mind with the intense beauty of the surrounding valley; in 180 degrees I took in the snowy contrast of the La Sal Mountain peaks, the 1700-foot vertical wall and Porcupine Rim, home of the famed mountain bike trail, to the east.

Behind the westward tower formation of the Priest, The Nuns, and The Rectory, the Colorado River canyon wound its way along the valley's northern edge, capped by the spectacular vistas of Arches National Park. A vast wildness of red desert rock and freestanding spires stretched in every direction, nearly jolting me from fearful preoccupation with my route, but not quite. Thank God Mike was leading the first pitch, because it also meant he would take the third - the crux.

A short 5.5 chimney got us off the ground without too much trouble, and I naively put my trust in the grade. How hard could 5.9 be? As I placed the first cam on my lead, the true groveling began. Inching upward through a narrow 5.8 chimney I wormed my way into constrictions more fit for a marmot than a 6'2", 180-pound human being. Then it got narrower. Desperately clinging to the vertical inner walls I half fell out of the then off-width crevice, using the maximum-surface-area-of-skin-in-contact-with-the-wall technique to not so blithely reach the belay. And this was the warm-up.