June-uary Love

June-uary 2010: What was supposed to be one of the coldest months of the year, was unseasonably warm in Bishop. The snow melted from the granite eggs of the Buttermilks. I worked on my tan at the volcanic tablelands. I fell in love.


Shannon Moore and I walking through the Buttermilks

Love never starts smoothly. I arrived in the middle of December, I left the sandstone sport climbing in Kentucky, drove past the bright lights of Vegas, through the sand dunes of Death Valley, and into a great desert. Hot springs bubbled along the side of the road. A recent storm covered the ground with snow. I stopped at the Looney Bean, a coffee shop on Bishop’s Main St., filled my body with hot chocolate and pastries, and spent an hour kicking in my sleeping bag, trying to warm up so I could fall asleep in the back of my station wagon.


Night time at the pit

The suffering began at the Owens River Gorge, a great crevasse in between the ski town of Mammoth and the honky-tonk of Bishop and the first climbing spot to dry. I drudged down through the snow. It was cold in the sun and colder in the shade. The weather moved in fast. What started out as a sunny morning on easy terrain, became desperately slapping up a 5.10 sport arête in a snow storm. Baltic. My hands stuck to the large flat edges and the heat drained from my arms. It reminded me of the time when I was on Gasherbaum 5, when the wind howled and the air froze. It was just me and the mountain. That was back in ’67, when I couldn’t afford crampons, and wrapped my feet in barbed wire to kick steps. Just me and the mountain. It was the type of suffering that some people love and the type of ex that I was happy to leave behind.


Owens River Gorge


Me on Thieves in the Temple 12a at the Gorge

I spent the first three quarters of my trip getting into bouldering shape. Pulling holds down to your waist and stepping above your elbows isn’t easy. Bouldering requires trying hard, something I can rarely muster the gumption to do. The technical nature of the Buttermilks kept shutting me down. The vertical rock is coarse, requiring fancy footwork and hard calluses. My finger tips bled. And I fell. I fell a lot. I thought about joining a club and beating myself over the head with it. This was the type of suffering that I could love.
The newness of my relationship wore me down. I needed rest. My friends and I spent the afternoon riding sleds down the Buttermilk road. The slush of the snow packed down hard enough for the orange plastic to shoot down the hill. Wesley, a chow-labrador who I was dog-sitting, chased me down, trying desperately to tackle me. Then the sun came out. Life became dreamy. The snow melted from the huge boulders of the Buttermilks. My toes stopped freezing when I went to sleep at night. I stopped hating Bishop.


In order of intelligence- Shannon Moore, James Lucas, John Vellatio

In an effort for something different, I sought out highballs, figuring they would be “easier”; the moves would be easier; the problems would just be more frightening. On the Roadside boulder, a tall v3 at the Buttermilks, the last bit to the summit involves high stepping onto a granite smear. Just as I moved my leg into position, I hit the end of my pants. The thick fabric of my Dickies wouldn’t stretch to allow me to step any higher. Twenty feet swam below me. I closed my eyes, tried to not think about breaking my ankle, and screamed, “Eek!” I summited. My friends laughed at my mouse squeak. I am tough. I knew that the Buttermilks loved me for that.


Creg Phares working Highbrow at the Happies

People swarmed the more gymnastic climbing of the Happies and Sads. The volcanic rock, with its big holds, big moves, and steep terrain, attracted a more movement oriented crowd, the people who focused more on the physical difficulty of the problems than the aesthetics. A guy at one of the warmup boulders, the “Girlfriend” boulder, stood around looking for just that. He was focused on digits just not the bouldering kind. I shook my head. I was a single man but I had found my love.


Matt Ciancio at the Happies

Eventually, I had to leave Bishop. I needed a job. Actually, I didn’t need a job-I needed a paycheck. I left with sore muscles, less skin, and an intense feeling of satisfaction. I wasn’t sure if I’d find a job back in the Bay area. I was sure I would return. How could I fall out of love with a place that tortured me?


Another evening in the Pit

All photos thanks to Eric Ruderman

Catharsis

March 2009: I pace beneath Joshua Tree's Intersection rock, the 120-foot blob in the middle of the park. I look for the long, red bloodstains I left four and a half years ago, in winter 2004, but the wind, desert rain, and time have washed them from the stone. When my fingers and toes warm, I begin free-soloing the North Overhang. Just below the 5.9 crux, I stop to breathe and chalk. This time if I fall, I want to die -- I cannot deal with falling again.

His sequin jumpsuit reflected the flickering casino lights. The ice skates cut smooth lines in the ice, sounding like helicopter blades as he delivers my dinner of crackers.

It was two weeks after the fall before I realized the ice skater wasn’t real. I woke from my coma dreams to a numbing morphine drip, prone in the ICU at Desert Springs Memorial Hospital near Joshua Tree. I wanted to return to the coma. My dreams were better than the reality of the pain and failure. The doctors spoke stoically when they discussed the eight hours of operations thus far -- the damage to my occipital lobe, the spinal fusion, the compound fracture of my ulna. I couldn’t quite understand what they had done. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I was Frankenstein’s monster, confused, angry, and sewn back together wrong. I tore the IV out of my arms -- I wanted to pull on my jeans and crawl to El Cap. My identical twin, Matt, held me down while a nurse sedated me.

Eventually, I calmed. The thick calluses of my hand were peeling away, I had shed 20 pounds. Long rods held my back together, plates supported my sad, destroyed left ankle, and pins cemented my elbow. Falling 100 feet had taken its toll. My body hurt.
The Stonemaster and writer John Long has described Joshua Tree as “a poor man's Patagonia.” It’s a raw, windy place, but also a winter sanctuary for dirtbag climbers, the old school-rock jocks who’d drop acid on Wednesday nights and run wide-eyed through the yuccas. I never liked the coarse quartz monzonite, the blob formations, or the wind, but the park had hardened the Stonemasters, and I wanted to emulate my heroes.

During my 2004 winter break from college in Santa Cruz, I ran around the busy Hidden Valley Campground, soloing a half-dozen moderates as I warmed up to redpoint
I moved fluidly up through a hand crack to a four-foot roof -- the crux. I reached out cautiously, felt the jams, sunk my hand around the roof’s lip, and pulled over. I neared the summit. I felt secure knowing I’d sent the crux, 100 feet of space swimming below me. Then I repositioned my feet, moving them underneath my body, a slight miscalculation. I started to barndoor, my balance suddenly gone.

I didn’t want to scream. I had too much pride. Death, however, was imminent, and there would never be a more appropriate time to cry for help. So I yelled. Seventy feet of air rushed by. A second later I hit a ledge. I was ecstatic and felt invincible. I started to sit up and promptly rolled off, striking the ground 30 feet below.

Trying to walk it off, I stumbled to my feet. But then a seizure bolted through me and I convulsed, crumpling to the ground. Nearby climbers ran to help, the crater I’d made beginning to fill with blood. I heard the faint thud of helicopter blades as I blacked out.
Imagine a world where others fulfill all your desires. They feed you. They dress you. They even wipe your ass. I was there and let me tell you, it was miserable. This was my world for 25 days at the ICU in Desert Springs, and then another 50 days after that, at a stroke and rehabilitation center near Santa Cruz.

John was a stroke victim and my first rehab roommate. He was a 60-year-old man who’d become helpless overnight. John’s family struggled with his transformation more than he did. He wore a diaper, and the room often smelled. One night, John left his bed and began to wander the room, mumbling about the bathroom and edging close to my bed.

“John, the bathroom’s in the corner,” I said. He ignored me.

I stabbed the callbox button, desperately beckoning the nurse. I was paralyzed, unable to leave the bed, and now John was going to crap on me. Eventually, the nurse responded. I was helpless; I was a 23 year old baby.

There was nothing inspirational about learning to walk again. It was painful, even though I stood during my first physical-therapy session. Seven seconds passed. I sat, rested, and then tried again. My legs wobbled precariously at five seconds. I felt uncertain at six. Would I fall? I fought through, watching the clock tick till 15 seconds. Later, I tried to spray to Matt about how walking made me feel excited, like I was climbing again. Sitting in my hospital room playing Fable on my Xbox -- a gift from my oldest brother, Chris -- Matt looked at me and asked, “How do I get the combat multiplier up for my hero?”

I progressed from a wheelchair, to a walker, to a cane. I hobbled back to school and began the spring quarter. A few more surgeries, and 381 days after the accident, I climbed again.

December 2005: A half-dozen Monkeys, climbers I knew from Yosemite, sat slandering by the fire in Joshua Tree. It was my first climbing trip since my accident. Even falling off routes I’d onsight-soloed, I was happy to be on rock again, to share J-Tree’s cold desert winds with friends. A couple of sloggers -- a pair of old Cascade climbers -- ambled up with a bottle of whiskey.

“You guys hear the story about the kid who fell off the North Overhang?” asked one, a 50-year-old pharmacist from Seattle.

My Monkey friends cackled, and then stabbed their fingers at me and screamed, “That's the guy!”

“What the f--k’s the matter with you? You get hit in the head with a hammer or something?” the pharmacist asked.

From my tent the next morning, I heard the pharmacist going off in his campsite. “What an idiot,” he said of me. “The Old Dads used to get that stuff wired before they soloed it.”

I felt a knife stab my heart. His words touched on a belief I’d long held: that I was a failure. Soloing had forced me to step into the void, to confront my insecurities and become confident. Now, I only had the notoriety of my failure to keep me company… and the $500,000 in hospital bills, the surgeries, the pain, and my slow return to climbing. Still, my fall had not crushed me. I decided to invent something better for myself.

Over the months that followed, I ignored the nerve damage -- the loss of movement in my foot, the stunted left arm -- and the trepidation. I obsessed over climbing and convinced myself I’d been rebuilt harder, better, faster, stronger. In the spring, I moved into a tent in the woods behind UC Santa Cruz, funneling my rent money (from student loans) to climbing trips. I spent more time at the crag than in the classroom. During breaks, I went to Smith Rock, Indian Creek, Zion, Squamish Tuolumne, Red Rock, and Hueco Tanks. I stacked my classes two consecutive days a week, enduring marathon days of economics and accounting principles that then left me four uninterrupted days in the Valley. I wanted to be a real rock climber: I imagined it and I became it.

March 2009: I drive into Joshua Tree by night, sleeping restlessly. I am a better climber than when I fell. I have the physical ability, but wonder about the emotional control.

I finish chalking my hands, inhale once, and then swing out above the void. At North Overang’s crux, I rock onto my foot, jam my hand, and pull through. The climbing is over quickly --. I wonder how I ever fell. Standing on the summit, I can imagine I’ve undone my failure -- that I never took that fall.

For a moment, I forget about the haunting dreams, the lingering pain, and the scars. I am normal again. This is what I worked so hard for. The desert wind blows, chilling the titanium rods in my back and the metal plate in my ankle. My fingers trace the foot-long scar that runs down my spine. I realize the scars will never fade. And then the moment is gone.

Published in Climbing Dec 2009

The Hipster Handbook

We rolled past the gawking tourists and the gear-laden climbers, the hoards who hobbled up to the roadside vistas and bunny-slope routes. My pickup eeked into the parking lot of the Tuolumne store and I swaggered out. Why shouldn’t I feel proud? I’d just kept it in neutral for the entire twelve-mile drive down the pass.

But as Max and I told each other, we were more than a pair of dirtbags coasting through the summer, getting by with no money and living out of a beat-up pickup. The Hipster Handbook, the little blue Bible I kept on my truck’s dashboard, pegged us as “deck”: hipster lingo for cool. We followed its words religiously, shunning and reducing to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream tourists, thru-hikers, and regular rock climbers. (Although we’d stolen the book from the tent of a New York employee- a Neo-crunch, a new wave hippy.) We slandered weekend climbing trips, families, and careers as trappings of an overworked middle class.

A dozen climbers lurked outside the store, spraying about epic ascents on the regular routes of every major dome. I glared at their shorts and long underwear and frowned. I would never be a tragically dressed gumbie again. I might end up as a tragic gumbie, but never one with poor fashion sense. The Hipster Handbook had taught me that much. Instead of zip-up pants and high-tech polyester shirts, I wore working-class denim jeans and pink T-shirts made for menopausal women with catch phrases like, “They’re not hot Flashes—They’re power surges!”

I glanced in the truck’s side view mirror. For the past week, as the book recommended, I slept on my side to maximize my cowlick. The tourist may have seen a climber with unwashed hair but I knew better. I looked good.

“What is hip about repeating routes?” I asked. An over-sized Eagle Scout thumped his guidebook on the tire of his Hummer and ranted about having to share a top-rope anchor with a group of NOLS students.

Max rolled a cigarette, smoked it, then ground out the tobacco and tossed the tiny paper in his pocket. His eyes shifted from the finished coffin nail to the open meadow beyond the parking lot. He stared blankly for a moment then responded, “Nothing.”

We coasted my truck down the road to the hillside fortress of Phobos Deimos. One of the only true cliffs in Tuolumne, this formation features perfect granite, and an excellent opportunity for first ascents—mostly because of the horrendous hike to the cliff. We pounded up the steep trail whittling our bodies down to the ideal hipster body fat of 2%. The right side of the cliff boasts steep classic cracks, the kind routes that attract Semper Fi climbers and the hardy Eagle Scouts. But we stared at the cliff’s far left side, at a black-streaked corner buried underneath decades of dirt and moss and lichen.

“That is our first ascent,” I told Max. That is our glory. That is the Hipster Handbook.”

“Looks dirty,” Max said. He loved to state the obvious.

“We just need to clean it,” I laughed. Sincerity is the new irony.

Max rolled another cigarette, letting the long strands of Bali Shag hang from the end. He stuffed his hands in his pockets while he smoked. “Cleaning huh?”

For a week, we were proletariat, rappelling from the top of the cliff with over-sized goggles, dust masks, and an arsenal of wire brushes, posing as heroes of socialism.

Max swung on the rope next to the crack, holding a thick wire brush. “What is the opposite of deck?” he asked.

“Fin.” I packed a medium wire stopper with hippie lettuce, lit it, and inhaled deeply, trying my best not to burn my lips and still get high. Hipsters are resourceful.

Crud covered Max’s face. “That is what this is.” Soot crept into his nostrils, and lichen streaked his black hair grey. “This is fin.”

I hid underneath a rock, safe from the waterfall of debris, and the scrubbing. I’d suddenly remembered that hipsters abhor the antiquated notion of work. I shouted to Max, hoping to distract him from the labor. “Just think of the tassels.”

Max paused, stared at the rock, and loosened his grip around the wire brush. Obviously, he had been neglecting the Hipster Handbook's glossary.

“The tassels: the girls. Ladies love a first ascentionist. We will be famous,” I lied. Max returned to scrubbing with a new vigor.

When the cleaning was done, we started climbing. On the first pitch a television-sized block detached from the wall and fell onto Max’s chest. The block pressed onto him as he jammed his hand deeper into the crack. With a casual shrug, the block left Max’s sternum and flew between his feet to the ground.

“Watch out!” he yelled.

I stepped two feet to the side as the granite block crashed into the rock where I had stood. If I’d been hit, it could have killed me or worse, maimed me and tossed me into a mindless job, sulking over my injuries in a cubicle. I watched the shrapnel fly through the air.

“Nice Max,” I said, checking to make sure my hair still had a perfect cowlick, then bobbing my shoulders with a nonchalant shrug.

Max quivered for a moment then he too shook it off. Hipsters never lose their calm. He continued to a sloping ledge. From there a widening crack split open the granite book of the climb.

We had scrubbed the rock so a waxing moon butted the straight line of the crack. I fought through 5.10 moss before hitting a strip of actual rock and finally some splitter granite. For five feet, I was in heaven. Then the crack opened and my foot, my ankle, and my leg sunk into the gaping hole. I struggled up the dirty offwidth, imagining myself in purgatory. (delete then) I banished this thought as a regression: The Hipster Handbook had replaced my dog-eared paperback copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, an along with it, my all-black outfits and forced Italian accent.

Toward the top of the pitch, I jammed my paw into the rock and tried to crank through a roof section. The granite bit into my skin as I yarded on the fist jam. I did not manage to pull the move but I did manage to pull off quit a bit of skin.


Before our next try, we scrubbed more so that the moon next to the crack was close to full and the climbing was almost clean. With little difficulty, Max dispatched the overhanging crux combining the fierce fist jam and a small crimp. I followed but my bloody fist ooozed out of the jam.

I never managed to climb the route. Max thought it was 10c. I thought it was 11a. We called it 10c.

“It will be better downgraded anyway,” I said. “Hipsters always sandbag.”

We hiked the ropes, the brushes, the goggles, and the dust masks down to the truck. In the week we had hung at the base, we had seen no one. Just the rock and open Sierra sky, that heavenly stillness and calm light. Just that feeling that came over us, at times, when everything we did, even climbing, seemed like a game. (edited) The YOSAR climbers were too busy pretending they worked, the weekend warriors were slaving in their cubicles, and even the guides never hiked that far.

Max and I fell into my pick-up.

Unfortunately, there was no coasting back to the store; it was uphill and we had to push. We arrived in the parking lot tired and worn.

“That was deck.” I glanced in my truck’s side view mirror. Sweat and dirt cemented my hair. The pomp of my cowlick had disappeared. The work, the grime, and the effort of the Hipster Handbook had transformed me. Now, I could not even pass as a proletariat in an old Soviet Film. I looked square. I looked midtown. I looked mainstream.

“Yup.” Max hacked up a black ball of lichen. “That was deck.”

The line never made it into the Tuolumne guidebook, despite our efforts to convince the mainstream how rad the Hipster Handbook was. The guys at the Tuolumne SAR site claimed the route had already been climbed. The mountaineering guides claimed it had never been touched, and for good reason.

I do not know if we made a first ascent or not and it does not matter because, after all, Max and I had escaped the confines of the ordinary. For a summer Max and I were the only hipsters in Tuolumne. We were kids who spent all our time out in the wild. All we had was miles of granite and a compulsion to be better men than we yet knew.

The last time I looked at the line, it was covered in moss again.


The Hipster Handbook 10c FA Max Hasson and James Lucas

The Lost Generation

The walls were closing in on me. After work, I stood in the meadow. El Capitan and Middle Cathedral moved ten feet closer each day. I barely rock climbed any more, spending the majority of my time sanding and painting a house in Yosemite West. I went to the job site late and made up for it by leaving early. The pressure of working a menial job and being too tired to climb tore at me. I needed to escape to find something new. I had contracted ditch fever.


Aaron checking out the climbs at the Red

A native Kentuckian, Aaron wanted to leave Yosemite to visit family and meet up with Hayden, a fresh out of high-school sport wanker and his upcoming partner for a trip to Patagonia. The Red River Gorge, home of the State’s largest concentration of quality sport climbing, sat a mere half hour from Aaron’s home. When he mentioned splitting gas at the job site, I immediately tossed two liters of high octane energy drinks and a batch of homemade brownies into my station wagon. We escaped the vortex of the ditch and the staleness of staying too long in Yosemite, pounding out the 2500 mile drive to Kentucky in a 48 hour continuous push.


Aaron, Matt, and Hayden to break a tree at the Left Flank


Though I’d been in Yosemite for a few months, I arrived at the Red not having climbed for a few weeks. I wasn’t out of shape; I consider round is a shape. I started climbing Monday, checking out every crag, trying as many routes as I could. I was psyched. By the following Monday, I could barely make it up the warm-ups. I was worked. Apparently, seven days of climbing makes one weak. At the top of Tuna Town (12d), one of the uniform jug hauls that the Red is famous for, all the climbing hit me. I got jazz hands and Elvis legs. I pulled up the rope, trying to clip the anchors. My hands slowly opened as I shook like an autumn leaf. I whipped. The ground rushed towards my face. This was insane. The biggest impression I’d leave on the earth would be a two foot crater where I decked. Why couldn’t I find a nice safe desk to sit behind? After seventy feet of screaming, the rope slowed. Hayden launched to the third bolt, and I came level with him.


Local cowboy Cory Herr on Flower Power at the Madness Cave

Hayden climbed with slightly more success. On the left side of the Mother Lode, at the GMC wall, 8 Ball (5.12d) follows an obvious corner system, arching rightwards as it nears the anchor. The fumes off a blunt of “Kentucky Dro” drifted across the Madness Cave as Hayden finished his bowline, and shot up, trying to onsight the technical route. He used his ninja footwork up into the corner and then to the base of its arch. A line of chalked holds followed the arch out right. Instead, Hayden headed straight up a desperate path of unchalked crimps in no man’s land. The vision quest began. He wandered about the face with his elbows pointing skyward and his body shaking. He fought to the anchors and managed to pull it off, despite climbing completely off route.

“I could see how most people get suckered out by those big chalked holds to the right. The crimp sequence above sure was heinous.” For the most part, the climbing at the Red is straight forward. Crimp left hand, crimp right hand, pull up. But even the best get lost. They go on these vision quests, the rights of passage where they struggle, get lost, and realize a bit of who they are.

On the drive back to camp from the Mother Lode, the fall sunset turned the clouds a thousand shades of orange. Hayden choked up. That night, he bought the after adventure beverages from the beer trailer on the county line. Maybe he found a bit of himself because that night he got lost in beer.


Hayden on Take That Katie Brown 13b

After climbing for a few days, Hayden, Aaron and I rested at Aaron’s cousin’s apartment in Richmond. The Slade Weekly ran an article about the local community law enforcement. The chief of police wanted his officers to command more respect so “Officers who grew a mustache received a 66% increase in pay.” The town’s class was made more evident when we ate breakfast at a greasy diner, the Waffle house. The snaggle- toothed waitress said “Ok, sugar” when I ordered pancakes. She said “Uh-huh darling” when I ordered orange juice. I wanted to order bacon but I was afraid she’d call me her boyfriend. While I wanted to get lucky in Kentucky, the idea of trapping myself in a place where most genetic characteristics go to die, scared me. Plus she could have eaten corn on the cob through a chain link fence. Before we left, I stopped to reconsider. Maybe she was the girl for me. After all, she had something the three of us didn’t- a job.


Me climbing some 12a at the Left Flank

Business Weekly discussed the current high rate of unemployment coining the term the “Lost Generation”- the young and unemployed, who have been disproportionately affected by the economic down turn represent an enormous demographic. Unable to even grab the first rung of the corporate ladder and faced with a depressed income due to being stuck in a career below their educated abilities, this group of high-school drop outs and college graduates are lost in America. Some of them, like me, found their way to the Red River Gorge, and more accurately, the camping behind Miguel’s Pizza Shop. They wander about causing trouble, roaming listlessly, and contributing to society only through their basic consumption.


Late night fireworks on the road by Twinkie

A 30 rack of Miller Lite in camouflage cans sat next to a gravity bong at the camp site. A high school student in Richmond kept us in heavy supply of ounces of brown stems and seeds that were bricked together and called “Kentucky Dro”. Our basic consumption, the cheap beer and brick weed usually kept our insanity at bay, but more often it ignited Aaron. After a blunt and a six pack, he’d shout, “I do what I marijuana!” He shot bottle rockets and M-80s at anything that moved then started enormous wax fires causing mushroom cloud explosions that lit up the field around the camp fires. Aaron let loose; he had escaped a long summer of humping haulbags, sanding and painting houses, and stacking wood. He scrounged his dollars and bought his ticket to Patagonia, trading his manual labor for a career in big wall climbing.


Aaron's wax bombs

After more pyrotechnics for Aaron, more huge whips for me, and more desperate onsights for Hayden, we spent another night in Richmond. At midnight, Hayden rustled on an air mattress when the door suddenly opened.
“This is my house and I need to use the phone.” A tweaked out woman barged in screaming, “I won’t kill you.” Hayden evaluated the woman from his sleeping bag on the living room floor.
“Uhh…,”Hayden said. He attempted to listen to her rapid fire gibberish and provide some advice but she only stared and babbled on.
In a moment of complete maturity; Aaron offered the woman some direction. He propped up on one elbow and yelled from the couch, “You’re lost. Now, get the fuck out of here. “
The tweaker pivoted on her heel and bolted from the house, slamming the door behind her.
Hayden pounded up the stairs, running into the guest room, and waking me. “Dude, did you hear that? She was tweaking and randomly came into the house. Weird.” Hayden watched her run across the back yard towards another Kentucky townhouse. “Dood, on a scale of 0 to 1; I think she was a 1.”


Hayden on Table of Colors 13b at the Left Flank

The Kentucky weather soured when we got back to the Red. Hayden and Aaron left for Colorado to train for their upcoming Patagonia trip and prepare for their Gasherbaum 5 adventures. I drove west to the next crag. The radio played a song about a cowboy casanova who broke hearts all across the Midwest. I tuned it all out, watching the odometer click off two thousand miles. The endless flats of Oklahoma forced me to reflect, something the whirlwind of Kentucky hadn’t let me do.


Hayden and I fighting at the Overtow wall

Climbing offers an easy escape, a justifiable excuse to ditch out on sanding and painting, an opportunity to forget about the despondent economy, and the possibility of a life behind a desk or worse, a mop. It’s easier to climb than to grow up. But was I just treading water rock climbing? Was there any sense in it all or was my life just a series of scrambled adventures: tweakers busting into the house, huge whippers, pyrotechnics, and the search for a “1”. I stopped the seriousness of my thought. What would Hayden and Aaron do? They’d say “fuck it”, turn the radio dial, and search for gangster rap in middle America.

Plastic Prince

Snow blew in through the window of my red station wagon. Inside was a nuclear meltdown: sweat soaked my cotton shirt, and my palms wet the steering wheel. I drove 13 hours before deciding that Boulder was in the wrong direction. I had planned to devote myself to three months of writing and climbing, to buckle down and make my dreams of being a real writer and rock climber a reality. I was also headed to a future with no money, no place to live, and an intense feeling that I had been living this lifestyle for too long.

On the side of the road, I called my twin brother and told him I was returning to his couch in California. I needed to kill the bohemian inside of me. For eight years I had lived the dream, traveling and climbing. But after nearly a decade of hopping between crags, living in a tent, and scraping by on peanut- butter-and-jelly sandwiches, I wanted to be more than a dirtbag. I wanted some security, a steady income, a sense of home, and some companionship. I wanted to be a regular member of society.

Moving to Berkeley, back to California, meant that while I searched for a career I would have to stay in the city and away from the walls. Adjusting from the dirtbag lifestyle to a normal one involved trading real rock for the unknown of plastic. Still, I approached the climbing gym with confidence. I was a seasoned veteran with ascents of El Cap in a day, onsight free solos of 5.11, sends of scary trad climbs and pumpy sport routes. How hard could gym climbing really be?

John Schmid nudged me toward the front desk of a Bay Area climbing gym. Apparently, my longtime climbing partner knew how to smuggle me past the entrance fees, a hurdle that had always kept me out of the gym. John waved his membership card, mumbled something about a guest pass, and then loudly announced my name: “He's kind of a big deal." And they let me in for free. This was going even better than I thought.

At the lead cave, I groped the plastic on a tower and stared down at the rainbow of tape dotting the footholds. I grabbed an orange hold with black tape and white spots then realized that I needed to crimp the black hold with the white tape and orange spots.

Searching the kaleidoscope of holds, my forearms bulged and I froze. In a last-ditch effort, I threw for a jug above my head. I hit it, stuck it, but then the wall spit me off. The hold spun. It kept circling as I slumped onto the rope. I had tried hard on Midnight Lightning but had never managed to spin anything on it. I lowered to the ground, dejected.

John said cheerfully, "Why don't we boulder? Maybe then you can become a real gym rat."

John was a Jedi knight. A former dirtbag climber, he had transitioned to the city well, and now had a successful nursing career, a beautiful girlfriend and an unbelievable ability to crush indoors. He was my role model—a real rock climber and a plastic prince. I followed his lead to the bouldering cave, and launched upward. A tiny series of polished holds had spit me off nine times before I finished it.

"Yes!" I screamed. I hung from the top with intense satisfaction. This almost compared to an ascent of Astroman. I was well on my way to being a badass gym climber. I smugly dropped to the ground, and searched the start holds for the grade. "Vfun," it read. My jaw dropped. This boulder problem was easier than V0? My ego plummeted, and I crumpled into a ball. A desk jockey saw me huddled below the problem, and walked over. "Yeah, dude, like half the tape fell off. Didn't you hear the beta from the Thursday Night Bouldering session?"

Lying on the ground, groaning and letting my pumped forearms recover, I noticed the circus around me. Little kids jumped around, couples fought over topropes, and a dating scene flourished. A dude sauntered toward a group of women, struck a pose, then pedaled his feet up the wall. Outside, the gym climbers had brought tales to the crags of the slinky yoga goddesses and other beauties who tore across the lead caves. They insisted that gyms were total meat markets.

"Haven't you read the articles in the magazines? That's exactly what it is like," they said, punching me in the arm.

Looking around, I noticed that, unlike at the Northwest Face of Half Dome, the Moonlight Buttress, and the offwidths of Indian Creek, there were girls at the bases of most of these routes. Maybe the plastic princes had a point.

I wondered if I could ever make it in the city. I was overwhelmed with the difficulty of the gym climbing, and by its busy culture.

John tried to reassure me. "Maybe you aren't the best gym climber. At least it's a place to meet girls."

I started thinking about who to approach. Surely the women would like me. I am, overall, a decent guy. I just needed to be genuine. Then I remembered the plastic princes, how they strut around with bare-chested bravado. At the crags they had boasted, assuring me that their tactics worked. Maybe that was how you got the girls? I puffed my chest, and sashayed forward.

"Are you running toward me or away from me?" I asked a girl on the treadmill.

Mascara smudged with sweat below her eyes as she hit a button on the dashboard and increased the speed of the treadmill.

"Well," she responded, "Now I am running away from you." So much for the cheesy pick-up lines. The plastic princes had been only partially right. The gym, I decided, was one-quarter meat market and three-quarters butcher shop.

This was too hard. The spinning holds, my damaged ego, the girls, the gym rats ... The reality of climbing at an artificial wall was overwhelming. This was the hardest crag I had ever been to. Why bother with any of this? There was no way I could attach myself to the city lifestyle if I could not even deal with the climbing.

I left Berkeley and headed for Bishop. Three hours into the seven-hour trip, I ran into a snowstorm, and headed back to a gas station to buy some chains. At the store, I stared at the price—$60. Instead, I bought a pack of M&Ms, sat in my car, and tried to decide what to do with my life. I ate a green M&M and thought I should go. I could keep climbing, ignore the loneliness and lack of fulfillment. I could be a man on the rock and let my passion for climbing be enough. I ate a red M&M and thought about stopping. I should become responsible, find a job, start a career, and commit to being something more.

Then I ate a handful of yellow M&Ms and made one clear decision. I needed to end my indecisiveness. The marginal existence of a dirtbag was romantic bullshit and completely overrated. Experience taught me that much. The city was something different. It would give me a chance to climb, work, and provide my life with some balance. I smacked the steering wheel and gave up on the frivolous lifestyle of a dirtbag climber. I headed back to Berkeley to try again. I drove three hours and then made the 15-minute walk to the gym. I really wanted to send the pink route anyway.

Published in Rock & Ice

Tales of the Temporary

Americans are twice as likely to kill themselves on a Wednesday. At work, the stapler eyeballed me, beckoning me to punch little bits of metal into my skull.

The recession doubled the competition for jobs in the Bay area; I fought with hundreds of other applicants to file papers for the California State Bar. At 8 am, during the hump of the week, I started shredding, filing, faxing, and copying. During my fifteen minute break, I sat on the curb, watching San Francisco's financial district's honking traffic. My head fell into my hands and I was in Yosemite climbing for a moment. The glacier polished cracks swallowed my hands and the Merced flowed lazily beneath me. Then the exhaust from a Greyhound tore me from my day dream. Those ten seconds of dreaming were the highlight of 120 hours of work. I shuffled back inside to shred, staple, file, fax, and copy. I hoped that the stapler would kill me. The job was death by paper cut and I was bleeding out.

The temp gig lasted three weeks. The job before that lasted three months. I ran food at a bar and restaurant in Berkeley. The restaurant manager eventually sat me down. I expected a raise or a promotion. There was nothing of the sort.

"James," he crossed his legs. I wondered if the stench of beer and pizza would ever wash off him. "Why are you here?"

I needed a job to get established in the Bay area, and to "springboard myself into a corporate environment." I wondered if the bullshit was thick enough. Maybe he wanted something more philosophical, more Zen. It was Berkeley. My mind raced through vague memories of Plato's Symposium, of Siddhartha, and of the stories I'd heard at the few Yoga classes I'd been to. What should I say?

Whatever he wanted I wasn't quick enough to answer with so he said, "You walk without a sense of purpose."

I didn't know how to respond. This was not exactly a promotion- actually it was the opposite. I stared at him. Maybe if I didn't blink for thirty seconds my eyes would start tearing. How could he fire a crying man?

At 8 am, in Saturday morning, I started my regular job or rather the less temporary one. When the sun came over the top of Half Dome and hit Washington’s Column, I began up the Enduro Corner of Astroman. The rack felt anorexic as I thrutched my way up the splitter crack. With his tube socks, mullet, and passion for classic rock, Mad Dog defines hard trad climbing. With an associates' degree from the Yosemite Valley Community College, and solid work on his bachelors at the University of Patagonia, Mad Dog could run it out with a thin rack. As an aspiring rock jock, I wanted a piece at my knees, waist, and chest. Instead, I punched it through the greasy splitter crack. I thrutched, fell on my jams a few times, and made a half dollar sized gobie on my hand. Mad Dog hiked the pumpy crack. At the belay he attributed his skills to his high sense of fashion

"It's important to go acrylic. Stripes help too," he yarded up his socks and fired up the Harding Slot.

Though there seemed to be truth his words, I suspected that Mad Dog's skills came more from years of climbing. He'd been working on YOSAR for four years, freeing the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome, Free Rider on El Capitan, and managing an ascent of the hairball aid climbing test piece, The Reticent Wall on El Cap. He spent his winters in Patagonia. In his free time he traveled to Alaska and the East Coast with his lady friend. He'd made a commitment to the climbing lifestyle. If successful and dirt bag could be used in the same sentence to describe someone, they’d fit with Dana “Mad Dog” Drummond.

I moved to the Bay area 9 months ago in an attempt to solidify my life. Big words and phrases like “career”, “professional development”, and “paycheck,” had a sudden pleasant ring to them. A move from the transitory life of a climber towards one of successful city dweller. It hasn’t happened. First I walked without a sense of purpose and then I wanted to put staples in my head.

My skull bonked against the rock behind me, snapping me back to the moment. “Get a piece in,” I told myself. A long stream of blood flowed down my arm. The Harding Slot had not gone well. I fell. And I gobied. We finished the route, ran down canyon, and now as the sun started to fall over the western end of the ditch; I struggled up the off width of The Rostrum. I stacked my hand against my fist, slotted my knee and looked at the cracks’ wide jaws. I had no gear for twenty feet and a strong desire to pass out on lead. Suddenly, taking a stapler to my temple didn’t sound so bad.

I struggled to the belay, clipped in, and fell against the cold granite. Mad Dog hiked the crack behind me, grabbed the rack, and led to the top singing The Scorpions’ “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” At the summit, I thanked him for dragging my carcass up the Astroman-Rostrum link-up. “You didn’t do too badly for a weekend warrior,” he shouldered the rope and sauntered off to the car. I followed slowly behind.

Though the climbing had been hard for me, I’d move with a sense of purpose- a task I’d been totally incapable of in the restaurant, too apathetic to try in the office, and too despondent to attempt in the city. Cementing myself to an urban lifestyle, attaching myself to that lifestyle was too hard. I’d tried. I walked back to my car and started to run a mental budget. This plus that plus this and that…I could make it out of the city at the end of October. We drove to the Swinging Bridge below the Sentinel and in the dark, we dove into the cold Merced. The water stung the cuts on my body but they would heal. A few more weeks of work and that pain would be over too. I could become a gypsy, get tube socks and be a hard man like Mad Dog. At least return to the dirt bag lifestyle...even if it was just temporary.

One of My Heroes

I held the rope nervously as a man twice my age with four times my courage ascended the runout face climb.

John Bachar moved with a delicate grace. His feet transitioned smoothly onto each rugosity of Hammer Dome's classic 5.10c Shadow of Doubt. At each bolt, he stopped, leaned into the wall and mimicked the stance that he would take if he had been the first ascentionist hand drilling the route on lead. John climbed the route with a casualness and poise I had never seen.

On Sunday, July 5, while climbing on the Dike Wall in Mammoth, John fell. It is unknown what caused his fall or where exactly on the wall he was. John laid in a pool of his blood, breathing but unconscious. The rescue team moved as quickly as possible, carrying him across a boulder field to a nearby lake, where they loaded him into a motorboat and brought him to Mammoth Hospital. John died in the hospital, due to the severity of his injuries.

John Coltrane belted into a funky solo on his sax as John scrolled through his slideshow and dozens of photos of soloing in Joshua Tree. There was John bouldering on Up 40, sticking it out on the line on More Funky then Monkey, and being cool and composed on Father Figure. Hearing the voice of Johnny Rock describe soloing touched me. He spoke about slow warm ups, about taking a fresh approach to soloing everyday. Cool and calculated emotions controlled his ropeless climbing; when he felt off or insecure in his movement he simply stopped. Soloing was an integral part of the climbing experience.

A few days after John’s slide show, I found myself at the base of Joshua Tree’s North Overhang on Intersection Rock. Four and a half years earlier, I fell from the top of the formation while free soloing. My body flew seventy feet before hitting a ledge. I rolled off and fell another thirty feet to the ground. I laid in a pool of my own blood. It was a lonely place. I had 8 surgeries, spent 81 days in the hospital, and returned to climbing 381 days later. John inspired me to return.

The four-runner bumped, shaking its black frame side to side, as Public Enemy belted heavy, old-school beats. The SUV parked on the side of 120 between Tenaya Lake and Tuolumne Meadows. The bass kept booming as John, Lucho, Linh, and I fell out of John’s rig.

We marched a long thirty minutes to South Whizz Dome, wheezing from the high altitude of Tuolumne. We skirted a small marsh, then hit a small slope of granite. Just around the corner from the start of the dome came the wall- a hundred fifty feet of technical steep edges and knobs. Kurt Smith and John established many of the hard, run-out, ground-up test pieces. John made the first ascent, on top rope, of a beautiful black streak in the middle of the wall. From a ledge sixty feet off the ground, Blackout follows a series of walnut knobs for sixty feet. Kurt onsighted the route, drilling two bolts on the lead, snagging the first lead ascent, and solidifying the 5.11 route as a serious undertaking. The route with its old bolts, and scary old-school vertical climbing is the definition of a “museum climb.” John flaked out the rope, grabbed two quick draws, and a couple of cams.

After fifteen feet of delicate climbing, John clipped a quarter inch rusty bolt. Another twenty feet passed before John clipped another rusty quarter incher. He moved slowly, placing his feet, shifting his hips, and transferring his weight onto the overhanging knobs with the elegancy of a ballet dancer and the funk of Flavor Flav. He danced his way, unprotected for thirty feet, to the top.

A few years prior, John crashed his car while driving back from the Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City. The vertebrae in his spine were fused and he had limited mobility in his neck. We talked extensively about recovery, about the best ways to deal with trauma, and return to climbing. John told me my recovery was impressive. “You’re one of my heroes,” he said. Watching John climb Blackout, to fight his injuries and return to climbing as bold as before, made the metal in my spine become a little more pliable.

I free soloed the North Overhang. It was a cathartic experience for me. If I had fallen again, I would have wanted to die. Trying to fight through the pain would have killed me-if not physically, then emotionally and mentally. John’s candid talk about soloing invigorated me, and reminded me how precious those ropeless moments are. His talk planted a seed in my mind to return to Joshua Tree.

A week before he died, we talked about meeting up this summer to climb some more scary routes in the meadows. I wanted a ropegun and John’s passion for climbing was insatiable. He wanted to get his granite legs underneath him before heading to the meadows. John always climbed so solidly. It pains me to think of him falling. John was a legend. A man made immortal not just by his deeds but by who he was. He will be missed.