Here is a short piece I wrote about the joys of climbing.
At Red Rocks, Nevada, you can find guides who act like soccer coaches with their clients, cheering them on as they dangle from top ropes. There are super buff climbers gliding up 5.12s, and mothers with their toddlers in climbing harnesses and miniature sticky shoes. In the campground you’ll find climbing bums living out of the backs of their trucks, like you always have at every climbing area in this country. Sprinkled in there are a few tourists who found their way out of Las Vegas, tore themselves from the slot machines to drive the 12 mile scenic loop through Red Rocks National Park. Some even get out of their cars and take a walk. A hike. Then there was me, a middle-aged woman, college professor on spring break, desert lover in search of canyon wrens and desert tortoise, and in search of a good time climbing as well.
I started rock climbing in 1975 in Central Pennsylvania. When I graduated from high school I crammed into a VW bug with my friend Munch and a ton of gear in search of the holy land. In Colorado, we were those climbers living out of their car (we could even sleep in the bug). The next year I hitch hiked to Tuolomne with my then boyfriend Michael and came home skinny, tanned, a bit confused and completely full of myself. For the next ten or twelve years I climbed almost daily (before the advent of climbing gyms), and with a certain desperation. We climbers know this, the hunger that drives us up the rock, the search for self on ledges, jam cracks and overhangs. And then I stopped climbing. I don’t want to claim this is because I found myself 150 feet up there with God and the turkey vultures. I simply stopped climbing because it hurt a bit too much and because other things seemed important. Reading, writing, family. From the perspective of my desk, New York Times enumerating the trials of the world at hand, climbing seemed a bit frivolous. A bit narcissistic. But even I could see that in all of this pseudo sophisticated thought, that when I stopped climbing, I lost a lot of the direct happiness in my life.
I did not, of course, really stop climbing. I climbed at least one day out of the year, like the person who pays their dues at the gym in order to think of themselves as an athlete. If I could still slip into my harness, pull on a few tweakers, I could call myself a climber. And even though I didn’t want to put in the hours at the cliffs, or gym, I still wanted the label because for so long I had identified as a rock climber. Calling myself a writer or editor or professor seemed both false and a whole lot less interesting.
So when I arrived in Red Rocks I still had a pair of climbing shoes with some rubber that hadn’t crumbled with time and a new harness that had replaced the two inch webbing I had climbed on for so many years. I still had a chalk bag. A sticht plate. I even remembered how to tie in. And I had some climbing friends, ones who had never stopped climbing. They would lead me up some routes. Nothing hard.
Rich Perch was right hand man to head ranger Thom Sheuer my first trip to the Gunks. If you’ve met Rich, you don’t forget him: he’s the guy with the thick glasses who is laughing, or telling a joke (or pun) to make you laugh. In his Gunks days he ate a lot of Freihoffer cookies and now he’ll settle for anything called chocolate chip. We’d been friends since 1976. But in the many years from then to now we’d shared a rope only about a dozen times—from the Gunks to the Flatirons. In the intervening years, Rich has been a ranger: in the Tetons, Rocky Mountain National Park and Grand Canyon. He is now retired. Through his wanderings and my own, we’d stayed in touch, through friends and friends of friends and then in the fall of 2007 and 2008 there was the Gunks Reunion.
The Gunks Reunion deserves its own essay or even book for the sheer fun of it. There we were, several dozen climbers who had ruled the Gunks in the 60s and 70s, straggling our way up cliffs we knew, well, like the back of our hands. At one point we had three former rangers and three guide book writers all together at the base of a few routes. The chances of being off route were zero and if anything went wrong rescue was a half step away. So we laced up the cliffs, told stories of the good old days, laughed a lot, and complained about our injuries (oy!). In one poignant moment a few of us stood around and related the stories of how our parents had died. These were people I had shared ropes, beer and sex jokes with. I never could have imagined the affection—dare I say love—that hovered around the cliff during the week we gathered to remember and play.
One person I met at this most recent reunion is John Bragg. John is six foot something, aristocratic looking and his name rides alongside some of the extraordinary climbs in this world: first ascent of Torre Eiger and first Alpine ascent of Cerro Torre in Patagonia, but more important to me, first free ascents of Gunks classics like Kansas City, which I had spent some time falling off of, Yellow Wall, which I’d actually done, and Gravity’s Rainbow, which I once looked at. He announced, “If we need more proof of a life wasted climbing, my roommate from college just won the Nobel Prize in Physics.” We all laughed a little nervously because we’d all “wasted” parts of our lives to climbing. “I don’t know,” I said, and not just to cheer him up. I was just beginning to appreciate—maybe even measure--life in a new way.
During that reunion, Rich and I galloped up a climb so easy we were able to chat and laugh our way up the first pitch and on the rappel down as well. At the base, a foursome of young, fit lycra clad climbers were coiling their rope after a good pump on something hard. Clearly puzzled by the geriatric crowd at the cliffs they started asking questions, and then more questions and then more questions. Everything from when and where we had climbed to are you married to why are you single to, finally, “Are you happy?”
At that point in this interrogation I walked away. I was not happy. I hadn’t been happy for a long time. There were many obvious reasons for that (see above, death of parents), but that still didn’t explain my recent half hearted approach to life. Suddenly it felt intolerable. What ensued over the next few months was an active happiness campaign. I was relentlessly cup half full. And as part of the campaign I decided to return to those activities that had made me happy. I went back country skiing (and almost froze to death) in Canada during my January break. Now here I was, embarking on a spring break climbing trip.
This was the first climbing trip I had taken in nearly twenty-five years. You know how old you have to be to even write a sentence like that? I was going to meet up with Rich at his winter home in Pahrump, on the California border, and then we’d make our way to Red Rocks. So I boarded a plane full of trepidation and arrived in Las Vegas with a crippling migraine. I spent my first few hours in the desert throwing up; at least I remembered to bend with my back to the wind. I should also probably mention that I was on week seven of antibiotics to try and kill a serious lyme disease infection. Rich was nursing both weak knees and ankles. We were a pair, me with my nose covered in zinc to ward of antibiotic-induced sunburn and he with his walking poles.
In this way, we soon found our way to the cliffs. The first day, we headed to the Panty Wall, just a short walk from the first pull out. The wall was so covered with climbers—one every five feet it seemed—and a stack of climbers waiting that I figured we would not even touch rock that day. So this is what had happened to climbing in the intervening years. I was dismayed.
But Rich scoured the guidebook, found some obscure, rarely climbed routes, and we had a marvelous time. Listen, I don’t want to describe the routes, or the sun or how beautiful the landscape is, pocked with cholla and prickly pear. I don’t want to go on about the long gorgeous hikes into the canyons, where one day we muscled up four long pitches of solid rock with dinner plate holds . I don’t want to describe the canyon wren that sang for us, its descending scale that ends in a slurpy kiss. Or the friend we made, a carpenter from Bellingham, who added to our jokes. I just want to say this. For hours at a stretch, I was able to forget about everything except how to belay and then how to move upward, my focus uninterrupted. Deep in my reptilian memory, I recalled the almost mind-numbing tranquility, laced with adrenalin that is the particular cocktail of long days at the cliffs. Those four days felt like eternity. Of a good kind. I did not think about the mid term grades I had to deliver, or the economy that had tanked. I did not care for one second about AIG. I used to think that this escapism was a fault, dropping out when I needed to engage with the world.
Through the years, I had tried to find such focus in yoga or kayaking, with some success. But this complete immersion in a place, the texture of the air, the tilt of the earth, the patter of talk to and from the cliff. This is rare. It might be narcissistic, but I would not trade those days at Red Rocks for a Nobel Prize. I lost 35 cents in the slot machines in Pahrump, but still, I left Nevada happy.
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