PART ONE: Nothing will stop us, everything we do is right
Ethan Pringle. Photo (c) Boone Speed
Chris Lindner. Loskot and Two Smoking Barrels. Photo (c) Boone Speed
Deep-water soloing didn’t always exist. Once, there was darkness on the face of the deep, and spirit was on the water. Climbing’s collective glaucoma obscured Mallorca’s seaside walls, making them colorless, gray. Around 2003, a climbing film showed Klem Loskot dynoing like crazy above the Mediterranean to the most wrapper jug you’ve ever seen. Waves everywhere, spirit in everything. God knows how many people saw the footage of Loskot and Two Smoking Barrels and felt like I did. A moment when deep-water soloing became as pellucid as the sea.
That was around 2001, a time when climbers were physically ready, but most were mentally too broke to buy a ticket to a ride like this. One exception was Chris Sharma, who saw the video, took the ride, changed everything. Still, for most of us deep-water soloing was too different, too abstract. Too wild a high.
Four years later, the book Deep Water arrived on my editorial desk, out of the blue so to speak. I flipped through Mike Robertson’s guide. A chapter on Mallorca, a theoretical place off the coast of Spain. I want to go deep-water soloing came to me. An alacritous, occult idea and therefore lacking any reason to bother understanding it. Who cares? By September, I was sparking and on the loose, strapped to an airplane traveling 550 miles per hour toward this far-flung island in that old sea.
“Are they climbers? Hey, I think those guys are climbers,” Mason said, taking a sip of espresso more or less ruined by the milk the Spanish use in cheap coffee.
Some blurry hours ago, I had met my friends in the Palma airport. Sam Elias, Jen Vennon and Mason Baker stumbled out of customs, bleary from a night of light international-flight sleep. Sam, Jen and Mason were special, the only ones who had taken seriously the e-mail I’d written to about 15 friends inviting them on a climbing trip not involving beta and bolts.
We’d just rented a car from a bird-woman who wore a manacle of keys around her wrist and tweeped on about having the lowest prices on the island. No insurance, no receipts, no questions—just instinct and money, and now a sweet diesel van to get us through these 10 days, also, very much so, without guarantees.
Overwhelmed by the initial shock of driving on foreign roads, we stopped at a neon-lit café embedded in the stained architecture of old-world Europe. We ordered bare-bones sandwiches called boccadillos, observed the local drunks who were getting after it, and sat quietly and tiredly until four bros came in. I don’t know what it was about them, their scruffy visages, torn threads or what, but Mason was right; they were English climbers, here in our café.
“There’s climbing everywhere here,” Sam whispered to us. “I’m not surprised.”
“What’s surprising is that we don’t already know them,” I said. It occurred to me that climbers are still a small tribe. We can seemingly walk into any bar or coffee shop near some random crag anywhere in the world and more often than not see someone we know. Yet we insist on fragmenting ourselves by discipline—in fact, perhaps you are doing it right now, wondering why you are reading about something as impenetrable as deep-water soloing in Mallorca. In my experience, everything is connected and those who understand that enjoy this sport the most.
“I wonder if they’re deep-water soloing or just sport climbing,” Jen said. We didn’t exactly know who these abseil-talking Brits were, but they were here, like us, to partake in Mallorca’s emerging climbing renaissance.
In the 1990s, Mallorca was an “It” sport-climbing paradise destination for Americans. Images of perfect limestone adjacent to unfathomable waters had an effect on the 1980s sport climbers, weary from a decade of having their bolts and fun chopped. An irresistible craving to go to Mallorca arose, to be accepted just because you clip bolts and have money. To drink good cheap wine and fuck off.
Now it’s 2008, and we’ve all heard about DWS & Mallorca. That the island has over 1,000 incredible sport routes has been forgotten by most, scrupulously replaced by the Dosages of Sharma and Loskot doing the outrageous deed above the roiling sea. We’ve seen the waves, heard the spray. Something about deep-water soloing embodying the “purity” of moving on rock without gear or ropes for a full pitch. The total freedom to do and go and climb wherever you want with the crazy acceptance that the ocean might just be the best damn crashpad ever made. Or that’s the line I was fed.
The guidebook that had arrived on my desk, however, described a place only as wild as you want. It revealed a majority of moderate climbs on cliffs not so tall. Jugs everywhere, 30-foot walls and enough 5.10s to keep anyone happy. Mallorca appeared to offer a deep-water soloing experience for the average climber who, if nothing else, could always screw off, drink lots of good cheap wine and go sport climbing by the sea.
“What’s the plan?” Mason said. “I’m beat. Maybe go climbing tomorrow?”
“Sounds good,” I said, then settled the tab with our barista while one of the local winos showed Jen the scavenged remains of his bicep, wolfed by some sort of muscular disease—a grateful omen that life isn’t always a vacation.
There was luck and guilt about, a sensation of being here at the height of our physical powers, secretly hoping for routes like Loskot and wanting desperately to be good at something as selfish as climbing. We exited onto the gray cobbled streets, a light rain blowing on shore.
Continued on next page …
