Evening Sends. Climbing. People. Travel. Words. A website by Andrew Bisharat.

Fair Means Free Soloing

AB — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:31:39 +0000

Dressing myself this morning, I donned my most cherished heirloom, my grandfather’s engraved belt buckle, which reads: “Philippines 1945, U.S. Navy, Manila Cavite, James Andrew Clary.” From that year on, Grandpa wore it every single day until his death a few years ago. The buckle still has the same leather hide, though when my mom gave me the belt after the funeral, I had to cut it in half to fit my waist.

Toward the end of the war he was stationed outside of Japan with pending orders to invade the mainland that would’ve gone through had Truman not decided to drop the bomb. I’ve always wondered whether I’d be around if that catastrophic event had never occurred.

When he was alive, Grandpa talked about the war, and not much else. We’d just listen. His mind was an unfailing steel trap for information, from how hot it was in a particular month of 1943, to the idiosyncrasies of his shipmates. I remember him describing the pure fear, which he operated in daily, of the kamikazes—the Japanese word for “divine wind.” The kamikazes, of course, were the suicide pilots who flew bomb-loaded planes right into Allied ships.

“They played by unfair rules,” Grandpa once said. “And that made them terrifying.”

As climbers, our “rules of engagement”—what counts and what doesn’t count in the vertical world—are rather nebulous. But fortunately, this translates to interesting, if entirely trivial, debates you can have with your climbing friends. What else would we talk about?

My friend Mauice Waugh got going the other day on this subject of what “counts” in climbing, and before I tell you what his half-crazed rant was about, I want to preface it by telling your more about Maury.

Maury is one of the most unholy and obscene persons I know. He is not polite, and has no regard for common courtesies. In that way, he’s a “social kamikaze” in that he doesn’t have to play by the rules that the rest of us adhere to in order to remain polite and decent. For example, I could see him—after having a few drinks, half-stooped over, yelling, spitting and driving his points home by jabbing the air with his finger—telling even the Dali Lama to his face that he ought to grow some backbone. Maury is completely wild and liberated, an inspirer of ritual madness. These abhorrent, deeply entrenched character flaws would be unsurpassable barriers if Maury weren’t so damn lovable. Now in his 40s, he is an unapologetic climbing dirtbag who makes his chosen path seem positively righteous, and in doing so, ingenuously puts the rest of us at ease that what we’re doing is OK too. Maury is a jukebox of funny truths and things that no one else has the guts to say: feed him beer-tokens, sit back, and enjoy the entertainment.

Maury’s latest greatest hit concerned famous free-soloists that later killed themselves.

“If you kill yourself,” Maury said, “then you’re free-soloing legacy should be nullified.”

I thought it was a fascinating, if macabre, point. He’s right, though … I guess. If you’re willing to take your own life, then the dangerous game of free soloing is being played by unfair means. Like the kamikaze, a suicidal free-soloist isn’t subservient to the same rules the rest of us are, and so shouldn’t that affect to what degree their feats are impressive? Not that it needs spelling out, but the reason free soloing is such an inconceivable endeavor to most of us is because one simple mistake means you lose your life, supposedly the most important thing in the world. This is free soloing’s one trump card. Take that card away, and the playing field is quickly leveled.

Every climbing discipline contains some inherent elements that make the pursuit difficult, and when those elements are faced head-on by a climber, he or she is praised. I believe this is the definition of what we call “good style.” These boundaries have been debated, quite extensively, in other areas of the sport—such as the use of fixed ropes on a mountain, or placing bolts on rappel versus ground-up, etc.—but I’d never heard the style argument taken as far as a person’s mental constitution. But this is why Maury is great and I love hanging out with him.

My brain began conjuring other examples along these same offbeat lines. I wondered whether the use of illegal drugs, like cocaine or mushrooms, detracts from famous accomplishments. I know some hard and run-out routes were established on coke binges, and that one of Yosemite’s most storied free solos was the result of a mushroom trip.

I also wondered about a person’s weight and sport climbing. If an already in-shape and fit person has to lose five, 10 or 15 pounds to send the hardest route of their lives, doesn’t take somehow take away from the significance of their achievement?

Like I said, these are trivial and pointless things to debate and discuss around beers with people like Maury. They ultimately don’t really matter, unless we start including footnotes next to everything we do in life. And if that happens, I’m going kamikaze.

This article was originally written for Rock and Ice magazine. Stay current on my latest writing: Subscribe to the free R&I eBlast, and get a subscription to the magazine, at www.rockandice.com.

Branded Controversy

AB — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:37:47 +0000

Three issues come to mind today. Two aren’t very important, while one probably is. Before verging into this meandering dirge on today’s state of sport, I must admit to feeling bewitched by some sort of hipster malaise, one that is causing me to feel most fired up by the least consequential topics. The malady is likely symptomatic of something deeper … perhaps I’m sick of seeing so many bloggingheads lost in their own solitary reveries while they whip up another portentous controversy supposedly plaguing the climbing world. Do any of these grave issues ever come to mind while you are actually climbing? One would hope not.

So much of today’s climbing writing seems to be removed from the empirical experience of actual climbing. I’m thinking not just of the topical pretentiousness of many siren bloggingheads, but also of all the metaphysical purple prose that tends to burble out of someone who, typically, has just climbed a mountain (or who has failed magnificently). Whenever I feel this way, however, I am easily assuaged simply by pulling out Issue 192 of Rock and Ice and re-reading “The Prophet” by Leo Houlding. I loved this article not just because Houlding’s ground-up attempt to free climb a new route on El Cap was as bad ass as it gets, but because Houlding stayed so true to his experience. His rather Spartan narrative is austere and authentic, deftly navigating the perils of this genre in which it is easy to trend into a conceptual rendering of the sport.

Alas, I get it. We have blogs. Therefore we must blog. And I’m as guilty as anyone. So with this tangential apologia out of the way, let’s get on with the show.

OK, first order of business: Daisy Chains. I still see climbers wearing these out at the crags, yet they aren’t aid climbing. I find this as baffling as one-piece ski suits (fart bags) or wearing Crocs on approaches (or just wearing Crocs in general). Unless you are standing in etriers on the Salathé Headwall, there is no reason to keep a daisy chain perma-welded to your belay loop. It’s potentially dangerous. It makes you look like a gumby. It’s not cool. If you still have a daisy chain on your harness, and you aren’t aid climbing El Cap, I have four words for you: Chain That Shit Up!

Second issue: You know how a climber will flail on a route and then leave his rope strung from the anchors while he and his partner go sit in the sun and make themselves sandwiches and contemplate how badly they just got served? You want to do the route, because it’s your warm up, only you can’t because someone else’s rope is mysteriously still hanging from it. But you can’t just pull it because you don’t want to come off as a jerk, so you politely call over to the climbers and ask if they are done with the route. Then you get this response: “Oh yeah, you can just pull it, bro!”

F that.

You know what? YOU can pull it! Put your f—ing sandwich down, come over here and get your rope off my f—ing warm up!

This happened to me the other weekend. Only because I’m weak, I didn’t say any of that, even though I felt like it. Very sweetly, I said, “Cool, thanks!” and then pulled his rope and flaked it for him like I was his underling.

Third issue: Branded Content. Obviously, this is the really important issue—the one that, as I explained earlier in my longwinded apologia/preface, I don’t really care about. But let’s talk about it anyway.

Does it bother you that all the best climbing videos we see online are thinly disguised advertisements for brands? Are you sick of seeing brand names flash at the beginning and end of every good climbing video? Are you tired of seeing the same climbers, doing the same things (but in different areas), in the same type of video, and branded by the same company? Do you care that the most creative people in the climbing world are inevitably finding themselves beholden to company interests because that’s the only way for them to get the money they need to tell their stories? Most of all, are you worried about what stories and which people are being bowdlerized by the industry?

Yeah, me neither. Just give me a sweet video that gets me stoked to go climbing, and I’ll be happy.

The Best Wobbler I Ever Saw

AB — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:26:48 +0000

Pot-addled Titans. Photo: Dean Fidelman

All that climbers have are our stories. All that climbers are are stories. In fact, before one can even be called a climber, he must be absorbed into our great mandalic narrative, like a molecule into an amoebic vacuole, or a spilt puddle into the inconceivably osmotic fibers of a ShamWow! He must be subsumed by the written stories and oral recitations of where our sport came from and what it is, mind-numbing incantations all interwoven and endlessly repetitive, invariably invoking John Bachar and Ron Kauk, the super-ripped icons whose internecine alliance gave rise to the Stonemasters, the pot-addled Titans who subsequently did everything significant in climbing before you were born, super-ripped, bold dirtbags, bandana-clad heads, Umbro-clad balls, ropes, racks and shirts on their backs, All Things fundamentally descending from Yet Another Golden Age (YAGA) among all the other mechanized myths, told again and again and AGAIN in a way that is almost exhaustively repetitive. And we love it because we are It.

This same theme spins off in a million little sub-universes, with all these little fragments spinning, breaking down into their most fundamental atomic strings before, again, being subsumed into climbing’s great mandalic narrative, like a puddle of spilt Olde English beer on the Mountain Room Bar floor getting sucked up into the inconceivably osmotic fibers of a ShamWow! For an editor at Rock and Ice, the year revolves and chimes like a spinning Tibetan prayer wheel or perhaps a giant wind turbine. Facts:

A new issue is born every six weeks.

Every Tuesday, you receive (“You’ve Got Mail!”) a free super-sweet, super-entertaining TNB eBlast (aka TNB-Blast, or sometimes The B-Blast, and always TNB-Bizzle), the weekly recitation that has been always written, every Tuesday, for as long as humans have been climbing, first penned by the pot-addled Titans known as the Stonemasters, and now by the Editors of Rock and Ice.

At least one issue every year will contain the word “Stonemaster” on the cover.

Not a month has ever gone by without an editor at Rock and Ice receiving an e-mail containing the words “Yosemite-esque” and “severe case of writer’s block.”

Every two years someone will query about an article on Cuba.

Every four years Rock and Ice will run an article on Cuba.

At any point on the space-time continuum, either Alex Johnson, Alex Puccio, or Daniel Woods is winning a bouldering comp.

No matter what it is, your hardest, proudest project will one day be onsighted.

Twice a year, all Rock and Ice editors pile into a car and sit cataleptic for six hours en route to the bi-annual Trade Show, aka El Lugar Donde Nada Cambia (The Place Where Nothing Changes) reciting the same stories again and again and AGAIN in a way that is almost exhaustively repetitive. The editor known as “AO,” aka Ojo de Halcón (Hawk Eye), often leads the recitations. The time a tornado struck the Trade Show floor. The time a truck carrying explosives tipped over and blew a whale-sized hole into Rt. 6. Times when we ran out of gas. Times we got a flat tire. When the Rock and Ice editor known as “El Jefe” (The Boss) got arrested for swimming in holy Mormon waters. How whenever the Rock and Ice editor known as “DR” aka No Se Mató (He Who Cannot Be Killed) drives past the giant wind turbines just outside of Price, Utah, he emerges from his cataleptic state and explains how the sight of the turbines makes him think about strapping prisoners to the spinning blades—the worse your crime, the farther out on the blade you go. The faster you spin. Around and around and around.

Once a month, the Rock and Ice editor known as “AB,” aka El Débil Gordo (The Fat Weak One), will write about Rifle, a place amid Yet Another Golden Age, and he will write about practicing the same moves on the same route, over and over and over again in a way that is literally exhaustively repetitive, the route subsuming him like molecule into an amoebic vacuole, like spilt Avery IPA being absorbed by the super-absorbent, unbelievably low-priced ShamWow! with its inconceivably osmotic fibers.

Now at Rifle, “AB” recites stories about “wobblers” (angry, childish fits), that echo in the canyon each spring like bird chirps. The time from “Route to Root”: when one friend was so mad over his sweat-soaked “vag hands,” which kept slipping off the slippery, greasy grips that he uprooted a young sapling—a fit that lasted a fat five minutes. The time another friend threw his shoes into the river and drove back to Boulder, vowing to never climb again. The time a friend could be seen in the distance, alone amid a talus field, angrily circling the gray limestone erratics, picking one stone up above his head and tossing it to the ground, then lifting another stone and tossing it mightily, over and over and over.

The best wobbler “AB” ever saw, though, came in the Red, which has been called the “Camp 4 of the East,” and some have even called it “Yosemite-esque.” There, the climber known as “Jonathan Thesenga” or JT was climbing in the Madness Cave, a name apropos to what transpired next, on a route with repetitive holds that appeared, one after the other, finger bucket after finger bucket, again and again and again until you either clip the chains or fall.

JT fell and produced a string a F-Bombs that continued unabated, f—k, f—k, f—k, f—k, f—k, which at first was extremely embarrassing because everyone who was in the Madness Cave stopped, shirking their necks into their shirts (or hip skateboarding tank-tops if they were climbers who could “do routes” harder than the Yosemite-esqe grade known as “5.13”). But then the cadence of the F-bombs took on a rhythm, and soon all the climbers bobbed and swayed to its tempo and flow. It was so over the top that it became funny. But then it kept going and it went back to being annoying and embarrassing again. But then it continued, f—k, f—k, f—k, f—k, f—k, until it was again funny, even funnier than before, each F-Bomb dropping and fading, their timing brilliant works of art. Each utterance ultimately absorbing into climbing’s great mandalic narrative, like Kentucky bourbon into a ShamWow!

Until finally the climber known as JT was lowered, his head lowered and, like a puppy (with its head lowered, too, if you can picture it), he retreated to his rope bag and curled up into a ball and looked up at his belayer, his wife, the climber who is known as Brittany Anne Griffith, aka “the BAG,” who seemed in need of some explanation for the apocalyptic fit that had left everyone in the Madness Cave (which is an appropriate place for this story to have transpired, don’t you think?) swaying in a cataleptic state. And then JT ended this week’s TNB Bizzle with these famous words, words that AB himself has repeated over and over in recitation of this wobbler, the best AB ever saw:

“I just wanted to impress you. I just wanted you to think I’m a good climber.”

No Respect

AB — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:38:22 +0000

I admired the perfectly crafted cappuccino before me, especially the artful mocha brush strokes through the white foam. The warm Sunday morning sun and dry air made the roast’s aromas and chocolate smack all the more piquant. The patio of an Italian café is a fine place to begin any day in Boulder.

The tranquility of the moment deformed like the foam in my drink when I suddenly found myself surrounded by a gang of extra-large lycra-clad road bikers. The incongruous sight of bulbous, sagging flesh in XXL spandex instantly razed any impression that this was an athletic lot, yet here they were, stretching their old groins, mindlessly chattering and feeding on coffee, juice and croissants, which I assumed would fuel a ride of some insignificant distance.

“Gawd, these people are disgusting,” I said to my friends Sam and Emily. It was an awful thing to say, but they agreed that the jiggling belly fat, pizza-dough man-teats and sausage-and-meatballs spaghetti-crotch — all squashed into a body-condom covered in company logos — was at least a little unappetizing. It was not their fault, per se — no one looks good in lycra, not even me (two obvious exceptions, of course, are Megan Fox and, my favorite, Giada di Laurentiis).

I studied the rotund roadies, which is not to say that I looked at them, but rather that I analyzed my own feelings about these carefree boomers, their glasses affixed with protruding rearview mirrors and their $8,000 carbon-fiber frame bikes, which I overheard one guy refer to as a “steed.” These people were like everyone else: just looking for an outlet — social and perhaps even physical — to somehow fill a gap in their lives. It’s like the old saying, “Biking: it’s something to do.” I actually don’t know if that is a saying or not, but it should be. Who can blame them for that?

What was most interesting to me was not the padding that makes it look like you’re smuggling a loaf of crap in your pants, but how at ease these people were with it. Lycra is part of the biking community, and it makes them feel comfortable in the same way that European climbers wear manpris. Who cares that no one else shares their aesthetic?

But at what point does exchanging the mores of mainstream society for the queerer set held by your fringe community make others lose respect for you?

One thing I’ve recently realized is that if people respect you, you can get away with a lot. Lose that respect and suddenly, nothing is permissible any longer. For example, one friend is down on his luck. He has joined the “Lost Generation” of young, bright, overly educated 20somethings that is experiencing an astronomic unemployment rate of 18 percent. As such, he’s adopted a “certain moral flexibility,” as he calls it, which permits him to steal food and clothing that are not his. It was no shock that my respect for him diminished, but I was surprised by how this decline directly correlated to how funny I found his already immature humor.

Soon, the roadies were off on their ride, and the café was once again peaceful. Twelve hours earlier, I was on a flight home from the Red River Gorge and had the pleasure of sitting next to an attractive woman. That had always been a dream of mine—every time I get on a plane, I pray that Giada boards the flight and takes the open seat next to me and we spend the rest of the flight making plans to crush juicy tomatoes together—but the hairy human dregs that smell of broiled meat have always been an abrupt and cruel end to my fantasy.

This girl was no Giada, but close. After telling me all about her giant diamond engagement ring and $40,000 wedding, she asked about the “gross” scars on the back of my hands. I explained what gobies were, and what rock climbing was all about.

“Look at your fingers!” she said. “They’re all knobby and swollen.”

“Yeah, if you think my hands are bad, you should see my toes,” I said.

“Ewwwwww!” she said. “Oh, yeah, my fiancé tried rock climbing once. He had to squeeze his feet into these tiny little girly ballet shoes!” She seemed tickled by the memory of her masculine Venezuelan boyfriend doing something so effeminate as rock climbing.

I thought about it and realized that climbers aren’t much less odd-looking than lycra-clad roadies. We’re a bunch of messy-haired and smelly weirdoes with the perpetually scabby, gross hands of a leper. We even wear harnesses that accentuate parts of ourselves that should never be accentuated—no different than bike spandex.

Maybe this is why, like Rodney Dangerfield said, we can’t get no respect.

This article was originally written for Rock and Ice magazine. Stay current on my latest writing: Subscribe to the free R&I eBlast, and get a subscription to the magazine, at www.rockandice.com.

I Made You

AB — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:35:00 +0000

I’ve been reporting on climbing news for awhile, and there’s one plug-n-play sentence I write that irritates the baby-shit out of me

“Blah-Blarma made the Blah ascent of Blahzation (5.15blah).”

What bothers me about this sentence structure isn’t the climber/route name or its depressing interchangeability. I don’t mind reporting about first ascents of great routes—and I don’t even mind reporting about the same route again when it’s inevitably repeated (big deal!) by the less motivated and more sponsor-hungry.

The thing that bothers me most about this familiar go-to sentence is the word “made.”

Made is a perfectly fine, useful word, even if it is technically more boring than watching mixed climbing. However, other editors here always tell me that I need to spice up the sentence by replacing “made” with something like “fired,” “blitzed” or “nabbed.”

Even the freakin’ interns are jumping on the anti-“made” bandwagon. It’s a mutiny.

Is it really that much more interesting to read about someone “nabbing,” as opposed to “making,” an ascent? Of course not, because it’s climbing news that isn’t about You and therefore not interesting.

Further, I have never understood how someone could “fire” an ascent. It’s rock climbing, not pottery. We use quickdraws, not kilns! Hellfire!

“Made” is suiting, I think, because it inhabits the most trivial part of the sentence. In fact, almost any verb would “work.” Don’t believe me? Let’s take some (no longer) recent climbing headlines, infuse them with random words and see if they still make sense:

“Patxi Usobiaga has LEAP-FROGGED an onsight of Home Sweet Home (5.14b/c).”

“‘Strong’ Steve McClure has DIVORCED the third ascent of Rhapsody (E11).”

“Nico Favresse has FARTED the second ascent of Cobra Crack (5.14c), Canada.”

Who wants to read about someone MUSHROOM-STAMPING a flash, or VOMITTING a redpoint when they could just as easily read about someone MAKING it?

That reminds me. I need to go FIRE my project—the one I can’t send. It’s fucking FIRED!

Notes from an Addled Insomniac

AB — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:06:31 +0000

Mahalo you fucking climbers, you goddamn nerds! I’m just kidding. We’re all part of the same tribe.

You may want to put yourself in a good mood with a viewing of this video. Kelly Cordes just sent it to me, and now I feel energized by its raw crassitude. Think about all the ways in which you can appropriate these sweet one-liners into your own vulgar climbing lingo. “Stay off my rocks, you fucking grommets! Locals only!”

It’s perfect for me because I climb at Rifle, which is basically the Zuma Beach of the climbing world in that it is filled with egotistical locals-only-attitude-having pricks such as myself (not really). I just returned to Rifle after an inanimate winter in which I was necessarily rooted to the couch, healing a shoulder left in tatters from a hard catch that spiked me into the wall on the last day of my China trip. Despite having not climbed or trained much at all, I climbed really well, which was sort of a frightening surprise. It’s like when you drink way too much but then, for no reason whatsoever, you don’t have a hangover the next morning … You’re like, “ What the fuck is this? How the hell did I get away with this?”

Sometimes, the universe throws you a bone that you don’t deserve, and when that happens, you must accept it and not ask any questions.

The proj

After brushing the winter grime off my project’s holds and sussing the moves, I managed to all but sail to my highpoint—a feat that took all of last summer to achieve. I’m right where I left off, only somehow I feel stronger. Could an early-season redpoint be in store? We’ll just have to see if I’m actually on that track, or if the gods are just toying with me.

It’s glorious out there right now. Perfect temps both in the sun and shade, dry rock, no crowds, no douches (besides myself, of course). I wonder who will be this season’s douche bag? There is always one. One new annoyance, one insufferably boastful but also really strong rock climber who settles into his first season in Rifle, climbs a hard route or two, and then makes himself unbearable to be around due to the faucet-less spray fire-hosing out of his mouth from warm-up to warm-down. Of course, come fall, we inevitably become friends once we realize that we’re really not much different from each other in that we’re both terrible people. Then we part ways and continue to fall into all the same traps, year after year. Indeed, one of the best gifts of getting older is that you can feel righteous about not changing your bad behavior.

So, if not training, what have I been doing? Well, I bought a house and got a puppy … Hopefully that explains the absence of my voice on this site in recent weeks. I’ve been sleep deprived by the puppy, and addled by the incessant glut of information readily available in the palm of my hand 24/7. It’s not as though I haven’t wanted to contribute my two cents to all the juicy, futile frays that have percolated online in recent weeks. Of course I’ve wanted to point out what a sanctimonious, jaded Boulder dude that guy over at Mountains and Water can be—even though I agree with many parts of his latest, well-discussed post about how much of what you see online is now dominated by annoyingly sponsored climbers who are all a bunch of Instagram-posting, hashtag-tagging, brand-championing, fame-seeking company drones—even though I find this an ironic perspective to be held by someone who tried to be one of those very same sponsored people, but was dropped and wrote about it bitterly.

(Also, unbeknownst to me at the time of this writing, this subject was broached much more deeply by my colleague in this week’s eBlast.)

I’ve also wanted to take a deeper look at some of the more amazing bits of news that I’ve heard—those 10-year-olds Brooke and Tito both climbing 5.14a, and Ashima’s V13 ascent. Is climbing really so easy that a baby can do it? It’s beginning to look like it. The tide has changed and the latest set has rolled in with this next generation of climbers who, in the next 15 years, will go on to completely redefine difficulty as we now know it.

Or not. Perhaps these ascents are only further proof that having good technique, small fingers and high strength-to-weight ratios are more important than wingspan and muscle mass. And if so, then is the future of rock climbing going to go the way of gymnastics, where the hardest ascents will be by uber-coached pre-pubescent girls who have spent 20 hours/week in the gym since three or four years of age?

I’ve always thought that girls should actually be climbing harder than men, a perspective that gets me in trouble with my lady (who, ironically, climbs harder than me) because I’m basically saying that climbing is easier if you’re a woman, even though by “woman,” I am really talking about any tiny, lightweight person with no tits or ass. The point is: size matters in climbing, regardless of what your chromosomal pairing happens to be. It’s better to be smaller. The only problem with my theory is that, thus far, there’s no proof: women haven’t climbed as hard as men. The question then becomes: why not?

My theory—again, likely to be unpopular with the ladies—is that women in general lack something that seems to be more common in men: not muscles, not wingspan, and not any of the other oft-cited reasons you hear for why the ladies are a few grades behind the guys. Rather what they lack is that particular brand of male arrogance that causes us to go out on our own and conquer unknown terrain. More specifically, women lack the belief that they can do things that haven’t already been done (usually by other women).

I posit this thesis based on patterns I have observed in women’s climbing, namely how few (if any?) females have done first ascents of cutting-edge difficulty (a situation where it’s not clear if the route even goes, undeniably one of the most significant hurdles to doing hard first ascents) and also how one female’s ascent of a hard route inevitably leads to many other females trying the exact, same route. I see it so many times in Rifle. One girl climbs a hard route; the next week, another girl’s draws are on it. How many females climbed Mind Control this year? I lost count. We can call it the Law of Mind Control that one female ascent begets another.

Even though there is a certain catty competitiveness there, let me be clear that I don’t think this is a bad thing, necessarily, at least in that I understand why it happens. Most of us (male and female) just follow each other’s footsteps; there is only a microscopic percentage of people out there who have the vision, drive and skill to push the limits of the human potential. So really, this is a critique of both men and women, with the emphasis being that I believe women are capable of climbing harder than men, and that these universal mental knots are the only things holding them back from doing so.

We need to see things to believe them. When people see me—with my slouched gait, my poor technique, my shaking, whimpering temperment five inches above a bolt, my belly flab, etc.—climbing a “hard” route, it becomes instantly obvious that they, too, can do it. There’s an undeniable allurement there.

I’ve always been impressed by the women who seem to be more willing to do and try new things and break through. I’ve always admired Emily Harrington, for example, not just because she was the first female to climb a 5.14 in Rifle (thus paving the way for a growing handful of other women to climb 5.14 there, too), but she’s not afraid to try new things: like competing in the Ouray mixed-climbing competition in her first year of mixed climbing (and then winning the whole event in her second year!) … Or, even her going to try and climb Mount Everest this spring despite having no high-altitude experience whatsoever! Part of me thinks that’s crazy … but I also admire and respect the courage it takes for her to break the mold and do something different.

Anyway, this post turned out longer than I’d hoped … but I got some things off my chest, and for that I feel that this has been cathartic. Hopefully I’ll be able to sleep better tonight. Mahalo.

The Taught Top Rope of Despair

AB — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:22:15 +0000

Jonathan Siegrist is not only capable of actually doing the moves on Necessary Evil, he sent the route a few years back in good style.

One time, never mind when, at the Virgin River Gorge in the Arizona Strip, I witnessed a spectacle anathema to everything that climbing is supposed to be. In fact, I still do not feel ready to write down what I saw until I’ve had some more protein powder to speed my recovery. Unfortunately, there’s no time and the doomed bastard I once watched toproping the first half of Necessary Evil (5.14c) is going to get what he deserves.

That’s right. After donning some high-performance slippers, this climber-dude stick-clipped his way up the first half of what, not too long ago, was the country’s most difficult rock climb. He fondled each hold lightly, with the obnoxious, nugatory precision of sprinkling garnish on chicken soup. After getting the rope up, the dude came down to rest (from what?), before his attempt at actual rock climbing. Of course, that wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for the deadweight on the other end, his girlfriend. She, The Belayer, sat on the rope with all her weight so that he, The Climber, could have pretend-fun-fantasy-time on Necessary Evil. It went something like this:

Step 1: Grab some holds—doesn’t matter which ones—and thrust hips upward so Belayer’s weight takes you in.

Step 2: Try to move hand and explode off the rock.

Step 3: Repeat.

Without even looking at his Belayer, the Climber would silently command to be lowered—I suppose to “rework” a section—by pompously tapping his finger in the air downward. He’d repeat the three steps, never linking more than two moves together, until he’d reach the only jug on the route, at which point we were all wowed by his token five-minute shake-out. It almost looked like there was some climbing going on. Oh yeah, in between each “burn,” The Climber would come down and nap in The Belayer’s lap, while she petted him like a dog.

Don’t get me wrong. Working on routes above your ability is a true necessary evil, and it is good for your climbing. I do it all the time, though only because I have yet to find a route that is actually below my ability. People can do whatever they want, and I don’t really care. But the scene really stuck with me because it looked like opposite of why I think people should go rock climbing. That is, it looked like the opposite of fun—for The Climber and especially The Belayer.

Apparently, after talking with VRG locals, Necessary Evil is frequently the site of this exact same scenario. It reminded me of when I used work at gyms, belaying awful little rug-rats at kids’ birthday parties. Why? Because their stupid boomer parents thought that taking 20 children who have never learned any discipline from these futile new-agey parenting techniques to a climbing gym is good way to spend their money. Anyway, even these kids, doomed as they may be, don’t like to be hoisted up a rock wall by the belayer’s weight. Interestingly, our most basic human instinct is to try and climb something by ourselves.

Of course, not everyone is like that, and some kids spent their time getting pizza sauce everywhere, pulling hair and sucking on foot-long pixie/sugar sticks (which, by the way, are really just one step and ten years away from a nasty crack addiction, and not the Indian Creek kind). Maybe I’ll be seeing those kids on Necessary Evil soon. After a few pixie sticks, I suppose anything is possible, especially if you have the “right” (heavy) kind of belayer.

American FA

AB — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:10:02 +0000

Sometimes you hear people bemoan the dearth of climbers out there who are willing to roll up their sleeves and put up first ascents. Sometimes the people complaining are the more fanatic first ascentionists themselves—though I believe their grousing is essentially self-serving: a way for them voice how much work they do in a way that’s not boastful but achieves the effect of putting themselves on a pedestal. In other words, they don’t really want people out there putting up routes alongside them; they just want to be recognized for what they’ve done.

As passionate climbers, we can all agree that having more routes is generally a good thing, right? Well, actually, no, we can’t, because there are factions of climbers—basically human hangovers from the 1970s—that believe that if you can’t do a first ascent ground-up, drilling bolts by hand and from stances (and occasionally hooks), then a route shouldn’t be installed at all. (I’ve never met the reverse—a climber who thinks everything should be bolted top down—and the vast majority seems to think there’s enough rock out there for both styles to coexist.)

I would like to believe that the old ways of thinking are fading as the American climbing community slowly detoxes from its internecine attitudes about style and ethics, which for the last 40 years have created our relatively antagonistic, progress-thwarting culture. Yet another part of me thinks that we might actually be perpetuating these attitudes, too afraid and prideful to reach any sympathetic, nuanced understanding of the way things actually work. It’s odd to the point of being tedious and even irksome (to me, at least) that, today, climbing articles continue to refer to a few crucial events that took place in Yosemite in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a way of giving context to everything else that has taken place in this incredibly vast world of climbing. The Bachar-Yerian is widely eulogized as the standard, though in truth it’s such an extreme outlier that it hasn’t affected anything about first ascents in America. Yet this story is one we recite again and again, to the point that it now feels mythological—a lesson of great importance.

I’m on the side that believes that more routes are good—for climbing and climbers alike—but I don’t believe that there should be more first ascentionists. Too many people don’t really understand what first ascents are. I think this because I’ve been reading Letters to the Editor in Rock and Ice for a long time. Articles, photos and videos try to explain and capture the experience of what it takes to put up a new route—but it’s quite honestly too nuanced, too complex, too abstractly imaginative to really capture. The language we’ve come up with to categorize first ascents—top down, ground up, chipped, natural, onsight, alpine-style—falls way, way short in its ability to accurately capture reality. It would be like categorizing all paintings by acrylic, oil, watercolor, etc., and then deciding that one medium is categorically superior to the other.

A lot of climbers go wrong, in my opinion, because they read these rather two-dimensional terms and construct ideas about how climbing works in their heads, doing so in a way that seems rational to them. They “get it.” Then they try to make the chaotic outdoor experience fit their rational understanding of how things ought to work, which it doesn’t because it can’t. This extrapolation appears in other areas of climbing as well—grades in particular. We want to believe that the difference between 5.10a and 5.10b is the same jump from 5.14a to 5.14b, or that because 5.12 is like 5.11 only with slightly smaller holds then 5.14 is therefore like 5.13, but with slightly smaller holds. But it doesn’t work that way. You can’t understand what 5.14 is because you climbed 5.13 any more than you understand what alpine-style is in the Himalaya because you climbed Mount Hood in a single push. And you can’t really understand what a first ascent is, unless you’ve put up first ascents on many types of rock and seen how first ascents differ in different areas all around the world.

I view first ascentionists as artists more than public servants. Well bolted, poorly bolted, overly bolted, brilliantly bold, stupidly run-out, chipped, glued, natural, good routes, bad routes, safe, adventurous. When I encounter these things on routes, I see them as testaments to first ascentionist’s vision, or lack thereof. A bad route doesn’t ruin my day any more than a bad piece of art—I may find what has been done to the rock sad and disgusting, but in a constructive way because even terrible routes inform and heighten my personal sense of aesthetics in climbing, of what’s right and what’s wrong, which I’d never be able to understand if I only sat at home and read about routes through words.

A Better World

AB — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:40:36 +0000

It’s the first day of spring, and I’m in a good mood. Birds are chirping outside my window. The aroma of thawing dog turds is wafting through the morning air. If you could put your ear up to my head, you’d hear the faint and soft melody of Michael Jackson singing, “Heal the world, make it a better place, for you and for me and the entire human race” echoing inside the empty chamber that is my skull.

Because that’s what spring is all about: new beginnings. New ideas. Fresh starts. Pruning dead wood and allowing something bright to grow. The first rock climbing season of the year kicks off now, and as we head into what will surely be another mind-blowing year of amazing climbing feats (5.15d anyone?), I’d like to propose some ideas for how to make the world of climbing an even better place.

Zippers that work: It’s amazing how much innovation and effort goes into creating these ultra-high tech, super-technical fabrics that protect you from the wrath of the weather gods and dissipate your sweat to the heavens, yet the $500 final product still doesn’t do the most basic operation: zip up properly. Zippers that catch on the fabric. Zippers that blow apart in the middle of the zipper. Zippers that unzip from the wrong end. Zippers that just flat out break. The zipper has to be the most glaringly crude and primitive product in the gear world. I propose we use magnets instead.They’ll never break and seal up tight. That said, maybe this is an idea that sounds better than it actually is—the same way “Greenland” and “buttermilk” sound better than they actually are. You’d be screwed if you had a pacemaker or a metal breast plate, and if you ever went to the North Pole, your clothes would fly off.

Stuff sacks that actually fit the thing(s) you stuff into them: Nothing makes me crazier than trying to pack up a tent or sleeping bag into a stuff sack that is exactly the size of the compressed bag or tent. It’s like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube—and for the record, yes, I do think you should be able to put extra toothpaste back because I hate wasting toothpaste. Same with rope bags that you need to wrestle like a wild boar in order to pack away your rope. Can’t you just make it a little, tiny bit bigger? Gawd!

Ashima Shiraishi on Martini Right. Photo: Julien Jarry

Give Ashima full credit for Martini Right: Let me get this straight. A 9-year-old girl crushes a V12 using footholds and non-holds for hand-holds because she’s too tiny to do it the “normal” (i.e., full-grown-male) way, and because her foot swings out and dabs against a tree branch, the climbing community puts an asterisk next to her ascent and says she can’t take full credit? Shame on everyone. If this isn’t an example of bouldering “rules” going way too far and getting way, way too serious, then I don’t know what is. In my mind, Ashima Shiraishi made the first female ascent of Martini Right, and if anyone has a problem with me saying that, feel free to write me a letter, and I will compile your responses for a new Rock and Ice department I am starting called, “Climbers with fragile egos who need to take away the achievements of little girls in order to make themselves feel better about their own sub-par climbing accomplishments.” (I agree the department title is a tad wordy … I’ll keep working on it.)

Bring back climbing porn: First, there was only your basic climbing porn. Ron Kauk in vacuum-tight jeans climbing rock and communing with nature like Patrick Swayze in Road House; Kurt Smith cutting his feet in Rifle, but still not “outta there”; Rampage. Etc. Then, people decided that just seeing raw climbing footage was boring, and they wanted their climbing porn to have more of a story line to it in order to hold interest through the monotony of movement over stone. I agree this was a step in the right direction, and ultimately a good thing. But now it seems that everyone is so focused on telling stories and doing all these fancy, show-offy camera tricks that the rad climbing footage has taken something of a back seat.

Who here is tired of seeing super-slow-motion soulfulness? Time lapses? Forget about it! I never need to see another time lapse again in my life! I love seeing stories told on the big screen … but sometimes I just want to see some good ole fashioned sport F—ing. The raddest/hottest girls and guys climbing the hardest routes out there. I don’t need to know their names; I don’t care that they’re from Boulder and are professional climbers who are balancing work and play. I don’t care about the history of the route, and who put it up, and why they are drawn to it. I just want to see someone climb something that looks really hard and really cool and do it without talking to me.

Cerro Torre: The Interviews

AB — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:18:24 +0000

I’ve compiled some of the interviews that I conducted while researching my article, “The Tyranny of History,” Rock and Ice #201, which discusses the Shakespearean events that took place on Cerro Torre this year. And I thought it would be cool to share them here.

But first, some more thoughts.

I find it interesting how equivocating the reactions to the events on Cerro Torre 2012 have been. Based on the responses that I’ve received to my column, I have observed that many of the detractors to the headwall chopping have a hard time reconciling their protestations with some of the most basic tenets that we as climbers champion—namely, leave no trace in the mountains, employ a minimalist approach when it comes to gear, and to try to follow the natural line and rise to the natural difficulties of the mountain as best as you possibly can.

Why do these people make an exception to Maestri’s compressor, for example, and not just call it what it is: garbage in the mountains? Should we also leave the thousands of canisters of oxygen that currently litter the slopes of Everest because they are pieces of history, in that they are reminders of all the people who have passed before us?

But what happened on Cerro Torre is not an environmental issue.

I think it’s important to understand what an extreme outlier Cerro Torre is: Maestri was the first, and last, person to ever bring gas-powered power tools into the mountains to overcome difficulties he wasn’t able to climb. His Compressor Route didn’t spawn 1,000 other imitations around the world; no one followed in his path because wholesale drilling your way up a mountain that can be climbed via its natural features is a stylistic dead end. To do so is the end of creativity, the murder of the impossible, and the end of the sport, period. There’s nowhere to go from there, no opportunity to progress.

Therefore, it’s equally wrong to think that this chopping—also an outlier, and necessarily an antithetically equal outlier—would also set a precedent to be emulated. I don’t see that happening. The sport of climbing is not going to fall apart because of the chopping, no more than it fell apart because of the drilling. It is beyond our normal sphere, in its own, entirely bizarre orbit.

In this age where it’s common to bemoan the “loss” of adventure in climbing—with sport climbing, gyms and comps etc.—why are so many people having such a hard time celebrating the fact that a new generation of climbers (Kennedy, Kruk, and Lama are all under 24 years old) have embraced this very vision: where climbing is about a minimum amount of gear, and a maximum amount of skill and self-reliance? Where you rise to the challenge of the mountain and not bring it down to your level? Above all, this is just an affirmation that says: “Climbing is about using and following natural features—as opposed to following an indescriminately drilled bolt ladder.” After all, that’s how it works everywhere else in the world.

These are, once again, supposedly our sport’s most basic, if not sacred, tenets. Yet if anything the mixed reactions to the events on Cerro Torre has shown that not everyone can get behind these ideals because of … what? A “loss of history”? The specter of “elitism”? The fear of what kind of precedent it might set? The fact that everyone in the world would’ve liked to have been asked permission first? These fears and arguments either seem fundamentally wrong, or just unwarranted to me.

A word about the kid, too: Hayden Kennedy is one of the most down-to-earth and encouraging people I’ve ever met; there’s not a shred of ego or elitism in his bones. He’s not an elitist, nor is he an idealogue. He sport climbs as much as anyone I know; it’s not as though he’s opposed to bolts, and he is certainly not opposed to less-talented people being out, enjoying the sport. Anyone who has ever met him will know that Hayden is just as happy to go climbing with someone on a 5.4, or on a 5.14.

He felt strongly that Maestri’s bolt ladders were wrong; they were out of place with the mountain; and they were pieces of garbage that didn’t belong on such a beautiful peak. People have been saying that for 40-plus years but no one has ever done anything about it. I applaud him not just talking about what needed to be done, but actually taking action.

In climbing, action is all that really matters. My writing, your responses, forum posts, campfire debates, and, above all, the ubiquitous arguments I’ve read online that muddle things up by making climbing into something abstract and metaphysical—all of that is ultimately nugatory. To anyone still grumbling and grousing over the loss of the Compressor Route, I present this option: go up there and replace the bolts if you’d really prefer to follow Maestri’s directissimma as opposed to the mountain’s natural line. Or, another option: find out the size of the holes, and bring up a rack of removable bolts if you had your heart set on taking a stroll down history lane and repeateing Maestri’s path. Either one of those actions, to me, is better than criticizing, complaining and especially espousing more notional concepts that have been concoted as if the sport of climbing is something that’s entirely metaphysical. Climbing is anything but metaphysical! This shit’s the most real shit on the real, yo!

Though this debate has been interesting to think about, I think it’s also dangerous to plunge too far down the metaphysical pipeline, because then climbing is no longer real. Because it must be real. It must be experienced to be understood. For reasons that are sacred.

I find it encouraging to see a new generation of gym-bred sport climbers (like Hayden) use their sport-honed talent in the mountains and do amazing things there while remaining true to our sport’s traditional heritage. This is something that the climbing community should be celebrating because it shows that we are headed in the right direction.

Anyway … onto the interviews. Please continue reading on the next few pages …