Time to revisit one of my all-time favorites:

Everything works out in the end; and if it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end.

We can always rationalize our way into believing we are in the part of the story that we want to be. We can rationalize that we’re in a story to begin with, and not, say, wandering through the wilderness, no paths, beginnings, middle, or end.

But yesterday did seem like a definitive end, in the way stories go. Such as we have in climbing: its routes, projects, and seasons. You either “send”1 or you don’t. And if the season ends before you get it, it’s over—at least until next year.

Yesterday I failed again on my 13a (7c+) project, the tricky, steep ramp up at Orange Crush known as Tin Man. Sometimes you just don’t have it.

And today, this morning, as the forecast stated, the weather has turned: snow, frozen sleet, sub-temps, overcast, and nothing but wet, rain, snow, and cold for the foreseeable future.

The season endeth.

I.

And yet.

I found myself climbing with two of the most joyful, supportive, stoked climbers I could have hoped for. It began as all climbing belay-tionships do, with chance run-ins at the cliff and small talk, with trading “beta” on how to get through the various sections of the route.

We traded numbers, Lauren and me, because after all, not everyone wants to keep coming back to the same route over and over, especially as the season fades. But that’s exactly what both of us wanted to do. Then later, the same with Ally. She says she got “suckered” into the climb, but what she means is it seduced her into its web, the same way it had seduced Lauren and me.

Eventually, it was the three of us all meeting together. All of us after the same goal, all of us questing after our first 13a. All a little obsessed.

Was it obsession in a good way? Immaterial.

When you follow your stoke and your passion, you find others with the same stoke and passion, I said one night as the three of us made fajitas in my kitchen after a hard day of climbing, and more failure.

We became friends. Giving each other belays, discussing in minute detail how to get through the crux sequence from the ground. All of us on a shared quest, but with slightly different styles and body types, and thus slightly different strategies—and different barriers to sending.

For Ally, an injury, difficulty with the cold, fingers and toes numbing out on the rock. Lauren, something of a mental block that kept spitting her off the bottom, even though she was by far in the best position to finish the climb. And me, a little bit of everything: fitness, technique, and my longer limbs making it difficult to tuck into the squeezed spaces.

Between attempts and in the evenings, we got to other topics: movies, travel, politics, love, relationships. And then, the next available weather window, it was back to the climb.

In such ways are friendships formed: time spent, pursuing passion, braving the cold and disappointment of failed attempt after failed attempt: shared suffering, one might say.

II.

And it wasn’t just us.

Up on the ledge at Orange Crush were a handful of other climbers questing after nearby routes. Matti on Tin Monkeys, James and Jason on Dynosoar. Orangahang, Flying Monkeys, and just down the hill, the grandaddy king line of them all, Predator.

If the weather was good, we could nearly always count on seeing each other on the ledge. And we almost always knew where the others were in our respective quests. Matti, with his new method of moving through the crux, powerful but suited to his huge wingspan. James inching higher and higher on each attempt.

On such climbs, progress can be measured not on whether you fell from a new, higher hold, but often whether you fell while moving up from the same hold as before. It can be measured in the certainty with which you were able to grip, whether all three pads of your finger were on or just two. Measured in a slight adjustment to your foot placement to make clipping the rope through the next carabiner just a hint easier.

Thus it was that climbing this one route took over much of our lives, even off the rock.

Back at the house, I hesitated to continue with a landscaping project because the risk of tweaking my back shoveling was just too great. Saunas were strategically timed for maximum muscle recovery. Our diets and drinking, our rest routines, our yoga stretches, our sleep: all were oriented toward recovery and preparation for the rock.

Our bodies were literally molding around the exact movements needed for this one, specific climb. Everything else was extraneous.

III.

So it was that on a cold, dreary day last week, after falling and failing for weeks, that Lauren finally pulled it out, seemingly out of nowhere.

Her stoke was high that day, even despite the gray weather. She had been saving a brownie for when she sent—a small pleasure, a victory snack for when it happened. But so certain it wasn’t going to happen, she ate the brownie just before the last attempt of the day.

And then: a release. A mental breakthrough. It’s hard not to see the connection: once she truly let go of the outcome, she did it. All of a sudden, she got through the bottom crux that had been defeating her for weeks. She moved onto the ramp, to the kneebar rest where the rest of the business starts, and called down to Ally, who was belaying: Oh shit, now I have to try hard.

And then she caught her breath, moved from the pancake-shaped hold, and slowly but deliberately moved her way through the ramp, to the final, steep jugs, and the anchor chains at the top.

Ally and I never got it. We came out one more day, just the two of us, the forecast bequeathing us one last window of warmth and sun before a snowstorm rolled in. Both of us were so close. We could taste it.

We had the send brownies in our bag, and toward the end of the day, we ate them, hoping to capture a bit of Lauren’s mystical send energy. Hoping for the same release that would unlock the final send for us as well.

But it was not to be.

IV.

They say everything is in the journey, not the destination. And I have to remember my beloved passage from Hunter S. Thompson: But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life.

But it stings to not finish when I’m so close. I could blame the weather, the shortness of the season here in New England. It was too hot, then there were about three weeks of decent weather, and then it was too cold and wet. In truth, I only chose Tin Man because I had no other choice—the holds on other climbs were all soaked, whereas Tin Man’s sheltered ramp stayed dry even after days of rain.

I could blame the style, not at all suited to me, or the odd, low-probability nature of the crux sequence. I could blame myself, my headspace, the mistakes I made falling from certain sections even when I’d gotten through harder parts below.

I could tell myself anything I want, really, I’m the author of my own story.

But the beauty of projecting in climbing is that it defies your own narrative: you don’t have it until you have it. It’s not a subjective thing. It’s not in the mind of the beholder. You either send or you don’t send.

When it happens, we all know that it’s happened. And if not, not. If you think about it, the very black and white nature of sending is the reason it’s a shared experience. The shared reality is the reason we can celebrate each other’s wins so unequivocally.

But of course, the process itself is also the thing. I now know I can climb that hard. Given the time, the conditions, the focus, I can climb harder than I ever imagined just a few years ago. I am strong in my body, confident, psyched, and I will soon head back to Spain where it is warm and dry another winter season awaits.

But the real thing is always the relationships formed, the time shared. Happiness only real when shared, as Chris McCandless famously scribbled just before dying alone in the Alaskan wilderness.

Lauren and Ally, my ledge partners, my friends: it was a beautiful journey with both of you. Lauren, you absolutely deserved the send; and Ally and I will just need to come back one day.

Everything works out in the end, and if it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end.

Brett Lowell, the cameraman who had been filming Caldwell’s journey for years, said he could never tell if he was wasting his time. Maybe Tommy would never send, and all those weeks and months hanging on a rope, pointing the camera, capturing footage, would all be for nought. Maybe Tommy was struggling against a void he would never overcome.

Many who aren’t climbers have seen the movie Free Solo, where Alex Honnold climbs a nearby route on El Cap without a rope. But what Honnold does is exceedingly rare in climbing. Less than 1% of climbers ever scale huge cliffs without a rope. And meanwhile, the Free Solo filmmakers make it clear that Honnold’s brain works differently from ours. That story is about the anxiety of the people around Honnold more than Honnold himself.

But Caldwell’s journey is supremely relatable. Especially because it’s not some unique area of the brain that made him beat his body against a 3,000-foot cliff for seven years, with little to no hope of success—it was something almost all of us can relate to. It was a breakup.

I.

The past five weeks, I’ve been visiting my old farmhouse in New Hampshire, which is just down the road from a major climbing area, Rumney Rocks.

I like to visit each fall and help my mom with the house (she’s been living here since I bought the property in 2019), and because Fall is prime climbing season. The leaves change color, the temperatures drop, and I think there is no better place to be.

But this year has been bittersweet. My mom wants to move (she’s in New Mexico at the moment), and so I’m thinking of selling the house. My life is in Spain now, and it doesn’t make sense to maintain this big property if no family is here, and I only visit a month or two out of the year.

More than that, however, is that I’m nursing my own breakup. I was supposed to be here with her, and now I’m here alone.

Which has thrown me into something of a Caldwell-like quest, with an amount of concentrated focus I’m not sure I’ve ever had before.

At 43 years old, I’ve never climbed this hard or this well in my life. Nor have I ever focused so intently on “projects,” i.e., hard climbs that can take weeks, months (or in Tommy’s case, years) to work out the moves before a send.

I say that Tommy beat his body against the wall, but projecting is much more than physical. It’s also a problem to be worked out, and the solution is both mental and technical. In Rumney, the climbs are often unusually “beta-intensive,” which means they require a lot of specific information about how to move through the route: which holds to grab and how, the specific body position at certain moments, the precise sequence of footwork.

For the past month, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time discussing beta with a rotating crew of climbers up on the Orange Crush ledge in Rumney. It’s a spot perched mid-way up on the side of Rattlesnake Mountain, with the entirety of the Baker River Valley spread below.

There are a handful of intimidating overhanging climbs that all start from the same spot on the ledge. There, we drink our tea, eat our sandwiches, and queue up one after the other for various routes—Flying Monkeys, Tin Man, Tin Monkeys, Dynosoar—watching each other’s approach to getting through the most difficult spots, or cruxes, discussing just how to rotate the torso so the back heel can lodge itself into the crack, or the exact finger and thumb position to be used on the affectionately called “baby ballsack” hold.

To a non-climber, these discussions would be practically unintelligible—it’s no wonder after two years of living in Spain I still can’t quite follow a discussion of the minutiae of beta on a particular climb: from the kneebar, lower onto the a-cup sloper, keeping the body tension, coming into the gaston with your right, to the finger slot with the heel-hook, and on and on, ad infinitum.

After three weeks of this, I sent a major project: Flying Monkeys, 12c (7b+ in the European grading system).

It’s an intimidating, acrobatic, steep endurance and power route. Basically, my anti-style. The crux is keeping it together while your forearms are so pumped out of your mind you can’t think straight. One friend even recommended skipping the last clip (i.e., not putting the rope through a carabiner for protection) because it would sap too much energy off the final moves.

The route took me 16 times tying into the rope over the course of three weeks. Counting “tie-ins” is a common measure of how long a project took, and thus how hard it was for each person individually.

Pro climbers will tie in to the rope dozens or even hundreds of times as they work their hardest projects. For me, 16 was the most I’ve ever done—the longest I’d ever focused on a single climb my entire life.

This signifies two things. One, I’m not choosing hard enough projects. And two, I’ve never given even a fraction of the focus to my climbing projects that stronger climbers do to theirs.

Which is why I’m writing here that I’m having something of a Caldwell moment.

II.

I’m not usually like this.

My time in Rumney is usually spent reconnecting with friends, climbing a lot but more casually. I’m generally a flexible partner, all-too-willing to alter my plans for another’s goals, but more often I simply don’t have plans to which I’m particularly attached.

This is different.

The other day, a semi-frequent climbing partner texted me to ask if I could do a day of high-volume, “moderate” climbing at some of the other crags. I texted back a friendly no—I was unusually focused on my project.

Two days ago, a partner from Boston regretfully texted that she couldn’t make it for a planned day up on the ledge. I trekked up there anyway, alone, against all my instincts as an introvert, in the hopes of asking someone for a belay (Of course, it was no problem; several climbers I knew were there working the same routes).

After sending Flying Monkeys, I briefly considered relaxing the rest of my time here. Perhaps I would do some out-of-the-way climbs, go to some other crags, or even visit another climbing area.

But no. Literally the next day out at the cliffs, I asked for a belay on an even harder climb up on the ledge, a 13a that shared some of the same moves. The crux is a boulder problem involving the aforementioned baby ballsack hold. On my fourth tie-in, I managed to do it. On my fifth and sixth tie-ins, I repeated the move, and started work on the other parts of the climb.

There is still a long way to go: putting it all together in one go, without a rest, is always harder than it feels like it should be, when you’re doing each of the moves individually.

But if I’m able to send, this would be the hardest climb of my life. Climbing 13a (7c+ in Europe) is a life goal for me, but it’s always felt pretty out of reach. Not because I don’t think I’m physically capable, but because I’ve always questioned whether I would ever have the time and focus for it.

My life has often felt so scattered. Parenting, moving countries, learning another language, the renovation, travel, writing, work, clients.

Leave it to heartbreak I suppose. Nothing to do but go.

III.

I do think about Caldwell up there on the Dawn Wall.

For months after the movie came out about his journey to finish the route, climbing gyms where I was living in Washington D.C. had gigantic, wall-covering posters up asking, What’s your Dawn Wall?

The push to complete the climb famously generated enormous media attention, with TV trucks parked in Yosemite Valley for weeks. Between tries, Tommy and his climbing partner were giving interviews to national media outlets from their portaledge thousands of feet off the ground.

Yet those in-the-moment TV appearances were curiously devoid of the heartbreak at the center of the story—his divorce from Beth Rodden after 10 years. Caldwell was there essentially because he’d just lost his marriage, his first love, his best friend, and his climbing partner.

Yet Caldwell has spoken openly about his motivations, both in the film and in other forums:

When my mind was going a million miles an hour and I was in this really crazy state, I needed a distraction from the pain of that. That’s when I really took this project on full force, because being up there in this place that I love and working hard was kind of the only time I could feel normal for a while.

Reading that makes my heart clench, and I have to take a moment. The feelings are so familiar.

My Dawn Wall, at least for now, is the Orange Crush Ledge. Up there with the rest of the crew.

It’s nowhere near the difficulty of Caldwell’s route (to my fellow climbers: please forgive even the hint of a comparison). And I don’t anticipate I’ll be there for seven years. Caldwell climbed a 3,000-foot stretch of wall no one thought could be climbed. I’m trying to do a few short routes on which thousands have come before.

What is the same is my grasp for control after a failure I didn’t see coming—and my need for focus when the mind wants to go a million miles an hour somewhere else.

To all the climbers who have joined me up on that ledge over the past several weeks: I am so grateful for your company, the belays, the beta, and the friendship. Sending season is here— let’s keep it rolling a while longer 🙏 💪 🤗.

In a relationship, at least one of the two people has to be responsible for grounding it (ideally both). Without that, the relationship is quite susceptible to falling apart.

Just something I’ve learned recently.

Another thing I’ve learned: I’m in a serious relationship with climbing.

It’s not an exclusive relationship. Never has been. But at this point, my relationship with climbing is among the longest in my life, preceded only by a small handful of friendships. That and the relationships I have with my family.

So what’s the secret to this longevity?

Climbing is possibly the most grounding presence in my life. Whatever happens, whatever heartbreaks occur, whatever tragedies might befall, climbing has always been there for me, and I know it always will.

It doesn’t even expect reciprocal treatment. I don’t have to show up for climbing (though, barring chronic illness or catastrophic injury, I always plan to). But climbing needs no reassurance on that account. It’s fine whether I show up or not. I can leave for however long; climbing will always be there.

I mean this in a very literal sense. Climbing is always in place, right where I left it. The cliffs will remain, the routes, the boulders. Sure, the holds may get polished over time, but the route itself will stay right where it is.

Climbing is immovable, in its own way, and so I can always trust it to be there.

Plus, we have a history. In times past, it almost didn’t matter what had befallen: the end of a long relationship, the death of a close friend, some particularly depressive episode in my life.

Even in those times when I couldn’t bear to work, couldn’t drag myself from bed, times when I wanted to eat my feelings and drink my sorrows, moments when I couldn’t find motivation for anything—I could still find motivation to climb.

In those dark moments, climbing showed me who it truly is: an impartial vessel, into which I can pour the inner demons, expunge all the doubts. I can smash them against the rock, wring them from my body, perhaps exorcise them completely; climbing won’t care.

And besides, climbing is such a beautiful mistress. In the Fall in Rumney, with the leaves turning red and orange against the Baker River Valley. In the winter in Siurana, when the sun sets over the vineyards of the Catalunyan countryside, and you can sip a beer from the little village, more than a thousand years old. In Greece, with its seaside cliffs. In Mexico, with its towering bolted multipitches. And of course, in Yosemite, with its granite prow sufficient to inspire a spiritual awe in all who visit.

Climbing becomes even more beautiful the more I visit, the more I commit. My body responds to its touch, making itself lean and strong. And my mind responds to its infinite, patient challenges, making itself brave and focused. I become more present, more grateful.

The better I get as a lover, the bigger the playground for exploring.

What’s more: climbing doesn’t mind if I have other relationships—in fact, it encourages it. Climbing is a wingman, a social connector, the best possible excuse for a date.

Of course, if I am with someone who also loves climbing, we can have threesomes every weekend. It’s a beautiful thing to share our love. Conversely, if I’m with someone who doesn’t climb, no pasa nada—but they’ll need to understand I do have a mistress.

Climbing takes me as I am, but it also questions me, as life itself does. Climbing asks, do you really want this? are you spending this brief time on earth wisely? what is your relationship to nature, to others, and to yourself? are you kind with yourself? with others? do you want them to succeed? do you want them to find joy and passion in their life? Do they make you feel safe? Can they trust you to do the same?

Like many relationships, this one can seem like something of a black box to those on the outside. People who have never been in a relationship with climbing can’t quite understand what the big deal is.

But that’s fine; they don’t need to.

In the end, no one can truly understand what goes on in a relationship, sometimes even including those who are in it.

As for climbing, I can always say: thank you for being there, even despite all my many flaws, always.

In the past, I’ve tried to write climbing-specific posts to be accessible even for those who don’t climb. In this case, I wanted to be as detailed as possible about what I did so that other climbers interested in pursuing the Rumney Tenagi can use it as a guide. As a result, I’m generally not shying away from climbing terminology.

So, this post might be a bit less accessible to non-climbers than past ones. You’ve been warned.

I. The Misogi

A ‘Misogi’ is a Japanese Shinto tradition of purification through mental and physical challenge.

Not surprisingly, the idea has been appropriated and popularized in the West, notably by author , which is where I heard about it. Easter wrote The Comfort Crisis, a book I read when it came out in 2021.

But it wasn’t until a month ago that I again heard Easter talk about the idea of an annual Misogi—an extreme physical challenge that you use to push the boundaries of what you think is possible.

As Easter put it:

In modern life, you can survive without being challenged. You can have food, water, shelter, etc. But by not being challenged and exploring the edges of our potential, we miss something vital about being a human. We never realize what we’re capable of—and this limits us.

Enter Misogi. It’s a circumnavigation of the edges of your potential to expand them. The idea is this: Once a year, go out into nature and do something really hard. Mimic the challenges that humans evolved to face. Explore the edges.

The idea resonates with me, not least because I’ve been known to do things like this in the past (For example, only eating food that came from my own property for a month—I basically subsisted on potatoes and vegetables and lost 15 pounds, all while climbing the hardest route of my life at the time).

As I was listening to Easter this time around I thought: why not a climbing Misogi?

II. The Rumney Tenagi: climb every 5.10a at Rumney in one day

I was in the car listening to Easter on a podcast when I thought of the idea, so I didn’t know what I was getting myself into exactly.

But I thought 5.10a would be a good grade to try something hard. What if I could climb every 10a at Rumney in one day? How many 10a’s were there even at Rumney?

When I was able to park, I brought up Mountain Project on my phone. I went to the Rumney section and sorted climbs by sport (I don’t have a trad rack), and grade. Twenty-four routes came up.1

Later, as planning progressed and my girlfriend Karen committed to supporting the challenge, I realized I’d need a name for this thing. I dubbed it the Rumney Tenagi, a riff on the idea of a Misogi.

I should say: if someone has done this before, I give full deference and credit to their accomplishment. That said, I’ve owned a home and have been climbing in Rumney since 2019. I’m reasonably connected to the community here and have mentioned this project to several locals who have been here much longer—based on these conversations, I’m reasonably confident this has never been done before, and that the Rumney Tenagi is something completely new.

Which is awesome. The challenge scratched all my itches for doing something hard, outdoors, personal to me, and in particular: meaningful.

III. Preparation and process

The first thing I did was map out the climbs.

Rumney’s 10a’s are spread out all over the mountain. Altogether the 24 climbs are split among 15 different cliffs (or 16 if you count Main Cliff as separate from Armed & Dangerous).

The different cliffs are about as spread out as it’s possible to be at Rumney. They start at Meadows, next to the parking lot, and they go all the way up to Crow’s Nest, Summit Crag, and include more than a dozen in between.

I needed to plan a route that would get me to all these crags reasonably efficiently. It would be a lot of climbing in one day—far, far more pitches of rock than I’d ever done in a single day—but it would also be a lot of hiking.

Not to mention: I’d never even been to many of these climbs.

We planned a day to go scout. We hiked up to the Northwest Territories, the part of Rumney most distant and highest up the mountain. I climbed B-B-Bubbas Link-up2, a long pitch up a buttress with a technical crux right off the ground and scary moves up an exposed arete at the top.

We hiked to Boundary Rock, a lichen-covered slab with a smattering of short routes I’d never been to before. Then we hiked up the terribly steep, trecherous gully to Cow Patty, a flowy 30-meter series of balancy crimps and small feet at the top of Yellowknife Buttress.

A few days after the scouting trip, we decided to give the Tenagi a dry run.

It was a hot day, and there were still a lot of unknowns. The biggest was a newish climb called Greener Pastures. The problem was that it was at the top of a three-pitch climb, so we’d have to climb two other routes just to access it. This sounded like a fun way to mix up the day, plus it meant Karen would get to actually climb some routes rather than just belay.

The day started well enough. I got through the three routes at Meadows, although I almost blew the crux of Repossession.3 When we got to the multi-pitch, I’d already climbed nine routes out of the 24.

But Greener Pastures was the wild card. I’d never been on the multi-pitch before, and multi-pitches have a way of delivering the unexpected. When I got to the top of the first pitch (Easy Street, 5.7), I saw an obvious line of bolts leading diagonally to the right. I figured that must be pitch number two. But after making the first few clips, I knew I’d made a mistake.

In the route description, it said the second pitch would be 5.5 climbing—super easy. But whatever I was on, it wasn’t 5.5. It felt more like a 5.10d or worse.

This, as the climbers say, is when we epic’d.

An epic is when a supposedly friendly day of multi-pitch climbing turns into a gigantic, draining, unexpected, possibly dangerous battle. Later, when I scrutinized the guidebook a bit more, I realized I’d likely stepped onto Cloud Atlas, a 5.11d (“Climb the first pitch of The Big Easy, then step right to a belay anchor on the ledge”). When I realized the mistake I bailed right to another climb, likely pitch two of Bourbon Street, a 5.10c, traversing down slightly, then over, then up, ultimately finishing at anchors to the left.

This zig-zagging created a huge challenge for Karen when she followed. To begin, the rope drag was enormous. Second, even on top rope, an 11d is extremely challenging. Third, the likely swing she would face if she fell on any section was pretty scary.

To top it off we could neither see nor hear each other. Even if it hadn’t been so windy, we were separated by a big bulge in the rock, and sound just doesn’t bend that way, no matter how loud you scream. She was on her own to navigate the drag, the hard moves, the swing, everything.

When Karen finally reached me, she was spent. I was also spent. And the sun had been baking both of us full-on for nearly two hours.

We continued on to the next climbs, but ultimately my body gave out at 10a number 14. It was more pitches of rock than I’d ever done in one day (14 + 2 extra from the multi-pitch). But I was still ten short of the goal.

We were out of water, running way behind on time, and I was tired enough that I didn’t feel quite in control of my limbs anymore, which meant I was tired enough to make a stupid mistake and get injured.

IV. Lessons learned from the dry-run

Of course, we’d learned some important lessons.

1. As with any climbing, the Tenagi would be harder in hot, sunny weather. We needed to find a cooler day, but that needed to be balanced with the fact that cooler days are also shorter days.

2. We needed to bring sufficient water and food. We’d run out on the dry run, and there was no intelligent way to climb that many routes while being severely dehydrated.

3. We had to find a more efficient way to climb Greener Pastures. The multi-pitch was out; rappelling in from the top was in. This meant re-organizing the order of routes, but it would let us skip the two extraneous pitches of climbing below.

4. We would have to start way earlier, basically as soon as there was daylight. We needed every hour we could get.

V. The Tenagi

On Friday, September 20th, we set the alarm for 5:45 am. By 6:20 am it was light out. By 6:41 am, we were parked at the crag and walking to the first climb.

Here’s how the day went:

Meadows

1. Rhino Bucket — most people hate this climb. Got me warm.

2. Mr. Popular — hard crux off the ground, but easy after.

3. Repossession — overhanging, almost blew it on the dry-run, but easy on the day.

Kennel Wall

4. Ian’s Arete — thoughtful, fun climbing. If the climbs at Meadows hadn’t woken me up yet, the hike up to Kennel Wall definitely did.

White Buttress (top of Armed & Dangerous)

5. Greener Pastures — in my opinion, one of the harder technical cruxes although it’s ultimately a very short route. On the dry run, I grabbed a draw I was so tired, but this time I sent. Eli Buzzell established this route in 2021, writing: “Feel free to accuse me of waxing poetic about a 50' dirt crawl on an already over-bolted hillside, I definitely just did. The top of the White Buttress is one of my favorite spots in the Baker River Valley, and I hope that others may find it as inspiring as I have.” I agree, the climb is nothing special but the view is one of the best at Rumney. I was glad to have this part of the Tenagi behind me early in the day.

Orange Crush4

6. Bullwinkle Goes Ballistic — most people use this as a warm-up for the harder routes at Orange Crush, which is my favorite crag in all of Rumney. I had been feeling good when we got to this still early in the morning, but I climbed quite ugly on the roof crux sequence here. Karen told me I was rushing, and I was. We establish our motto for the day: chill, but focus.

Main Cliff

7. Underdog — considered one of the Rumney classics, although I’ve climbed enough the sheen has worn off a bit. I got back into rhythm here, dancing up a climb I’ve been on at least a dozen times before.

8. Far from Feral — one committing roof move, then done.

9. Arugula, Arugula — a longer roof sequence.

10. Scene of the Crime — adventury, as the saying goes.

Venus Wall

11. Venus Envy — I on-sighted this on the dry-run day. Gave me no trouble here. We paused and ate some breakfast burritos.

Bonsai

12. Masterpiece — a beautiful, juggy, overhanging climb. Only pumpy if you do it wrong.

After Bonsai, we had a route decision to make. On the dry-run day, the plan took us from Bonsai past Waimea to Triple Corners. Then the idea was to go back up to Jimmy Cliff, then to Crow’s Nest, and rappel from Crow’s Nest into Northwest Territories. However, I didn’t much feel like two rappels in one day, especially from a crag I’d never been to. Instead, I decided to do Jimmy Cliff and Crow’s Nest after Bonsai, then come back down to Triple Corners and avoid the rappel by hiking from there up to Hinterlands.

Jimmy Cliff

13. Lonesome Dove — I’m embarrassed to say I’d never been on this climb, despite its classic status. Slab is my anti-style, and here I geared up for my first true mental challenge of the day. I on-sighted this beast, pulling scary moves, smearing, pulling out all my tricks to get through the crux sections. But I had to admit as soon as I was lowered: this was without a doubt the most beautiful slab climb I’d ever been on. Onsight.

14. Beginning of All Things — I agree with the route description: contrived. But it was still hard, and I was beginning to feel my body getting quite tired. Another onsight though.

Crow’s Nest

15. Keel-Ho — I’d never been to Crow’s Nest. It’s just far. This was a cool route, but by now it was in full-on sun. The temps were mid-70s, but every time I got into the sun everything felt harder. Another onsight.

Triple Corners

16. Murk Trench — blessedly short and sweet.

17. Where Am I? — we’d reached a milestone. I’d quit after this climb on the dry run (not having gone to Jimmy Cliff or Crow’s Nest), but here we were, after 17 pitches of climbing. Karen asked how I was feeling. My back was hurting, and so were my feet, but I still felt reasonably good. It was around 2 pm. We had seven more climbs to do, and at least 5 hours of daylight left. Chill, but focus. I could actually do this.

Hinterlands

18. Jolt — it’s a classic, and deservedly so, tip-toeing out a “wildly exposed” prow with all of Rumney below. Before climbing, I set an alarm for 20 minutes and we both lay down in the sun. This was the first actual rest I’d taken all day. Then the alarm chimed all too soon. We suited up and I went. 18 routes in a row.

19. Dolt — unpopular opinion: Sometimes I think I actually like this more than Jolt. The bottom is more engaging, and the exposed moves at the top are just as badass. 19 routes in a row.

Yellowknife Buttress

20. Cow Patty — we’d both climbed this on the scouting day, and I knew I liked it. But as I got on the route, everything started to crash, especially mentally. It was hard to trust the feet. It was hard to pull on the crimps. Everything felt sharp. My fingers were shredded. More than that, I was mentally exhausted from leading so much. I’d thought the limiting factor for finishing the Tenagi would be physical—but here I recognized it could be mental if I wasn’t careful. This route was the cognitive crux for me. It was covered in lichen, making the feet feel insecure, and it’s 30 meters, especially long for Rumney. It also feels very secluded up the gully. Watching me struggle with even simple route-finding, this is when Karen said she got worried about me. She thought I had the strength to keep going, but the mental challenge of leading so much could still stop me. I heard her tell me to breathe, and as she did I found a rest and gathered myself, doing as I’ve learned to do in two decades of climbing: focus on the present. One move at a time, then the next, and the next.

Summit Crag

21. Yid Kid — hard crux high up another steep, dirty gully on Rattlesnake. This was the last unknown of the day, another route I’d never climbed. At this point, I couldn’t tell if I was doing moves the smoothest way or the hardest way. Everything felt hard. Still, if I could get through this one, I only had routes I’d done before. Another onsight.

Very Nice Crack

22. Tintinabulation — I don’t love this route, and I knew that going in. But after sending Yid Kid, something flipped in my brain. I was close, and I felt it: something turned, and I went into machine mode.

Northwest Territories

23. B-B-Bubbas Link-up — this had scared me on the scouting day. The bottom move is crux-y, but only because I’d messed up the beta. Meanwhile, the top, an airy, exposed finish had challenged my lead head even when I was fully rested. But something happened when I started up the route this time: I found a new level in my climbing, a level I’d never experienced before. I was twenty-three pitches in, all mind, body, soul, and spirit were in sync. In high contrast to just a few routes earlier, I now felt as confident a climber as I’d ever been in my life. I was in pure flow state. Occasionally I paused and looked down at myself from above, and realized what was happening: I was floating upward. Every small shift in weight, every dance of the feet felt like grace. Every small step from nub to fin pure technique. I was on a cloud. This was it, the last one. I had found something new deep down, and I knew it, and I could see it on Karen’s face when I was lowered. Maybe it was all adreneline and endorphins, but for those ten minutes it took me to climb, it felt practically like another plane of existence.

Boundary Rock

24. Imaginations of the Heart — it felt like a fitting end, a coda. A brief slab, in the middle of the woods, at a crag no one ever goes to. And the name: I had imagined somthing in my heart, and here it was made real. I nearly cried when I came down. The tears sitting in my eyes—they felt like joy.

VI. Exploring Edges

Easter wrote that the Misogi is about exploring the edges of what’s possible. When you do this, it changes you:

Over the course of human evolution, we had to do hard things to survive. We were pushed out to our edges often. But in those edges, we'd learn about ourselves. We'd see we're more capable than we realize—and our edges would expand. That realization changes you.

I felt like this happened and more.

The Tenagi completely reset my conception of what my body and mind are capable of. I truly found a new level in my climbing that I didn’t know existed. What is possible now that I know it does?

Life is beautiful and exciting. Especially when lived like this.

We got back to the parking lot at 6:23pm—nearly 12 hours of near-continuous climbing and hiking.

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VII. Note to the Rumney community

Of course, in speaking with friends in Rumney about this challenge, many have voiced their excitement about a new way of experiencing the crags they love and call home—my hope is that they and others will take up the challenge as a new way to climb Rumney.

As with other climbing challenges, others may quibble with the specific parameters I set for myself, but here they are:

1. You have to send (red point) all the routes. This is important in that it adds the actual stakes. You can’t just blow moves, hang, or ask for a take at the top of your 23rd pitch, or any others. I sent all routes on my first try (and several were on-sighted), but if I had blown a move I would have lowered and started the route again.

2. Start from whichever parking lot you want, but don’t use a vehicle to go between them. The time I set—11 hours, 42 minutes—is starting from the parking lot and ending at the parking lot. I didn’t feel getting in the car at any time during the challenge was appropriate because one of the beauties of Rumney is how compact the entire area is. You really can hike to every crag from any of the three parking lots.

3. The Rumney Tenagi is only bolted sport routes. One might arguably eliminate Greener Pastures because it’s at the top of a 3-pitch climb, but I didn’t because if you sort for the grade on Mountain Project, Greener Pastures is obviously included, and it’s bolted. My Tenagi doesn’t include trad routes, although I could easily see a very tough variation that adds the 10 additional trad routes listed on Mountain Project to the 24 sport ones.

4. Mountain Project grades control. Some of the routes have a different grade in the guidebook than on Mountain Project. Beginning of All Things, for example, is listed as a 10b in the guidebook. I used Mountain Project as the source of truth because the app is more accessible to more people, and also reflects more of a consensus grade than the guidebook.

I look forward to hearing about the next Rumney Tenagi—or about variations, such as adding in the trad routes, or having both you and your partner climb.

And speaking of partners: Karen was an amazing partner throughout the process and deserves huge credit. She planned food and water, was an extremely attentive belayer for 24 straight pitches, and best of all she probably believed I could do this before I believed I could do it. So many thanks go to her. 🙏

Addendum: my ranking of the best 5.10a’s at Rumney

From best to worst:

1. Lonesome Dove

2. Underdog

3. Jolt

4. Cow Patty

5. B-B-Bubba’s Link-up

6. Dolt

7. Masterpiece

8. Ian’s Arete

9. Arugula, Arugula

10. Scene of the Crime

11. Venus Envy

12. Keel-Ho

13. Where Am I?

14. Far from Feral

15. Yid Kid

16. Repossession

17. Beginning of All Things

18. Mr. Popular

19. Bullwinkle Goes Ballistic

20. Murk Trench

21. Greener Pastures

22. Rhino Bucket

23. Tintinabulation

24. Imaginations of the Heart

I thought by now I might be a shredded crusher sending hard test pieces around Spain, with a fully-renovated townhouse in the heart of the Catalunyan countryside—

Well, that didn’t happen, not yet. But I did find a community of climbers and much more. I found my people. And I did it through the climbing crags around Barcelona.

I. My plans go awry

Just to catch up new readers: In November 2022, I took what turned out to be a magical climbing trip to Siurana, which surely must rank as one of the top five or ten sport climbing areas in the world. I didn’t expect to fall so in love with the Catalunyan countryside (which reminded me of my birthplace in New Mexico) or the small town of Cornudella de Montsant, where we stayed nearby, but fall in love I did.

My long search for a home base somewhere in Southern Europe came to an end on that trip, and a few months later I closed on a four-level rowhouse in need of a complete renovation. After working on my homestead in New Hampshire, I was excited for more. Not to mention I would have another world-class climbing area right out my back door.

But I put all that on hold when plans for my son to do a homestay in Germany suddenly fell through. The family friends who had offered to host him in Munich couldn’t. Instead, I started negotiating with his mom to bring him to Spain. His mom thankfully agreed—on the condition that I find an international school he would be excited to attend.

Eventually, I found LearnLife, in the center of Barcelona. It’s a place where he’s thrived, immediately making friends among students and faculty, finding new freedom to move around the city by himself, and seizing opportunities for new experiences and more travel (a school trip to Rwanda, for example).

I had finally sprung him from the conformity of the Washington D.C. area.

Meanwhile, for me, this past year in Barcelona has been unexpected and incredible—tough to sum up without superlatives. It’s a phenomenal city, “leisure and pleasure made manifest in a half-planned, half-medieval, modernist, paternal, liberal Catalan city,” as I recently wrote, with the ocean on one side and mountains on the other.

I’m not even a city person—but if a city were to make me a believer, this might very well be the one.

All of this aside, coming to Barcelona forced me to alter not just plans for the renovation, but my climbing goals as well. I’m not complaining. In fact, Barcelona has more access to both the sea and the mountains than any cosmopolitan European city has any right to have.

I knew, for example, that one could be at the jaggy, totally unique saw-toothed spires of Montserrat, in less than an hour on the train. There are several lifetimes of climbing just there, and in lieu of proximity to Siurana, I had assumed I would be getting to know Montserrat quite well.

What I hadn’t expected—what I really had no idea—was just how many different climbing crags there are. From Barcelona, you can drive in nearly any direction and happen upon limestone or conglomerate, or granite cliffs tucked up against small mountains adjacent to picturesque Catalan towns. The longer I lived here, the wider the circle of climbing friends I developed, the more crags I discovered.

And just when I thought I’d visited them all, I found one more, one that felt like a “home” crag in a way the others hadn’t.

But let’s start at the beginning.

II. Les Casetes de Vallirana (My first climbing friends)

Of all the challenges of moving to another country, most people put at or near the top of their list the challenge of finding a strong community.

Digital nomads gather in coffee shops and co-work spaces in the hopes of connecting with heads buried in laptops. Message boards about expat living and digital nomadism bemoan the isolation, the outright loneliness. Women note the lack of deep connections they experience, while men wonder why the dating apps aren’t working for them.

And language schools host a constant stream of social outings precisely to fill this deep need for social connection. (I’ve written about all this before. See, Why you should stay in place).

Most people who find themselves lucky enough to be location-independent in their work over-emphasize the pursuit of freedom, only to wake up years later wondering why they haven’t found a partner, or why a sustained “community” is so damn hard and takes so long.

But I’ve never been able to join this chorus of lament. Because I have climbing, and climbing solves all this.

During the first few months in Barcelona, people would ask how my son was fitting in, and I would reply: great, because he loves his school. Then they would ask how I’m fitting in, and I would say: well, I have climbing, and all the community that comes with it.

Before moving, I’d joined all the Barcelona climbing Facebook groups I could find. A few weeks after I arrived, I saw an invitation from one of the group’s moderators to connect with other climbers.

This is how I met Kevin, a friendly Frenchman who had been living in Barcelona for several years along with his wife. Kevin was the moderator and ran a climbing website called Climbing House, which I promptly looked up after we met at the climbing gym one afternoon. It’s a great site, with trip reports, reviews, and guides.

Soon after we met, Kevin invited me to join a small group for a day trip to Les Casetes de Vallirana.

It’s only a 45-minute drive from the city, with about a 15-minute approach to the crag. Vallirana is known for its abundance of short, easy routes, which means it’s often packed with beginners. That wasn’t me, but no matter—I was overjoyed to be in the mountains, with a friendly group, pulling on real rock.

It had been just over a month since moving to Spain.

III. Bloc District (And how my climbing started to suffer)

Kevin and his group were the first climbing friends I made in Spain. But alongside were people I met at Bloc District, the bouldering gym where I signed up for monthly membership.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to climb outdoors the way I had in New Hampshire, where the cliffs are within walking distance of my house. There, it was possible to work a full day, run some errands, and still have time to pop over to the crags and pull hard on a few routes.

As a result of that beautiful privilege, my climbing ability dramatically improved. The year before moving to Spain, at 40 years old, I was climbing the strongest I ever had. Toward the end of 2022, I red-pointed (climbed on lead, with no falls or rests) Anaconda da Vida, a 12d (7c)—the highest grade of my life.

But in Barcelona, my climbing began to suffer. Bloc District only had bouldering—no roped climbing—and bouldering has never been my strong suit. To begin with, it’s easy to injure yourself on short, powerful routes, where the whole point is to try the same really hard moves over and over. Aside from that, I found it difficult to motivate myself without the lure of a long, beautiful piece of rock above me.

But Bloc District did have a spray wall—long, overhanging, stuffed with holds where you can improvise longer circuits. The idea is to simulate the longer, pump-inducing routes you find outdoors, and thus keep up your endurance.

Still, I struggled.

Climbing has exploded over the past decade, and that’s as true in Barcelona as anywhere. If anything, the phenomenon is even more recent in Spain. Gyms are packed with beginners, and beginners usually don’t go to “train” in the way I was aiming at.

I just wanted to pull hard on overhanging crimps and slopers until my forearms couldn’t stand it any longer.

Still, I tried to be social. I wanted to find more climbing partners, after all.

IV. Grau de Maxtos, Gelida, Garraf, and Sant Llorenç del Munt

At the gym, my climbing circle grew.

I met an Italian woman, Fran, and we immediately clicked. She didn’t have a lot of time to climb outdoors, but we were on the same gym schedule. She had a young kid, so she would come while he was at daycare, and I would come while my son was at school.

Soon, she started working at the gym, and it felt almost like I was local nodding to her on my way in, saying hi, catching up, not having to tell anyone my name so they could look up my membership.

I also met an Italian crusher named Julian. He’d just moved to Barcelona for work, and after training together one day we traded info and started climbing outdoors. Julian reminded me of Jordi, my Catalan climbing friend who had organized the trip to Siurana. Both are super strong, absolutely committed to climbing, so personable that they attract a wide group of friendly, good-vibes-only kind of climbing community.

Between Julian and Kevin, I always had a group to climb with on the weekends, and together we started sampling the various crags.

• At Grau de Maxtos, about a 1-hour drive from Barcelona, I got a little bit of everything. It’s interesting rock, with a mix of moderate routes, slightly stiff grading, and a killer view of the valley below. On hot days in Barcelona, it’s a good bet Grau will be significantly cooler.

• Gelida, even closer, is about a 45-minute drive, and quickly became one of my favorite spots. Its limestone streaks of orange and black and crimpy face-climbing were a lot like Siurana. The only drawback is it’s a relatively small crag. You might climb it out after a half dozen outings.

• For harder routes (7a - 8c), we drove to Gran Pared at Sant Llorenç de Munt. It’s a 45-minute drive, but also a 40-minute hike up on the approach. But the views are wonderful, and it’s in the shade in the afternoon, and you’ll be among super-good climbers.

• One of the places that grew on me is Garraf, only a 30-minute drive from Barcelona and perched directly above the sea. There’s little shade, and lots of polish on the easy routes, but there’s also a tall cave with some classic 7s where you can escape the sun. And the view is hard to beat.

V. A mentee for me—a close friend for my son

Early on I resolved to drag my son with me to the crags.

Core to my feelings about parenting is the idea that one should not arrange your entire daily and weekly schedule around your kids. Instead, I believe it’s important for them to see their parents pursuing their passions, rather than to be seen sacrificing their passions for whatever it is the kids think they want just then.

Thus, I struck a balance with my son. He wasn’t particularly excited to go climbing, but he would go sometimes. He would do a few routes, try to make conversation with my friends (mostly about soccer and FC Barcelona), and then play on his iPad for a bit. He was pretty bored a lot of the time, and he got easily frustrated with climbing, but at least he was outdoors.

This changed when we met András.

It was during one of our usual Friday afternoons at the beach, where my kid played volleyball, and I drank beer, socialized, and sometimes played volleyball.

It was there I overheard this young kid, maybe 24, talking in an Eastern European accent (Hungarian) about how he was in Barcelona for a semester for Erasmus, and how he mainly wanted to rock climb in whatever spare time he had. We exchanged info, and he became a regular with the group I met through Kevin.

In fact, in that group of mainly beginners, it was only András who wanted to climb the same hard stuff I did. He’d only been climbing a short time, but he had an obvious fire inside him for improving. He could usually follow the climbs that I led, and occasionally he could even do some hard, bouldery move that I couldn’t. His strength was bouldering, power, and youth. I could offer experience.

I started teaching him everything I’d learned over my last four years of dramatic improvement. How to project routes. How to choose goals. What to focus on. He soaked it up.

Meanwhile, my son took to him immediately. Among all my climbing friends, András was both the youngest, and the most into talking about soccer (ahem, football).

Dragging my son climbing suddenly became much easier—is András coming? he would immediately ask. And he always was.

On our last climbing trip together, a long weekend to Siurana, I belayed as András red-pointed his first-ever 7a. As he clipped the chains at the end of the climb, he let out a joyous victory scream. It was more emotion than I’d ever seen from him. I was so proud. In just a few months, he’d improved dramatically, and this was a milestone to prove it.

Sometimes people would mistake András for my younger brother. He was tall, brown hair, a little gangly, handsome, with a nice smile. But in fact, as he told me one evening after his going away dinner, it was my son who András started to think of as a little brother. He didn’t have any brothers himself, but he’d always wanted one. My son, he told me, had been like the little brother he’d never had.

It made my heart very warm.

On the bus on the way back to our neighborhood, I watched the two of them laughing and talking about football, as always. My son can be very affectionate with people he likes—throughout dinner he’d been leaning on András, putting his hand on his shoulder, soaking up what little time he had left.

We got off the bus, and András, taller by at least a foot, put his arm around my son’s shoulder. They walked like that, talking, back to Mercat de Sant Antoni, where we parted ways with long hugs.

András said that climbing with me the past few months had been the best part of his experience in Barcelona. I told him he’d always have a climbing partner, any time.

VI. More than community (Penyes de Can Marcer)

You’re very lucky, Fran told me one evening.

We’d seen so much of each other in the gym—now we were out having a glass of wine to socialize like normal people. We tried to talk about things other than climbing.

Not that many people find someone, she said.

Fran was talking about my girlfriend. I’ve been seeing her for six months—but in fact we’d met months earlier, on that very first trip to Vallirana with Kevin.

Karen had been a part of the group when I got there, and at first, we were just friends—I never expected it would be more. But we climbed together often. I saw how she related to people. I saw her kindness and generosity, her curiosity, her empathy and openness, her passion not just for climbing but for life in general. She helped me improve my Spanish (she’s Colombian), and I helped her improve her climbing.

Then, somewhat mysteriously, I found myself really missing her. She’d been away for a work trip and hadn’t been climbing with us recently. Her absence was a hole in our climbing community, but slowly, cautiously, I realized it was something even more than that for me. When she returned in December, I asked her to dinner. I shared my feelings. We kissed.

Actually—I don’t think it’s that I’m lucky, I told Fran. I begged her patience while I explained what I thought had really happened.

I’d moved to a place where other people move for the same reasons as me. I’d spent most of my free time pursuing a deep passion, rock climbing, and had met others who shared that passion. In fact, I’d done exactly what the dating coaches say to do, which is to get off the apps and spend your time pursuing activities you love.

It wasn’t luck. We had each put ourselves in the place we wanted to be in life, and we’d found each other there.

As Winter turned to Spring, and Spring to early Summer, Karen mentioned yet another crag we’d had yet to visit. It was a towering, 40-meter cliff carved into the side of a small mountain not far from her apartment. Crucially for the impending heat of Summer, it was north-facing—which meant it was in the shade nearly the entire day. This made it a rare find among climbing crags near Barcelona, most of which are at least partially south-facing.

Penyes offered a respite, a way to keep climbing even though it was getting hot. Eventually, the two of us found a spare day to go check it out.

We pulled off the highway into a small community tucked into a little valley surrounded by hillsides. The houses reminded me of a partially off-grid community in New Mexico—solar panels on the rooftops, mini wind turbines in the yard, large, overgrown gardens and fruit trees. It looked like a slightly messy, entirely unplanned eco-village. Peering between slats in the fences, I saw lots of outdoor spaces for eating, cooking, and socializing.

Then there was the terrain. It was almost like a temperate rainforest. In stark contrast to the dry, open landscape throughout Catalunya, this little enclave was overgrown with vegetation. Vines covered everything. Water was abundant. The crescent-shaped hills seemed to be catching it, making every space that wasn’t actively cut back thick with plants and shrubs.

When we got to the trailhead for the crag, we saw a sign: climbing closed until June. Bird nesting. We looked around. There was wildlife everywhere. On a later trip, we saw a family of wild boars suddenly tear across one of the dirt roads in the village. The whole place was like a little haven tucked away, out of sight, little-known. We walked to the cliff anyway, touched the rock, gazed up at the cliffs, and marveled at how much undeveloped rock there was yet to climb.

I’d been living in Barcelona for ten months before I finally climbed at Penyes. But it already had the feeling of a home crag away from home. It felt like we’d discovered something together.

This Summer and Fall I will return to New Hampshire. Then I will come back and finally turn my attention to the renovation project in Cornudella de Montsant. From then on, Siurana will be my actual home crag.

But Penyes definitely captured my romantic imagination. The little, disorganized eco-village. The fortuitous, day-long shade, a respite from the Summer heat. And the huge swath of undeveloped cliff, still waiting for someone to clear back the vegetation, waiting for a creative mind to envision new climbing routes, waiting for hours upon monotonous hours cleaning the rock, drilling holes, placing bolts.

Waiting for someone to leave a part of their legacy there.

I may be spending the winter months working and kitesurfing in Mexico, enjoying the sun, living in the moment, drinking cervezas from my rooftop deck and all that living my best life stuff, but I’ll be honest—with each new group of episodes that dropped for HBO’s The Climb, I stopped everything, sat down on the sofa and watched TV. I plugged my laptop into the widescreen television in the apartment and watched until there were no more episodes to watch.

Yesterday, the last two episodes aired—and though I’m not in the habit of reviewing TV shows here, it seems this one was made for me.

Or, it kind of was.

The Climb attempts to straddle a middle ground between appealing directly to climbers and being accessible as entertainment to a broader audience, to the merely climbing curious.

It’s a challenge, and I can certainly relate. I write a lot about climbing here—but as I’m aware most of you don’t climb, I try to write in a way that communicates to non-climbers what exactly is so special about the pursuit, and why those things are important to me. This piece (gated) and this one are both good examples.

The Climb does the same, and it can be a bit awkward. There are a lot of times when Sharma and co-hosts dumb down the language and over-explain the more technical aspects for the benefit of viewers who don’t have any exposure to climbing. For me, it’s mildly annoying. But I get it—and it’s worth it for all the amazing things about the show.

Ultimately, Sharma and the entire show faithfully communicate a lot of what is special about climbing (which is more than I can say for the crazy-stupid Olympics format). In a world where many of the media representations of climbing are either highly sensationalized, far outside the norm, or outright wrong, The Climb lovingly respresents many of the qualities that make climbing special. Well done team.

Ok, five things I loved:

1. The camaraderie in climbing is real, even among competitors

The Climb purports to be a competition show—the winner gets a $100,000 prize, plus a sponsorship from Prana worth another $100,000. But from the camaraderie on display throughout the series, it was easy to forget the climbers were actually in competition with each other.

I assure you, this is a very real reflection of what it’s like out at the crag. Climbing can be competitive, but that is far from its essence. More than anything, climbing is a test of you against yourself, and every climber knows it. Even at the highest, most elite levels of competition, climbers are friends, supportive and encouraging. Climbers share beta (information on how to do specific moves), discuss strategies about how to approach climbs, and celebrate every time someone sends, or finishes leading a climb without any falls.

The same happens on The Climb. It wasn’t at all surprising, but it was heartening to see it on display so prominently. Even when facing elimination, the climbers are unfailingly supportive. When one is eliminated from the competition, it’s sad even for the climber who narrowly eliminated them, because everyone is aware the community itself is diminished when one of them has to go home.

And that is a huge part of what makes climbing so, so special: the community. It’s a sport that naturally lends itself to it, and there are generally very few assholes around (they tend to have difficulty finding climbing partners).

With incredibly rare exception, what climbers want most is for everyone they’re out at the crag with to do their best, try hard, push boundaries and conquer whatever fears or demons are holding them back—seriously, it’s that cheesy. But it’s very real, and you see it in the show.

2. The climbers were good, but not elite good

As soon as a show announced these climbers were competing with each other to go pro, i.e., get the Prana sponsorship, I was concerned that I’d be watching a bunch of semi-pro climbers who were so far out of my league that it’d be tough to relate to the challenges (see Honold, Alex).

Thankfully, that’s not the case. The climbers are all good—definitely better than me—but not that much better.

In the second-to-last episode, the four remaining contestants climb a four-pitch, 5.11c. It’s a climb totally within my range, although, I’m sure they all did it much faster than I could. In the last episode, the winner of the competition essentially on-sites a 5.12b (climbs it on the first try, with no falls). I’ve never done that, but also I have climbed a 12b—it just takes me a bunch more tries.

The point is, the show is about very good climbers trying to get better—not super elite climbers to whom it’s difficult to relate. It was super refreshing to see since it’s in stark contrast to a lot of the recent climbing documentaries, namely Free Solo, The Alpinist, and The Dawn Wall.

3. Men, women, and trans all together, in one competition

It’s clear the producers aimed to get a diverse group on the show: men, women, old, young, black, white, and trans. What’s cool about the sport of climbing is that this actually works as a competition, and in fact, it’s not that big of a deal, or really even a factor. Not to give too many spoilers, but I assure you that none of the details of a contestant’s gender, race, or age are much help at all in predicting the outcome.

This is part of what I love about climbing. I can show up to pretty much any gym in the world, and it won’t be surprising to see both a 13-year-old girl and a 50-year-old man climbing harder than me. Race, gender, age, and sexual identity just don’t have much to do with performance. Ok maybe age—but age still pales as a factor in comparison to technique, strength, mental toughness, and other factors.

Granted, it is good to be tall most of the time, but then certain moves also lend themselves better to shorter people. Maybe it’s good to have a lot of upper body strength on some kinds of climbs, but I’d trade strength for better footwork any day. You can see this on the show, with the super muscly guy having problems in some places, but thriving in others, and the woman with a good head game excelling where others who might be stronger or have better technique struggle.

It’s good to be lean and lithe, and to have mental toughness and good technique—but it just doesn’t necessarily help to be any particular gender or identity.

I think that’s pretty cool.

4. They showcased all the different kinds of climbing

This perhaps is one of the greatest services the show did for the sport. As he mentions a few times, Sharma’s intent is to find the best all around climber, which means exposing them to as many different styles and types of challenges as possible.

So we get to see almost everything: hard bouldering problems, sport climbing (even projecting), a long multi-pitch, a heady trad lead, and even deep water soloing. Sharma takes us on a tour of everything outdoor climbing has to offer, and every style, from low-angle slab, to overhanging jug hauls, to crimpy, cruxy beta-intensive faces, and my favorite: a long, skin-punishing, masochistic crack climb.

I say outdoor climbing, because the show rarely goes into a climbing gym, thank God. This, despite the fact that all modern day climbing competitions take place on fake, plastic holds, and also despite the fact that Sharma himself owns two gyms. There is one brief sequence where two climbers facing elimination have to outrace each other on a standard speed route up an indoor wall in Sharma’s Barcelona gym, but aside from those few minutes, the show remains blessedly, gratefully outdoors.

And why not? Spain is utterly gorgeous (At one point, a sweeping opening arial shot even captured a specific crag I climbed on in Siurana last November). They also go to Wadi Rum in Jordan for a few episodes, a nice detour to get some limestone and other geology into the show.

Whereas I’ve run into more than a few civilians who think climbing is about free soloing because they saw Free Solo, The Climb shows the actual diversity of the sport’s many styles, and how each can challenge different climbers in different ways.

5. Chris Sharma represents the best of climbing and climbers

Cards on the table: Chris Sharma is my climbing hero. I already think he represents an ethic and a lifestyle worth paying attention to, whether or not you climb.

Last November, my son and I happened to ran into Sharma in Siurana on our last day of climbing. My son even took a selfie with him. It was the perfect cap to an amazing trip.

Later, I wrote that part of what I admire about Sharma’s approach to climbing is that he pursues routes not only because they’re hard, but because they’re beautiful and inspiring to him personally:

Aesthetic lines. Arches above the ocean. Perfect cracks. Overhanging cliffs inside cathedrals… Sharma eventually coined the term King Lines— “iconic routes that inspired him to spend the months and even years needed to climb them.” Today, Sharma embodies a kind of zen ’d-out, intrinsically-motivated, guru-like love for the sport.

In The Climb, it’s evident the other climbers feel the same way about him as I do. He is not just guru, but coach, mentor, tour guide, and friend.

There’s a telling sequence in one of the early episodes, when a climber who has already qualified for the next round decides to jump off a deep water solo climb, rather than waste more energy pushing to the top. It’s the kind of strategic gamesmanship that in other sports, or in other settings, would be totally expected of a competitor to get an edge. Par for the course.

But Sharma has none of it. Later over dinner, he calls out the climber in front of the entire group for not giving the climb his all, for not trying his hardest. In his usual “just one man’s opinion” totally chill voice (but also the voice of a climbing legend they all look up to), Sharma admonishes him to respect the show, his fellow climbers, and the sport itself by always trying his hardest, always giving it his all.

The scene is emblematic of why climbing is more than a sport, and the show is more than a simple competition. Climbing really can be a way of life, and if it’s a way of life, you need to decide how to live it, and by what ethic: not half-assed or simply to beat others, but to find your own limits, to know in your own heart you tried your hardest, to be sure that you took the highest possible advantage of every opportunity given to you.

Anyway—he was a good guy, the climber. But from then on, neither him nor anyone else would dare do anything to disappoint Sharma. Moments like that—and shows like this—are how ethics get communicated from one generation to the next, and it was wonderful to see.

And then, on the ninth day, I knew it was almost the end. The next day, my son and I would fly back to the U.S. He would go back to school, I would turn my attention back to client work, and there would be three weeks in Bethesda where the mountains and all the beauty and charms of Catalunya would again be far away. This small community of climbing friends would disperse. None of us looked forward to the return.

The trip was special almost from the beginning. My friend Jordi—I’ve written about him before—organized it among friends to test out the idea of a business that brings groups of climbers to Catalunya to climb. I didn’t know everyone who was going, but I knew that if they were friends of Jordi, they would be good people all, some of the best.

The first afternoon, he organized a welcome lunch at a place outside Reus. It was his father’s favorite restaurant (actually a commercial kitchen next to a town pool that can be rented out for private events), and so the fourteen of us—ten guests, Jordi and his brother Xavier, plus their parents—drank bottle after bottle of local wine and vermouth and dined on some of the best paella any of us had ever tasted in our life:

After, we drove the windy mountain roads to the house where we’d stay for the next nine days, a gigantic villa just outside the town of Cornudella de Montsant:

For the rest of the week, we climbed. First, to Margalef, with its conglomerate cliffs and pockets cobbled together eons ago. Conglomerate was a new style for me, different from the rails and corners of New Hampshire. Half the effort here was to pick from the dozens of odd-shaped, different-sized pockets, fighting a slowly-increasing pump in your forearms as you pinch the sides of each one on your way up searching for the best grip.

We climbed until dark, as we did every day, and as the sun set over the canyon we all began to snap the first pictures in a series we knew would never do the views the justice they deserved:

On the third day, we climbed at Siurana. It’s an almost mythical place in my mind, and in those of many climbers. We grew up hearing about it, usually in connection to legends like Chris Sharma, one of the earliest climbers to start routinely filming (and thus popularizing) what a life devoted to climbing could look like. Siurana is also known for epically hard, overhanging sport routes like La Rambla.

On the list of best sport climbing crags in the world, Siurana is almost always going to be in the top five. To me, it feels like a cathedral. The limestone cliffs are arranged in an elongated, u-shaped configuration. The orange and brown ribbon-shaped bands of rock layered into each cliff are the stained-glass windows. The sun setting to the west is the chandelier. The climbers who come are the congregants.

Whatever your idea of beauty bordering on the divine in this world, mine is epitomized by cliffs like these. Again, a photo cannot quite do it justice:

We climbed at El Pati, a crag on the right-hand side looking in from the road. Jordi and Franky, a young crusher from New Hampshire, had just finished a 7b+, when we noticed a certain someone climbing next to us—an unassuming, quiet 19-year-old from South Korea named Chaehyun Seo.

One of the top five female climbers in the world.

I knew her from a hundred IFSC climbing competition videos on YouTube. I had watched her machine-like, level-headed precision inching her up a hundred competition sport climbs and earning her countless World Cup climbing medals.

Jordi talked to her for a few minutes. This was a warmup climb. She was there to project La Rambla, he said. She’d been at it a few days, with ten more before she had to return home.

Only 27 people in the world had ever climbed La Rambla, and only one woman—Margo Hayes in 2017. The climb has its own Wikipedia entry, which I scrutinized later and from where I’m basing the information here. Many of us climbers think of La Rambla as the first 15a in the world—an important milestone in sport climbing history—but in fact, it was the second, after Biographie at Céüse in France. Later, over beers, I raised the question with the group why so many of us thought of La Rambla as the first, and I think it’s because we had all watched an early video of Chris Sharma working on its ascent (similarly, we all had an idea of Sharma being the first to climb it—actually he was the third). As is the case in so many areas, those who popularize a thing often have their name attached to it in the public consciousness.

It was an incredible treat to watch Chaehyun warm up. But we had no idea what was coming. A few hours later, we walked around the corner to see Chaehyun starting up La Rambla. We figured we would see her mostly hanging on the rope, sorting out the moves, considering the sequence, “projecting” the route until she was ready to make a full attempt to climb it clean from the ground—a send. The thing only 27 people had ever done before her.

But then, as she started from the ground, slowly, deliberately, choosing her rests, moving with purpose, it became clear she was on a send attempt. She was going for it.

Here we were in the cathedral, but instead of bowed heads, we had craned necks. La Rambla is steeply overhanging the entire way. It starts in a 14b crack, then juts to the left onto even steeper ground, where the limestone turns from burnt orange into a dirty black.

All around Siurana, from every cliff that was in view, climbers stopped what they were doing to look. We sat below our respective routes and watched utter beauty of movement in front of us. We had tingles. We whispered in hushed tones. This is special. This is a gift. This is so, so fucking cool.

Later that day, Chaehyun announced the send herself:

Send it on my 7th try was just amazing! It’s been one of my biggest dream in my climbing life and I still can’t believe that what happened today🥹 Second female ascent for this route❤️‍🔥

Thank you for giving me huge cheering, was just awesome😜

I was one of the cheering. We all knew what we had just seen was special—one of the very best climbers in the world climbing one of the absolute hardest routes in the world.

But this is the beauty and the magic of the sport. If you are at the crags, you will run into someone. It was that way at Potrero Chico in Mexico in 2012, where I and another group shared the campground with none other than Alex Honold. He wasn’t world-famous just then—only climber famous. Nearly every climber who has spent significant time outdoors has a similar story. They were at such and such a place, just out for a day of climbing, when a certain word-class climber was also working on some hard project next door. Honold? Yea, he’s super friendly, they’d recount.

It is part of what I love about climbing, among many things: the rock is egalitarian. It is the great equalizer. You don’t have to be famous to show up at Siurana, you just have to love climbing. And you just may be there to watch Chaehyun Seo send one of the most famous climbs in the world.

This kind of serendipity is specific to sports where the playground is a specific place in the natural world. You have to go to the cliff to climb the cliff. In other sports, there is a built environment, and it becomes segregated. Exclusive. LeBron never just shows up at the local basketball court to work on his jump shot. Messi doesn’t bum around to different soccer fields to practice his penalty kicks. But then, neither do people who love playing soccer. The other sports just don’t work the same way.

But climbing does. We all share the rock, we all share the crag—it is a cathedral for all of us, a place we come to practice our own version of worship.

On Thanksgiving, after four days of climbing, we rested, our bodies sore, the skin on our fingers shredded. We walked around Cornudella de Montsant, bought wine at the local cooperative, had a coffee at one of the cafes, and played some soccer in the plaza:

There was so much to give thanks for. Health, climbing, friends. The good life.

Later, we set the large table in the dining room of the villa and feasted. Everyone contributed. I cooked a bread pudding. Jordi’s mom cooked a turkey. Roast vegetables, stuffing, a cranberry sauce. We had it all. Franky spent five hours the night before and the morning of making four pumpkin pies from scratch—he said the crux move was improvising a mortar and pestle to crush the cloves.

In the evenings, we drank wine and vermouth and talked about the day’s climbing, or what we were planning for tomorrow. There was no politics, little talk of work. For my son, it was a baptism into a different world—not just Catalunya, but a group of adults who had oriented their life around a passion, one that comes with certain values: not climbing a career ladder, or money, or social status.

Two of the nights evolved into dance parties. Some, we stopped for beers and pizza at Goma 2, a bar attached to a climbing gear shop (the place rakes it in). Other nights, we binged old climbing videos from the 90s on the big TV at the house. There was Sharma, a fresh-faced kid probably not more than 15 years old, bouldering and waxing poetic about flow and how he feels just thinking about the rock right in front of him.

Part of what we admire about Sharma is a certain purity of intent. As a teenager, he’d been into competition climbing and had been one of the best in the world—but he’d also become burned out. He considered quitting climbing. He went on Buddhist pilgrimages. He moved to Spain (Siurana is his home crag). He abandoned competition climbing and instead pursued lines that spoke to him. Aesthetic lines. Arches above the ocean. Perfect cracks. Overhanging cliffs inside cathedrals. According to his Wikipedia page, Sharma eventually coined the term King Lines— “iconic routes that inspired him to spend the months and even years needed to climb them.” Today, Sharma embodies a kind of zen ’d-out, intrinsically-motivated, guru-like love for the sport. He practices climbing at its highest level—is he also practicing life at its highest level?

On the last day, we went back to Siurana. My mind had begun to turn to the trip home, and I was climbing with a certain resignation. It all felt very bittersweet.

We were warming up across the road from the main area when a text came from Jordi into our group chat:

The one and only in El Pati. Trying “Sleeping Lion”.

His brother wanted to clarify… One and only? And Jordi replied:

Sharma.

He was over where Chaehyun had been a few days earlier, gearing up to work on a new project. We finished our climbs and walked over. My son rushed. Xavier encouraged him to go introduce himself. He sat down next to him and posed for a picture. He asked for a selfie. Chris, as friendly and chill as everyone who has ever met him reports, was happy to take one:

It was the perfect last-day capstone to an unforgettable climbing trip.

As the sun began to set over the cliffs, I began to wonder if I could change our tickets. Stay another week, perhaps. I’d have to talk to my kid’s mom and to his school. I’d have to find other lodging. But maybe? Jordi would still be here, and so would Franky. We could climb with them. There were more cliffs to see, more of Cornudella to experience.

The last of the oranges and reds of the sunset cascaded down, and we again tried to capture the moment. The phones won’t do it, I said. We need a poet. Still, we stood on the side of the windy road where it met the trailhead, trying to grasp and absorb all the beauty we possibly could before it ended and we flew home. The vans and cars from higher up the mountain swerved around us on their way down the hill. We should get off the road, I said, as the last of it faded into darkness. And we walked back to the parking lot, to the van, to wait for the rest of the team.

Once I got service back on my phone, I brought up our flights and searched for a way to change them. Service has been cut back, the United Airlines site told me. Flights may be limited. There was nothing for at least a week. But at least one thing was clear—I would be coming back. As soon as I could manage.

Coming soon:

• Thoughts on choosing between Spain, Italy, and Greece

• Property-hunting in Cornudella de Montsant

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Anything is possible. You just have to set your sights on the goal. Make a vision board. See yourself doing the thing. Envision it in your head. Believe that it’s possible, and it will happen.

This kind of power of positive thinking stuff is—how shall I say—not for me.

And yet as rock climbing has exploded in popularity over the past 5-10 years, sometimes it seems a new generation of just believe-in-yourself thinkers has suddenly flooded the climbing gyms and shown up at the crags.

They’re the ones who are incessantly calling up to their friends who are on a climb, “you can do it!” when in fact they have no idea if their friend can do it, since they themselves have never been on the climb and probably just met this person at a Meetup.

Look, the facts are these: climbing up a hard, vertical rock formed by a million years of uncaring geology is not simply a matter of believing in yourself. Y’all are new here, so my advice is to maybe get to work on cultivating the very real strength, technique, focus, and mental toughness that it takes to climb, and climb hard and well and with grace—and then you can start to get back to relentless positive encouragement.

My friend Jordi is brilliant at straddling this ground. He’s great at paying attention to your climbing style and then suggesting a goal that is just enough to stretch your ability and make you a better climber. And, he is relentlessly stoked and encouraging about your capacity to try hard and do it. But the thing is Jordi knows you the climber and the climb he has suggested as a goal. His positivity is directly anchored to reality—it’s not bandied about as some all-purpose tool to magically generate results and good feelings.

One time not long ago I was climbing with someone new to Rumney (so they’d never been on the climb I was attempting, and they didn’t know anything about my climbing ability), and at the first sign of struggle on my part, they called up to me, “you can do it!” I stopped, hung on the rope, looked down at them, and in my best joking fun voice said, “you don’t know! You have no idea if I can do it!” They took it in the spirit I had intended, and we both laughed and continued on.

In my climbing, as in my life, I’ve always strived not to delude myself in my abilities, and there’s nothing less attractive to me than someone else deluding themselves about theirs.

When I don’t know if I can do something, that’s exactly what I tell myself: that I don’t know. And if I know for sure something is out of my depth—that a climb is way harder than I’m capable of this week, or this season—I don’t pretend that if only I just believed in myself that those facts would magically change.

And yet… so it was that I had all of this deeply engrained commitment to what I “know” about my own abilities suddenly challenged. The past few weekends I’ve been climbing with someone new, and far, far better climber than me. She was psyched to work on a climb called King Cobra, rated 5.13b. I’d never even been on a 13. My highest red point (climbing clean on lead with no falls) to date had been a 5.12a/b—and three years ago I hadn’t climbed anything harder than a 5.10c.

I’d come a long way, but still: getting to 12b, the next grade up, was proving difficult. I’d tried a few already this season and still hadn’t been able to send.

The plan for the day was to belay her on King Cobra, and then she would catch me on British Airways, a towering 12b arete a few climbs over. It’s long, with a cruxy compression move out to the arete and a looming pump factor on hard, crimpy moves at the top—moves I’d watched a much stronger climber than me twice fall on a few days earlier. Still, I felt like it was within reach if I could build some endurance and climb smooth.

Unfortunately, as we got to the crag and I looked up at the arete jutting from the beautiful black- and orange-streaked rock, I saw the whole top of the climb was soaked. Two days of rain earlier was still seeping down over the crimps on the upper slab section—there was no way I could hope to send.

I had to find another climb, and the only obvious candidate was directly next to King Cobra: a wickedly hard, technical, slanting traverse called Anaconda da Vida, rated 12d. The climb was two and a half grades higher than anything I’d ever climbed. Still: maybe I could try hard and hope to not embarrass myself. It was a beautiful October day after all, and I was out enjoying it, climbing and strong, healthy and alive.

That first day of trying, I had no belief. The aim was to sort out some moves and maybe build some finger strength, but mainly just to give her a good belay on King Cobra.

The second day, I got a little obsessed. Her stoke was rubbing off on me, and I put in more tries than I ordinarily would on something so out of my range. Also, I’d suddenly become very interested in the crux move, the hardest part of the climb. it was a balancy bump with the left hand to a terrible, oddly angled crimp on ridiculously tiny feet. The first four times I’d fallen trying to do it, but it was the fifth or sixth try when finally my left hand stuck, my feet held, and I was able to shift my body weight ever so slightly to set up for the next move.

Still, just being able to do the one hard move once did not mean the climb was within reach. After the slanting rail, there was a scary, heady lead up through a roof, and then a second roof. At the end of the second day, I couldn’t see how I could possibly have the endurance to string everything together. Maybe a section here or there, but not the whole thing. The climb was very, very hard.

On day three, I came out with another partner. He’d seen me climbing strong, but not this strong. He was encouraging about the progress I’d made on the crux, but also realistic about how hard the whole thing was. On my first go, I climbed through the difficult and tiring lower section but ran out of steam just before the crux move. I hung, rested, did the hard left bump to the crimp again, then worked up to the first roof.

Then, as I was moving up, something deep in my memory clicked—an image from the year before, of my friend, working the same climb—she had moved left just below the roof—a simple traverse, to a rest—a pause, to regain some strength before pulling through the upper sections. A break in the climb.

I stepped left, reached my hand around a blind corner, felt a juggy bulge of rock, and stepped over onto a deep, slightly slanted ledge. It was a mondo rest. Gigantic. What we call no-hands. I could more or less just stand there indefinitely. I could get it all back. All the strength and pump and effort expended on the lower traverse section, I could regain.

Suddenly, Anaconda wasn’t one, long endurance climb that I could never hope to string together; it was now broken into two sections, with a major rest in between.

Holy shit. Maybe I could do this.

There, midway up the climb, my belief did a 180. A full pivot. I definitely could not do it before—and now, I maybe could do it. I could maybe even do it today. I hadn’t believed in myself. Now, I wanted to fucking go for it.

On the next attempt, I climbed smooth. Focused, deep, my breath calm, everything in sync. I got passed the crux, finished the traverse, and then—just below the rest—my foot slipped. It was a heartbreaker. I’d fallen not because I’d been too tired, or because I couldn’t do a move, but just from a foot pop. It happens., but I was upset. I was upset because I was so close. I could feel it. Taste it. A 12d! It was within reach.

I lowered and rested for an hour. I had one more burn in me, one more attempt before my muscles quit and the light faded. This time was as before: my breathing smooth, all grace, all footwork, all commitment. My head fully in the game. I bumped to the crimp, shifted feet, leaned into the rail, got to the clipping jug after the crux. I breathed, calmed my heart rate, shook the pump from my forearms, and prepared for the last scary roof move before the rest: right foot up, reach to the crimp, over to the horn, to the side-pull, to the under-cling, clip the rope, step left, grab the jug, and I was there. Rest… keep it together, don’t fuck up, and send.

As I pulled the final roof, moved up the slab, and clipped the final chains, the endorphins rushed in. I let out a scream and all the emotions flowed.

I’d just done something that just a few days earlier I hadn’t thought was possible. I’d tried just to try, and now my entire framework for what I was capable of had shifted. Everything about my goals and physical limits were being recalibrated. And later, as I enjoyed a send beer with friends and smiled a wide smile, I had to wonder: what if I had just believed in myself from the start?

It was cool and fresh outside, not yet dripping wet with humidity. The sun was out, the temperature just right.

Except that I’d been up since four. Bad dream. Something about a female tattoo artist pricking my arm with ink before we’d agreed on what the design would be. I kept telling her to stop, but she kept going, and finally, I got out of there, although not before she’d left four little black dots on my arm.

“She left her mark!” Leanne said later when I told her about it.

I was early, so I brought up the Mountain Project app on my phone and started thinking about where we could go. We didn’t have much time—I had to be in a meeting by 11—so I searched for something not too far.

About a week earlier, we had been at 5.8 Crag, down the easy path along the road, where there’s a 12b called Pump Up the Volume. After a few tries, the route beta on the crux sequence was still shrouded in mystery to me: too much chalk, too many options, all of them on sharp, precise crimps or slopey desperate gastons, all of which felt horrible.

On Mountain Project, I went searching for help, and there in the comments, someone had posted a link to a YouTube video. About four moves in, my eyes lit up: there it was, right at the start of the crux: the climber in the video was using a new hold I hadn’t seen before. Neither of us had. It wasn’t chalked—it wasn’t even visible from the ground. But there it was, some kind of finger pocket that enabled a new sequence: a bump to an intermediate hold, then a re-arranging of the feet, then a long span out to the good crimp toward the end of the crux.

Suddenly, I was excited. I’ve been trying on a few 12b’s this season, but haven’t sent any yet. If I do, it’d be my hardest grade ever.

Leanne pulled up next to me in the parking lot and we both got out—I showed her the video of Pump Up the Volume. Look! Right there. I pointed to the climber as she grabbed the new hold. Leanne’s eyes, like mine, lit up, and a wide smile spread across her face. We had our plan for the day.

Priorities that day—and in life

When my relationship of 10 years ended in May, I went through a few stages of grief right away—then I went to my New Hampshire house to climb. I needed the therapy.

Now, I’m here for the rest of the Summer. Climbing is still therapy (it always has been) but it’s also just doing what I love. I’m a mile from the Rumney crags, with a thousand sport routes, and dozens of classic 11s and 12s beckoning me to come try hard, sort out the sequence, get strong, and send. The mountains are here, the swimming hole across the street is here, the garden, and the puppy, and the beers in the fridge—

What is not here, in rural New Hampshire, is a particularly viable dating market.

And that’s totally fine with me—for now.

As Leanne and I warmed up on some easier routes, I mentioned feeling a little transient. Earlier in the Summer, I’d been to New Zealand for almost a month to see my sister and her kids. Then I’d been at my house outside DC for two weeks, sorting out the jetlag and putting my head down on client work.

Now, I was here in New Hampshire. Later, when my son’s school starts, I’d go back to DC, then maybe to Spain, then to Mexico in the winter. It’s a nomadic lifestyle I have planned, and here I’ve just renamed my newsletter—I was supposed to be Post-Nomad. Not bouncing from place to place, but investing in relationships, in community. But how could I invest in relationships if I kept telling people that I’d be leaving soon?

Actually: Leanne felt the same way. Her work as a travel nurse plops her at a new hospital, in a new city, every few months. She takes assignments that are near climbing areas, she quickly finds partners to climb, builds friendships, and then… on to a new place.

Are you feeling like you should settle down? I asked.

I don’t know. Maybe? But then… mostly I just want to climb!

We were done with the warmups, and ready to go over to Pump Up the Volume and try out the new beta.

She told me about everything that climbing gives in her life, and how important those things were. I knew exactly. The point, for both of us, was that we’d made climbing the priority, not just for today, but in life.

She could stay in one place long enough to develop something deeper and longer lasting with someone—so could I. But that would mean giving up the next climbing trip, the next kiting trip. And I’m not gonna do that. Not yet.

We all have our passions

To an outsider, climbers can feel a little extreme about their chosen passion. Maybe they’ve seen Free Solo (completely unrepresentative), or maybe they had a fling with some long-haired climber dude who couldn’t stop talking about his “projects.” Maybe they’re scared of heights (news flash: we all are).

Honestly: they don’t understand. First of all, climbing is no more extreme than skiing, and with less possibility of serious injury, if you ask me. But second, Leanne and I were prioritizing the rock because it gave us everything we both needed—almost. She was there on her day off and I was there at 7 on a weekday because this is the way each of us most wanted to spend our time in the world.

Climbing is my therapy, yes, but also my meditation and my exercise. It is my outdoor time and my social time. My reminder to be humble, that no matter how good you are, there is always something that will kick your ass. Climbing urges me toward gratitude: for nature, for my work that enabled me to buy this house and which allows me to spend time in this place. Gratitude for my climbing friends and for my health. I eat well to climb, I stay lean to climb, and I try not to drink too much so that I can climb.

A story: in college, I ripped up my ACLs pretty good on a long, heavy backpacking trip. The injury stayed with me. On long car trips and airplane rides in my 20s, my knees would begin to ache painfully around hour two. In my early 30s, when I briefly gave up climbing, my knees started to really hurt: up and down stairs, even walking on flat ground for anything more than a few hundred meters. I went to PT, got an x-ray, was told my knee joints were just prone to this kind of pain. I was handed exercises to do to strengthen the ligaments—I didn’t do them, at least not well enough. Then I started climbing again. Within three months, the pain was 80 percent gone. Within six months, it was completely gone, and I was back to being able to live, to being able to walk up staircases without wincing. I was back to hiking New Hampshire’s 4,000-footers with my kiddo.

Rock climbing is, quite literally, a prophylactic that is saving me from a lifetime of chronic pain. (And, it may even be good for civilization).

But that’s just me.

We all have our passions, which lead to our priorities, which lead us to choose how to spend our time on this earth. For digital nomads, it’s usually travel. A desire to see things, experience things, maybe learn new languages, meet new people. The relationships we develop in that kind of lifestyle can be powerful—I know, I’ve been there. But often their power comes from the transcience itself. You are two people, alone and together, in a foreign country, and the music is playing… so why not have tonight?

I’ve had many friendships develop over the years on trips, only to never see the person again. Maybe they are on the Insta, and maybe a DM is offered here and there. But it’s not the same. We have all made it our priority to be somewhere else, and not with each other.

The narrow space

I offered to go first—hang the quickdraws so Leanne could give it the first real proper attempt. I had faith: I’d watched her knock out super hard and technical climbs before. Maybe—just maybe—if I hung the draws, she’d be able to send with the new beta.

I got to the crux and found the hidden finger pocket from the video. It was sharp and awkwardly shaped, but unambiguously a better hold than anything we’d been grasping around on last time. But the rest of the sequence was still a struggle.

We brought up the video again, and watched and did what climbers do: left foot up to the ledge, right foot flags, reach for the pocket. Right hand to the gaston intermediate. Rearrange the feet, right up, left out to the horn. Then, the long reach to the crimp.

The next time up, I imitated perfectly—everything except the long reach. I could touch it, just not stick it. But, for the first time, it was all there. The feeling that it might just go. The excitement at a new high point. The rewiring of neurons in my brain to dial in the sequence, the tendons in my fingers strengthening themselves for the hard crimps, the puzzling out of the problem, and the endorphin rush of progress on a short, small, contained piece of vertical rock that had seemed impassable a moment before.

The thing is, I do want to date again. I want to find a partner who will share with me in life’s hardships and in all its adventure and beauty. But, for now, I’ve left a very narrow space in which that could happen. Because my priority is being on that rock, or being out in the waves and wind. Or, hanging with Jordi—the most psyched and joyful climbing partner I’ve ever known, who is organizing a trip to Spain in a few months’ time. I’ve told him I’ll be there. And I’ve told my kitesurfing friends that I will be in La Ventana this January and February.

These are my priorities.

But, there is a sacrifice being made here. I’m not blind to that. It’s important to me to have a partner, to share life with someone. Most people feel the same, and then they don’t take steps to actually create the space for that to happen. Things will not develop if you’re not there for them to develop.

For now, that’s fine with me.

Leanne, on her second tie-in, reached up left for the finger pocket. Then right hand to the intermediate—then right foot, then left out to the horn. Her reach is slightly less than mine, so she might go to a sidepull before the good crimp. Or, having the foot locked into the horn and her finger strength in the pocket might be enough to rotate the shoulders and reach all the way. But we’ll have to see next time. The sun was rising, the humidity was coming, and I had a meeting to get to.

We walked back to the parking lot, both psyched, both ready to come right back at the earliest opportunity. Our endorphins rushed, the anticipation seeded in our joints and muscles and in our neurons, giving us something to churn in our subconscious, a few more hard tries to look forward to. We’d made progress—

Just at that moment, climbing was giving us everything we needed.

I wrote about Bryce last week, the Kiwi from 20 years ago who casually leaned back and declared, “I reckon New Zealand is paradise” — the owner of a climbing hostel and shop and guiding business in the middle of the North Island. Bryce, who had been seated into memory through a week of climbing adventure with my buddy Zach, and late-night debates about politics as we drank beer after beer.

My son was skeptical. So you’re just gonna pull up?

Yes.

And you don’t know if he’s even there?

Correct.

And this was twenty years ago…

Exactly.

So he probably doesn’t even remember you.

Probably not.

My son was anxious to get to the Waitomo caves, where we would don wetsuits and go on a three-hour underground adventure to see the glowworms. I was anxious to see if Bryce was still there after all these years, and if so, what he was doing with his days.

The first time I’d come with Zach, we’d hitchhiked from the Te Awamutu bus station 17 miles away based off directions Bryce had given us over the phone. This time, I pulled up in a rented Mazda Demios, Google maps pointing the way. The sign was still there: Bryce’s Rock Climbing Gym, with the URL underneath.

We got out of the car, put on our masks, walked over to the shop, and went in.

There he was: masked, but unmistakably Bryce. Stout, bald, and strong. A customer he was talking to thanked him and walked out, and Bryce welcomed us —

For the next twenty minutes, I told him about my memories, we walked around the shop, and I asked him about his life, the business, and the past twenty years. He asked if I still climbed. All the time, I said. I asked him if he still climbed. And that’s when he started talking about legacy.

I remembered Bryce as a competitive sport climber who would lie to us about grades to push us to climb harder, and who relished mocking anyone who he perceived as not going all in. He was a tough love kinda guy, with a dry humor.

But now the years had moderated him, and his interests had changed (though his humor hadn’t). He wasn’t into sport climbing so much anymore, Bryce told me. He was into development. New routes.

Nowadays, Bryce likes to go by himself (“I like my own company”) to a new cliff, one that’s never been climbed by anybody. He sits, he makes himself a coffee on a portable stove, and he looks at the unclimbed rock. He studies it, he visualizes, and he starts to piece together where a route might go.

New route development—as far as I can gather, since I’ve never done it myself—is a high art form combined with serious craft, not to mention the cost of gear to place each route. Bryce described the process as intensely creative, but also requiring “broad shoulders,” i.e., the shouldering of lots of responsibility, combined with a thick skin. As a route developer, every climber who comes after may have an opinion about the work you did, the climb you created, and the decisions you made. Whether to place a bolt here or there, why you took the left sequence and not the right, how you let it get a little too run-out at just the wrong spot.

But Bryce said nothing is more satisfying to him, at this stage in his life, than creating something new that will be climbed for decades to come. Anyone who just walks up to a sport climb, gives it a few goes, or tries hard and then leaves, is just a “bolt clipper,” he said, with not a little disdain. They come, they go, and they leave nothing behind.

I asked Bryce how old he was, if he didn’t mind saying. He is 70. I don’t know exactly how many routes he has personally established but it’s at least in the hundreds, and it could be more. According to his website, there are 800 routes walking distance to his place, and more than 2,500 within an hour’s drive. Many of those were his first ascents—I remember that much from the guidebook 20 years ago that he wrote. Bryce named and gave most of these climbs their route descriptions. But it’s clear Bryce felt his real legacy was the climbs he created out of nothing, and that hundreds and thousands of climbers would come to climb after.

I resolved to learn this art, learn the craft, and invest the time and money. Climbing can sometimes seem a little frivolous, though I believe the sport to be nearly transcendent—important for civilization, even.

Yet even with it’s strengths, Bryce is right: most climbers come, climb, go, and leave nothing behind. Some, like me, donate annually to Access Fund, the national organization dedicated to protecting land access for climbers (if you consider yourself a climber and cannot spare at least $50/year for Access Fund, then shame on you). Others serve on the boards of local organizations, like the Rumney Climbers Association, dedicating their time to ensuring the areas are well-managed. They supervise the maintenance and replacement of old bolts and anchors, raise money to build and maintain trails, and negotiate for access to new and existing areas, or purchase land to ensure access.

But there are an even more select few who develop climbing areas in the first place. I ran into one of these climbers, Lee Hansche, just a few weeks ago in Rumney. Lee (and many friends, it should be noted) spent much of the pandemic developing a new area, coincidentally called Russell Crags, just a short drive toward the mountains. In fact, the friend who I was climbing with that day had just been to Russell Crags, and came back with rave reviews, which he passed along to Lee.

Lee gave me some beta on the 12b I was struggling on, called Jedi Mind Tricks (first ascent: Ward Smith; route description on Mountain Project submitted by none other than Lee Hansche), and then he continued on down the trail.

Climbers like me owe climbers like Lee and Bryce an enormous debt of gratitude. Their legacies are there, in New Hampshire, in New Zealand, glued and bolted into place, and will be for years to come.

I asked Bryce if he’d ever considered retiring. Nah, he said. What would he do, sit in an old person’s home? Dream about the bolts he clipped in the past? No—he’d rather be there at the shop, having conversations like the one we were having just then.

It was time to go, our appointment for the cave adventure was drawing near. I asked Bryce what I should buy from the shop before I left. He took a deep breath, and said I should buy a book. Over in the corner he had a crate of used ones. I walked over and picked out an old volume by Peter Matthiessen I hadn’t seen before.

He’s never written anything bad, eh?

No, he hasn’t, I said.

I paid Bryce the 15 NZD, and I told him I wanted to get into route development back in New Hampshire. He gave me his email and told me to write him. If he’s ever in the area, he said, he’ll look forward to getting on one of my climbs.

You can’t help but feel Dani’s excitement and get excited yourself. Football is life, Dani says over and again:

The beauty and power of Season 1 of Ted Lasso lie in its earnestness, its strait-down-the-middle assertion that people are inherently good. Released in August of 2020, Ted Lasso was almost radical in its positivity. It was a show about believing in yourself and others, at a time when no one wanted to believe anything.

The show chips away at cynicism, yours and mine, scene by scene, episode by episode, until you, even you, are on board, rooting for them, believing in them, and knowing, just knowing, that no matter what happens in the end, belief is better non-belief. Optimism is better than cynicism.

Ted, the coach, personifies American optimism, and the show is ostensibly about his clash with UK cynicism. Meanwhile, football-is-life Dani Rojas personifies pure joy and love for the sport.

I really love Ted Lasso Season 1 (can’t speak for Season 2… it lost me a few episodes in), and soccer is indeed a great sport—perhaps the greatest. But with all due respect to Dani, I believe rock climbing is life.

Not only is rock climbing life, but I have a friend in New Hampshire, also, coincidentally a Spaniard, whose pure love for the sport is infectious to all around him in precisely the same way as Rojas’ love for soccer inspires his teammates. His name is Jordi, and Jordi: this one’s for you.

Your love for climbing—your psych—makes all of us want to climb stronger, reach higher, try just once more, and try hard.

Climbing is nothing if not an internal struggle, a battle against your own fear, a measure of you against yourself. I love it because it is totally committing mentally, physically, and technically, and when something is so committing in all those areas it produces flow, and flow borders on the spiritual.

Climbing creates the same imperative to be present (and for that matter to pay attention to your breath) that is taught through meditation, or through other spiritual practices. I’ve even written how climbing is important for civilization itself.

The only other sport I’ve ever heard spoken of in this way is surfing, and indeed surfing seems to combine many of the same all-committing, you-against-your-fear, physical and mental skills that climbing does. In rock climbing, you commune with the rock, with mountains, with elemental forces; in surfing, you commune with powerful, elemental forces of the ocean and the waves.

What climbing has that surfing doesn’t (IMHO) is the need for a partner. This is a crucial distinction because when you need a partner, you need a community, and the climbing community is a special thing. Surfing is competitive with others—there is only so much space on that one, perfect wave. But climbing is cooperative. We all know we are all in this individually, and together.

To climb with Jordi at Rumney Rocks, a mile from my home in New Hampshire, is to experience the height of what a climbing community can be. Simply put, Jordi knows almost everyone. He’s climbed with them, he’s gotten psyched with them, projected with them, laughed, traded beta, shared a beer, or shared a ride. If you need a partner, he’ll connect you to someone he knows who might be going that day. If you need a project, he knows the perfect, next climb for you to get stoked on, and then his stoke becomes your stoke.

I once walked with Jordi from one end of the Rumney climbing area to another, passing six or seven crags along the way, and at every single crag on a random Fall day, Jordi knew someone and stopped to say hi. Everyone knows Jordi, because Jordi’s love for climbing is infectious and unforgettable. You want to be around it.

His love convinces you, climb by climb, day by day, inevitably, that climbing is life. I’m heading back to New Hampshire tomorrow, to get one more week of climbing in before heading to New Zealand for a month to see my sister and her family. It’s the last time I’ll see Jordi before he finally moves on from Rumney to other climbing areas and crags, and then back to Spain.

So, I will savor his company. Jordi: you are a true joy to be around, and I couldn’t be more grateful that you have been in my climbing life for the past two years. Thanks buddy 🧗 🤜🏼 🤟🏼.

P.S. By the way, Jordi has a new YouTube channel, Unsung Climbers. Check it out.

We walked over to the Hidrogliser wall, which was properly shaded from the Croatian sun and slightly off the main park path, thinking we might get some quiet. But there was a mom and her toddler picnicking, while the toddler’s doll, perched on a boulder nearby, repeated a computerized wailing “cry” once every two seconds.

It started only once I had gotten halfway up was a nearby 6c. I asked for a take and looked down at Kelly, my friend who was belaying and who had accompanied me to this European sport-climbing mecca. I shook my head at her, then nodded over to the baby doll on the boulder.

Kelly called over to the mom: “Excuse me?” she inquired in her most unobtrusive English. “The bebé?” she said, pointing at the crying toy. The mom blessedly switched off the wailing, which prompted immediate complaints from the toddler.

We had come to Paklenica for its hundreds of bolted sport routes, easy approaches, and, if we were feeling spicy, its dozens of long, bolted multi-pitch routes. What we didn’t anticipate was just how developed it all was.

Paklenica is like a giant, outdoor climbing gym, except it is also a Croatian National Park with a lot of easily accessible hiking trails. Thus, it’s a nice afternoon out for families, and also a well-known stop for tourists passing through Dalmatia. Plus, there are the chatting shopkeepers, the crying dolls, the barking dogs, the groups of tourists taking climbing lessons, the guided tours, and the legions of Czechs and Germans drinking their beers, down for the warm weather and beaches.

Honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I’m making it out to be. Just busy.

Paklenica certainly deserves its place as a European sport-climbing mecca, albeit one less known to Americans. Paklenica and the nearby town of Starigrad are a great area to spend five days, as we did in August during the height of a record-breaking tourist surge. Croatia, like Greece, had decided that COVID presented an opportunity: open up, loosen restrictions, and the people will come. And so come we did.

A perfectly nice European sport climbing vacation

It wasn’t until early July that Kelly raised the idea of a Croatia climbing trip. That’s how planning went in the Summer of 2021. One-way plane tickets, last-minute bookings, and rapid antigen tests at the airport the day of the flight, and if you get a false positive, well then you try again or you head back to a hotel to quarantine.

Kelly and I met long ago: we went on a date, got drunk, made out on a street corner in DC, and talked about how we should climb together sometime. Probably a week later we had decided that the dating wouldn’t happen, but the climbing definitely would.

She became the social hub of my little Washington, D.C. climbing community. Texts from her went out, and groups of people came, first to Carderock, then to Great Falls, and, eventually, to Potrero Chico in Mexico. That was the last major trip I took with her. It was probably eight or ten of us there over an unseasonably cold and rainy New Year holiday. But the climbing still happened, as did the run-in with Alex Honold, who was not yet Alex Honold, but was still a minor celebrity amongst us climbers.

Potrero Chico and Paklenica have some things in common: very long, slabby bolted multi-pitch routes with relatively short approaches.

In at least a few other ways, they are not so alike. Portrero has a few large campgrounds and a growing handful of vacation rentals, but aside from that, the nearby town is essentially devoid of tourism. Meanwhile, Starigrad is a vacation destination in its own right, completely aside from the climbing: virtually every house or apartment complex there is requisitioned for visitors during the Summer months.

“Like Potrero, but…”

The weekend after we left Portrero all those many years ago one of our friends sent us a notice: authorities had discovered more than a dozen bodies with limbs severed dumped down the well that is on the way into the park, directly along the route we walked to get to the climbing every morning.

It was news in the climbing community.

So it was on day two of our Croatia trip that Kelly gave her assessment of Paklenica: “It’s like Potrero but with cafés instead of massacres.”

To be clear, the Portrero incident hadn’t involved any tourists. Hidalgo, besides being a town you don’t much want to be out in after dark, is in Northeast Mexico, in Nuevo León, which is pretty much right on major drug trafficking routes. The bodies dumped down the well had nothing to do with climbing—it just so happened to be a convenient place to dispose of yet more victims of the drug trade. Still, not exactly a gleaming advertisement for the place.

Meanwhile, Paklenica is about as far from a Mexican drug war as you can get.

A very busy outdoor climbing gym

Paklenica is easily the most developed climbing area I’ve ever been to, down to the bathrooms with running water dug into caves in the side of the cliff, the triangle plaques that conveniently mark the bottom of climbs, the gift shop with drinks and trinkets and snacks, and yes, even the cafe where you (and every tourist out for a hike) can stop and have a beer and watch the climbers.

A sport climbing crag this developed has a lot of advantages. Climbs are easy to find and easy to get to, and you can bring young kids. There are routes of all difficulties, although the easy routes get climbed so much that they are polished down to a slick marble. This can make even easier routes feel quite a bit more difficult than the grade would let on.

There are hundreds of single pitch bolted climbs all within a 5-10 minute walk of the parking lot, all spread within a safe, flat area you could let a small child wander around in (and many do!). Meanwhile, the really large cliffs are not more than 20-30 minutes up the canyon, and host dozens more multi-pitch climbing.

Though, I advise you to take the guidebook (and other online resources) seriously when they tell you that a small rack is probably a good idea even if a route is listed as bolted.

The highlight of our five days in Paklenica was climbing a seven-pitch, 600-foot 5b (Centralni kamin). This supposedly works out to 5.9 climbing, except they didn’t mention the 40-foot runouts up tricky chimneys and around exposed corners, out of sight and earshot from your partner. I had a set of four tricams and one sling, in addition to my quickdraws, and I put every single piece of that “rack” to extremely good use.

The final pitch is easy 5.7 climbing, but there wasn’t a single bolt the whole 50 feet. The main protection I used was to loop my one remaining sling around a rock wedged in a crack about halfway up.

Trip planning for Paklenica

After climbing Centralni kamin, I made my first multi-pitch contribution to Mountain Project (figured I’d warn some folks about that near-free solo 5.7—plus I do not agree you need to rappel down to a tree after pitch 6, as the book suggests).

So, by way of some more trip planning information:

Paklenica is about 45 minutes from Zadar airport, which has a surprising number of connections to many European destinations. If you’re flying to Croatia from the U.S. or outside of Europe, though, you’re likely to come in via Zagreb or Split. In either case: yes you will want to rent a car.

Starigrad, the town right outside the park, is a hopping little vacation town, and much more developed than it looks on Google maps (Though Seline, down the road, is exactly as sleepy as it looks). Starigrad has a long and busy strip of waterfront restaurants, and the Google reviews are not necessarily accurate. Our favorite restaurant in five nights there was this one (order the grilled scampi).

There were a lot of tourists there to enjoy the waterfront, especially families from Germany and Czech Republic, many of whom probably had no idea there was a major sport climbing destination just up the road. There are beaches, but they are all stone. No one seemed to mind much (except maybe Kelly).

There are apartments and vacation rentals everywhere, but Airbnb is not necessarily the cheapest way to go—many more are listed on Booking.com, where for our money there were slightly better deals.

The weather in August was hot, but as Paklenica is in a deep canyon, there is plenty of shade to go around. Meanwhile, the rock will dry quickly if you happen to get a passing rainstorm. In other words, don’t let hot Summer temperatures or an iffy rain forecast necessarily deter you.

And finally: be prepared for onlookers if you stick to climbing in the canyon. The real adventure—and solitude—can be found on those multi-pitch routes up on the gorgeous cliffs.

I have some thoughts about what I did this month (below), but first, the scorecard:

1. Red point 5.12 by August 31st ✅

2. Eat only food that comes from my property ✅

3. Write daily (stories published on Substack) ✅

4. Jettison, for one month, my general aversion to documenting my life on social media ⚠️

Thank you to my girlfriend, who helped make sure I didn’t starve and also came out to belay whenever my climbing friends weren’t available. Thanks also to my mom and my son for telling me what was ready to be eaten from the garden, setting it aside for me, and not complaining (too much) when I commandeered 90% of what was coming out ground.

And of course thanks to my climbing partners for the support, the belays and the strategic advice: Thomas, Jess, Ela: you rock!

By the way, if you want to read the whole story, starting with Day 1, head on over to Live Free Climbing, where I documented the entire journey.

Now to some lessons:

Documenting my life

If you saw the post yesterday, you know I didn’t get any video or even a pic of the successful send attempt. My friends watched, my girlfriend belayed, but I honestly didn’t once think to myself: can one of you take a pic please?

And actually: I count that as a win. I was in the moment, entirely focused on what I had to do in front of me, which was the climb. There was an audience there, in person, which was audience enough.

The goal of sharing this journey on social media was one I added kind of an afterthought — and, you’ll notice, it’s the one goal that wasn’t clearly defined. That’s on me. What does it mean, exactly, to “jettison my aversion”? As any life coach or McKinsey management consultant will tell you, a poorly defined goal is one you’re bound not to accomplish.

But in this case, I’m ok with that.

The truth is that there are many times throughout the month where I could have been more diligent in documenting what I was doing, and I wasn’t. And that’s because no, I didn’t truly get over my aversion.

I do not want to go through life thinking to myself: should I film this? Do I need a picture? Should I pause to make an Instagram post? Should I now bury my head in my phone for 20 minutes while I tell the world what’s happening to me and what I’m thinking about it?

As I wrote on What Really Matters more than a year ago:

I don’t want to go through life thinking about which parts of it would look good on camera… Everywhere you go, every moment you live, every piece of avocado toast you order, in the back of your mind, you are thinking: Instagram? (Or, take your pick of social media broadcast platforms).

I wrote that almost exactly a year ago. This month has shown me: I haven’t changed my mind.

Self-sufficiency vs. community sufficiency

Another thing this month has illustrated in painfully hungry detail is the difference between self-sufficiency and community efficiency. I bought this house not just for the proximity to climbing, but for the proximity to a tight-knit community, and I’m grateful to have that.

A lot of people, when they think about self-sufficiency, they think about an off-grid cabin in the woods somewhere. But a better way is to think about resiliency in the face of crisis — be it a climate crisis, or a global pandemic — and for that, you need to look at the strength of your surrounding community.

Sure, the food that came from my own property got me through a month. But I also lost 15 pounds, was hungry pretty much all the time, and had to make exceptions for cooking oil (I downed a LOT of coconut oil, let me tell you) and spices to get through it. Plus, if I have to eat another piece of roast pumpkin I just may vomit.

If, on the other hand, I’d expanded my geography to just a 4-mile radius of rural New Hampshire around my house, I could have added honey, maple syrup, farm fresh chicken and duck eggs, corn, and I could also have tripled the number and variety of vegetables available. And in November, I’m picking up half a pig which is being raised on one of the many locals farms nearby. That is an actual, well-rounded diet.

Now, if I could only pick up some grain and more legumes rather than ordering those in bulk from a restaurant supply store. And the hazelnut trees we planted a few months ago can’t mature fast enough.

Models of achievement

Finally, earlier this month I wrote a piece for What Really Matters about my production function, or how I get things done. For years I’ve relied on an annual strategic planning for life model, but what I’ve done here offers a different possibility: the month-long sprint.

I’m not the first to try this, of course. Perhaps you’re familiar with NaNoWriMo — the idea is to write your novel in one month, or at least a first draft of it. The organization provides tools and community to support a very clearly defined goal: 50,000 words in 30 days. I actually signed up for NaNoWriMo three years ago, and did in fact finish the first draft of a memoir about my filmmaking days.

This month has reinforced for me that my production function works well off those kinds of sprints. I couldn’t continue this diet for a year, nor would I want to have to write every single day. But I can put in an intense amount of commitment and discipline over a shorter period of time.

Meanwhile, goals which have indefinite end dates are just difficult. Climbing 5.12 — I will reveal here — was actually a life goal of mine. I first put it down years ago, on a master list of life goals I maintain and check-in on from time to time. When I first put down the 5.12 goal all that time ago, it felt distant indeed. I didn’t yet own this house. I was living and working in Maryland. How would I even carve the time to get good enough to try? It was one of those, maybe, one day, don’t know how kind of things.

But recently, it seemed like climbing 5.12 just might be within reach. I needed a push, a model for achieving it. And this turned out to be that model.

So now I’m asking myself: what else can I do in a month?

Long-time readers are familiar with my story, but let me quickly recap, because it’s important context for what comes next: a year and a half ago I bought this house in New Hampshire, the one I’m writing this in, the one in which I’m riding out the pandemic. I bought it because of climate change, and also because it’s a mile from one of the best climbing areas in the Northeast.

Last year, before all the coronavirus stuff went down, I wrote a post about why I climb. It was a heartfelt post. It was deep and existential and all the things I like to write about with regard to life and its purpose and meaning.

Anyway: that climbing area — Rumney — has been closed since April.

Why it closed in the first place was obvious “abundance of caution” type of stuff; but why it has remained closed nearly three months later, even though literally everything else in New Hampshire has re-opened remains a bit of a mystery to me. (Why everything re-opened is also a mystery, but that’s for another post).

I already wrote in April about Rumney being closed, and about how the local climbing community responded, and of late I’ve also been following a Mountain Project thread in which climbers are engaged in a, shall we say, spirited discussion about the reasons it remains closed, including discussion of what the Rumney Climbers Association has said, or not said, about the whole episode.

Personally, I’m in favor of opening the crags now, at least for locals. Others seem to want them closed a bit longer, or at least, have yet to settle on a way to re-open them such that stakeholders involved feel it’s being done safely. The Rumney Climbers Association says it’s working to get them re-opened some time after July 4th, but when exactly is still unknown.

As an organization, the RCA exists to preserve access to climbing. Like many climbing organizations of its kind around the country, its strategy for doing so has been (and presumably remains) to buy the land on which the crags sit and then gift it or sell it to the US Forest Service. Historically, this has always seemed like a wise move: forest service land is public land, so the assumption was that giving it to the forest service was a way to ensure long-term access for climbers.

Except when that stopped being the case. When the pandemic hit, the RCA put out a statement on its blog which essentially shared responsibility for the closing. “The RCA in conjunction with the USFS and White Mountain National Forest have made the determination that Rumney is closed,” the post read. At time of this writing, the organization’s home page states:

RUMNEY IS CLOSED. FOR THE LENGTH OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

However long that may be. Which, right now, could be a long time indeed.

This is all to say that the whole reason I bought this house and decided to spend so much time here over the past year is because of a reason which, for the moment, has ceased to exist.

To be clear, there are other reasons to love Rumney, and I’ve written about those as well. But the original reason — the crags — is for now up and closed, a victim of a global pandemic which no one saw coming and yet, simultaneously, was also inevitable.

When Rumney closed, local leaders in the climbing community exhorted each other to take a breather, to not get too upset about it. Your project will still be there next season was a common refrain. After all, this line of thinking implied, climbing is, at its heart, a frivolous pursuit. No one needs to climb.

Which is true. I don’t need to climb, even though I love climbing. It satisfies deep human urges inside of me. It lets me forget about time, it helps me stave off depression, it keeps me in shape — far better shape than any weight lifting regimen or treadmill could — and it gives me that elusive feeling of flow.

But this is a newsletter about What Really Matters, and what really matters is health and family and purpose and a roof over one’s head, food to eat, all those things. It doesn’t make any sense to get in a tiff over some climbing crags being closed. Even if I really love climbing, no recreational activity is worth a big fight over. Climbing obviously fits into the good to have category, not the essential goods and services category…

Right?

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

Actually, not right.

I want to introduce you to John Vervaeke. Vervaeke is an assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. And, perhaps taking after his colleague there, Jordan Peterson, some while ago he began filming his lectures on purpose and meaning, which turned into a podcast and YouTube series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.

Purely by coincidence, I began listening to the series around when Rumney closed. And it was in episode 2 that Vervaeke started talking about rock climbing. My ears perked up. Rock climbing? In a podcast about meaning?

Here we were in an episode titled, “Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution.” The previous episode had been about shamanism in hunter gatherer tribes, and he hadn’t even gotten to Socrates yet. So why was he talking about rock climbing?

At first glance, rock climbing would seem to be like “some sort of torture from Greek mythology,” Vervaeke says. “You’re presented with, ‘Here’s a rock face. What I want you to do is I want you to go up that. It’s gonna be really physically demanding, it’s going to hurt you, you might fall and harm yourself, and once you get to the top, you come back down.”

Basically, something like Sisyphus condemned to push the stone up the hill.

But look again, Vervaeke says. Climbing is the epitome of the kind of activity which produces “flow.” The conditions for flow are as follows: it has to be something where the demands of the activity go just slightly beyond your ability, such that you must expend all your effort and focus to do it. It must also be something where there is “very tight feedback between what you’re doing and how the environment responds.” And third, failure must matter. It must be consequential.

As Vervaeke point out, rock climbing (and I would add, lead climbing specifically) satisfies all those conditions for flow. That’s why people do it.

But why is flow good for civilization? Because, Vervaeke continues — it goes back to the shamans. Throughout human history, there have always been humans who try to alter their consciousness in order to achieve insight about the human condition. Shamans were the first. Whether through fasting or chanting or dancing or drugs, shamans sought to achieve altered states of consciousness, the points of which were to increase insight. Tribes who had good shamans did better than tribes without shamans, because the shamans were making cognitive breakthroughs due to their capacity for reaching altered states of consciousness.

Flow is exactly such a state of altered consciousness which trains your mind to achieve cognitive breakthroughs. Here’s Vervaeke:

So you’re rock climbing, and if that breaks down, you impasse, you’re stuck. And I don’t mean just cognitively, you’re physically stuck. Now if you want to be a good rock climber you have to break that framing. You have train yourself to break the frame, restructure, change what you’re finding relevant and salient and then change yourself to fit that and then you’ve re-fit yourself to the rock face. Then you have to do it again and then you have to do it again and then you have to do it again.

So climbing trains your mind.

Well obviously, you might be thinking. But it’s the specific kind of training that matters. It’s training to strike out into unknown territory, find that you’ve made a mistake, and re-adjust, try a new strategy, break your existing mental framework and restructure your mental map. Climbing does this by bringing us into a state a flow, where the consequences of failure are serious, and where our actions provide immediate, clear physical feedback, and where our consciousness is primed to achieve insights.

Rock climbers are doing what shamans did. Moving civilization forward by training our capacity for cognitive insight. I’ve often marveled about how many climbers I know who are engineers. There is an overlap there: engineers are smart people who experiment and create things to solve problems in the physical world, and climbing trains them to be better at that.

You find this kind of thinking all over rock climbing.

But let me take it one step further than Vervaeke did, because I’m a climber and I have opinions about such things. My opinion is that not just any climbing will do. What you need is lead climbing. And I’m not talking about the climbing gym. I’m talking outdoors.

Why lead climbing, specifically, advances civilization

If you’re not a climber, you may feel a little lost at this point, but fuck it. This is important to me (clearly), so I urge you to stay with me.

Simply put: the kind of continual restructuring of your mental map under high consequence situation that Vervaeke is talking about doesn’t exist in a gym, and it doesn’t exist top-roping either, whether in a gym or outdoors.

The gym is easier to explain: you don’t have to re-adjust your mental map because the holds are in goddamn colored tape right in front of you. It’s never a question in a climbing gym as to where the route goes. You can literally pick out every hold you’ll be using (or choosing to skip) from the ground. The demands of the route are primarily physical demands.

Within a gym setting, there are two ways to go up a route: either lead it or top-rope. Leading is better, because it adds the “head game” I talked so much about in the Why I climb post. That head game is about overcoming fear and doubt to push forward, even if you’re not sure you can do the moves. Especially if you’re not sure. That kind of fear and doubt are endemic to being human, and lead climbing helps you to recognize when to push forward through fear and doubt and when to back off. But though lead climbing in a gym may expose you to some of those mental demons, it still doesn’t provide the kind of route-finding, mind-stretching, back off and try again opportunities which exist outdoors.

Top-roping, meanwhile, doesn’t carry the same kind of fall potential as lead climbing, and thus it doesn’t carry consequence — and as we saw, consequence is necessary for flow. In fact, top-roping carries zero fall potential. So it lacks that key condition. Without that serious consequence, your brain doesn’t actually need to adjust. Top-roping is exercise, plain and simple. It doesn’t much go beyond that.

But if leading is good, and top-roping not as much, why then does it have to be leading outside? As I said: the holds. Outside, you must figure out where they are, and one of the first lessons of outdoor climbing is that the climb looks very different from the ground than it does once you’re on it. Lead climbing outdoors demands the kind of route-finding Vernaeke is talking about when he talks about breaking the frame and restructuring, skills one need not develop in a gym setting where every hold is taped off in bright color for you to follow along, like a color-between-the-lines coloring book.

Outside, on the other hand, you must constantly re-adjust, reframe, and re-build your mental maps over and over, and if you are leading that means you are doing this under threat of consequence in case of failure. If you are trad leading, then you’ve only upped the game on both accounts: greater potential for harm in case of failure, and greater need for adjusting your cognition as you climb. Trad lead climbing up a multi-pitch big wall is the epitome of an environment with the conditions necessary for flow.

In other words: Yosemite.

It’s not just romance or aesthetics that makes Yosemite the center of the climbing universe. It’s something deep down inside in our genes, in our evolution, in our need for flow, in our evolutionary psychology, in our push to move civilization forward.

If I were a religious man (which I’m not), I would say this: God created Yosemite so that we may train ourselves to grow and advance as a human race.

Lead climbing outdoors trains us to be better humans

When I heard Vernaeke talk about this process of reframing your cognition to fit your mind and your body to the environment, I thought about every time in my life I’ve been leading up a cliff, thinking the route went one way, only to touch a hold, find it’s not what I thought it was, and be forced to back down, re-think, find another way.

That’s not just a description of lead climbing; it’s a description of life.

I’ve had to undergo this process of rethinking under physical duress and high consequence a thousand times on hundreds of routes. I never attached too much significance to it, until recently. Climbing for me was simply pushing myself, battling those demons, learning when to push and when to back down, asking myself why I do it, and why I do anything.

What I hadn’t realized was just how much climbing trains us to do that most basic of human things: move civilization forward by training our minds to achieve cognitive insights about ourselves and our place in the world.

All of which is to say, in so many words: it’s time for Rumney crags to damn well re-open. It’s not just about a frivolous recreational pursuit. It’s a matter of civilization itself.

What do rock climbers do when they close the big climbing areas?

They lament. They chafe. They express solidarity. Some virtue signal. They rededicate themselves to their hang boards. And - this is important - they crowd into the smaller climbing areas.

On March 26th last month, the U.S. Forest Service closed down the huge expanse of sport climbing spread over Rattlesnake Mountain, one mile from my house in Rumney, New Hampshire. That morning, my partner and I and our kids went for a walk. It was part of our daily ritual while schools were closed and the state was on lockdown, an easy way for everyone to get out for some air and exercise.

It was one of the first truly warm and sunny days of Spring, so we decided to extend our walk up one of the trails to Waimea, Rumney’s “flagship crag.” Waimea is a gloriously over-hanging, wave-like behemoth home to dozens of hard routes, including Jaws II, one of the hardest climbs in North America. I was excited to show my 9-year-old.

We spent about 20 minutes at the crag, admiring the cliff and the view of the Baker River Valley, then hiked back down to the parking lot, where two U.S. Forest Service guys about my age were parked in pickup trucks. I asked what they were up to on this fine morning, and that’s when I learned: they were there to block off access to the parking lots and close off the area.

Outdoor spaces closing worldwide

It’s not just Rumney that’s closed, of course.

Around the world, governments and institutions are closing outdoor areas with the stated purpose of preventing crowds from forming. And while rural New Hampshire has plenty of outdoor space to go around even with the closure of a major climbing destination, that’s simply not the case in the urban areas hardest hit, where each closure simply crowds people into the other outdoor areas which are still open.

Vox writer Matthew Yglesias noted as much a few days ago. In a tweet, he wrote that “the various moves to restrict access to outdoor spaces in the name of anti-crowding seem self-defeating.”

Meanwhile, yesterday in The Atlantic, writer Zeynep Tufekci echoed the sentiment, using as an example the closure of Brockwell Park in London, which the local Lambeth Council announced via “scolding tweet”:

All of these closures are well-intentioned. But there are two glaring unintended consequences, both of which could have serious public health consequences themselves.

The first is that closing outdoor spaces is like squeezing a balloon. You’re just pushing people into other areas, just as Yglesias observed that Malcolm X park in Washington D.C. gets more crowded each time a public space elsewhere in the city is closed. D.C. has a particular problem with coordination, as so many of its public spaces are managed by different municipal and federal agencies (more on this further down).

The second unintended consequence is the potential harm to people’s immune systems and overall health simply by keeping them inside. As Tufekci wrote:

The outdoors, exercise, sunshine, and fresh air are all good for people’s immune systems and health, and not so great for viruses. There is a compelling link between exercise and a strong immune system. A lack of vitamin D, which our bodies synthesize when our skin is exposed to the sun, has long been associated with increased susceptibility to respiratory diseases. The outdoors and sunshine are such strong factors in fighting viral infections that a 2009 study of the extraordinary success of outdoor hospitals during the 1918 influenza epidemic suggested that during the next pandemic (I guess this one!) we should encourage “the public to spend as much time outdoors as possible,” as a public-health measure.

All of which is to say that closing outdoor public recreation areas might be the last thing we would want to do in a global pandemic caused by a virus that targets the respiratory system.

This is all common sense, of course. But as George Orwell once said, it takes a constant struggle to see what is in front of one’s nose. We know the outdoors and sunshine and exercise are important for our health. But that hasn’t stopped the institutions of the world from starting down a path, which, the further one goes, the more counter-productive it gets.

The Rumney climbing community’s response

As the coronavirus pandemic accelerated in early March, as restaurants closed, then schools, then all non-essential businesses, as social life all but shut down, and as people were asked to #stayhome, being in Rumney was a saving grace.

My family wasn’t stuck in a tiny New York City apartment. Instead, we were a mile’s walk from one of the greatest sport climbing destinations in the country, planting our garden on an abundant acre of land that I owned, in a rural, tight-knit community with neighbors who knew and supported each other.

Last year, before any of this was even a blip on the radar, I wrote, “If the apocalypse comes, you could choose worse places than Rumney to ride it out.”

The Rumney crags themselves contain more than 1,100 climbs spread out over dozens of individual cliffs. It would be easy for locals to spread themselves out. But Rumney is also a destination for climbers throughout the Northeast, and as the winter began to thaw, climbers began to make the drive. The cliffs never got crowded - it was still too early in the season for that - but they got busy enough that the Rumney Climbers Association (RCA) decided to make a request.

On March 18th, they posted to Facebook:

Though it’s incredibly hard to believe it has come to this, we are reaching out asking climbers to please avoid the crags right now. The same message is being spread around the globe. We love climbing more than almost anything... Almost.

Part of their reasoning was that many of Rumney’s climbing old timers were also those most susceptible to coronavirus. The request was made in part to protect those locals who had helped develop Rumney as a climbing destination in the first place:

Out of respect for them and others who stand to get very sick if this situation doesn’t improve. Either take a break, train at home, or find a crag so remote you are sure no one else will be on it this month.

From the comments on social media, it was clear Rumney’s climbing community was supportive, though obviously sad. Even so, people didn’t stop climbing all together. Every day after the announcement the parking lots at the base of the crags had a few cars parked in them. After all, the climbers association had left the door open to climbing so long as you picked one of the more remote cliffs.

Besides, crowding at Rumney didn’t seem to be a problem as long as the campsites and the hotels were closed. Without a place to spend the night, the crags were naturally limited to those within easy driving distance, and that was a population low enough to make spreading out easy.

Then came the forest service closure on March 26th.

That day, the RCA again posted to Facebook:

It would have been hard to imagine the RCA reaching a point where we'd support the closure of Rumney Rocks to climbing, but the current COVID-19 situation has made many unimaginable things come to bear.

The USFS has (temporarily) closed Rumney Rocks to climbing. The parking lots will be barricaded and signs will be posted with details.

Again, the community was sad but supportive. But, like Washington D.C., Rumney is not immune from the unintended consequences of well-intentioned policies.

The next day, my family and I walked the opposite direction from the crags to a local bouldering area, called The Pound, which is on private land and therefore not subject to the U.S. Forest Service jurisdiction. It was another glorious Spring day, a Friday, and I even brought my crash pad, shoes and chalk just in case.

As we rounded the bend in Quincy Road and the parking pull-off for The Pound came into view, however, I realized my folly. There were three cars parked, which meant enough climbers were there to complicate physical distancing. And even if one could stay away from the other climbers, it struck me as borderline idiotic, in that moment, to boulder in an area small enough that every climber there would likely have touched the same rock as you within the past few hours.

I was desperate to climb. So was my kid. Neither of us had touched real rock in four months. But we didn’t.

“We can do better”

We turned around and regretfully walked home without climbing a thing, but not before snapping a picture of the parked cars, which I texted to a neighbor, also a climber, with whom I had been chatting about the closures. I told him my analysis: “well-intentioned government policy backfires.”

He texted back, “climbers still can’t socially distance!” which, I noted, was kind of the point. By closing off Rumney crags, the forest service had pushed all the climbers who desperately wanted to get outside into the one small bouldering area. The policy was self-defeating.

A few days later, The Pound was also closed, signs posted. The owner of the land evidently didn’t want every climber in the area congregating there during a pandemic. The RCA again took to social media, urging everyone to abide by the closure so as to preserve future access once this was all over.

This time the Facebook comments were harsh toward the climbers who had crowded in over the weekend. “I am so embarrassed by the climbing community because of this. Absolutely shameful,” wrote one. Another posted, “Come on, climbing community...we can do better.”

I thought the climbers were idiotic for crowding into a bouldering area so close to each other - but I was also sympathetic. After all, I was dying to get out there myself.

As a global community, climbers are used abiding by a common ethic, one that combines a shared respect for nature with a fierce commitment to protecting our access to it. In fact, considering how much of the average climber’s capacity for civic engagement is focused on protecting our access to public lands, we shouldn’t be surprised if some percentage of climbers decide to flout closures. Indeed, we should expect it, and plan accordingly.

If there is real a finger to be pointed, it’s at policy-makers, who have been failing us pretty much at every turn. And beyond that, there is a larger systemic problem, namely the lack of coordination between local, state, and federal government institutions. When different officials are on different pages, implementing a sensible policy response in the face of a global emergency is all but impossible.

It’s not hard to imagine a different scenario, one where national leadership set a clear direction for the whole country, and actually, you know, coordinated. But those aren’t the leaders we have right now.

As Tufekci concluded in The Atlantic, there are other ways our public spaces could be managed through this. A coordinated response could sensibly ration access, for example. There are a lot of potential strategies that would be better than poorly planned, full out closures:

We could, for instance, reduce congestion by regulating inflows of people over time… In large cities with limited park space, households could be assigned days for visiting, with even and odd house numbers going on different days… We could install number counters in parks and on trails, similar to those in parking garages or some museums, and provide sensible limits… Walking and running trails could assign directionality so that everyone runs and walks in one direction, avoiding close encounters.

There are more suggestions, but the point is this: we can absolutely do better.

I was 40 feet in the air on a climb called Buried Treasure - and frankly wondering what the fuck I was doing there. I looked at the modified bowline knot I had tied and threaded through the two tie in loops on my harness, and gazed for a moment at the 9 millimeter thick piece of rope that was keeping me alive just then.

In the Baker River Valley stretched out behind me, what sounded like bikers revving their engines, or perhaps a farmer operating a chainsaw, had been incessantly amplifying itself up the hillside toward the cliff for more than an hour. Meanwhile, just below me a mom who was done climbing was trying to get her five-year-old to follow her back down the trail to the parking lot. “I’m touching my mom’s butt crack!” I heard him yell as I dangled above.

Struggling

I was struggling with this climb. Or, hang-dogging, as climbers often put it. No graceful, uninterrupted ascent of Yosemite was this. Rather, I was making tentative, fearful moves up the cliff, my tired calf-muscles shaking up and down like the needle of a sewing machine, my forearms burning and pumped. I moved one clip at a time, asking my partner to “take” after each one, and sitting there in my harness to rest. Worst of all, my head was completely in the wrong place. And the five year old below and the engines in the valley weren’t helping.

I had been here before. In fact, I had been here dozens of times. Maybe hundreds. This moment - when everything is telling me to go down, to ask to be lowered, to maybe just give up on climbing all together - is the moment I live for. It’s why I do it in the first place.

This, right here. The fear, the questioning of one’s life decisions, the physical exhaustion, and the battle within one’s self and all things this moment teaches me about being human. Those are the things I love about climbing.

Being present

For all its physical demands, for all of its technical requirements, it’s the mental component which elevates climbing to some other more vivid plane of existence. Climbing well is a struggle to be present, and for presence of mind.

For those of you who have climbed on top-rope before, I must pause just to say that I’m not really talking about top-roping. On top-rope, falls are not really falls. They are a mere gentle glide away from the rock or from the gym wall. Top-roping may share some of the physical and technical demands of leading, but it has virtually none of the mental demands. On lead, you place your protection as you go, pushing up without the benefit of a rope above you, and falls are truly falls. And that possibility of a real, true fall is everything.

We are all afraid of heights, but climbing - lead climbing - is an investigation into whether and to what degree our fears are justified. It is a search for real and imagined doubts, not just about whether one can make it up a climb, but about why one does this in the first place. Indeed, ultimately climbing is about why we do anything.

It’s a natural question to ask one’s self when one is dangling from a 9 millimeter rope on the side of a cliff.

Sometimes, like that moment on Buried Treasure, I just want to come down. The next hold and all the unknown ones after that are scaring the shit out of me, and all I want is to be lowered and go home and drink a beer and take this goddamn harness off and not have 15 pounds of metal gear hanging from my harness, and not have my life depending on a small bowline knot I tied to myself before leaving the ground.

The whole world in a hold

In those moments my whole world passes in front of me. All my questions about purpose and the future and how I spend my time and what really matters in life are contained in those moments between when I feel paralyzed to go any further, and when I gather myself to make the next move, and take hold of the rock.

It happened on Buried Treasure. I thought about why I do this and why I do anything, and then I put all of that away, as I have trained myself to do. I took a few long breaths. My vision narrowed, my focus returned, and I called down to my partner, “Climbing!” and I moved.

I focused on what was right in front of me: in a literal sense the rock, the vertical and horizontal cracks, the edges of granite, the next bolt and the next clip. But in a larger sense, I had again forced myself to focus on the now, on my breath, on my movement, on the sensations of life.

I had been reminded, yet again - because in life we are in constant need of reminding - that my existence is fleeting, and also precious. Life is a thing which I should pay attention to, and move through deliberately. On the rock, I have to confront and grapple with the mental and emotional barriers which prevent me from moving, and so it is in life.

And we fail

Of course, there are those climbs which really do defeat us physically, as opposed to mentally or emotionally. Sometimes they’re just too hard, the edges too thin, the overhang to steep. Sometimes our muscles give out, our fingers simply can’t grip the holds anymore, and we fail.

Climbing is nothing if not physically demanding. A whole body, muscles never before used, sweat pouring down your face, total commitment kind of demanding. It requires the tendons in your fingers to strengthen. It requires you to not pull a shoulder muscle or a back muscle and sideline yourself with an injury. It requires you to not be overweight, and to learn to move as a dancer would, with grace and precision and power all at once.

If I come down from a climb, it may well have been a mental defeat - a climb which I could have completed but not for a losing battle with inner demons - but it could just as well have been a physical defeat. My fingers simply couldn’t stick on the holds. But sorting one kind of defeat from another is part of the joy and the satisfaction. Did that climb defeat me physically? Or did I defeat myself mentally?

Either is fine. I climb also for the self-knowledge. For the clarifying of things not clear in other parts of existence. At least, that’s why I climb.

We are small

After hang-dogging on Buried Treasure, I came down and rested for 20 minutes. I found a piece of flat rock to lie down on and used my hiking shoes as a pillow to prop my head up. The mom and her 5-year-old were gone, but the incessant whine of the chainsaw up the valley remained. I looked up at the angles and the holds and the 80 feet of vertical rock which had just taken so much out of me, and I thought about how I would move through it all next time.

The move over the diagonal roof. The pull over the mantle, to the small undercling on the left and the little shoulder-high edge on the right. The traverse over to the crack. After a rest, I tried again, and I did the climb “clean” - no falls, no takes, no hanging. I did it with focus and at least some grace.

It felt incredible. Exhilarating. Climbing gives one achievements, but then it gives you new challenges. And there’s not a climber in the world who can’t find a cliff that will bring out their inner demons. No matter how good you are, there’s always a rock wall out there somewhere that will kick your ass.

After Buried Treasure I decided to try the climb to the left, a black streaked arête called Prime Climb. I was feeling strong, confident. I got about half-way up when a sloping hold and a particularly devious sequence stopped me cold. I took. I hung. Pulling the move felt scary, and I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I tried again, and I took, and I hung. I remembered that we are all small before Nature. Just another small reminder. I can’t have enough of them.