Emptying Out

 “This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning here than a gust of snow…[mountains] serve as a mirror to one’s own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound. Yet as long as I remain an “I” who is conscious of the void and stands apart from it, there will remain a snow mist on the mirror.”

                                                                                                -Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

Springtime and footloose, on the road again, Tucker and I hitting our stride. After two days of hard crack climbing in Zion we rally west to Red Rocks, Nevada and leave the car on a cool evening with rack and bivy gear, bound for the Rainbow Wall. After an hour of scrambling up a boulder-choked gulley and schwacking through copses of tough manzanita we emerge at a clean slab split in two by a silver knife: a thin veneer of water trickling down the sandstone, glimmering with the shine of another world. The trickle passes up into darkness, then beyond to the towering walls of the Rainbow Mountain cirque, our destination, looming stoic beneath a wan quarter moon.

In these moments we perceive the earth in the vastness of its form. Two small self-regulating sacks of ninety-eight degree blood and sinew and dreams alone in the indifferent terrain of this planet: deep gulleys and sheer walls of stone that climb straight into the infinite sky. A lot to behold; the unfettered space can feel overwhelming, but just as quickly I breathe the cool air, feel the sweat soaking my back under my wet shirt, and revel in the beauty of the place. Then nothing to do but shoulder the pack and begin scrambling up the smooth slab, all attention focused on tiny nuances for foot smears and hand holds. We spread sleeping bags under a boulder, drink a beer, cook a simple meal, and fall asleep with the dome of stars cut in half by the dark bulk of the Rainbow Wall.

We wake in the early morning to fierce winds buffeting our sleeping bags. Violent gusts whirl up the canyon in some invisible vortex, unceasing through the graying hours into the dawn. We peek outside our boulder bivy and the wall looms grey and menacing under a leaden sky. Tucker is almost knocked over by a gust as he takes a piss. Maybe this foul weather is an excuse to descend back to car, camp, and comfort.  Sheltering the stove in the back of the cave we make oat porridge and coffee; we sip the bitter brew watching the canyon wake up beneath the fits and tantrums of an angry sky. Eventually we shoulder the rope and rack and begin walking up the slabs towards the wall. Might as well check it out. We zip our jackets tight and steady ourselves as whirling gusts blast our bodies.

It turns out, by some miracle of aerodynamics, the vertex of the Rainbow Wall is sheltered from the harrying wind.  We’re at the base of one of the country’s finest 5.12 free climbs with a small selection of nuts and cams, a dozen quickdraws, one rope, a few Cliff bars and a quart and a half of water. These are the moments we try so hard and make so many sacrifices to create. It’s on.

The corner continues unceasingly toward the sky. The bullet-hard rock offers just enough imperfections for upward passage: an edge here, a slivered crack there, a mottled texture to press on. At times the features seem to peter out completely and the leader pauses, breathing, stemmed in position and trying to read the puzzle. Every time, subtle features emerge offering exquisite movement. The gear is solid, but well spread, keeping us always in calm focus on the sharp end.

There is a curious relationship between the difficulty of climbing moves and the analytical engagement of our mind. On easy terrain, the mind is free to sit back and enjoy the simple sensation of movement. As difficulty increases, the mind engages, reading the rock and indentifying discrete moves. Harder still, the mind scans the next twenty feet, analyzing incredible subtleties of angle, texture and size, formulating a complex sequence of moves while the body waits, breathing, poised at the stance, ready to pounce. The mental engagement increases toward a crescendo of analysis as the holds thin out to the limit of our ability to read the moves, and in these cruxes we are locked into an iron focus where nothing else gets in. These are great climbs.

What happens when the holds thin out a little more, beyond the threshold of what we can read into moves? Stemmed into a tenuous stance on the sharp end, searching, looking, analyzing in vain, what happens when we can’t visualize the way forward? For years this was my stopping point. I would take and aid, or try a desperate throw that I knew was pointless and fall. I could not move upward into the realm beyond my perception.

High in the upper dihedral of the Rainbow Wall I’m stemmed below a smooth bulge, breathing and searching, asking for holds which I know aren’t there. Every feature within reach appears useless, too small to pull on. Five feet higher there’s a jug. It’s my onsight attempt; my mind is churning with information and speculation at a nauseating rate. I’m judging the fall distance (short), the holds (useless), the move (can’t see it), how much I want to onsight this pitch (a LOT, my ego is on board and cheering). I make a desperate attempt to crimp on nothings and fall with a grunt.

Dangling above the void, the wheel of my fevered brain gradually slows down. I notice the cool wind, what a blessing it feels on my sweaty neck. A raptor glides beneath us in perfect repose, searching for prey with keen eyes. The rock itself is captivating, deep maroon with crimson blotches, dappled with green lichen. This whole cliff is just the aggregate collection of billions of sand grains, heaped up long ago in sinusoidal dunes by driving winds in the blistering heat of a vast Jurassic desert. Buried beneath the ground for eons, these solitary grains were compacted and glued together into something more solid, and as our continent slowly rose again in its unfathomable cycles of bulging and sagging, the earth has been carved away by the incessant grinding of snows and rivers to reveal this exquisite memory of an ancient desert.

My pulse has calmed to its regular steady rhythm. I pull back up to the bolt and stem up to my high point again. Having already tried to solve this puzzle with my brain, I simply look at the rock, the subtle features, the jug above, and accept. This is reality. There is nothing more. Accepting this, my mind lets go with a great sigh. In the vacuum left by its absence, beautiful silence rushes in. A hawk cry pierces the air, the wind rustles my hair. There is no more “I”. There is stone and texture and breath. Pressing with both palms I make an improbable step, another stem, another press, all on the “nothings” of before, and thus poised like a spring I look up and fix a soft gaze on the jug. The bottom of my mind drops out into the silence everywhere; I am empty, clean, a piece of the wind. Three limbs press, the stone presses back, and outstretched fingers close on the jug.

Summit Poetry

                                     

On a golden blue-sky November day, my roommate Tucker and I climbed The Priest in Castle Valley via the spectacular Honeymoon Chimney.  On the small summit we discovered this poem in the tattered summit registry, which dated back to the 80's and includes the scribbles of hundreds of elated climbers.

Freedom is pain:

The wolf in winter

slavers at the sight

of trampled crimson snow.

Pain is freedom:

Do not accept

the undertow’s embrace

as did the rocks

ground down to sand.

The gravid light of the moon

is the night’s cold knife.

Open yourself to everything

except the momentary innocence

of your betrayal:

The talons of angels

will pierce you, regardless.

There is no easy way to the summit of the Priest; every path requires significant physical and mental commitment.  We read this poem several times on the summit before rapping down to prepare for a late ascent of Fine Jade, which took us up incredible cracks through the golden hour and subtle twilight into the night.  I don't know what these words mean exactly, but on that narrow summit it seemed a worthy human effort at grasping what we and all those scribbled names were doing up there on the tip of a precarious dagger of Windgate sandstone in the vast desert of eastern Utah.  

Maybe freedom is pain; I spent 2 months on the road this fall, living a simple, dirty, sometimes lonely existence out of my car, waking in the pre-dawn cold many a time to pursue arduous goals on the sheer cliffs of Sierra granite.  Maybe pain is freedom; at Indian Creek after Thanksgiving I committed to tortuous sustained ring-locks on an immaculate wall, and despite the excruciating pain in my knuckles and toes, the beauty of the place and the sensation of soaring on the sharp end encouraged me to crank even harder to claim my purchase in that ephemeral place.

As to the last stanza, I do not feel betrayed, but I am grateful for the challenge offered by the steep places of the earth; climbing forces me to return to innocence, again and again.  In the vertical world, there is no lying: I am inspired.  I am  scared.  I am desperate to save my own life, and I am elated to feel it pulsing through my straining limbs, one miraculous heartbeat after the next.

Tucker spelunking up the Honeymoon Chimney

preparing for the wild step-across

stickin it

Hale Melnick, fellow rock-scrambler.  We met on whimsical outings on block breaks at Colorado College.

Tucker beginning Fine Jade in the late afternoon

"Man will you pass me that #4?"  Nick Chambers on the assist.

The windy summit of Fine Jade

Tucker battling the offwidth on Crack Wars, III 5.11

         

Nick Chambers victorious on the summit of the Priest

The Sharper World

A sunny Saturday at Indian Creek, tired and not sending, my hands ripped from their tortured devotion.  More cracks loom all around, each an invitation to try, to get whupped, to see if I have the strength and tenacity and elegance to dance with its brutal simplicity. 

So many opportunities, and I’m so tired.  The dance is so hard.  Why am I trying?  Why did I drive here alone on a weekend, to struggle and bleed and drink beer with tired hands with these stoic men?  Why do I keep running?

Thoughts drift to loss and sadness…the tendrils of a dream.  Memories of love, days spent basking in a woman’s sunshine, the bliss of togetherness.  Days of friendship, with our own rains but absent of the sting of isolation, the endless march, feeling the weight of my tired feet.

Someone at the wall needs a toprope put up so I grovel out of my perch amongst the rocks and shake the cobwebs from my head, rack up.  In itself an act of intention.  The climb is a 5.10 finger layback into a thin-hands slot, don’t need extra gear, it’ll go.  On the vertical again, pulling hard above a piece, pushing the possible fall out of mind beneath me, only movement is upward.

Clipping the anchors on a wall of chocolate in the early evening, the gulf of air all around, the ravens circling, the valley verdant in spring foliage, life blossoming in cactus and cottonwoods in the desert.  Lean out and breathe it in, my back sore and rippling under my shirt, my hands crusty and stiff.  This is why. 

Lowering to the ground amongst sore, sweaty people, and for now, because of now, they are friends.  Lounging on a boulder in the fading sunlight, commenting on the progress of comrades above, sharing pains, telling lies and fueling dreams.  Letting bare feet smudge into the coarse red dirt, climbers above, etched in shadow against the rock, still in that sharper world.

Ryan grunts as he attempts to swing a meaty wrestler’s thigh into the gaping crack above his head. Large cams hang beneath his shoulders on a sling, dangling like some whimsical wind chimes as he shudders to get purchase.  Scott belaying, silent, stoic.  In their world each edge of rock is sharp, each line clear, each feature and curve of stone critical in its size and texture.  The light slices across immutable edges, the rope, their lifeline, threads humbly over unchanging stone.  Never more clear that we are visitors. 

Below, the edges soften.  Features blur together into aggregate forms, lumped together for simplicity: pillar, talus, corner, ground.  No longer tuned to the whispering rhythm of rock and cliff, the mind drifts to softer hues: the view below, the panorama of canyonlands, conversations, water.  The sun dips into some untrodden tract of desert, the golden hour falls on the Second Meat Wall; conversation mingles with the pop of beer cans, truth and lies.  Our world soft, our bodies relaxed after the fight.  Climbers still above, perched on the cliff like some forgotten gargoyles, clawing their way toward heaven.

The sky above, the dirt below.