VDiff Winter 2015

“I darted a glance at my

leg to check if it had been severed or

not. But that was the least

of our worries.”h

VDiff Winter 2015/16 - 1

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Front cover: Climbing a vertical wasteland, Patagonia. Read more on page 6


22)




38)





“Our portaledge clattered

against the rough granite wall; a broken

sail on a sinking ship.”



I rolled from side to side for most of the night, peering through the gaps, waiting for morning. Outside, the Paine towers dominated everything; the landscape, my thoughts, my dreams.

My climbing partner, Callum Coldwell-Storry, and I had found shelter in a small, coffin-like cave beneath the towers, formed by a fallen house-sized rock. The line of The South African Route rose above, following a clean-cut corner system up the east face of The Central Tower. The last guys to climb it (Nicolas Favresse, Sean Villanueva & Ben Ditto) had free-climbed the entire 1200-metre route. They were real climbers. We were average Joes. They can climb 5.14. I struggled with 5.9. To compensate, we came equipped with aid-climbing gear to hook our way through the hard pitches.

The Central Tower was wedged, shoulder-to-shoulder, between its two brothers; The North and South Towers. The triplets, each of them twice the height of The Empire State Building, were still growing

and had an angry adolescent attitude. The three sheer rock walls disappeared into clouds and then reappeared higher up, soaring majestically into the endless, windswept skies above, exuding a powerful dignity that was both tantalizing and terrifying at the same time. The mere sight of them was enough to turn courage into fear,

excitement into anxiety, trust into suspicion. Standing there, gaping at the turbulent expanse of granite and ice and cloud and sky, I felt a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I wanted to climb it all. I wanted us to have it all to ourselves. Sounds insane, but at least


“On the ledge above us I saw the image that - even years later as I write this - continues to

haunt me when I close my eyes.”

there were no other humans to dispute possession with us.

Our equipment and food weighed 180kg; the same weight as an average 500cc motorbike. We had hitch-hiked to the end of the road and, for seven days, shuttled our burden along tourist trails, through boulder fields and finally across glaciers to reach the base. The Central Tower, as grey as a dark secret, had something sinister to tell us.

In the coffin-cave, drips of water splashed on my face. The blue dark of night was broken by the outline of a serrated summit ridge like the upturned spine of a stupendous primeval beast. Below the crest, a wall of pale granite plummeted over a kilometre down to a permanent glacier and a wind-worried lake; a splendour of aquamarine, crested

with small, white-topped waves. I felt like a soldier trying to sleep in the trenches the night before a major battle. That wasn't so far off. Climbing the Central Tower is like going to war. The only way to succeed at a climb like that, I later learned, is either to be oblivious to the dangers, or to genuinely not care if you die in pursuit of the summit. At the time, I think Callum and I fell into both categories.

As with any war, you have to ready yourself for battle. We had patrolled the rainy streets of the local town, Puerto Natales, weaving through the bustle and competing with stray dogs to search bins and the edges of west-facing buildings where windblown rubbish tends to collect. In these places we found a sufficient supply of plastic water bottles for the climb. We later collected seventy five litres of water in these odd-sized bottles from a small glassy flow which trickled from

the glacier below the towers, making our bags weigh more than a family of lions. We had a portaledge to sleep on and an old wind proof cover to wrap around it. We were well prepared and that should have comforted us a little. But it didn't. Not at all.


A pink cloudburst detonated across the pale grey stone, quickly draining down to iridescent red. Tendrils of high cloud built in the morning sky. Callum was chewing his thumbnail."Ready?" He asked. The uncharacteristic doubt that emanated from the single word of his question greatly concerned me. The most fearless man I had ever met was scared of the climb we were about to do."Yeah, sure." In truth, I wasn't ready. I was frozen with fear; a fear of what I wouldn't find if I didn't go.

Terrific updraughts assisted our progress on the lower section of the tower, often giving us a feeling of weightlessness. The enormous tower soon developed an angry pugnacity in its attitude towards us, as if we were a parasitic itch on its coarse skin. As we climbed the lower slabs, I noticed many deep scars on the rock; evidence that we were climbing through a regular rock fall area. Callum caught a glance of the scars. His gaze lifted and our eyes met. There was a genuine, exhaustive terror in the white-rimmed bulge of his eyes that I'd never seen before. I gave a

solemn nod of understanding. The deepest anxiety emerged in the presence of the quiet air between us. We continued climbing in trepidation, certain that every noise we heard was rock-fall. We sneaked through the lower slabs without being hit by falling rocks and began to build up courage on that first day. But it was a cruel kind of courage that led us deeper into the

mountain's clutches.

“What’s Spanish for tuna?” A foul odour emitted from the small tin.“Atun, I think.” Callum replied.“This doesn’t say Atun anywhere on it.” I forced a

spoonful of the oily grey substance down my throat. “It tastes like vomit.”“Huh. Maybe this pasta will dull the flavour a bit.” He emptied a bag of one-inch long, straw-like yellow strands into the stove and stirred it with a broken plastic spoon. The bubbling sound of the stove was muffled by fierce south-westerly tempests pounding on our portaledge cover. Snow melted and dripped through into our sleeping bags.“I think I figured out why the pasta was so cheap.”“Why?”“Because it’s not pasta. It just


“I darted a glance at my

leg to check if it had been

severed or not. But that was

the least of our worries.”

dissolves and turns to glue.”“What is it then?”“I’ve no idea. Everything’s written in Spanish. I wish I’d listened at school.” He tsk'ed his tongue and sighed.Windswept snowflakes were posted through holes in our shelter, adding a pleasant winter seasoning to the lumpy grey gloop. Whatever that sludge was, we ate it every day.

CCCRACK! A thunderous clatter forced us awake. The deafening sound reverberated through the cold morning air.CCCRACK... BOOM! Our portaledge shook with a violent tremor."What's going on!?" I yelled."What!?" Callum slid out of his sleeping bag with a frantic wriggle. "Storm?"CCCRACK!I ripped open our portaledge cover. I couldn't believe what I saw. Directly across from us, hundreds of metres of rock was falling off. It crashed down the rock face, annihilating everything in its path. It was like

watching a 20-storey building collapse, while sat in the next building.BOOOOOM! The huge rock exploded into the glacier below. Enormous chunks of ice and rock were spat from the impact zone, tumbling into crevasses and destroying their own paths. The event had doubtless been in preparation for hundreds or thousands of years – snow falling, melting, trickling into minute fissures, dissolving the cements that bind granite particles together, freezing and expanding, slowly wedging the rock

from the main face. The tower creaked and groaned as smaller rocks followed their powerful leader. An immense dust cloud erupted in slow motion. I shivered. I didn't know what to say.

An eerie jacket of calm cloaked the towers. The


“..the fuzzy onset of

unconsciousness had frozen my

voice into a hard lump of wordless desperation in my

throat.”

sky was curdled grey, saturated with lumps of cloud. It looked like a giant plate of our tuna-pasta disaster. Dusty air encroached upwards, engulfing us in the burnt cordite scent of fresh rockfall. A lone nylon sling flapped in the faint breeze, creating the only noise in an otherwise silent atmosphere. I'd never seen a falling rock bigger than a golf ball before.“That would have landed on us if we’d started the climb today.” Callum said, monotone and matter-of-fact. He had bags under his eyes.“What should we do?”“Don’t know.”Dust particles swirled around us, exaggerating the apocalyptic scene. Hours later, when the dust had settled, we saw the rubble and destruction. The glacier that we walked across had been obliterated. Car-sized rocks covered our footprints.“It’s probably safer to go up.” Callum said. Despite the cold, sweat streamed from his brow. He looked older, like he was ageing a year for each pitch climbed.I nodded. We escaped unscathed that time, but the malicious tower had other cruel intentions for us.

We continued battling relentless winds and dodging falling rocks,

while inching our way up the enormous vertical wasteland, driven by the fact that we could only be rescued by ourselves. It became commonplace to see blocks the size of car wheels arcing out into space, followed by the familiar echo of a dull explosion as they hit the lower slabs. The days blew by, merging into a wicked blur of cut ropes, rockfall and bad food.

On our 8th day we reached a point which became our 'high camp'; the top of a huge dihedral: an alien refuge of smooth, solid rock amidst a vast citadel of choss. When we climbed from there, we fixed our tattered ropes


as far up as they would go, meaning we could quickly ascend them to make a push for the summit when the weather granted us permission.

On the morning of our 10th day we woke to find an extremely rare, perfectly cloudless, purple-blue sky; the lake below tranquil and still, the air charged with silence and frost, the only movement the arc of the occasional blue eagle gliding by. Frost thinly glazed the glacier's surface, until it beamed in the burnt-red eastern light like polished marble. The Towers, largely hidden by gloom for the past ten days, stood out in their aged and mighty splendour.

The ropes above us had frozen into windswept positions and were encased in icicles. Fortunately, the ropes' icy jackets added a necessary layer of protection against the countless sharp edges of rock they'd been blowing over throughout their time up there. We ascended our ropes and crept through a vertical maze of caravan-sized blocks balanced precariously one upon the other like a teetering staircase of giant Jenga towers. The euphoric rush of summit glory buzzed between us. The landscape below resolved into a quilt of glacial

white and pale grey rock, punctuated by the emerald green lake. The Andes mountain range stretched into distant horizons to the north, west and south, a view that had been hidden from us as we climbed the east facing wall. Seemingly endless black and jagged peaks poked out above a thick snowy blanket, all with peace and strength and freedom. The mountains seemed to rise infinitely into a world beyond the world. It appeared to be the end of the earth, or perhaps the beginning of another earth. In the west, a thin film of cirrocumulus softened distant


mountain peaks. We sat on the very tip of the tower, absorbing it all on a small block that had persevered through millennia of winter's ice and vicious winds. Callum's white teeth gleamed through a grubby patchwork of beard and dirt. For both of us, a life-long dream had been completed.

After so much time away, the thought of civilization was unreal, unbelievable. The sun gave its parting kiss to the towers' summits,

and golden light reverberated through the open space. The setting sun gave the trio a brief but colossal spiky shadow which stretched eastwards over rolling hills until their summits touched the far horizon. Dusk rolled in like a sea of phosphorescence. Our exhilaration intensified. We shook hands and posed for photographs. A happy and excited grin spanned my rosy cheeks; an expression which had brightened my face every day for as long as I could remember. The next time I smiled so unabashed like that was six months later.


Tufts of clouds drifted overhead. Cold, hostile weather had caught up to us. Sleet stung my face. The wind whipped it under the collar and sleeves of my jacket. The mist was so thick that visibility was down to a few metres. Callum's mouth was moving erratically. He was shouting something but his words were snatched away by hurricane force winds before they could reach my ears. He was losing battle with sixty metres of rope which was blowing directly upwards, whipping over sharp edges of loose rock. Getting down was not an option until the wind

eased. The strain of the past days had turned his skin a chalky white, accentuated by his dark jacket. An almost detached expression was settling into the eyes of a man who could suffer more than a Chilean street dog. Our portaledge clattered against the rough granite wall; a broken sail on a sinking ship.

On the third day of the brutal storm, the wind softened enough for us to pack away our shelter and continue our battle down the remaining nine hundred metres of vertical rock.

We made each abseil anchor far to the side of the previous one, to avoid being hit by rocks when pulling our ropes. This technique proved to be extremely valuable, especially on the lower slabs. After more than twenty abseils, but still with a few more to go, strong winds had blown our ropes onto a ledge about twenty metres directly above us. Cautiously, we pulled them through. Small pebbles fell and bounced off our helmets as the rope snaked through rock


obstacles high above on the ledge. Suddenly, a booming groan echoed from deep within the tower. On the ledge above us I saw the image that - even years later as I write this - continues to haunt me when I close my eyes. An enormous jagged rock slid over loose pebbles to the end of the ledge. In slow motion it turned to look at us with revengeful eyes, angry that we had awakened it from a thousand year sleep.

“No!” Callum cried in the despondent tone of a trapped animal. His eyes and mouth stretched wide into ovals of disbelief and horror as the rock tumbled from the ledge and rapidly accelerated directly towards us. “Oh fuck, it’s coming straight for us!”Pinned in close to the wall with no escape, the only thing we could do was watch and hope. The air above us ripped into a deafening, scraping scream. And then, silence.

I'm splashing through muddy puddles in a woodland park on a foggy summer’s morning. The scent of moist vegetation fills my lungs. At the age of five, I'm thrilled to be guiding my grandma and her small brown dog, Toby, through the new and exciting land. I stretched back and threw my hands up in an attempt to deflect the giant rock, but its overwhelming dominance crumpled my shaky arms. Toby, strong for his old age, runs ahead of me. The long hair from his abdomen collects mud from the damp path. In one movement, the violent rock crushed the breath from my chest and slammed into my right leg. A plume of warm air visibly escaped into the cold air around us. Toby's droopy ears flop in rhythm with his short legs as he runs. The rock erupted into a shatter of vehement thunder against the slabs below. I opened my mouth. I opened it so wide my jaws creaked. My lungs tightened, squeezed. It was like breathing through a drinking straw. Without stopping, Toby turns around and smiles with his slender, drooling


tongue and wide, excited eyes, beckoning me to follow him. Numb with a bursting surge of adrenaline, the only pain I could feel was a tingle of horror creeping across my skin. I try my best to catch up with Toby. The hood of my jacket bounces on my back as I run. He disappears out of sight. My grandma shouts me, "Come back, Neil. Come back." The tone of her voice is worried and serious. I darted a glance at my leg to check if it had been severed or not. But that was the least of our worries.

“You okay?!” A voice shouted. It had the desperate edge of someone in real peril. The words echoed distantly through my confused mind. My hearing was muffled, my vision blurred.Am I alive and dreaming, or dead and remembering? I wondered.

“You okay?!” The voice repeated.“Ummmm I... I dunno.” I forced out shaky words.“Oh fuck! Look at that! Don’t move!” The voice screamed.

The rock-fall had almost completely stripped our belay from the wall. All of our haulbags, all of our equipment, my life and the life of my best friend were dangling solely from a single strand of frayed cord, the thickness and strength of a shoelace, which was wrapped around an ancient, rusty piton. Our lives were literally hanging by a thread. All laws of physics state that the thread should have snapped. I'll never know how it didn't.

It is moments like this that bring out our true character; moments that are simultaneously the worst and most memorable of our lives. When our lives are hanging from a thread, there is nothing to hide behind. This is when we discover who we really are.

Callum slotted a small nut in a crack just above us. His fingers were trembling. The nut didn't fit. I couldn't move. I couldn't blink. I couldn't take my eyes off the straining thread and rusty piton which our lives were hanging from. He tried again. A cold, slate-grey flush of shock bleached his face. I watched the old piton flex with each gentle movement. The nut


wouldn't fit. Nothing would fit. The shoelace-cord creaked. My stomach roiled with nausea. If Callum was as hopeless as me, we would have dangled there until the thread snapped, perhaps a few minutes later. But there was a fighting strength within him. A strength to fight to the very end. With incredible care and precision, he smeared his foot on a dimple in the rock and reached higher. He placed a small cam, and clipped me to it. Then clipped himself to it.

We were safe once again, safe enough. But the fact is that we should have been swept from the rock and swallowed by the deep crevasses of the icy coffin below.

The adrenaline began to subside, intense pain roared through the veins in my leg. My eyes rolled around in erratic swirls, as if what

they had just witnessed was beyond the realm of reality and they were searching the depths of my mind, hoping to find a less hellish nightmare. I tried to speak but the fuzzy onset of unconsciousness had frozen my voice into a hard lump of wordless desperation in my throat. All three of our ropes were shredded to the point of uselessness. The rest of the descent is a distant blur in my memory.

Spikes of pain battered my leg for every step of the four-day walk back. It healed soon after but the emotional scars took much longer to heal.

I once moved to the other side of the world because I'd fallen in love with a woman. Shortly after, she cheated on me. It's the same pain. Six tough months passed before I tied into a rope again. But when I did, the vibrancy of life returned. Trust was rebuilt. My psyche for everything came flooding back. Life was exhilarating again. I'll never stop climbing.




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On September 6, 2008, a thousand feet up the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome, as I pushed through dirty cracks and vegetation, wondering if I’d gotten off route on the Higbee-Erickson free variation, I sensed the threat of another cul-de-sac. My anxiety wasn’t ratcheted up to the level of genuine fear, but it got my attention. So I focused hard, took a deep breath, and sorted out my options.

I told myself it wasn’t a do-or-die situation. Climbing down is almost always harder than climbing up, but I still felt that I could have downclimbed the whole route so far, all thousand feet of it, if I had to. For that matter, if I got into a truly nasty predicament, I could always sit and wait, even for a day or two, until some other climbers came along, ask to tie in with them, and finish the climb as their probably unwelcome guest. “Hitchhiking,” I call it. Other climbers in Yosemite have chosen that means of escape, or even have had to be rescued by helicopter, but I’ve never had to resort to either gambit,


thank God except for my ignominious chopper rescue on Mount Tallac, ―but that wasn’t climbing. On Half Dome, “hitchhiking” would have really sucked, and a helicopter rescue would have been even worse.

As I later realized, I had climbed too high before traversing right. For all I know, on that traverse I was inventing a new variation to the Higbee-Erickson free variation, charting new waters. The variation is supposed to end with a hundred-foot downclimb of a 5.10 finger crack. I actually had to downclimb 150 feet. Eventually, though, I found some old nylon slings hanging from pitons, and that bolstered my confidence. But then I found it hard to get my fat fingers into the 5.10 crack. I could only lodge the first knuckle in a crack where other climbers Lynn Hill, for ―example could have sunk all three knuckles on each finger. So the ―downclimb felt distressingly “thin,” harder than 5.10, and the pitch took me a long time. In all, the variation cost me a ton of time in actuality, ―maybe fifteen minutes, though it seemed an eternity and a lot of stress, ―and I was relieved to finally get back onto the clean, well-traveled path.

I put on my headband iPod again and switched back into autopilot mode for the next five hundred feet of chimney climbing. It felt great to be in a clean, secure chimney. A pleasant routine of squirming my back, stemming my feet, palming, and repeating for hundreds of feet. I took it slow and steady, enjoying the climbing. And that brought me to Big Sandy, an enormous ledge system 1,600 feet up the wall.

So far, I’d eaten none of my food and drunk none of my water. Big Sandy isn’t the only place on the route where you can sit down, but it’s such a spacious ledge you could have a barbecue there with friends (if you could get them up there in the first place). I spent a few minutes taking off my shoes and relaxing. It had taken me about two hours of climbing to get here, and now I needed a breather. I ate my bars and drank the water, so I wouldn’t have to carry the weight through the next hard pitches. Some climbers might have tossed the plastic flask once it was empty, but I’ve always believed in packing out your trash, so I stuck it back in my pocket. Soon enough, I re-tightened my shoes, set my iPod to repeat Eminem, and started climbing again.

The day was getting warmer, even though I was still in shadow. At some


point I took off my shirt and wrapped it around my waist, cinching it with an over-and-under tuck of the sleeves. My short rest stop hadn’t really felt like relief, because I knew the hardest part of the climb was still above me. That final challenge hung over me the whole time I sat on Big Sandy, ramping up my concentration and intensity for the crux to come.

Resting can be a double-edged sword. When you’re free soloing, the pain in your feet and your fatigue just seem to vanish. When you rest, those annoyances come back. You have to snap out of it and get serious again.

The next three pitches above Big Sandy are called the Zig-Zags, presumably for the single, zigzagging crack/corner system they follow. Rated 5.11d, 5.10b, and 5.11c, they’ve always seemed harder to me. Maybe it’s because I happen to have huge fingers, but the thin crack set in a steep, polished corner has always felt more like 5.12. Aesthetically, the Zig-Zags represent the best Yosemite has to offer, perfect clean corners with staggering exposure. But I wasn’t thinking about the amazing view of the Valley as I carefully liebacked my way up the first tenuous pitch.

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I climbed almost in a daze. I knew what to do; I just tried not to think about it too much. I didn’t think about the next hard pitches above. I didn’t think about the 5.11+ slab on top, a pitch above the Zig-Zags. I just moved steadily between small fingerlocks up the steep dihedral. The crux of the first Zig-Zag felt much easier than it had two days before, probably because now I had the sequence dialed. Every hold felt crisp and perfect, and I pulled really hard.

The second pitch of the Zig-Zags flew by in a frenzy of hand jams and hero liebacking. The climbing was secure enough that I could relax and enjoy it. With every zag of the crack, I found myself handjamming over big protruding blocks, the base of the wall almost 2,000 feet below me, the Valley floor itself 4,000 feet below. The pitch was a delight, compared to the thin liebacks above and below.

Handjamming is another essential technique for the rock climber, and it’ssurprising that it took many decades to invent. If a vertical crack is between about two and five inches wide, but there are no edges inside it to grasp with the fingers, you can still use it for a hold, by inserting the whole hand, then flexing it to fit the crack, either by making a fist or by arching the back of the hand against the straightened fingers. Your hand acts like a wedge that you can put your whole weight on. Jamming is tough on the knuckles, and guys bent on a hard day of crack climbing will tape their hands to minimize the damage. I’ve never been into tape myself, though, mainly because my skin is so naturally resilient I don’t ―tend to suffer from the little cuts and scrapes that other climbers do.


I stopped again for a minute below the last Zig-Zag. I felt good but wanted to be sure I didn’t get pumped. On a rope, you’re forced to rest at least fifteen minutes per pitch while you belay. But when you solo, you never have to stop, so I force myself to pause at stances and relax, just to make sure I don’t get ahead of myself. After a two-minute breather, I set out up the undercling lieback feature, a slight variation on the original aid line.

The undercling is somewhat pumpy but only 5.11c, not terribly difficult compared to the original corner, which is supposedly 5.12+ (though I’ve never tried it). The real crux of the variation is making blind gear placements in the flaring crack. But since I wasn’t placing gear, I was doing the pitch the “easy way.”

Still, it was another pitch of insecure liebacking, with both feet pasted against a smooth granite wall and flared jams for my fingers. Again, as on the whole rest of the route, the crux of the pitch was an extra-thin section. I knew exactly what to do and hurried through it. The nearly two thousand feet of climbing below me were beginning to take their toll. I was finding it harder and harder to give the climbing my complete attention. Part of me just wanted to get the climb over with.

With the last Zig-Zag below me, I was soon walking across Thank God Ledge, the amazing sliver of rock that traverses out from beneath the Visor, only about 200 feet shy of the summit. I could hear noises from above and knew lots of people would be up top on this perfect late summer morning.The easy Cable route up the other side of Half Dome is one of the most popular hikes in the Valley, culminating in a fifty-five-degree slab on which the National Park Service has installed a pair of metal cords to use like handrails. On a warm sunny day like this one, there’s a nonstop procession of hikers lined up on the cables like airport travelers in a taxi queue.

I could hear the chatter of the tourists on top, but no heads peered over the edge. I was glad no one was watching.

I walked across Thank God Ledge as a matter of pride. I had walked its thirty-five-foot length before, but I’d also crawled or hand-traversed it. It’s less than a foot wide at its narrowest, with the wall above bulging ever so slightly at one point. But I didn’t want to taint my solo ascent I had to do this correctly.―



(Incidentally, walking Thank God Ledge is another of those things that’s quite a bit easier with no harness, rope, gear, or pack hanging off you. The balance is more natural.) The first few steps were completely normal, as if I was walking on a narrow sidewalk in the sky. But once it narrowed, I found myself inching along, facing out with my body glued to the wall, shuffling my feet and maintaining perfect posture. I could have looked down and seen my pack sitting at the base of the route 1,800 feet below, but it would have pitched me headfirst off the wall. The ledge ends at a short squeeze chimney that guards the beginning of the final slab to the summit.

I paused for a moment beneath the ninety-foot slab, looked up to see if anyone was watching (still no one), and started up. The first few moves are easy enough, on somewhat positive holds with good feet. As you get higher, the holds disappear and the feet shrink. Two days earlier, I’d considered two sections “cruxy.” The first involved a step-through onto a miserly smear, while the second, thirty feet higher, involved a few moves of shitty hands and feet before reaching a “jug” a big, positive edge I could wrap my fingers around ―that marked the end of the hard climbing, sixty feet up the pitch.

I also knew that it was this slab that had thwarted Higbee and Erickson's attempt to climb the whole route free. So close to the summit, they’d had to use aid to surmount the last obstacle. Perhaps that should have given me pause.

I hardly noticed the first crux. I cruised right through it, feeling pretty good about myself. Twenty feet of thin cord hung from one of the bolts. I very briefly considered running the cord under my thumb not weighting it but ―having it there just in case. But that felt suspiciously like cheating.

I climbed into the upper crux, feeling good about doing things legit. And then I ground to a halt. I’d expected to find some sort of different hold or sequence from the one I’d used two days earlier, which had felt pretty desperate, but perhaps I’d done it wrong. This time, in the same position on the same holds, I realized there were no better options. I had a moment of doubt . . . or maybe panic. It was hard to tell which. Although I’d freed the pitch maybe two other times the year before, I could remember nothing of the sequence or holds, perhaps because there aren’t any.


A gigantic old oval carabiner hung from a bolt about two inches above the pathetic ripple that was my right handhold. I alternated back and forth, chalking up my right hand and then my left, switching feet on marginal smears to shake out my calves. I couldn’t make myself commit to the last terrible right-foot smear I needed to snag the jug. I’d stalled out in perhaps the most precarious position of the whole route. I considered grabbing the biner. With one pull, I’d be up and off.

Tourists’ oblivious laughter spilled over the lip. Tons of people were up top. I was in a very private hell.

I stroked the biner a few times, fighting the urge to grab it but also thinking how foolish it would be to die on a slab, sliding and bouncing almost 2,000 feet to my death, when I could so easily save myself. My calves were slowly getting pumped. I knew I should do something soon, since treading water was only wearing me out. Downclimbing never occurred to me I was ―going up (it was just a matter of how high) one way or another. But now, real fear seized me. Once again, I took a deep breath, studied the holds in front of me, and tried to think rationally about what I had to do.

Although I never wanted to be on that slab in the first place, I had to finish what I’d started without invalidating my ascent. Finally, I compromised. I kept my hand on the pathetic ripple but straightened my right index finger just enough for the tip of my last pad to rest on the bottom of the oval. My thought was, if my foot blew, I could snatch the biner with one finger and check my fall.

I smeared my foot, stood up, and grabbed the jug. No problem. I was delivered, free from my little prison, where I’d stood silently for a good five minutes. And I hadn’t cheated by grabbing the biner.

I took the final 5.7 slab to the summit at a near run. Twenty or more hikers sat on the edge of the precipice, witnessing my final charge. But no one said a word. No yells, no pictures, nothing. Maybe they thought I was a lost hiker. Maybe they couldn’t conceive of where I’d come from, or maybe they just didn’t give a shit. When I mantled onto the actual top, I was met with a


flood of humanity, a hundred-odd people spread across the summit plateau. Tourists ate lunch next to me. They made out, took scenic photos. People everywhere.

It was so weird. Like parachuting out of Vietnam into a shopping mall.I was shirtless, pumped, panting. Psyched out of my mind. Flooded with conflicting emotions. I was embarrassed that I’d gotten scared on the slab. But I was thrilled beyond words to have finally done something that I’d been thinking about for months. Ashamed of myself for maybe pushing it a little further than I’d planned. Yet still proud of myself.

On the summit, part of me wished that someone, anyone, had noticed thatI’d just done something noteworthy though ―maybe it was better that I didn’t have to talk to anybody. How could I have expressed what my last few hours had been like? It was enough that I knew.

I didn’t make a sound. I took off my shoes and started hiking down the Cable route. It was only then that someone noticed. “Oh, my God,” this dude blurted out. “You’re hiking barefoot! You’re so tough!”


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“Take off your sunglasses and look at the colours.”Not exactly words of encouragement or reassurance to quell the acid-like fear I could feel building in my toe joints. I clung shakily to a sheer rock face forty feet in the air, attached to a rope and some hunks of metal a Brazilian I just met who barely speaks English jammed into the route for ‘safety'. My first time climbing outside and I was terrified, on the verge of tears, exhausted, and only a few moves up the first pitch of Calypso, Eldorado Canyon's famously daunting ‘intro climb.’

ColoursBy Alecia Philips

“Take off your sunglasses and look at the colours.”The words drifted up from below. Standing on my tip toes on a tiny lip of rock I peered down at my two new friends staring up at me encouragingly, one with his hands securely on the belay, the other licking off the remains of a chocolate energy bar from his fingers.“I can't!” I shouted back. “I can’t take my hands off the rock.”“You’re fine,” returned my belayer, the one who could speak English. “Trust me, it will be worth it.”


I was breathing hard at this point. The toe-fear had now pitched a tent in every cell of my body and the idea of removing one of my sweaty hands from the rock long enough to take off my sunglasses and take a calm look around felt like a fool’s agenda.

But I did it anyway. I took a painfully slow breath, reached tentatively for my sunglasses and slid them down my nose. I relaxed into the harness a bit, let the rope tighten and feel my weight.

Then I looked around. I turned my chest far enough to look out over the canyon, to take in the vivid patchwork of blues, greens and browns. I fixed my gaze on the edge of a large cottonwood tree, right where the brilliant green mass of leaves ceased to exist and the steady blue of the sky took over.

It was worth it. To see those colours with my naked eye. To see them in their purest form and, if only for an instant, fix my attention to that point of visual transition: green to blue. All this, of course, in a moment of extreme discomfort.

I still see those colours. In moments of ease and even moments of distraction. Without sunglasses, I see them, naked and radiant: green to blue.






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VDiff Winter 2015