Monday, January 23, 2012

A little about climbing

I remember first climbing when I was 6 years old.  A vertical rock/cement embankment holds up the road along the Whitefish city beach in Montana, near where I grew up.  At its greatest height, the embankment perhaps reaches 15 feet.  When my family went to the beach, I could never resist the urge to climb the rocks.  My parents blessed me by happily looking the other way.  They knew I would do it one way or another, I've always been a bit impetuous, and rather than have me pursue in secret what some might deem "dangerous," we've often agreed that I could do what needed doing, so long as I spared them the details.

That first climb did not, I regret to say, start anything.  I didn't continue from there to become a world class competitor or a first rate climbing instructor.  In fact, except for two or three high school Friday nights at the Summit Fitness Center in Kalispell, I didn't climb again until college.

This is where my story about climbing gets a jump start ... to nowhere.  I climbed maybe 10 times in college, over the duration of my entire four years.  I climbed outside a couple times with some friends, but mostly pushed my limits on the occasional Friday night in a gym in Concord, CA with SMC Outdoor Adventures.  My dedication to the sport?  Pithy.

The first time I really committed to climbing, my friend Johanna invited me to tag along on a trip to Joshua Tree Nat'l park over a Thanksgiving holiday.  I bought a pair of shoes and a harness and off we went.  JTNP is a climbing pilgrimage for many, but my trip there would make only a lackluster beginning to an anticlimactic story.  The truth is, climbing has never been, and still isn't, a big part of my life.  I love to climb, but my commitments mostly lie elsewhere - whitewater kayaking right now, snowboarding and soccer when I was in high school, hiking and studying in college, and so on.  In spite of this, if somebody asks me, "Do you climb?" I say "Yes."  I say yes because there's another question I have an answer to, that every climber has an answer to, and that non-climbers hardly even ponder.

"Why climb?" **

Climbing is a lot like learning how to do math.  The easiest problems challenge you for a little while, but are fairly easily overcome.  The hardest problems look impossible, and the inexperienced don't even know where to start.  As you master the easy problems, you learn new techniques to try on the harder problems.  Learning the technique takes time, and learning to apply it takes even more.  You build up your strength, practicing how to recognize when a technique is right to use and when it isn't.  The longer you practice, the better you get.  Sometimes you feel like you're more confused at the end of the day than you were at the beginning.  Sometimes something that looked easy turns out to require a trick you haven't learned yet.  Sometimes somebody else sees the problem differently and easily passes what's been stumping you for days.  Some days you feel like you can do any problem on the page.  Some days you leave every answer space blank.

 I love to climb because I love to fail.  We take our LaSalle boys to a cliff in Cropseyville where I spent an entire year falling off a route before I finally sent it.  The moment of accomplishment tasted sweet, much sweeter for the bitterness of my failures.  For me,  the dichotomy of failure and success bears the essence of climbing.

People who fear failure don't climb, because climbing guarantees failure, over and over and over again.  I don't mean climbers want to fail all the time, but they understand the inevitability.  As soon as a climber steps off the ground and onto the rock, he accepts the risk that the rock will bruise equally his ego and his ass.  The climber who falls and gets back on the rock anyway takes his energy from the challenge.  Falling stops sounding like failure to him and becomes a kind of motivation, a fuel for the fire of his determination.  The climber dances and fights at the same time, one minute loving the rock for its own sake, the next for the spirit and drive of competition it evokes in him. He caresses its curves and moves in perfect concert with it even as he considers the best way to conquer its every steadfast challenge.  He would love the rock even if it posed him no challenge, but the love would be a kind of stale marriage, tedious and wearisome.  The dynamism of their love comes from the challenges between them, from their constant trading of failure and success.

I love to watch a group of climbers attack a boulder problem.  They take turns falling off the rock, slowly but surely figuring out what move to make where, and how.  The energy of the group grows with each little success, and the elation of the first climber to send the route reverberates off the walls when he (or she) cries out in triumph.

We climb because the rock is a puzzle, and only the joy of finishing a problem exceeds the fun of working on it.  Another problem, another challenge, always waits on a different rock, on a different day.

**A quick note about some entry-level climbing terminology.  Climbers call a whole climb a "route," and if the route is long enough to be broken into different sections, those are called "pitches."  Different pitches are usually distinguished by places where climbers can rest, such as a ledge.  There are routes on walls and on boulders.  A route up a wall "requires" a rope (some people free climb 2000' faces, but it isn't normal).  Bouldering is a kind of climbing that stays close to the ground and relies on spotters and crash pads for protection - no ropes.  Usually, a bouldering route "tops out," meaning that you can walk off the top of the boulder, rather than having to climb back down.  In bouldering there are no pitches, though there might be several routes up a boulder.  Bouldering routes are usually chosen to include a particular problem or set of problems.  A "problem" is just what it sounds like, a place on the rock requiring a particular, usually difficult, kind of move.  In bouldering, when you finish climbing a route, we often say you "send" it (I have no idea where this term comes from).