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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 24, 2008 - 10:49am PT
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A life to rockanice...
A mystery to the cook!
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rockanice
climber
new york
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Apr 24, 2008 - 12:01pm PT
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Nice Lynne, that sure distills some of the essence.
As an aside, I've been meaning to get back to that cave up in the cliff wall. It's on a long list
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Social climber
valley center, ca
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Apr 24, 2008 - 08:40pm PT
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Thanks Rockanice. And who said New Yorkers weren't polite!
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Social climber
valley center, ca
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Apr 25, 2008 - 01:02am PT
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To much fun to let die. All you guys and gals that live and eat rock have many hilarious, sad, crazy or historical short stories. Just tell it. We will all benefit by it. You don't have to be a writer to do this. Just a short paragraph will do. There are no writers critics on ST that I have run into so far.
I stuck my neck out yesterday with a poem and a guy FROM NEW YORK actually posted a positive note on it.
Here goes:
Years ago there was a great party at Ash Gordon's house in J. Tree. He really was ashes and reposed on the mantel in the home.
Well Jerry Moffat was there and he had an earring that I coveted. It was kind of like a fishing lure with a feather and all. So I proposed a challenge. I was going to try and put it into genteel terms for this post but basically it was a beer guzzling contest. Who ever finished first got the earring. Well they did not call me Guzzalita in college for naught. I still have the earring, but I'd rather have had his climbing skills.
How did I have the "as my brothers put it" nads?!to challenge J.M.? Well, when he and his friend Chris came over from England they lived at our place til they could get their dole and live on their own.
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Rockin' Gal
Trad climber
Boulder
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Apr 25, 2008 - 09:58am PT
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Glimpses of Truth
Some say that climbers have a death wish. No, it's a wish to live I always tell them. But after reflecting on the subject, it seems to me that part of the attraction of the sport may be that death is but a single mistake away. Given the fact that climbing and other high-risk activities entail making life-and-death decisions, perhaps climbers do have a death wish, or at least a desire to come a little closer to the void, to peer into that which is normally obscured.
While having a close encounter with death is not normally what we seek out, it is often necessary to put the gift of life in perspective. Over the years, several incidents have made me realize that at any time we are seconds away from death no matter where we are. It's never too soon to be thinking about what's important in life.
*
Moonlight glinted off Yosemite's water-polished walls, illuminating the valley floor. I punched the Ahwahnee Dining Room time clock at 11:33 PM and hurried to my packed-up truck. The shiny, fire-engine red pick-up's odometer read almost 1,000 miles. The maiden voyage for my first new vehicle, the journey led me to my brother's wedding in the Midwest some 20 hours down the highway.
The road to Wawona to pick up my passenger, Robyn, passed in a rush of shadows and curves. Upon my arrival, she threw her duffel bag in the open back.
"I'm fine to drive," I said. "Let's get outta here."
As she dozed, I drove, over Tioga Pass and down the East Side, following Highway 120. I stopped for gas around 5 am in Tonopah, Nevada. She stirred.
"How ya doing, Sally?'
"Great, a little tired but I can keep on going."
An hour later the ghostly shadows lurking on the horizon settled into finite shapes. As the sun rose, the smokey hills of Nevada shadow-danced in the distance. Miles of desert highway rolled by, shimmering, mesmerizing,glimmering, hypnotizing until...
WHAM!
Hot sand kissed my face, feeling like the three-day-old stubble on a big-wall climber's cheek. Purple mountains framed the yucca bush at eye level. As I struggled to get up, Robyn's face appeared in my line of sight. "Are you OK? Some people stopped and they're calling for help." Nothing could be done. The sand welcomed me. I drifted off. "Owwww--I have to move. This hurts!" My tailbone protested at the hard, unyielding surface. Tied down to a backboard in an ambulance bound for Tonopah, I struggled to release my bonds.
"Let me move!"
" Now you can't do that," said a placating voice from above, "this is for your protection." A five-minute plea to loosen the tethers finally paid off. The pain eased after I rolled on my side. Thankfully, the hour-long ride passed in a blur.
An exam in the hospital which included a blood sample assessed my injuries as a small scrape on my wrist and a bruised tailbone; Robyn sported a neck collar. The local magistrate spared us a ticket, mainly because alcohol had nothing to do with the incident. For if it had, his secretary told us, we'd be in jail as he had had a relative killed by a drunk driver.
A trip to the towing company which had retrieved my truck proved illuminating.Robyn and I stared at the once-new truck, its cab now peaked due to the rollover, the windshield smashed and doors askew. Joe the mechanic had it all figured out.
"Yeah, you drifted to the right when you fell asleep and the tires caught in the sand. It rolled four times; you came out on the second roll, and she came out on the third. You ladies are lucky; 95% of the time, if a person is thrown out of the car, it'll roll on him! If I were you, I'd go play theslot machines."
I eyed my prized possession for the last time. "What will you do with it?"
"Well, we'll sell the engine for sure and whatever parts we can. The frame is bent, so that's no good."
I shook my head and walked away.
Luck stayed with us until we found a cheap hotel room. After hunkering down for a day, we chartered a four-seater airplane to Las Vegas where a commercial flight to Milwaukee awaited.
We had come close, too close but had been spared, barely hurt. I felt blessed, cursed and puzzled. Why am I not dead? I wondered. It's not my time. What mission am I to do? What is important in life? The only question of these I could honestly answer was the last. People. That's what's important. Not my new truck, not the amount of money I had in the bank, not my job, the climbs I planned to do or new clothes.
Robyn and I got off the plane in Milwaukee and were greeted by our parents. Her family grabbed her and shuttled her away.
"Well, they certainly weren't very friendly," my mother observed.
"Geez, Mom, I almost killed their daughter. Do you blame them?"
They knew what was important: People.
***
After earning my degree in Economics from the University of Colorado in 1981, my goal was to lead 5.10. To accomplish that, I pilgrimaged toYosemite, the place where I had learned to climb. It seemed like a logical career move at the time.
My ability to do 10 pull-ups combined with my desire to push my leading skills would hopefully translate into a successful climbing summer. On the first day I followed a couple of hard 5.10s without falling. I hoped that following 5.10 would translate into leading 5.8 without too many problems.
My testpiece was Surprise, a recommended 5.8, one of the Five Open Books near the base of Yosemite Falls. To up the commitment, I recruited Dianne, also an aspiring leader.The day began auspiciously enough, with Dianne backing off the 5.6 lead. I motored through, then embarked on the crux. A challenge yes, but not beyond my honed abilities.
After bringing her up, only the last pitch remained to be deciphered. Confident by this time, I moved upward, no protection between me and the belay. But where was the exit? The topo said 5.7. I went up, then traversed right; no, that wasn't the way. I returned left....
EEYAH!
A mini-boulder I had used as a handhold liberated itself from the munge and became airborne. It flew, and I flew. Time extended as I bounced down the rock for 30 feet before landing in a large manzanita on a ledge. Stunned, I wrestled with the bush, cursing and not appreciating the fact that it had saved me from several broken bones. I threw in a piece, belayed Diane up and tossed the rack at her.
"Get us out of here. Go left, I went right and that's not the way."
Eyeing my bleeding knees and elbows, she had no choice but to suck it up and tough it out. Placing gear every few feet, she hesitantly led the final section and set a belay. I followed, a ripping pain in my side everytime I tried to pull myself up. After limping down the descent, I headedimmediately to a shower.
Blood and dirt mingled with soap and water as Diane, a registered nurse, inspected and sponged off my cuts and scrapes. "I think you'll be okay," she said, "Do you want to go to the clinic?"
My lack of health insurance as well as my plan to live in Camp 4 and Tuolumne for the summer precluded me from paying any expensive medical bills. I slunk into the Mountain Room Bar and proceeded to order all the white wine I could drink. One of the guides entered.
"Surprised on Surprised, Sal? Well, you aren't the first."
I barely looked up from my glass of liquid anesthetic to acknowledge that comment. Friends who had heard of my humbling stopped by, and at midnight I left the bar and stumbled to my tent.
The next day dawned harsh and clear. A pitbull hangover conspired with my injuries to make leaving the tent the hardest move I'd ever contemplated. Eventually, the necessity of relieving bodily functions compelled me to commit. I contorted my stiffened body through the tent door, then lurched the 50 yards to the Camp 4 bathroom.
For the next few days, I rued my existence. My right leg ballooned to elephantine proportions; wearing shoes or socks was impossible. It hurt to breathe, laugh or sneeze. Each morning I had to peel the sleeping bag off my oozing wounds. I finally received some medical attention when a third-year med student in camp practiced his diagnostic skills on me.
"Your leg? A subdermal hematoma, that will recover in time. Watch those lacerations for signs of infection--the one on your elbow is deep and could have used a couple of stitches. Your ribs are bruised and not cracked, otherwise you'd have black-and-blue marks where the blood seeped out."
"Hey, Jeremy," he called to his friend, "come over here and see what rock climbing will do for you!"
I contemplated what climbing had done for me as I watched my friends from my lawn chair in Camp 4. What's important in life? My climbing goals that I had trained for and now couldn't accomplish? Would I climb again? Of course, everyone said, yes, you have to climb. Inwardly, I recoiled at the thought.
One of my climbing partners came by my tent and off-handedly said, "This is good for you. What doesn't kill you, keeps you alive."
My dander rose immediately. "Bullsh#t. There's nothing good about this, my climbing summer is ruined, I'll never lead 5.10."
But after he left, the second part of what he said stuck in my head.
Lessons, lessons are what's important in life, especially in climbing, because what doesn't kill you, keeps you alive. I, should I climb again, would be more cautious, put in more pro, test the holds for looseness. Fear of falling was now impressed upon my brain cells, my ribs, my leg, my elbows. To make this experience worthwhile, I had to learn its lesson and apply it. It was a gift to me which presented, on some level, what I needed to know.
***
Fourteen years later, my red four-wheel-drive gamboled up the dirt road to my Saturday rigging job. Women's Crying Climbing I called it, and half of the female climbers in Boulder had set up topropes at a scruffy little cliff that June Blanding used for her feminist healing and trust-building weekends. I had made a cool hundred dollars cash working for her a few weeks before: set up the ropes, get a tan and watch the tears flow. Piece of cake.
Today the group numbered seven, rather large, and as they got acquainted, I hauled five ropes and assorted pieces of gear over to the 70-foot mini-crag. Not being a climber, Jane believed in overkill as far as safety was concerned, and this was the most redundant system I had ever seen: one person belayed by four people, with two on a rope, one with a sticht plate and one with a hip belay, each rope hanging from a separate three-bolt anchor. (Later in my tenure, I discovered that this overkill was warranted--one woman fainted from the mental strain of belaying and other belayers rushed to her side, leaving the person climbing protected by one slightly shakey hip belay.)
As a bonus activity for the class, another line was rigged so that participants could try rappelling. After tying the rope into a tree at the top, I tossed it off only to have it hang up on a bush. I clipped into the old goldline and began to head down to clear it for the students. Easing my weight onto the rope, I mentally noted that this was a bad rappel for beginners because of the overhang at the start.
POP!
I was flying and instinctively my right hand clamped onto the rope. I came to a stop on a small ledge a good 15 feet down from the overhang. What the...? My belay plate and locking carabiner dangled above me, still attached to the rope. Disbelief, shock and bewilderment flooded my being.
My hand throbbed, having stopped my rapid descent to the talus 50 feet below. I knew not what had happened, and simply had to get down. Taking a single carabiner and rigging it into the rope, somehow I arrived on the ground.
Dumbfounded, I hiked to the top of the cliff. I knew I had clipped into the rope, the plate and the biner still there were proof of that. Searching for the answer, I discovered the broken gear loop on my harness. Not meant to hold anything more than a few quick draws or nuts, the gear loop had given away under the pressure of body weight. In my haste to straighten out the rope, I had not taken enough time to check what I had clipped into nor had I given this seemingly innocuous cliff the respect it deserved.
My hand had turned into a near useless claw, the burn fully blistered across my fingers and palm. What to do? I needed the work so I had to continue on as if nothing had happened. Before returning to class, I stopped to bathe my hand in the cold creek water. As I taught them to belay, one woman noticed the prominent blisters.
"Look," she said, "she has calluses from belaying!" I smiled, nodded, and continued to keep my right hand palm down as much as possible.
June appeared from the main cabin as I wrapped up the belay lesson and said, "OK, everyone must sign the waiver before continuing."
I barely contained my laughter.
"Now, is there anything that anyone wants to share before we get started?" I almost died, I wanted to say. I'm here and I don't know why. Yes, this is totally safe, but I almost didn't make it. Operator error. Mental meltdown.
The day passed. I kept my hand low profile and concentrated on the job. My adrenalin-flushed state gradually ebbed.
Finally I took my little secret home. I had planned to go to a party, but it paled in comparison to the day. I couldn't go and make social chatter to a room full of strangers. I made a totally avoidable, boneheaded mistake! Why was I still here?
Marveling at my good fortune, I sat on the back porch, drinking in the sky, the trees, the grass, the earth. It was alive, I was alive. What's important? The fact that I'm here and not mush on the talus at the bottom of the cliff. The fact that I can climb again, see my loved ones, learn this lesson and continue playing the game. Life, that's the most important thing.
*
Yes, I've been lucky. I've survived to climb and to live and to love and to laugh again. These days my goal is to come closer to the truth without getting too near the void. But by getting closer to death, I've gotten closer to life and am thankful for these glimpses of truth.
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 25, 2008 - 10:54am PT
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You know Lynne,
Jerry Moffatt is, well, "He's Light".
Wait a minute; that's probably an asset.
Rockanice, Lynne, Sally!
Way to put it out there...
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 25, 2008 - 10:55am PT
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An Exposition on the Unique Rewards of Traditional, on Sight, Ground-Up Climbing
(excerpt from a long conversation...)
For starters, I tend to favor traditional climbing. For me there is a certain tension to the energy afforded by on-site ground-up climbing. Largo's "experiential voltage" if you will. Given my background and experience, the majority of sport climbs under the 5.12 grade tend to have too many bolts, the outcome is predictable and the exercise feels repetitive, such that the experience of leading the route lacks a certain zest.
Done from the ground up and on sight, a successfully achieved ascent has a very palatable internal energetic feel. The construct of a sport climb; which encompasses things like rappelling and succinct prior knowledge, a fairly sanitized and very safe protection scheme, and in a subtle way, yes even the communal lore of its construction -for me, these things sever the energetic tension of the route. We typically know how a route was originally done and I say that does matter. In ground-up style climbing, there is an aspect of emulation at play which is quite valuable.
When Werner says the route has a soul he's describing that energetic tension that exists for the route as a possibility. I get it more as a collusion of my internal striving with the canvas which the route represents. So for me it's a relationship and I like for that energy to be as fresh and whole as possible and ground-up climbing, whether I'm doing the first ascent or following in the footsteps of a pre-established ascent, the ground up traditional style effort does the best job of retaining that essence, best characterized as a completeness and a continuity, like an independent living thing.
So that's my sense of the peculiarly distinct internal reward conferred through trad climbing. It is something that should not be overrun. It's an artistic imperative that has fewer and fewer voices and outlets in our urbanized, formalized society. Spontaneous, fluid improvisation: we need to keep that heart alive and beating.
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 25, 2008 - 11:40am PT
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I'm taking the liberty of posting Roger Breedlove's tender and hilarious revelation here...
--Take note you pretty boy hardmen, for if you survive your vain glorious adventures, you too will likely be one day singing this tune!!!
Roger wrote:
Speaking of reinventing oneself, I finally figured out how to drop the unwanted, unusable, unsightly, unmuscle, and most importantly unhealthy fat this year. After dieting daily for 20 years, I had only accumulated an additional 40 pounds. (Average daily calorie intake above my required amount over that time--19.3 calories per day. Who would notice?) Of course it doesn't show on my 14-3 frame. Nevertheless...
Anyway, I have had some success, so to celebrate, I let my salt and pepper (mostly salt) curly hair grow a bit and started using expensive goop to give me a 'style' while trying to avoid being stopped by security as I made my way into the building in clothes that fit like they belong to someone else. (I even allowed extra time for airport security.)
I have not yet figured out how to show off my nascent abs in public short of spilling copious amounts of water on the thinnest of the dress shirts I own in the building cafeteria, and then making a small scene, holding the flex as long as possible, uttering oaths, and patting myself dry while inadvertently pushing my wet shirt tightly against my skin. Of course, I am already in way over my head with the 'style' and baggy clothes, and could never muster the courage.
My bride and youngest daughter are taking a month long trip to Africa in May and all of my wife's friends want to invite me over for dinner. I assure them that I am all set with the grill and a recent subscription to a subsidiary of NetFlix called DDG (Daily Dancing Girls). Now when a middle aged guy with white hair and a paunch makes a statement like that, everyone smiles weakly and looks away, unable to stand being in the presence of such foolishness and clear evidence of the disturbing inability to middle aged men to accept that life moves on. But when a longish curly headed, expensive goop styled, nascent abs middle aged punk makes a statement about DDG when his wife is planning to go away long enough to clean up the damage after the fact, everyone gets nervous.
So I struck a bargain: My bride suggested that I get a bit trimmed off. (Some of you will read ‘suggested’ and correctly guess what was actually said since, at least in this regard, we are all more or less married to the same women.)
I got the hair cut, stopped the DDG subscription, (and threw away the very thin shirt material catalogues) but I kept the goop and the nascent abs.
Getting old can be fun.
All the best, Buzz
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Apr 25, 2008 - 11:59am PT
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STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS:
A WRITING ABOUT CLIMBING THE SALATHE WALL AND THE SOUTH FACE OF CONNESS WITH ROB LESHER:
A magical trip with one of my oldest friends: I woke him up in his van and he said "where you been?" He didn't want to go climbing, so I pestered and goaded and chided and teased until he agreed.
We climbed Freeblast and all was well. I was happy because the machine was working smoothly, just like days of old. I got to watch him lead the hollow flake smooth and strong. I looked down into his smiling face from the ear and dropped my jug while I was fiddling with aiders. "looks like you'll get to figure out how tough the old school guys were with their prussicks" he said.
We saw the spacious beauty of El Cap spire and then continued on to the cramped quarters of Sui Le Tois or however the funny frenchmen spell it. We actually had enough water to leave some for a thirsty young girl who was fighting with her partner a lot. She gave us big hugs back in the valley for saving her. That nice young girl was killed on El Cap for a rookie mistake not long after.
We saw the beauty of the upper Salathe cracks and the headwall, and the space filled my head with the purest joy. The great bonus was my friend who walked to the top with steaks and booze. We partied like kings and laughed the night away.
But I was still hungry and hadn't burned all my leave so we went to the high country. We woke in the wee hours and drank straight shots of espresso. We hiked through perfect high alpine meadows sweating little esspresso bullets.
My friend was an animal, his legs churning like twin pistons. I must have been an animal too, because there I was watching him. We got off route on the approach and climbed some difficult icy cracks with packs. It didn't matter though, the outcome had already been determined lifetimes ago. We would not be stopped by an inconvenience.
Soon the bottom of the great face was in front of us, and we shared leads as always. I lead the hard traverse and he lead the hard offwidth, just as it should be. The work together was so smooth that the pitches fell like leaves and the sky was ours. We lingered for a time on the summit, our last together and watched the sun fall into the western mountains and the far away sea.
La Luna was our giant cosmic flashlight as we descended to the moonscape plateau to hunt for our packs, and hunt, and hunt. After successfully finding the needle in the haystack we climbed down the great mountain, choosing a different door out than we had come in. The day finally wore us down and we filled our plastic bags with needles like the great mountain hobos we were. We rested and watched the stars dance in the great cosmic blanket that god had bended above us. My heart was filled with love for this place, and this man, who I could trust like no other, and I slept.
At the lake where we basked in our success, it all seemed so normal, so contiuous...like a rope that never ended. How could we know? And yet when he said he had to go and find the wind, I begged him to stay.
Something inside of me was speaking, but I couldn't quite make out the words...How could we know that the days of kings were over? Two of us, mighty kings, sharing our overlapping kingdoms. They say dragons never die, unless people stop believing in them. I have always loved legends, and I want to believe them. I will just keep dreaming,......and believing in dragons.
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Apr 25, 2008 - 12:12pm PT
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FIRST TIME ON EL CAPITAN, 1978
Maybe people can't experience it this way anymore...now that it's a sport crag....
A bit over the top maybe, and I swiped a couple lines from Robert Hunter, but I was trying to make a point with a friend that it really was magic.
THE NOSE
In my youth we were together.
Rob and I, we split the sky.
I was young but I believed. He was brave and strong.
We had seen many hard stones together, but not this stone.
It was big enough to make my mind squirm with fear,
but Rob wasn't afraid. I was young, but I believed.
No fixed ropes, no pitons, no hammers, only heart and sun.
The rope quivered between us, and grew thinner as we climbed.
The stone shimmered in the sun and we thirsted.
The space beneath my feet yawned at me,
but I was young and I believed.
Time had no meaning other than the shadows which brought relief.
We climbed for minutes and hours and they were the same.
We struggled against the mighty pull of the Earth's spinning,
and moved like water flowing uphill.
The resting on Dolt Tower was one of the happiest moments
of my life. Mortal beings cannot imagine the true taste
of canned peaches.
The cool shade behind Texas, the narrow top.
The beauty of the boot and finally,
the mighty swing of Kings. Massive forms
and tiny crystals, all were ours.
The black fear crept into me
but Rob could sing Poncho and Lefty
without water. He was brave
and I believed.
The Great Roof, no sacred cathedral can match.
The perfect Pancake
our evening breakfast.
Camp Five, not like the ones below
where the ant people walked.
They could not be gods like us.
We gazed down at their insignificant world
while the welcome shadow climbed in our footsteps.
Drier than a skeleton's dust, my throat and his,
but we were strong enough to save some precious
liquid in the fragile vessels. A golden chalice
could not have done better.We weren't angry,
the planets were aligned.
My friend and I, sky and star
We sat together in the warm glow
of brotherhood. The resting was long and needed
the cold hollow fear was gone.
He was brave, and I was young,
and I believed.
My hands ached but my heart was laughing.
Our ship sailed along through the straits
of the awesome dihedrals,
that the great spirit himself had cleaved
from this sacred space.
The other world, the world below held no meaning,
except a vague longing,
for comforts left behind.
My muscle and sinew stretched and strained
and my spirit was thin and mixed with space.
I felt I could turn into the stone and never leave it
if I only wished, but my brother brought me back.
He was brave and I was young,
and I believed.
I grew like a billowing cloud while I tied our narrow thread
to the ancient mountain top. I could hardly contain my joy,
from carrying me forever into the spiritworld.
A thousand voices wrapped around me
bright and singing like the twisted manzanita
shining in the sun. My heart ached
because there were no words a tongue could hold.
I bent my ear to hear the tune
and closed my eyes to see.
I wanted so much to describe it to my brother
but there was no need.
When he joined me there in that place,
where others had been, but no one had ever been.
I could see that he knew things that others did not know.
I looked into his smiling face,
and his shining eyes and I knew that I had joined the place,
where shaman could speak with the great stone itself.
Suddenly I realized,
I wasn't the youth I had been........
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rockanice
climber
new york
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Apr 25, 2008 - 12:44pm PT
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Lynne, we aim to please in NY!
Rockin Gal, some of us think we're still alive only because of our wits and skills, but I'll take a dose of luck anyway.
I'm gonna post a l-o-n-g TR later which includes a close call and apologize in advance for the length. I blame inspiration on Tar and Survival who get at the notion of something raw about climbing that doesn't diminish from rookie to grizzled vet.
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Apr 25, 2008 - 12:51pm PT
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rockanice,
wow, thank you. That was very unexpected and kind.
I rarely have a good idea about whether I'm actually getting to what I'm after.
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L
climber
The salty ocean blue and deep
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Apr 25, 2008 - 12:55pm PT
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Really wonderful writing Survival. Talk about touching the heart...thank you.
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 25, 2008 - 01:08pm PT
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Rockanice!
The longer the better, don't hold back and let'er rip...
Michael Kennedy, in the Mugs Stump thread, posted a really nice story, and he apologized for word count... yeah right. We loved it. I may even dig it up and take the liberty of posting that one here too...
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Social climber
valley center, ca
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Apr 25, 2008 - 01:40pm PT
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Tarbuster, Moffat may be light, but I'll have you know I have NEVER lost a chugging contest in my life except once and that was to a New York young arrogant stockbroker. We did it twice because I could't believe he beat me. He beat me twice by one swallow. I think he cheated. But I couldn't figure out how.
I may not be able to climb yet, but I can chug! and I think I may even work on the climbing, after I chug.
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 25, 2008 - 01:43pm PT
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That's the spirit Lynne!
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 25, 2008 - 01:52pm PT
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I don't want us to get into the habit of posting other people's work here,
But I found this piece about Mugs by Michael Kennedy to exemplify a very personal style:
Michael wrote:
The Dream
High on the Cassin Ridge three climbers considered their options. It was bitter cold and snowing hard, and as far as they could tell they were off route. Searching for a decent bivouac among the windswept granite cliffs, they were astounded to see a lone figure off to the side, climbing quickly and confidently up into the raging storm.
Carrying nothing but the ice tools in his hands, a liter of water, a few energy bars, a stove, and a parka stuffed in a day pack, Mugs Stump paused briefly to shout directions to the trio. Concerned that he'd disappear into the clouds above and never be seen again, they told him he'd be welcome to share their shelter.
It was early in the morning on June 5, 1991. Mugs briefly considered staying with the three climbers. "I knew how bad it could get up high," he said several months later. "I had to make a conscious decision to keep going." But feeling that the storm wouldn't get any worse, he pressed on toward the summit of North America's highest peak.
Mugs had developed a keen sense of the vagaries of the region's weather from his years of experience in the Alaska Range, so the intensity of the storm came as no surprise. He had also made several previous ascents of Denali, including two of the Cassin, and realized that he now might be climbing into a trap. Though he had already dispensed with the major technical difficulties of the route, the wind and cold could stop him dead in his tracks at almost any point. Nearly 4000 feet lay between him and the cloud-encased summit at 20,320 feet. And from there he'd still have to make a tiring, 6000-foot descent before reaching the safety of his camp.
Mugs had started at 14,200 feet on the West Buttress at 9 p.m. the previous night, traversing over and descending the steep West Rib to the start of the Cassin Ridge at 11,500 feet. Near the bottom of the West Rib he encountered a party laboring up the steep snow, belaying each other and carrying heavy loads. "You're bumming our epic, man," one of them commented as Mugs sped past.
Continuing on in the twilight of the Alaskan summer night, he motored up the Japanese Couloir and the ice ridge above, then tackled the difficult traverse necessary to circumvent the bergschrund below the Cassin's hanging glacier at 13,900 feet. At 5 a.m. he came across a Czech climber bivouacked in the first rock band. The weather had started to go bad, and Miroslav Smid made tea while the two got acquainted. "We are solo brothers," Smid told Mugs, offering him a spot in his tattered tent until the weather improved. After a short stop, though, Mugs continued up the route.
By the time he'd reached the off-route party in the second rock band, Mugs was climbing in a full-scale Alaskan blizzard. Yet there was something oddly serene about the snow drifting silently down the steep granite and the surrealistic gray clouds swirling all around. "I felt very comfortable being up there alone, at home," he said later. Even the distant howl of the wind on the summit ridge seemed less threatening than usual.
His intuition about the storm and faith in his capabilities paid off. A few hours later, Mugs climbed through the clouds into the morning sun, and soon he was standing happily atop the Cassin Ridge at 20,000 feet. He had spent 15 hours on a route that even fast roped parties climb in four or five days. Eschewing the summit, a half-hour of easy walking away, he headed down, taking a short nap in the middle of the "Football Field," the19,000-foot summit plateau, along the way. Mugs stumbled back into his camp on the West Buttress at 12:30 a.m. on June 6, just 27 1/2 hours after leaving it.
As long as it was at least a little bit out there, Mugs Stump was always psyched for anything -- big walls, long free routes, frozen waterfalls, or high alpine faces. A true “climber’s climber,” he wanted to be on the edge, pushing the envelope of possibility, getting to that rare place where you climb intuitively, fluidly, unburdened by doubt and fear. Although Mugs readily shared his experiences with friends in conversation and letters, he seldom wrote articles or lectured about his climbs. The act of climbing, the doing, was the important thing. The Emperor Face on Mount Robson in the Canadian Rockies, the East Face of the Moose's Tooth and the Moonflower Buttress on Mount Hunter in Alaska, his two big solo routes on Mount Gardiner and Mount Tyree in Antarctica, and his one-day solo of the Cassin were all precedent-setting climbs, but he wasn't primarily concerned with either his physical performance or making history. For Mugs was more than just a superb athlete -- he pursued his climbing, and his life, as a quest for spiritual enlightenment, a search for the godhead.
Other climbers were stunned by his rapid solo of the Cassin -- the closest anyone has come to his time was Charlie Porter, who took 36 hours from the top of the Japanese Couloir during the first solo of the route in 1976 -- but Mugs considered this audacious ascent as just another step along the path he'd been following for well over a decade. Inspired by the enchainments done in the Alps, he'd even thought about doing a super link-up of hard routes on Denali, Mount Foraker, and Mount Hunter, the three highest summits in the Alaska Range. It would be a project of almost unimaginable proportions, involving miles of glacier travel and close to 30,000 feet of elevation gain as well as difficult climbing in harsh Arctic conditions.
Before the Cassin solo, he had planned to solo a new route leading up from the head of the remote Peters Glacier to Denali's north summit, and after a rest, go on to the Cassin. "The Fathers and Sons Face [as he had named his proposed route] has become a deep part of me," he wrote in his journal at the time. "It can be done on-sight and solo, and it is extreme and big and at altitude in Alaska! It is the epitome of this type of big mountain climbing." But during a lengthy reconnaissance and acclimatization period on the nearby West Buttress, he became increasingly concerned with the amount of new snow building up on the route. He decided to leave it for another year, opting for the Cassin alone.
"The Cassin wasn't the ultimate," Mugs told me later, as we sat around his ramshackle house in Sandy, Utah, last February. "What it really did was to open my mind to lots of other possibilities." We talked about some of those possibilities, about climbs past and what he or I or our contemporaries might be capable of, about what the next generation of alpinists would do and the potential adventures that would be left for our children.
As always, Mugs was full of plans: for 1992 alone, he had lined up forays to the Black Canyon, Yosemite, Alaska, Baffin Island, and Antarctica. He was in the middle of negotiating the purchase of the house he'd lived in for several years, and he had hopes of getting a concessionaire's permit to guide on Denali. He was as happy and as at peace with himself as I'd ever known him to be.
It was an enlightening discussion, pleasantly interrupted by friends passing through on their way to a ski tour, random questions from other house guests, and numerous trips to Mugs' library to dig out references to certain peaks or faces. Crumpled sleeping bags littered much of the open floor space, and ropes, racks, and ice gear haphazardly decorated the walls. We parted with tentative plans for a climb together in 1993, our first in several years.
"Much form and concentration," he wrote to his parents in March after making the first winter ascent of the Hallucinogen Wall in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Colorado, with John Middendorf. "Home on the stone. Close to those I love and the 'big force.'" The day before Mugs left for Alaska later that spring, he told me about the Hallucinogen and we talked about our proposed trip, going over the mundane details of peak fees and the logistics of Third-World travel. "Do you think you'll really be able to spend that much time away from home?" he asked me, more concerned about how I'd feel leaving my young son for such an extended period of time.
Three weeks later, on a perfect Saturday morning as I packed lunch before leaving for a mountain-bike ride, the phone rang. It was Billy Westbay, an old Colorado climber I hadn't seen in years, who had been to India with Mugs in 1988. He had terrible news. On May 21, Mugs was killed while guiding two clients down Denali's South Buttress in a storm, the victim of a simple misjudgment and a substantial dose of bad luck. Investigating the route ahead, he'd strayed too close to the unstable edge of a huge crevasse. When it collapsed, Mugs fell in and was buried beneath the jumbled mass of ice.
Mugs started climbing at a relatively late age -- he was 26 when he did his first roped climbs in Utah -- but his sense of the spiritual potential of athletics started early on. "I can look back and I remember ... when I first realized that my life was not going to be as [his father's], an incredible feeling of freedom, realizing a choice that was a part of me," Mugs wrote in his journal on the Kahiltna Glacier in Alaska in the mid-1980s. "I was lying on the grass end of Dietrich Field watching the clouds pass over the mountains and Mifflintown [his hometown in Pennsylvania]. I had just run about 15 miles. Something in me so natural created by the push of my physical body. An opening of my mind brought to be part of the beauty of the earth around me. I thought of the abilities I had and how high they could take me, and how close to God, the spirit that is in everything, I felt when using them. I thought then I would probably be a professional athlete. I was 15."
Born and raised in Mifflintown, Pennsylvania, where his parents still live, Terry Manbeck Stump started fishing, hunting, and camping at an early age with his father, Warren, and his brothers, Ed, Quig, and Thad. His mother, Sis, remembers him as a happy and energetic child who nevertheless seemed to live by the adage "question authority." Although sometimes unruly, Mugs was well liked by his teachers and often displayed a surprising sensitivity for one so outwardly tough.
During his first couple of months at grade school, his mother recalls, Terry, as he was then known, would cry and cling to her leg when she dropped him off. He later told her that he remembered being afraid of his first-grade teacher. His father, who worked hard at the family's grain-and-feed business, was usually gone early in the morning, but eventually he became the one to take Terry to school, and the crying stopped. Later, in high school, when his classmates made life hell for their ninth-grade homeroom teacher, Terry told his mother he felt for sorry him. "The way some of those kids treat Duffy [as the teacher was nicknamed]," he told her, "I'd like to hit them."
Mugs played baseball, basketball, and football throughout his school years. He made the honor roll in his senior year of high school, and also was an all–state quarterback and captain of the "Big 33," a team of the best high school players in Pennsylvania -- a state in which people eat, breathe, and sleep football. "I remember when you (Dad) came up to the field in the evening and would stand by the stands and watch me do my drills," Mugs wrote in his Kahiltna journal. "I would push hard for you, a communication we made to each other without saying a word. It made me so proud and happy. Wanting you to know that I loved what you gave me."
He attended Pennsylvania State University on a football scholarship, and his teammates came up with "Mugs," the moniker he’s been known by ever since. By the time he'd graduated in 1971 with a degree in Recreation and Health, Mugs had started in two Orange Bowls. "He wasn't the best athlete on the team," says Joe Paterno, the well-known Penn State coach, "but Terry was very enthusiastic and courageous, a strong leader, and a hard worker." He was also an independent thinker. Paterno recalls that Mugs was the only player he ever had to tell to get a haircut. When he informed Mugs that he had a choice of playing second-string quarterback or third-string defensive back for senior year, an undaunted Mugs told him he'd play defensive back and start in every game, which he ended up doing.
After college he skied in Aspen, Colorado, for a winter, and then played a year of semi–professional football. Mugs realized that he was probably too small to make it into the big leagues, and he moved to Snowbird, Utah, in the winter of 1972–1973 to ski full time.
Mugs soon became well known for his go-for-it-attitude both on the hill and off -- wild apres-ski parties being the major form of entertainment in the isolated Snowbird community -- and after two years of skiing virtually anything that held snow, found himself increasingly drawn to the backcountry. He spent his summers roaming the Wasatch wilderness surrounding Snowbird and by the winter of 1974–1975 had given up lift skiing in favor of touring. Bill MacIlmoyl, Mugs' roomate at the time and a constant companion both on and off the slopes, recalls, "Mugs' favorite thing was to go up early and lay down a bunch of tracks before the helicopter skiers came out."
As Mugs ventured into steeper and wilder terrain, he sought out local climbers and avalanche experts for advice, and in the summer of 1975 made his first roped climbs. "Rock climbing is the ultimate spiritual communication with our center – God!" he wrote to his parents that fall. Climbing soon supplanted skiing as his raison d'ętre. As he and MacIlmoyl watched the sun come up after a night on the summit of Mount Timpanagos early in the summer of 1976, Mugs said, "This is what I want to do -- climb all over, do big routes, really big routes."
A quick study, Mugs soon started to do routes that were hard by anyone's standards. In the summer of 1977 he spent two months in Chamonix, France, climbing classic snow and ice routes. The trip culminated in an epic attempt on the Dru Couloir (then regarded as one of the most difficult ice climbs in the Alps) with Randy Trover, Steve Shea, and Jack Roberts. Starting out with no bivy gear, and food and water for a single day, they got off route and were trapped on the face by a storm for two days. They barely made it off the mountain alive when, in the worsening storm, the ropes repeatedly froze to the anchors; unable to pull them through any more, the four finally abandoned them on the last rappel. "If we'd started down 10 minutes later," said Trover at a memorial service held for Mugs in Utah last summer, "they would have been doing this for both of us 15 years ago."
The climbs only got harder. In spring, 1978, Mugs attempted the second ascent of the Hummingbird Ridge on Mount Logan, Canada’s highest peak, with Trover, Jim Logan, and Barry Sparks. After 10 days of hard climbing and marginal bivouacs on a new direct start, the four reached the point where the original ascent party had gained the upper ridge, but retreated with several thousand feet and many corniced miles still to go. For Mugs, it was nevertheless a pivotal climb. "He came away from the Hummingbird knowing he could do anything he wanted," says Trover.
Later that summer, Mugs and Logan returned to Canada intent on the Emperor Face on Mount Robson. Logan, a very experienced climber from Colorado, had tried the unclimbed face three times previously, and now the pair was determined, as Logan later wrote in the 1979 American Alpine Journal, "to spend all summer if need be in the attempt." They spent two weeks observing their route and waiting out storms from a camp near Berg Lake, then clearing weather prompted them to move up to a bivouac at the base of the 4000-foot upper wall.
On the second day, 60-degree ice slopes interspersed with thinly iced rock steps -- the most difficult ice climbing Logan had ever done -- took the pair to a good bivouac on a snow rib in the center of the face. The difficult mixed climbing continued to an uncomfortable third bivouac on tiny seats chipped out of a 70-degree ice slope. A storm moved in that night, and spindrift avalanches threatened to push the two off their airy perch.
The final headwall loomed above. Mugs led up steepening ice to its base, then Logan took over the crux lead, a full ropelength of intricate aid and mixed climbing on loose rock. It took him eight hours. A few more easy ice pitches and they reached the summit ridge, where they spent the night.
Mugs and Logan had made the first ascent of one of North America's greatest alpine prizes, a route that had repulsed numerous attempts by some of the strongest climbers of the day. The achievement gave Mugs a heightened sense of inner strength and a feeling of the "rightness" of the path he'd chosen. "I have felt myself going through some amazing changes on the walls in the last year, becoming totally relaxed and comfortable, feeling like this is the place I belong," he wrote to his parents several months later. "It can be so peaceful ... even in the most extreme situations. Feelings of endless space and time made so real, a closeness to nature. A sense of accomplishment and a sense of worthlessness – a combination that feels so fine."
Mugs had a recurring dream that he related often to his friends. In it he had just climbed a very challenging new route, sometimes alone, at other times with a partner, but the style was always impeccable: using neither pitons nor aid, he had done it quickly, leaving no trace of his passage. Next in the dream, he went to a pub and was sitting in the corner with his girlfriend when a group of climbers who had just done the same route came in. The climbers were toasting themselves about their seeming first ascent, and after joining their celebration Mugs would sit back and smile. All that was important, he would say, was his own knowledge that he had done the climb the way he'd wanted to.
The dream represented an ideal that Mugs would pursue consciously and persistently throughout his life. "Doing the extreme is not the point," he wrote to his parents after climbing Fitzroy in 1980. "I care less and less about that, but the desire to climb and be with nature's and the mountain's forces is still there, strong as ever. I don't care about accomplishments. I care about fulfilling dreams of being happy." To Mugs, being happy would mean achieving an ego-less state of perfection, "Living outside and exercising, moving every day, climbing -- just looking." Even at his house in Sandy, he'd sometimes sleep in his van with the doors open.
Although Mugs traveled widely and loved rock climbing perhaps best of all, the snowy expanses of the polar regions are where he came closest to reaching his ideals. He made four trips to Antarctica under contract with the National Science Foundation. He took his work as a safety consultant as seriously as his guiding. "Mugs was not just a one-man climbing machine, he was into doing the best job possible to ensure the science was done," says Paul Fitzgerald, a geologist who worked with Mugs both in Antarctica and Alaska. "Of all the field assistants I've had, Mugs was easily the best, not just because he was the best climber, but because he really got to understand why we wanted to do things the way we did."
Mugs developed a special affinity for the pristine and barren continent of Antarctica, and did much off-the-record exploratory mountaineering there, including two of his purest climbs ever, the 7000–foot Southwest Face of Mount Gardner and the 8000–foot West Face of Mount Tyree — each solo, without bivy gear, and in a single day. He never said much about any of his climbs in Antarctica (outside of sharing information for a brief report I wrote for Climbing in 1990 highlighting the Gardner and Tyree ascents), preferring, I think, to share the memories and feelings engendered by these remote gems with only a few close friends.
Well before his first trip to Antarctica in 1980, Mugs had ventured north, and over time, Alaska would become his spiritual home. "It's so, so beautiful, unique," he wrote his parents in 1984. "Subarctic lands have such a vast, quiet beauty, a stillness I really hope I get the chance to share with you."
The pioneer atmosphere and booming economy of the 49th state also appealed to his free-spirited nature. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Mugs earned his living between climbs by salmon fishing off the Alaskan coast. Later, he guided extensively on Denali and elsewhere in the Alaska Range. He returned again and again to peaks surrounding the Ruth Gorge, attempting Mount Johnson several times and climbing a host of routes on lesser-known peaks in the area.
His greatest climbs in the Alaska Range, however, were on three of the region’s most celebrated mountains, the Moose's Tooth, Mount Hunter, and Denali, the first two just a few months apart in 1981. In March of that year, Mugs and the legendary Yosemite hardman Jim Bridwell made the first ascent of the East Face of the Moose’s Tooth, a 4500-foot wall that had repulsed some 10 strong attempts in the previous decade, including one by Mugs and Jim Logan in 1979. Mugs and Bridwell's was an exceptionally bold effort over five days in frigid conditions and with minimal food and equipment.
After several days of storm, the two started out a bit hungover after "deliberating on whether to wait another day while consuming large quantities of whiskey," as Bridwell wrote in his 1981 article about the route. In contrast to the earlier attempts, which had all concentrated on the central aid line, Stump and Bridwell climbed icy gullies to the right, then traversed back left on sparsely protected ramps to the center of the wall. They tackled the crux section of the climb, seven pitches of steep, ice-choked chimneys, on the second day, then continued up an A4 headwall and more tenuous mixed climbing on the third. Gorp, coffee with sugar, and two packets of soup were their entire rations for the climb, so when the pair reached the top on their fourth day they were hungry and severely dehydrated.
After a bivouac near the summit, the pair dropped onto a 1500-foot rock face, aiming for a wide snow couloir that would eventually deposit them at their basecamp at the bottom of the wall. As they descended, the rock got worse and worse. They hadn't brought any bolts, and wished they had. Ten pitches down, they had no choice but to rappel from a single #3 Stopper. As Bridwell started off, Mugs looked at the anchor and reached towards it, ready to unclip, then dropped his hand. He'd prefer a quick end to a futile wait of a day or two. One more rappel got them to the snow, and two hours later they were celebrating in their tent on the Buckskin Glacier.
Although Mugs would later say that his and Bridwell's climb was, in retrospect, unjustifiably risky and probably not worth repeating, he had no such doubts about his other great Alaskan climb that year. The Moonflower Buttress on Mount Hunter, which he climbed with Paul Aubrey, represented a quantum leap in technical difficulty for climbs in the Alaska Range. Asked 10 years later what had been his best route, Mugs said, "Probably the Moonflower Buttress -- doing it just like I'd hoped. It was a very aesthetic line, safe and difficult. It had all the elements."
It was also the only climb on which Mugs ever published an article. The story, which appeared in Mountain 85 and the 1982 American Alpine Journal, describes a four-day odyssey, punctuated by precarious bivouacs and the odd pitch of aid, up icy ramps and grooves. "I thought of what I'd done to get here, not just in the last four days but in the years past," Mugs wrote of the final night. "I felt part of some great movement, one of an infinite scale, too grand to see but only to feel in the night's wind ... In the vastness in front of me, I felt even more isolated. I was a shell, the same as the figure beside me and the mountains around. I felt an aloneness, my thoughts totally my own, creating a peacefulness of beauty and friendships."
"No place to stop, there was no need to stop," he would write about the last pitch of the route, an ice-filled vertical crack he managed to free climb. "Freedom was my catalyst as I deliberately and methodically made each placement. As I pulled over the top and onto the summit slope I was envisioning a crack such as this running for days ... I didn't want the feeling to stop." A mile and a half of steep snow climbing would have gotten them to the summit of Mount Hunter, but satisfied with the effort, they rappelled the route, reaching the bottom that afternoon. "I climbed to the top of the photo" was Mugs' usual response to questions about why they didn't go to the summit. (Mount Hunter's North Buttress, as Stump and Aubrey's route is also known, was climbed to the summit in 1983 by Todd Bibler and Doug Klewin. The route has been repeated several times since, becoming something of a modern Alaskan classic.)
Summing up an incredible year, Mugs wrote later in 1981, "My imagination is a gift for my life. The climbs to do are creations – to understand what is there, not to be surprised. The more I have done and been with other climbing partners, the more I have learned about myself. I am so lucky to have such a life, to have such freedom – not the political or social, but the freedom that is my spirit."
Climbers are prone to a certain hubris, and Mugs was no exception. At his best he was generous, supportive, and enthusiastic, but he could also be selfish, insensitive, and moody. More than anything, he wanted to be a good person -- humble, open, caring, and, above all, centered -- and he struggled mightily with his own ego and insecurities in finding that perfection.
His relationships with his many girlfriends, in particular, were intense and joyful, but often strained. "We struggled in the relationship because he could not be owned," says Lynne Romano of her time with Mugs in the past two years. "I finally asked him for more than he could give me, and we were no more." It seemed as though he could relate more openly to women he wasn't intimately involved with. Indeed, he counted many women, several of them ex-girlfriends, as his closest friends.
"He was the most important person in my life," says Mona Wilcox, who lived with Mugs on and off in the 1970s. "He taught me everything -- about the mountains, climbing, skiing, living." She is happily married to one of Mugs' old climbing partners from Telluride, but she and Mugs regularly kept in touch with each other over the years. "Words just don't fulfill the experience of things like I am trying to say and do," Mugs wrote to Mona in 1985. "I'm glad that you know me and know what I hope to be and feel in my life."
"Mugs had a huge ego -- he was the most selfish person I've ever known," says Jenny Edwards, an occupational therapist whose Anchorage house and Talkeetna cabin had been his base of operations in Alaska since the mid-1980s. The two were incredibly close nevertheless. "I knew Mugs neither as a guide or a climbing partner," says Jenny, "but as a spirit sister and soul mate, and loved him with his imperfections as he did me."
Diane Okonek, a long-time friend from Talkeetna, also remembers his sensitive side. "Mugs would always come by and we would spend a few hours catching up on each others' lives," she says of his return to Alaska each spring. "Sometimes we would laugh and sometimes we would cry, and it was always a special time for us both. I have always thought of Mugs as one of those rare men who was self confident enough to allow his gentle side to show."
Mugs could be intimidating to those who didn't know him well, but it usually didn't take long to break through that shell. "I have climbed on and off for 30 years and have never met a guide as considerate, capable, and likable as Mugs," says Bob Hoffman, one of the clients with Mugs at the time of his death. "He had a gift for bringing out the best in people, for showing them how to overcome fear and do things they felt unable to do."
Mugs was a good mentor and coach, although he could be demanding. "Some days he would be excited that I was climbing better than he. He was proud that my skills were shaped by his actions," says Conrad Anker, Mugs' protégé over the past several years. "Other days he would hold the high ground and rub it in that I was still the grasshopper." The two climbed extensively in Utah, Yosemite, and Alaska, forming a lasting friendship. In an exercise to help develop mental toughness, Mugs and Anker once drove all the way from Salt Lake City to Yosemite without talking. "By being stronger in the mind," says Anker, "Mugs felt one would be better prepared to tackle the big climbs."
In 1983, Mugs and I spent eight long, difficult days on the West Face of Gasherbrum IV. On our second night out, we bivouacked sitting up in the open as a light snow fell. I stayed up late melting snow and passing hot drinks to Mugs, huddled deep in his sleeping bag next to me. But the frigid night air aggravated my already chronic cough, and in the morning I knew that I wasn't going to be climbing well. Mugs took over the lead without hesitation and got us to the base of the Black Towers at 22,500 feet, the high point of several previous attempts on the face. After we'd chopped out an airy bivouac site from the crest of an ice ridge, he led a short, difficult chimney, and fixed a rope.
Good bivouacs were rare on the face and we knew that the climbing above would be time-consuming, so we anticipated staying where we were for two nights. A thin scud of gray clouds veiled the sky the following morning. As always, Mugs gave me the thumbs up as I started up the next pitch, a rotten, poorly protected overhang that left me gasping. The climbing felt like 5.12, but it would probably have been 5.8 in rock shoes at sea level. Mugs continued on, free climbing and then aiding up the steep, friable rock. He finished the pitch with a spectacular double pendulum, reaching the top of the Black Towers. We'd done what we thought would be the crux of the route, and even though we still had over 3000 feet to go, the way ahead was clear. Our two ropes barely reached the tent as we rappelled down in the worsening spindrift.
We settled into "the hang," rationing our remaining supply of oatmeal, tea, soup, and dehydrated potatoes in hopes that the storm would move through quickly enough to allow us to continue. For the first few days we maintained our psyche, but as the avalanches boomed all around it soon became obvious that we weren't going anywhere but down. We spent five storm-bound nights in the cramped Bibler tent before retreating. "I thought I'd never go back to the mountains again," Mugs later told a slide show audience in New Hampshire.
When we reached the relative safety of the West Gasherbrum Glacier, Mugs strode out ahead, anxious to rid himself of the intensity of the face, to go the last few miles at his own pace. I trudged on well behind him, lost in my own disappointment about the route. A couple of hours later I crested a little bump in the glacier, and there was Mugs, waiting so we could walk back into basecamp together.
A year later, Mugs, Laura O'Brien, Randy Trover, and I traveled to northern India to try the virgin Northwest Face of Thalay Sagar, a peak that had seen just two ascents at the time. We planned on climbing independently as two ropes of two, but from the start a subtle tension was in the air. We'd had some minor hassles with the Indian bureaucracy over Laura's late addition to the team. Mugs was sullen and uncommunicative with all of us. In particular, he didn't seem to be getting along too well with Laura, who was his girlfriend and climbing partner. A few days after reaching basecamp, Trover had to retreat to Gangotri, the nearest village, for several days to recover from a bronchial infection. To top off our problems, persistent storms battered the peak, plastering our proposed route with snow and rendering it too dangerous to climb.
We turned our attention to the elegant Northeast Pillar, which after several attempts had been climbed by a Polish/Norwegian team in 1983. It had also been our original objective when I'd applied for the permit for Thalay Sagar in 1982, so as a consolation prize it wasn't bad. Laura and Mugs tried it first, but high winds low on the route beat them back. When Trover and I passed them on our way up, all Mugs would say was that we didn't have a chance. "It has been a rough day, and a rough last week," he wrote to his parents at the time. "I've been very frustrated lately and going through the usual questions of the value of what I pursue at times like this."
Trover and I made the climb despite the continued bad weather. It was a hard-won summit, my first after four trips to Asia. Trover had put in a stellar effort for his first climb in the Himalaya, especially considering his earlier illness and relative lack of acclimatization. We'd pushed hard all the way, especially on the descent, knowing that the porters were scheduled to arrive the morning we would return to basecamp.
But when we got there early on September 15, camp was empty. No one had waited for us or left us any food or even a note. We were disappointed and angry, but not too surprised given Mugs' moodiness over the past weeks. We stashed our climbing gear in a couple of duffel bags under a boulder and trudged down the valley. Late that afternoon in Gangotri, Laura ran up to us full of smiles and hugs and questions about the climb. Mugs, who was cooking some eggs on the porch of a teahouse, barely glanced up.
We moved to another basecamp nearby to try Shivling, but Trover and I were burned out, so we headed home. Mugs and Laura stayed on for a few weeks and didn't manage to accomplish anything. Our trip to India ended on a sour note, and we other three drifted apart from Mugs for a while. "I thought we'd never speak to each other again, let alone climb together," says Trover, who had learned to climb with Mugs and had been one of his best friends.
Each of us eventually made our peace with him. "Mugs and I knew each other well enough that we didn't need to say anything," says Trover. "Just going climbing together was an acknowledgment that we were friends and that things would work out." The rift wasn't easily healed, but the two eventually became closer than ever. "The last three years were the best time for our relationship, despite the fact that we did almost no climbing together," says Trover, who with his wife, Adrienne, now has a three-year-old son, Eric. "We became his surrogate family. The way Mugs latched onto Eric was incredible – I think he realized it was as close as he'd ever get to having children."
When I had left India, I'd thought that Mugs had simply gotten too full of himself. He seemed to feel that his obvious talent and drive somehow made him a better person than the rest of us, and that the world owed him something. He had even expressed some bitterness over the fact that we'd paid for the entire trip out of our own pockets, forgetting that it had been largely a matter of our own choice not to seek sponsorship.
In retrospect, it seems to me that Mugs underwent something of a spiritual crisis at that time, that he lost sight of his chosen path. Success in the mountains didn't come as easily as it had for several years. He made two more frustrating trips to India to try Meru, for example, as well as three attempts on the East Buttress of Mount Johnson in Alaska. They were the only two routes he returned to that many times. Others I've spoken with have commented that Mugs seemed out of sorts for a lengthy period of time in the mid- to late-1980s. A letter he wrote to Mona Wilcox in 1985 while he was recovering from knee surgery confirms this impression: "It's been good to have this quiet, still, sedative time here to catch up on some thinking ways, reading and going into my spirit some, to try and reach some understanding about myself [that has] slipped away the last couple of years. I haven't felt as centered as I used to."
In the end, Randy, Laura, and I gained a deeper understanding of both ourselves and of Mugs, and developed a stronger and more complete friendship with him, as have many who were close to him as he grappled with the vicissitudes of his life.
We all struggle to balance our inner yearnings with the demands of the world; our lives are littered to one degree or another with unkept promises to ourselves and others, but we hope that our existence has a purpose beyond the self. It was this search for a deeper meaning that always preoccupied Mugs.
In December, 1991, Mugs went back East for the first time in several years to visit his family and friends, and at Christmas his father told him he was facing some serious potential health problems. "What a month this has been with the closeness to death," Mugs later wrote. "Many thoughts about the fullness and happiness that is held with our friends. I do in my personal (and selfish?) self find a lot of peace and happiness in this drifting way with climbing and the mountains. But it is so good to see those close to us and give our time to those we love."
Earlier in December, Mugs stayed by the bedside of Gavin Borden as he succumbed to the final stages of cancer in a New York hospital. A wealthy heir and publisher of college textbooks, Borden had been Mugs' best client, but more than that he became a true friend. His death affected Mugs deeply. "The feeling of love and caring for others seems to be a natural part of us, yet so many times we don't let it out," Mugs wrote. "I guess one way I keep a positive outlook is by trying to keep aware that we are all of the same place. When I look into Gavin's eyes or my dad's eyes and I see the fear and worry, I just wish I could somehow help them have peace.
"Our lives are so wonderful and it's all we really know," Mugs concluded. "We want to keep its joys, but there must be such an amazing awakening in death. I can't imagine that the supreme God is not realized, or at least in a way there is a true awakening that we are all a part of it."
-Originally published in Climbing, February/March 1993.
From the super topo thread, "mugs" by Conrad Anker:
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.html?topic_id=440954&msg=441781#msg441781
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 25, 2008 - 01:53pm PT
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My intent for this thread was for us "average, regular, everyday supertopians” to share our experiences and writings in an uninhibited way.
Of course, average, regular, everyday supertopians is a misnomer, because what we have here is very special: it's the confluence and aggregation of our tribe at large. A lot of us, at one time or another, put quite a bit of ourselves into climbing, then went "back into the world" and are now rejoining in this reflective space. We've also got some neat writing being shared by young people, people such as James. And we have so many "greats" here on the forum, with the likes of Doug Robinson, Pat Ament, Tom Higgins, Peter Haan, and oh gosh, John Gill -so many have passed this way with their thoughts…
So, this thread has worked out well.
I encourage all who read and post in these pages to share some words and leave a little piece of yourselves here.
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rockanice
climber
new york
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Apr 25, 2008 - 02:12pm PT
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Bonne Chance (Part I)
August 25th 7:00 AM I’m scrambling right down to the wire, as usual. The Alps await and we leave for the airport shortly. My partner Gerry is due to show up any minute. He’s been awake since 5:00 AM going through his own last minute checklist. For both of us, today is the culmination to months of thought focused on streamlining what will fit into two checked bags and a carry-on. Give me a month to prepare, and it’ll take a month. Give me an hour, and an hour’ll do. It really doesn’t matter, though – something always gets left behind. As I make the final zip on my bags, I wonder what will be forgotten this time as Gerry suddenly arrives ready to go. Time’s up.
This current adventure, however, is no ordinary trip for us. We take extra pains to predict what we need. This trip is to be our grand transition to the major leagues. It’s our time to step up to the plate to find out if we’re worthy of our daydreams. A desire to measure ourselves against a bigger yardstick has compelled us to place our hands on the very stone that our heroes have built their legends on. We leave the local crags behind to pursue bigger and better things.
“Hey, Brian, you’re drooling,” Gerry laughs. The glaze vanishes from my eyes, and I snap out of it immediately. The time is at hand, and we’re off. Sixteen hours later, after hurried goodbyes to my wife Kym and son Conor, we arrive exhausted in Zurich. Although we are sleep deprived and delirious, we are spurred on by that euphoric anticipation that only the brink of adventure provides. We point the car immediately toward Grindelwald and head to the mountains. The scenery along the way is magnificent if only for a glimpse of the sheer scale that lies ahead of us.
“Where the hell is Interlaken?”
“Oh, OK, turn here.”
First coming into view of the Monch, we chorused, “Hey, is that the Eiger?”
GRINDLEWALD. It was simply incredible that we were finally there, and we tried to take it all in. The day was beautiful and the Eiger followed us everywhere, dominating the town and our consciousness. We explored around the village sensing the rich history among the blend of the old and the new. While surveying the hordes of tourists, we marveled at the random assortment of people who flock to the legend of the Eigerwand, ourselves included. We spent our first full day stumbling around Grindelwald trying to somehow shake off the New York time zone.
It was during one of our fervent attempts to acclimate by consuming alcohol that we met some other climbers who could speak English. Shep and Robin from Canada joined us at an outdoor café with Eiger view. They had spent the summer roaming throughout Europe climbing, and we hoped to gain some insight into what may be in store for us locally. We wondered what secrets they knew of the Eiger, and almost immediately we bared our souls to them, revealing our intentions to warm up on the mountain. Well, the West Flank anyway.
Once we laid our plans on the table, we searched their eyes trying to gauge from their reaction the feasibility of the endeavor. The Eiger aura had us fully in its’ snare, and we wanted assurance that even the modest West Flank would be reasonable for us. Well, rather than counseling us to some other course, they beamed smiles and suggested they’d come too. Then, incredibly to me, they asked us if they might need boots and crampons!
Well, not to sound too uninformed, I advised I had some vague suspicions that the top-out might require some crampons, and maybe even an axe. Inwardly, I knew that there was no remote chance of me going up there without them. I silently marveled that they would consider taking it on with just rock shoes. What were we getting into? I’m not one to mention climbing projects idly. The Eiger, especially, holds some historically sacred value to me that would not allow its’ name to be casually bandied about. I needed the firmest of convictions just to broach mention of getting on it. Yet, casually the words, “Eiger, Monday” had floated from my lips and breezed across the table to Shep, Robin, and Gerry. The words then drifted off to the very heights of the mountain which lay within our gaze, as beer and wine fueled the night.
Monday came quickly. We caught the first train up to Klein Scheidegg with no sign of the Canadians anywhere. On the train ride up, we craned our necks to seek out the legendary features of the North Face familiar to any dreamer. We mixed in with the other climbers, catching those measuring glances that transcend mere language barriers, and we too wondered what lay in store for each climber that day. At Klein Scheidegg, everyone got off and reboarded another train for the next leg. It seemed rather decadent taking the train but somehow it fueled our eager anticipation. The train hauled us up, stopping at Eigergletsch Station, and we stepped off into the gloomy shroud of a Sherlock Holmesian fog. We were the only ones to get off and the train soon disappeared into the thick fog. It seemed that all the other climbers were heading off to some more intelligent destination. Gerry looked over to me and shrugged. I returned a vapid smile saying, “Hey, it’s early yet. This will all burn off in awhile.” When the fog did lift, it revealed the West Flank newly pasted with a fresh layering of snow on what had been sunny dry rock the day before. Echoing down from the loftiest reaches of the mountain the wind carried the faintest whisper reminding, “Eiger, Monday.” We each stood a moment to pause with our own thoughts, and with surprising ease, the idea of “Eiger, Tuesday” came to my mind.
“Hey, Brian, you’re drifting”, Gerry said. I snapped out of it immediately, and we began the approach to the base of a legend. OK, well, really we were gonna sneak up on it from the side.
“Looks great,” we said. “We’ll rope up anytime it gets, you know, too out there.”
The skies eventually cleared. Along the way, the day unfolded to glory and grandeur with the Monch and the Jungfrau to our right as majestic companions to cheer us on. A hanging glacier on the Monch unleashed a powerful noise, and our heads jerked up to watch what seemed the smallest bits of ice rubble dislodge and give in to gravity’s sway. It defined the power and beauty of this mountain playground, a power that dwarfed the scrambling efforts of those who wander through hoping to emerge from its’ shadow unscathed.
Indeed, we, too, moved along with a renewed sense of respect for this power. We picked our way through terrain that has been described as layers of broken dinner plates piled atop each other, but loved every minute of the adventure. As the lower third of the mountain yielded easily to us, we chased doubt back into dark recesses, and began to envision a successful outing. A moderate snow slope led us up to the beginnings of the real rock trickery. Delicate climbing and traversing with the packs was required, but not quite enough to warrant a rope as of yet. We passed a meager belay, continuing to puzzle our way along, happy to see some confirmation that we might be in the right neighborhood. Above some minor difficulties, the angle relaxed, and, still unroped, I took off my pack to recon the leftward traverse to the ridge that would deliver the summit. Rather than wait for Gerry a minute, I figured I’d scope out the best way to gain the ridge.
Moving along throughout the day, I had gone from measured caution to a full blown state of hubris, defying the elements. I knew it was icy, and all it takes is a patch of ice the size of a matchbook cover to kill you. Within a lightning streaks instant, my world unhinged, as my left foot shot up like a circus clown on a banana peel. A seering pain charged through my foot from the ankle to midway up the outside of my calf, and I took three quick dance steps on sloping ground toward oblivion. The quickness and severity of the strike surprised me. In a moment it was over and I had danced around almost fully 360 degrees with those three recovery steps. Amazingly, though stricken and wounded, I was still on my feet, facing out into the void. Had I gone down, I don’t think I would have had much chance of avoiding the bigger plunge.
Gerry hadn’t caught up yet and I was still absorbing what had just transpired when he came into view.
“Gerry, I’m so sorry, man. I have to go down.”
Gerry laughed and smiled at me. I took a deep breath and Gerry still stood there with this huge smile that demanded that I let him in on the joke.
“I’m not kidding, Gerry. My ankle is done.”
We stood across from each other on the sloping ground, and he began to grasp that I was serious.
“And I’ve gotta go now.”
The ridge leading to the summit was tantalizingly close. I wondered if I could scrabble up, but it was coming down that really bothered me. I knew that regaining that meager belay to rap from would be the key to getting me off this thing. There was no way I could downclimb the first hard key sections with this ankle.
On the train down, Gerry said I looked so crestfallen and robbed that he could hardly feel bad that his own trip was likely ruined, too. Getting down off the mountain was slow but workable. On making our way to the hospital, I found I could walk. I was happy I could walk, but I could only walk straight on. The slightest twists on the way down had me clenching my teeth and growling anguished sounds to join the whisper of “Eiger, Monday”. As we waited in a small side room for a doctor, I dreaded the prospect of taking off the boot. I convinced myself it would be better to wait for the doctor. We waited ten minutes. No doctor. Another twenty minutes went by and impatience took over. To hell with waiting, it was time to ease off the boot. I braced for what I imagined might be a mass of swollen purplish flesh, while the boot removed easily. When I pulled off the sock my foot looked fine. In fact, it felt fine. I was amazed and astounded. How could this be the same source of misery that had just tortured me all the way back down the West Flank of the Eiger? It seemed nothing short of a second miracle for me today. We asked the nurse if she minded if we just left and she blinked at us as we turned to leave. The lounging ambulance drivers with cigarettes dangling from their lips just stared at us as we walked out and let the door swing closed behind us. They had my name and address, but that was about it.
So I could walk, sort of. Naturally, it was an easy leap to suppose that if I could walk, then I could probably climb something. It was Gerry who suggested that we leave Grindelwald, and head for Grimselpass. I couldn’t have been more pleased. Grimselpass was said to offer some fine granite climbing and it sounded delightful to me. At that moment, it was difficult to say which might have made me happier: the simple fact that I was still alive, or, perhaps, just the mere prospect of salvaging the climbing trip.
GRIMSELPASS provided the ideal testing ground for a troubled ankle. The granite was beautiful and the climbing varied. We opted for first trying me out on that most treacherous of crucibles: the slab. This particular medium of granite offered the ideal proving ground to gauge my ankle’s tolerance for footwork. The slab does not generally allow brute strength to cheat your way through. It demanded enough finesse and foot control to truly judge what I could get away with. Gerry’s experience as a quarterback in high school and later coaching football, assured that I had a pro tape job to keep my ankle on the straight and narrow. Gerry was happy to lead on and allowed me experiment on second. I guess miracles come in threes for me because I was ecstatic to be grimacing through V+ the following day of the injury. We spent two days sampling the granite of Grimselpass. I was encouraged enough to be able to hike and climb that we decided it was time to head for the main event of the trip. We said goodbye to Grimselpass and aimed the car towards France.
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rockanice
climber
new york
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Apr 25, 2008 - 02:17pm PT
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(part II)
CHAMONIX for me was always a magical name that evoked greatness. I could hardly contain myself when we slipped over the border into France and rode into this fabled and incredible valley for the first time. The distractions of the town’s bars and restaurants alone have ruined many a trip for climbing. We soon found ourselves struggling to maintain focus. I had to stick to a plan that involved more recuperative climbing while sampling a bit of the good life that Chamonix offered the eyes and the palate. I was hesitant to foray out into any mountain setting until I had a good handle on what my ankle would allow me to do. It turned out to be a blessing that we were treated to all the marvelous valley climbing opportunities that abound. Taping my ankle allowed climbing the easy access local crags. We spent several days climbing at Servoz and Balme, both within easy striking distance of Chamonix. A little farther beyond we hit the Giffre Valley and other areas like Chapelle Saint Gras that provided just the ticket to get me back on track for the big mountains. Climbing in the valley boosted my strength and confidence. By degrees, it seemed plausible to bring the ankle out into the mountains for a test. Well, maybe something on the tame side. Rebuffat’s “100 Finest” describes the Aiguille de L’M as “a pleasant little outing without the stresses of the high mountains.” We looked forward to it as our first venture in the mountains proper. OK, the lower reaches of the foothills, anyway.
At last we were on the Telepherique de L’ Aiguille du Midi, stepping off at the midway cablecar stop, the Plan de Aiguille Station. As we were getting our bearings, a woman asked where we were to climb that day. We told her and she lit up saying she had met some other guys who were going to climb it, too. They were on the next car behind. Both our heads jerked up and we stared at the incoming cablecar preparing to stop and unload. Thank you m’am and we were off ! We quickly shouldered our packs and launched out into the boulder strewn terrain. This wasn’t exactly what I had planned for the ankle, but the race was on. We had a two minute head start thanks to our lady friend. Scrabbling over loose boulder fields, crossing over five ridges and two little ice fields, we couldn’t shake the team behind us. They couldn’t catch us, either, though, and never closed the margin between us. We secured the route and linked the first two pitches. Classic moderate Chamonix crack/chimney jamming followed for a fun route. The way off was a deep gully fraught with loose boulders including a section of iron ladders down the back side. Before long, it became apparent that we owed that team behind us a huge debt. We were now racing the clock to catch the last telepherique down. We never would have hustled without them dogging us earlier in the day. The penalty for missing the last car down amounts to about a few hours steep trail descent, supposedly, and we were glad to avoid it.
All in all, we were pleased with our performance, though. My ankle had held up due to what had evolved into a daily masochistic taping ritual. We had decided to bring our game to the top of the Aiguille du Midi to climb the Arete de Cosmiques the next day. During dinner, however, we learned that all of France was suddenly gripped by a strike protesting the summer’s surge in gasoline prices. No trucks were to refuel the service stations and we had less than a quarter tank left. We only had a few more days left in the trip and we decided we had to drive into Switzerland in the morning to fuel up. The morning was effectively shot. When we finally arrived atop the Midi in the afternoon we were laden down with heavy packs. The dismal weather outlook had prompted us to load up. We soon found out when the sun emerged that the Vallee Blanche was an efficient reflector oven and we were saddled with superfluous heavy gear and extra clothes. Most who exit the Midi Station to approach the Vallee Blanche, pass through an ice tunnel leading to a gate that guards the catwalk of a precipitous ridge. This ridge slopes down about a hundred yards leading to safer ground. On this ridge, to the right looks like a survivable fall down into the Vallee Blanche. To the left was the abyss. You don’t want to fall down the left side of that ridge. Right from the start it spoke to us saying, “You’d better be on your best game here, boys.” It was all so wild as we marched down that ridge ignoring the exposure on either side. I felt that first rush of excitement, the one that tends to fade with familiarity, and I reveled in it. As we rounded down back toward the right into the Vallee Blanche, we eyed up the gorgeous South Face of the Aiguille du Midi. We stopped to pick out the classic line of least resistance, the Voie Rebuffat, pioneered as the first line in 1956 by Gaston Rebuffat with Bacquet. What a grand undertaking it must have been to put up the first route on that amazing expanse of beautiful rock. There are the S-curved cracks on the slab, and the clean, sweeping lines-
“Hey, Brian,” says Gerry. Hold on, wait. I was not drooling that time, though the South Face provokes Pavlonian responses for many.
“Let’s get acquainted with the Cosmiques Ridge today, and if tomorrow’s weather looks good we’ll come back up for the South Face.”
As it turned out, we were making our ridge acquaintance pretty late in the day. It was probably about halfway through that we realized we weren’t going to make the last telepherique down as we’d hoped. We would be spending the night somewhere up here. The Arete du Cosmiques Ridge rises up to the Midi Station, presenting a few gendarmes along the way to make it interesting. There was nothing for us to do, but try and enjoy the rest of the climb. Tomorrow was our last climbing day. I guess we were gonna be in good proximity for the South Face no matter what the weather held.
We arrived at one of the station’s observation decks where the climb finishes up a ladder. We took a quick inventory of the supplies we had to get us through the night. Two Clif Bars, no cigars, no beer, no food, no guide book, way too much climbing gear, and luckily some long underwear for the long night ahead. Down in the valley, our bivy gear was resting comfortably in our paid hotel room, while we looked forward to a long night on cold cement. We were lucky to have cement, though, and access to the cold corridors inside an unheated back part of the station.
We were not alone by any means. We had a varied crew for companions that also slept in the concrete stairwells of the station. We met some Czechs who worked in Germany for Boeing, a couple of Spanish climbers and a big contingent of paragliders who were there to compete in the Coupe du Monde. One older French climber stood out in particular. I had swung the platform telescope around to narrow in on the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses, and he confided to me that he had ascended that majestic route many years ago in his prime and his youth. He may have been in his seventies or older. He was there to climb Mont Blanc alone. He said long ago he had established a custom of climbing the mountain every two years in his own style. He said that it was his personal tradition that he must climb the mountain every two years without fail. He had vowed that the year he failed to do so would be his last year in the mountains, and he would never again return to this pursuit that had given him so much joy and rich experiences over the years. If he failed tomorrow, there would be no other chance. We knew from the internet that tomorrow promised to be a glorious day, but, somehow, the Czechs and I agreed that it was this old man we should thank for the weather. It surely had to be for him, and we left him to sleep with a heartfelt, “Bonne chance.”
Most of the people were there by design, and were well-equipped with sleeping pads, cookers, bags, etc. Gerry and I each took a coil of rope to try and escape the cold of the cement that worked its’ insistent way through anything contacted. A long night followed. At 5:00 AM Gerry confessed he hadn’t slept a wink. I retrieved my two contact lenses I had stored in separate bottle caps I had hastily scrounged and jammed them back into my aching eyes. We recharged ourselves watching a procession of lights wending their way in the darkness up the distant flanks of Mont Blanc. All in all, though, our chief complaint was the lack of cigars, so we stocked up on water and readied ourselves for the South Face. Well, let’s not leave before the restaurant opens, though. They might sell cigars you know. Yesterday, when we thought we were going back down to comfortable beds, we’d vowed how much weight we were going to cut from the packs. Of course, our impromptu overnight didn’t allow us the chance to offload. We’d have gladly staged a tag sale to rid ourselves of the overburden, but instead resigned ourselves to taking it all with us again on today’s harder climb. Live and learn. Comically we moved out saddled with huge packs filled with all sorts of cold weather gear and useless weight on a glorious day of sun and blazing rays. Man, it was a beach day in the mountains. The first pitch went nicely, and apparently, like so many others before us, we baked in the sun at the belay under the first roof. After cooking there for a bit, it soon became evident that this was where people decide to break out the sunblock. The first pitch is lotion free, but the second pitch is a slimefest of lotion, a testament to people’s newfound respect for the alpine sun. It seems regularly people dive into the sunblock before launching out onto the second pitch S-cracks. It could be said the crux of the climb is navigating the lotion soaked holds, but the climbing is beautiful, with the balance of the climb lotion free. Pitch after pitch brought us up through awesomely gorgeous granite and we soon felt we must be approaching the top. Some Germans were rapping down, and casually, we asked how far to the top. Certainly, we had just one long pitch to go, and we’d catch the last telepherique down. They replied at least four or more to go. Whoa!
“Four pitches! We have to catch that last ride down or… Quick gimmee the rack and let’s rock and roll!”
You bet we did, spurred on by the threat of another forced night at the station. We still don’t know what routes we may have variated to mongrel our way into the finish of the Voie Rebuffat, but the climbing was absolutely tremendous. Nothing was sweeter than running in, carrying our gear and ropes tangled in our arms over the finish line to manage the last telepherique down. As we plunked down in the car to catch our breaths with our own victory complete, our thoughts drifted once more to the Frenchman in his seventies with his own outcome uncertain. Then, in the noisy telepherique, along with my weariness and relief, there escaped from my soul yet another secret hearty echoing of “Bonne Chance” for his hopeful success as we headed down to Chamonix to collect our own rewards.
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