This piece was published in Issue #3 of Hangdog Magazine. You can purchase a copy here.
In 2020 I stopped rock climbing.
Or rather, it stopped being the sole singular focus of my life. Like a lot of Americans in 2020, I got involved in political organizing. I traded my life out of a hatchback in the Red River Gorge for life in a studio apartment in the city. The following year I met a girl in California, was wrapped up in a relationship, and found myself drifting further and further away from climbing.
By 2023 both of those side quests had fizzled out. I found myself living in Lexington Kentucky, working a job doing chimney repair with my friends and dabbling in arborism. Out of sport climbing shape from my hiatus, I started trad climbing more seriously. I found myself taking weekend trips back to the Red River Gorge to trad climb as much as I could. It felt like learning how to rock climb all over again, ten years after tying in for the first time.
When my Canadian friends told me I should come to Squamish for the first time that summer, I couldn’t really think of a good reason to say no. As a consequence of my recent breakup I had a 1993 Ford Festiva parked in California outside of Yosemite with plenty of camping gear and clothing. All I would have to do is fly out with my rack and somehow get my shitbox car all the way to British Columbia. I hadn’t done a good climbing trip to a new destination in years and the prospect excited me.
The plan goes off without a hitch. Other than a leaky coolant hose and a misfiring cylinder, my car somehow makes it all the way from California to Squamish. I drive around the final bend on the Sea to Sky highway and see the Chief looming above. I find my friends at the campground and get the beta for the area. I quickly settle into a routine. I wake up early every day to do an easy multipitch before the sun hits the chief. Afternoons I spend on the couch at Zephyr, catching up with friends and drinking coffee. I become quite fond of the sandwiches at the hot bar at Save On. There is a thanksgiving cranberry bread turkey sandwich that I eat every single day. Evenings I drink beers with the dirtbags at the campsite. Walking through the campground in the evenings feels like reconnecting with a deep part of me that I had thought I had left behind. As I slowly get my bearings on granite for the first time, one route begins to capture my attention. The Grand Wall. I’ve seen photos of the split pillar pitch for years. It looks rad. I’m still getting used to 5.10 terrain on gear, but I think I have a shot to fire it before I go.
A month breezes by. Time is fickle in Squamish. One day during my rest day routine of two cups of black coffee on the Zephyr couch, I look at my calendar and realize I only have a week left until I need to begin my long journey back east to Kentucky. Between my dwindling time, the rain, the wildfire smoke, and the tendonitis creeping up my left bicep, I only have a few shots left to attempt the Grand Wall. My friends in the campsite are either boulderers or not up to the task. I manage to source a potential partner. His name is Camille. He sports a cowboy hat and boots, despite his Quebecois roots. It’s a charming juxtaposition, and it makes him stand out from the other approach shoe wearing dirtbags in the campsite. I dig it. He wants to climb Bullethead East as preparation for the Grand. I can tell the real reason he wants to climb the route is to test me as a potential climbing partner. I realize that I need to be on my A-game and impress him.
We link up in the afternoon midweek and hike through the campsite to the start of the route. We rack up and I take the first pitch. I’m already feeling a little out of it. It’s 5.9, but I feel unconfident working my way up the pitch. I finish and belay him up.
“Man, we got a shitty problem down here!” Camille yells from below me as he approaches.
“What?” I shout.
“It’s shit! I’m gonna shit myself!” He hauls himself up onto the ledge with me and sits down.
“You prairie dogging?” I ask him.
“What does that mean?” Camille has not heard the term.
“You’ve never heard that? Prairie dogging?”
“No? What does it mean?”
“You know how the prairie dog’s head pops in and out of his hole? Kind of like your butthole right now.”
Camille laughs. “Wow. Yeah except maybe it’s a skid mark now.”
Camille leads the second pitch and I follow him. I have done this pitch before, taking a flipper in the crux in the middle. I push the memory of it out of my mind as I pass the crux. I reach the ledge before the third pitch. I trade gear with Camille up and start up the pitch. I am scared as piss. My friend Jonny informed me yesterday that getting into the stembox from the ledge is the hardest part of the pitch. I desperately fumble to place a .3 around a corner and kick my leg out on the polished granite. I slowly inch my way up, attempting to make my way for the jams above. Suddenly my foot slips and I feel myself start to go down. Somehow, my foot catches a tiny crystal and sticks. A jolt of adrenaline shoots through my body. Shaking and Elvis legging, the rest of the pitch goes poorly. I send, but it takes me far too long and with far too many grunts. Camille almost certainly takes note.
I put Camille on belay and bring him up. One more pitch. This one looks unassuming enough from the ground, and is the second easiest pitch of the route at 10b. “Alright. Knot looks good, got ya locked and loaded.”
“Cool, here I go.” Camille reaches up and puts his hands on the starting holds, and then abruptly comes back down. “Oh wait! I almost forgot.”
“What?” He reaches in his cargo pocket and pulls out a couple fruit snack packs. “My fucking dude.”
“Yeah man. Always for the last pitch!”
Camille leads, gliding up the pitch. He puts me on belay and I follow up. It feels like the hardest pitch of the route. I can’t fathom leading it. I pull myself up, soaked in sweat, dehydrated, and cursing. “Fuck man! That might have been the hardest pitch.” I make one last move, heaving and grunting, and collapse under Camille at the belay station, panting. “Dude, I don’t think I could have led that. Nice fucking work.”
“Thanks man, that pitch is so good.”
I look around at the view of the Howe Sound, pausing. One question hangs over my head: “Man, I’m gonna be real. I still am stoked on the Grand but that thing just kicked my ass.”
“Yeah man I don’t know, it got me even. Maybe it was just the sun but I’m feeling it.”
“You don’t know if you got it in you?”
“Nah man. Fun line though!”
Camille is right, but I am crushed. I can tell I just blew my chance of convincing him to fire the Grand with me. I can feel my Grand Wall dreams slipping through my fingers.
Later that night me and my friend Leona eat a couple edibles and she cooks me some dinner on her green Coleman stove. We down a couple beers, a couple seltzer waters, and banter back and forth; a typical Chief evening. I complain that I don’t think that I will find a partner for the Grand Wall, and resign that maybe I will just have to save it for next summer.
“That sucks. Keep trying! The weather is about to get good.”
“Yeah, I know. I think I’m going to make a Facebook post soon.”
“Yeah, that’s probably the move.”
Leona and I met sport climbing in the Red River Gorge back in 2018. Since then our climbing careers have diverged. She is single-mindedly focused on bouldering. I’ve drifted harder into trad climbing. We don’t climb together anymore, but our friendship has remained.
”Do you ever resent that climbing is your thing?” I ask her.
”What do you mean?” She replies.
“I don’t know. Like the human species is slowly going extinct and America is sliding towards fascism. It feels weird being so invested in climbing sometimes.”
”Yeah, I’m pretty blackpilled about it all nowadays.”
”Yeah. Also climbing is just so lame. Like, my ex was into playing vernacular music. It was way cooler than rock climbing.”
“How so?”
“Like it was almost an anthropological interest. You can be like ‘this song was written by these people in this time in this place in response to this economic trend.”
“Yeah, like it kind of tells you interesting stories about that time in history in a way that climbing definitely does not.”
“Yeah exactly. Like, climbing feels way more nihilistic, or just far less interesting. Sometimes I resent thinking about climbing as much as I do.”
Leona pauses, stirring the food in the pan. “But also, like, fuck you dude.”
“What?”
“Fuck you dude. I love rock climbing. Why can’t I enjoy something just for the sake of enjoying it? That’s like such a basic human need.”
I pause, thinking this new concept over. “Damn, that’s a good point. I feel called out.”
“If we’re going to sink time and money and effort into this arbitrary activity that no one is paying you to do, you better fucking think about it all the time.”
”Yeah I mean, man. Good point.” I mull it over in my brain.
“Yo!” Leona snaps me back to reality. “Grab a bowl!” Dinner is ready. I grab a bowl and dish myself out some food.
Against all odds, somebody named Adam responds to my desperate post seeking a Grand Wall partner on the Squamish Climbing Facebook group. Appearances don’t mean much in climbing nowadays, but his profile photos make him seem trustworthy. We have a single mutual friend from the Eastern Sierras that I trust. He meets up with me at my daily spot on the couch at Zephyr and we chat over coffee and connect. He needs to regrow a bit of skin, and the weather looks immaculate in a few days, so we both agree that Tuesday, my last day in Squamish, will be the best day if the rain holds off.
Later that day I rock out Slot Machine with my friend Dan. He asks who my newfound climbing partner is.
“I don’t know, some guy named Adam? He knows one of my friends from the eastern Sierras.”
“Oh, interesting.”
“Climbing small world stuff. You know.”
“Yep.”
“If Louie trusts him I do. Hopefully he’s not a total chuffer though. I’m probably going to bring a backpack in case we epic really hard and spend forever up there.”
“He might be thinking the same thing about you.”
I laugh. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
I sleep on the street in my car near downtown the following evening. I wake up having to shit my brains out, which I am quite pleased with. I go to Zephyr and use the bathroom, and then order a breakfast burrito as a treat. It’s the first meal I’ve paid for in almost a month. I head back to camp and park and begin organizing my rack. My hands shake with excitement. Suddenly I hear someone’s voice.
“Hey man!” I look up, and a man with long hair has approached my car. “Hey man, you’re doing the Grand Wall with Adam today right?”
“Uh, yeah! That’s me.”
He hands me one of the cranberry sandwiches from Save On. “Crush it today.” He turns around to walk away.
“Yo!” I called back to him. “Did someone tell you to give me this?
“No, why?”
“I’ve been eating them all trip, they’re my favorite.”
He laughs. “Heck yeah man, crush it! The name’s Charlie.”
“Alex.”
Adam meets me at my car at 9:30am, just as we planned. We grab our gear and head out through the campsite parking lot towards the approach trail. A massive rockfall occurred under the Grand Wall a few years ago. We hike up through the fresh scree towards the beginning of the first pitch. After spending the whole summer with Squamish’s short approaches, my cardio is in pathetic shape. I huff and puff as we hike to the beginning of the first pitch. I hope Adam doesn’t take note of my heavy breathing.
There isn’t a single party at the beginning of the climb, and we can’t see any above us either. The weather is perfect: overcast and mid 50’s. All systems are go. Adam begins flaking the rope and I begin racking up. The first pitch was described to me as “scary, run out slab.” I was concerned that it would be friction slab. Lucky for me, I can see that the route ascends a series of face holds up the slab. I tie in, Adam puts me on belay, and I start up the first pitch. I go into mission mode; climbing smoothly and ignoring the runouts between bolts. My mind is sharp, and I feel like I could do anything. I make it to the first belay and bring Adam up.
“Dude I’m feeling so good.” I tell him as he arrives. “We’re gonna rock this thing out.”
“Hell yeah man, yeah we are.”
Pitch 2 goes much the same way. It feels a little harder, a little scarier, but I still feel confident, and push on. I get to the next belay, bring Adam up, and then begin the third pitch. The moves continue to get harder, but I climb with gusto. I continue on through the 5.10 traverse pitch and make it to the first bolt ladder of the route. I’ve never used a bolt ladder before, but I quickly figure out how to climb through it with ease. Just clip a sling, step into it, clip in, clip the next one, repeat. I make my way through, arrive at the ledge belay at the beginning of the split pillar, and bring Adam up. With our arrival at the beginning of the split pillar pitch, stoke courses through my body. As Adam makes his way through the bolt ladder, I decide that this is already one of the best days of my life.
The Split Pillar is the first of the “money” pitches of the Grand Wall. When the first ascensionists put it up back in ’61, they had to have special pitons made in town to ascend up it. As they pounded their pitons in the pillar, the pitons beneath them would fall out, suggesting that the whole thing moves a little bit. I am reminded of this fact as I stare up at the pillar, looming over us.
Adam racks up and begins climbing. It’s his turn to lead the next two pitches. He climbs confidently up the slowly widening crack of the pillar. I can tell he is stoked as well. He squeezes himself into the squeeze chimney guarding the top of the pitch, and then puts me on belay. I start my way up. A few lieback moves and then I make it into the good jams. What begins as fingers turns to knuckles turns to hands. As I climb I become grateful that I am not leading this pitch. As I move higher and higher along the pitch I start to understand that while the first few pitches went well, I am not sure if I am prepared for the terrain that awaits us above.
I make it to the top of the pillar and plop myself up. It’s one of the better belay stances on the route, and we use it to take a quick breather. Above us lies The Sword of Damocles, the crux of the route. We both pound a Clif Bar, and swap gear. Stoke is still high. I put Adam on belay and he begins climbing. He continues to climb well, but I can tell that he is beginning to have to work for it. He arrives at the first hard move of the route and hangs there, puzzled. “Is this move the crux?” he yells down.
“I don’t think so?” I shout back. In retrospect I am very wrong.
“Damn!”
He moves into the sequence, and makes it through with a few grunts. He continues up the pitch. I know that the redpoint crux is coming up. I spent the day prior watching Gopro videos of the pitch on the internet. The final 15 feet of the route ends with a desparate move to some chains. “Do you want any more beta?” I shout up.
“No, I’m good!” Shortly before the run to the chains he hesitates, desperately placing some protection before committing to the move. He climbs a little farther, realizes that he does not have the gas in him to make the last move, and falls. “Dammit dude!” He hangs there kicking off the wall. “There goes my onsight.” he shouts down.
“Ah well. Nice job man!”
He pulls back on the route and completes the pitch, aiding his way through the next bolt ladder above. He puts me on belay and shouts down that I’m good to begin climbing. I pull my anchor and then look up, chalking my hands. I know that this is going to be the hardest pitch of the route for me. “The Sword of Damocles.” I mutter to myself as I start climbing. The crux quickly greets me. It feels very, very hard. In a single moment the stoke completely leaves my body as I realize that I am in over my head on this route. I gas out and fall. Adam feels the rope tighten and calls out to me encouragingly.
“Come on Alex! You got it!”
“Fuck man! This is gonna be an epic!” I call back up.
“You got it!”
I pull back on to the wall. “The Sword of Damocles” I again mutter to myself. I try the move and fall again. Defeated, I decide to save time and cut my losses. I shove a cam in and aid my way through the move. I know that the crux is still above me and keep on. With every move I feel more and more over my head. I continue to climb and aid my way through the pitch, finally making the big move left to the chains and begin the bolt ladder. Huffing and puffing to the belay station, I finally reach Adam. I go into direct and muster the most confident voice I can. “Hey man, so I’m gonna be straight and real with you.”
“Yeah man, what’s up?”
“I’m still feeling stoked, but this is above my head and I know it. If you’re game and you wanna fire the rest of the pitches I’d be super down. I’m really sorry, I think I’m just realizing this is a little above my head.”
He laughs. “Dude you’re so good. I’d be stoked honestly.”
“Cool, looks like it works out. Sorry about the epic man.”
“Dude. If this is epicing for you you’re totally fine.”
“Hey man, I’m a guide. I gotta epic professionally.”
Adam laughs. “Hell yeah dude, we got this.”
The next pitch is Perry’s Lieback. It’s a bolted endurance pitch that climbs up and through a long lieback traverse. A friend informed me earlier that the usual beta is to skip half of the bolts to save energy, or to simply use the bolts as footholds. Adam continues to climb on. He climbs efficiently, clipping all the bolts, looking calm and collected. Just as the lieback begins to taper off, I think I see his foot touch a bolt. He finishes the pitch, yells down that he is secure, and begins pulling up rope.
“Dude! I dabbed so hard!” I hear him shout.
I laugh. “I couldn’t tell if you did or not! I didn’t want to say anything!”
“Yeah I totally did. Dammit!”
He puts me on belay and I follow him up. I barely make it a few meters through the lieback before the pitch begins to ransack me. I pump out and fall.
I hang there in my harness, and look around, exhausted. I look down at the Howe Sound, and the campsite, and the big beautiful sea of granite around me. Gratitude fills me as I reflect on the month I’ve spent here. I remember my conversation with Leona. The stoke returns to me. Why do I feel deflated? I’m climbing the Grand Wall right now. I pull back on and continue climbing.
I am climbing for the sake of climbing. I am stepping on every bolt, I am pulling on every cam. It is now a game of upwards progress. The stoke shoots back into my body like a jolt of adrenaline. I don’t care that I’m aiding through the whole pitch. I am so jazzed to be there. Being on this massive beautiful wall is enough for me. To be feeling my body work with every ounce of strength, and to be cold and hungry and feel like my heart is exploding out of my chest. I don’t have a care in the world. I realize that this is what I was born to do all along and finally for the first time in my life, I fully accept it and love it.
I arrive at the ledge at the end of pitch with a huge shit eating grin on my face. The next pitches breeze by. I am absolutely euphoric, and Adam is too. He floats the Sail Flake pitch and we arrive at the Bellygood Ledge. As we kiwi coil our rope we reflect on our year. We realize that we both spent the last few years political organizing, losing love, and taking steps back from climbing. We make the traverse across the bellygood ledge like two compatriots who have been victorious in battle. It is one of the most joyous descents I have ever done.
We get back to the parking lot and sort our gear. We embrace, congratulate each other, and make plans to drink some bourbon in celebration later that evening before I head back to Kentucky the following morning. We part ways and I head back to my car. I open the hatch, toss my rack in, and slam it closed.
Wait a minute. I open my hatch again and fish through my food bin. I pull out the cranberry turkey sandwich Charlie gave me earlier.
I take a bite. It’s very good.
High Sublime 