This Summer, climbing ended.
A journey which began in exploration of the heights by a few weirdos equipped with boots and a powerful dissatisfaction with life on the flats, concluded when Alex Honnold climbed El Capitan in Yosemite Valley equipped only with boots and a powerful dissatisfaction with life on the flats.
El Cap. was where the closure had to happen. It was where climbers rounded the bend to see the sport’s conclusion, because El Cap. was where the use of climbing implements – pitons, ropes, chocks, etc. – peaked and then slowly started to tilt toward freedom. Now, parties still engineer their way up the face of Yosemite’s premier monolith, but their methods have been exposed as second-best. They have been rendered the sport’s Civil War reenactors by the nuclear blast of Honnold’s solo.
Yet there may be hope for roped climbing. It may still be more than shooting blanks at a campout.
All history looks circular from a certain perspective, but that view misses the metamorphoses within lifecycles. And, that miss is a big one. The transformations carry all the themes, while the repetitions merely demonstrate mechanisms.
Yes, the butterfly will lay eggs, but its wings are beautiful.
Ropes and pitons opened the way up previously forbidden ice and stone. But the equipment also bound us to each other and the mountains. The rope gave us things like Pete Schoening’s famous catch on K2 in 1953. Actually, it gave us the 1953 K2 expedition. It gave us Peter Terbush.
We shouldn’t forget that the rope also gave us Alex Honnold. Without a safety system which allows for failure, and for pushing past the point of failure, soloing is just a stunt, like going over Niagra Falls in a barrel. The rope allows soloing as perfection of an art. A soloist climbs alone, but not apart from other climbers.
Still, climbers are a breed apart, and not because we are capable of feats which are beyond the average citizen. The rope sets us apart. It lets us see that soloing El Cap. is not a stunt. Climbing accomplishments of all sorts, which the average citizen, mired as he is in the institutionalized narcissism of our civilization, can only see as ego gratification, we see as steps on a path to a broader vista.
Ahhh, what else is there? I mean that rhetorically.
Use of a rope gives access to that view: of the self as part of a team, the ego as malleable, and a person as part of the fauna on the vertical face of the crag. Some people will always yearn for that perspective, despite societal admonitions to keep looking down and stay in line. And so, roped climbing will persist as more than a quaint habit.
Dedicated to the Game 