I pirouetted around the man in the tiny atrium and past the slowly closing glass door. It was an unusual way to enter McDonald’s, so I thought at first that he gave me an odd glance in return for the odd maneuver. But as I joined the line, just before the end of breakfast service on Saturday morning, he looked at me again in the same way. Then I recognized him, as well.
“Hello,” I said, extending my hand.
“Hey,” he smiled, “here to climb?”
“Yep,” I replied, “Good to see you.”
“Likewise. What are you going to do?”
“Joy After Pain.”
“Oh,” he nodded, “That’s huge this year. Well, have fun. I’m shopping with the kids today, so…”
“I know how that is,” I said, “Good luck.”
He didn’t seem concerned about the time, but neither was I. We were coming home in the dark. We might as well live it up.
We ate our sausage and egg biscuits on the way out to the Valley.
It had been cold in the Valley. Ice had formed back up on the North wall, and it would stay for the day, at least. It was cold, with temperatures in the teens. It even looked like Ovisight was accessible. We looked to the shade though, to the South wall of the Valley, where the ice would be old, cold and brittle. It was formed as well, though the base of our objective tapered ominously. We did not care. We had our decision, and we had the word, and the word was “huge”.
Two other cars sat in the pull-out across from the ranch’s mailbox. One party was visible on Moratorium.
We did not see tracks on the intermittent snowfields on the way to the wooded slopes below our objective, but we met the second party at the tree-line.
“We have guns,” the older fellow joked.
I wasn’t going to race them to the base of the climb. We were coming home in the dark, and there was room at the base to stand and wait if need be.
We walked with them for a ways, up the steep, left side of the drainage. Then, they broke right and fell slightly behind.
I could not see them as we rounded the last, bulging shoulder of the streambed and saw the first pitch fully revealed. Still, I heard them, although I could not make out the words. The tone was plain enough: dismay and disgust. The base of the pitch was a thin, tapering pillar – translucent and gray. I wasn’t deterred. Somehow, “huge” had lodged in my mind, and it made the sight reassuring. The pillar looked well rooted, despite the fact that I could wrap one arm around its connection to the ice sheet below it.
Before I started up, I hit it with the side of my ice tool. It didn’t come crashing down and it produced a deep, resonant note. It would be fine, if I just didn’t hit it too hard, or at all. Fortunately, it had plenty of feature – blobs, divots and candles. I tapped and hooked for thirty feet up to the point where the ice attached to the cliff face and it was safe to place a screw.
The angle eased soon after, and the primary difficulty became the hard and brittle state of the medium.
We anchored at the very end of the rope and climbed a deceptively steep and rotted pitch above. There was a short walk with a solo step and then a short, solid roped pitch.
We climbed another ice ramp and finally stood beneath the two-tiered, final pitch. It was four thirty in the evening.
The next day, Mike’s breakfast sandwich would have its revenge, and the fish hatchery climb would melt out before we arrived. The pitch at Leigh Creek would seem too anticlimactic. We should grasp at every last foot of climbing, being practitioners of what is possibly a dying art. But we wouldn’t, because it would be art for us alone, and a ridiculous thing or a cheap thrill for the rest of the world. It must be right for us if it were to make sense at all.
We would save the last pitch of Joy After Pain too. It was blue and intricate, and flowing with water – huge. And it was in the shade, so it would be there when the sun-side languished. We would come back to climb it in the light.
Dedicated to the Game
Climbing and other disturbing things.
Tag Archives: global warming
The Discontented Future
Broken pillars cluttered the slope. Winter had come to this. False starts, collapsing possibilities, and ruined glory lay across the span of weeks between the first snowfall and the now-inevitable warm-up. I loaded the Soloist and began to climb.
My swing was still good. Over the preceding couple of seasons, I had passed a threshold. My technical skills no longer seemed to deteriorate over the long warm spells. My performance on ice now depended almost exclusively on psychology, and my psychology today was fueled by anger.
Maybe this Winter was an aberration, but I suspected that it wasn’t. Things were changing; the climate was changing. I’d made a vow, back when rumors of soft and liquid Winters first circulated. When the day came that ice climbing ended, and I had no more use for my crampons, I’d clip them to my boots one more time and kick the nearest climate-change-denying Republican politician in the ass. I felt the time coming.
The column of ice I’d chosen was forty five feet tall, and beginning to deteriorate. It was a bit of a risk, and a little silly. It was so short, and it was wet and manufactured. I could hear cars on the road down in the canyon. I had followed a tourist’s Yak-trax prints up the trail to get here. I knew that I would find a PVC pipe leaking water over the cliff band at the top of the ice. There was no wild beauty or uniqueness to be found here. The pillar’s existence was all that recommended it.
The bottom took a light touch. It was wet and brittle ice. It tolerated only one, gentle swing per placement. I weight tested each tool before committing to it. I placed the crampon points in little divots in the ice, rather than kicking the spikes into the column. I waited to place the first ice screw until I was well off the ground. I had picked the spot from below, and it turned out to be as good as I had expected.
The ice improved after the first piece of gear. Above a small roof, it took a full swing. My anger transformed, clarified in the movement. Another ice screw and a few more swings led to a different game on the thin steps of low-angle ice at the top. I grabbed a tree and stepped over the PVC pipe.
I fancied another lap then. I was done being angry. I knew that the anger arose from fear of loss, and a deeper fear of loss than the fear of losing cold seasons. It came from the fear that I might someday no longer be a climber and find myself looking at the world from the same viewpoint as those cramponned-boot-in-the-ass-deserving politicians. It was a fear that I was losing. As more days like today passed, I felt more and more certain that I would not habitually trade an ‘is’ for an ‘ought’. I would not stop paying attention. I would not find myself trading real days for fears of an imagined future and its glories at risk.
As the ice receded, I would move higher. I would take notice of the boulders that had been hidden under permanent snowfields. My tools would scratch more rock. At last, I would walk up glaciers covered with rubble, arthritic knees aching, tottering on my piolet, and feel no different than I did at the top of the little pillar today.
As I set up the rappel, words from a Howlin’ Wolf song began to run through my mind:
I have enjoyed things that kings and queens never have – things that kings and queens can’t never get. And they don’t even know about ’em.
May be I was still a little angry. Yeah, fuck them, another lap.
Certainty
I try not to rope up with people who are too certain. They tend to do things like walk under seracs because seracs don’t fall when the weather is cold, forego protection because they can just climb it, and cross loaded slopes because they went this way before and it didn’t slide. Some of them are certain because they are fatalists, some because they are true believers, most because they can’t deal with the fear and uncertainty anymore and have decided to just switch off.
For a couple of centuries it seemed like we were poised to untie from certain people in general. A series of uncertain people came along and showed that their way was better. Their questioning lead to an understanding that the earth was really old, Democritus was right, kind of, and our thought and language were a self-referential tangle. These and other revelations of uncertainty eroded the old institutions whose source of knowledge was authority.
But change lead to anxiety, and the certain people saw an opportunity in that angst and in the methods of the uncertain themselves. To people who lived by a belief in authority, relativism equaled Nihilism and statements like “There is nothing but the text.” represented soft-headed weakness rather than caution and humility. So, the certain rejoined the discussion.
Their bid was an appeal to relativism and uncertainty as they saw it. If the field was level, their ideas should merit equal consideration in principle. And they packed their methods right along with those ideas. Debate to replace discussion. Moral force to replace reason. Because, with authority as their source of knowledge, they didn’t need to refine an incomplete understanding, they needed to win. And they did win. They managed to replace real skepticism, which implies uncertainty, with their version, which is synonymous with mere derision. Worse, they managed to draw uncertain people into debate.
Once the uncertain engaged, it was over. They kept trying to be reasonable and have a discussion. When that didn’t work, they tried to be certain. The certain people didn’t care about a discussion, they knew what they knew and just wanted the popular influence all authority craves. And when the uncertain people expressed certainty, they became vulnerable to a claim of equivalence. They were revealed as authority-based too, so the claim went, so it was a simple matter of choice among similarly valid systems of belief.
The mistake was to allow the premises of certainty in the beginning. Before the uncertain began a defense of their ideas, they should have demanded that the certain defend and explain their own ideas first, with an eye toward divining the premises. When the certain appealed to assertion of authority, whether in the form of a moral sense, supernatural agency, or incredulity, the talk should have ended. A person may certainly assert whatever, but once they do, there’s no point talking about it unless you begin by agreeing with their assertion. And in that situation, it’s best to just un-tie.
Not lookin’ good
Not much ice in Spearfish canyon. 11th Hour is about the only thing climbable.
The cave was trying earlier last week, but there’s not much left now.
If you’ve got the secret weapons.
You can still make the best of it.
Those global warming skeptics best hope they’re right, though. Because if these temp.s are the new normal, they’re gonna find out what it’s like to get cramponned boot up the ass.
Dedicated to the Game 