Being a dirtbag in your thirties is like being the last holdout of a dying breed, and as I entered year eight of living on the road last October, I had become something of a solo encore from my generation. In many ways, I wondered if I could even still call myself one, having spent the last year straight moving my van from one friend’s driveway to the next, even throwing down a few dollars for rent now and again. I spent half my climbing days training in the gym, and to even take my aging van up a dirt road toward proper wilderness sent pangs of anxiety straight to my racing heart. Even the dumpsters in most of my favorite haunts were sealed up with lock and key these days, sending a clear message of change.
One by one, most of my generation of nomads has all left road life behind for one reason or another over the last few years; in search of stability, comfort, or the desire to lay down roots that you naturally start to crave in later phases of life. Some days I was the last member of a once-vibrant symphony standing alone on a stage, playing a song from a different time.
Other days I’d walked off stage first to go play my own tune, because no one else could keep the beat. Either way, if my life as a dirtbag were to be sung as a song, the events of the last few months told me exactly how the lyrics would likely go. It would be tune of Binks’ Brew from One Piece, a world-famous Japanese manga and anime, with just a few words altered to sound something like this:
All alone, or with a crew!
It’s time to ship out Brittany’s brew!
The wind, it blows. To where?
Who knows?
The road will be our guide!
All along the highway ride
Rays of sunshine far and wide
Birds they sing of cheerful things, in circles passing by!
Bid farewell to Washington!
Say so long to Oregon!
Sing a song, it won’t be long, before we’re heading off!
O’er the hills and through the trees,
The open road puts us at ease!
Day and night to our delight
The road trip never ends!
All alone or with a crew!
It’s time to ship out Brittany’s brew!
Dirtbags we, eternally are living to be free!
With the earth to rest our heads
Vans beneath us as our beds!
‘Cross mountains high and rivers wide, adventure is the prize
Somewhere in the endless sky
Stormy winds are blowin’ by!
Clouds are dancing, evening comes
It’s time to sound the drums!
But steady women never fear!
Tomorrow’s skies are always clear!
So pound your feet and clap your hands till sunny days return!
All alone or with a crew!
It’s time to ship out Brittany’s brew!
Wave good-bye, but don’t you cry
Our memories remain
Our days are but a passing dream, everlasting though they seem
‘neath the moon we’ll meet again, the wind’s our lullaby!
All alone or with a crew!
It’s time to ship out Brittany’s brew!
Sing a song and play along
For all the countries wide!
After all is said and done
You’ll end up a skeleton
So spread your tale, from dawn till dusk, of doin’ whate’er you please!
The sea shanty had been on repeat in my head for months after I’d recently started re-reading One Piece, a childhood passion I was revisiting for the first time in nearly a decade. I couldn’t stop listening because both the lyrics and the story itself felt strikingly relevant to my life. It reflected a lot of big questions my decision to stay in Moab for the winter had raised, in a way I hadn’t expected from a work of fiction, right at a time when I especially needed it to.
To those familiar with One Piece this might hit a bit harder (it’s the kind of thing where if you’re a fan, you’re a FAN), but to those that don’t, it’s a story about a boy’s adventures on his quest to be the King of the Pirates, because to him the Pirate King is the freest man in the world.
The freest person in the world, huh? Now wasn’t that a romantic idea. As the story progresses, the protagonist sails from one island to the next, each as uniquely fantastical as the one that came before it, making friends, gaining notoriety, and growing and evolving along the way. Despite the importance of relationships being one of the primary themes, the crew always says goodbye to friends and family along the way without a second thought because they acknowledge that everyone must be free to live their own adventures, even if it takes them in different directions. I’d said goodbye to countless people myself with a wave and naught a backwards glance.
Replace the pirate ship with a van or a tent, and wasn’t all that exactly what being a dirtbag was supposed to be all about? Except, my life didn’t really look like that anymore. As soon as I drew one parallel, the other stuck like a splinter that could not be ignored. The question I couldn’t shake was if I had stopped being a true dirtbag, was I still free? Or was I just comfortable. That was why I had chosen this life, after all. To be free from the shackles of society’s rules and structure and have grand adventures, just like the Pirate King. It definitely wasn’t to look for an easy life at the end of the road.
The more I thought about it, the more Moab, the very place I always think of as holding a lifetime of potential adventures, started to feel very, very small. It wasn’t just reading One Piece that had given me a sudden resurgence of wanderlust, it was how long I had been there, but more importantly the reasons why. I had been struggling with big existential questions for some time, but at last this silly story about pirates put everything into the perspective I had been needing to answer them.
I had decided to stay in Moab for the winter because fall had come and gone in the blink of an eye, leaving me rather unsatisfied. Three months and I could count my climbing days on my fingers and toes after trying a new strategy on my long-term project that required dramatic amounts of rest days. It’s burnout that usually drives me to leave a place, so the lack thereof naturally compelled me to stay.
Simultaneously, words from my friends in town like being told ‘Welcome home,’ instead of ‘welcome back,’ meant I truly belonged there. I was a part of the community, and it was a nice feeling, like a warm blanket on a cold night. I had begun to care less about meeting new people in general, and more about spending time with those I had already grown to love; the natural evolution of wanting to build, rather than explore. It was the same thing that had caused the settling down of my previously nomadic friends, but that couldn’t be happening to me, could it?
I’ve always known the day would come when the seasons would change in the desert but I wouldn’t leave with them. Had that time come already? If I’d always seen it coming, why did the idea of it actually being here weigh heavy in my chest like a stone instead of comfort me like a blanket?
In my heart, taking that step meant some wild part of me would be irreversibly tamed, the peak of my adventurous spirit subdued. Sure, you can still get after it at any stage of life, but I despised the idea that my very best days had come and gone already, when it felt like they had barely gotten started. I pictured myself telling tales of the great adventures of my youth with a fond, albeit bittersweet nostalgia for days gone by; that everything that came after was just slightly less; less thrilling, less vibrant, less free.
The idea of that day eventually arriving, whether tomorrow or in fifty years, is one of my greatest fears. That has never, not for one single second, been who I want to be. I have always, always, wanted to be forever in the phase of my life where I’m still out having the adventures, telling the stories of one while I’m already in the middle of the next, never stopping nor slowing down nor allowing a single precious second of my life go to waste. What was I supposed to do, if philosophically my idea of the best life that I could live didn’t match up with the calling of what my heart was telling me to do here and now?
For months these questions had haunted me, as I tried to either make peace with the idea of my life changing, or make sense of what I was doing right now if it wasn’t.
Winter came and went, and then it was spring, and I’d been in Moab for longer than I had been anywhere since 2018 when I first hit the road. As that time began to pass however, little by little my body and mind began to show the telltale signs of cumulative fatigue of doing the same thing for a little bit too long. It started with my fingers, the ache from crack climbing that used to fade after a few rest days now a permanent fixture deep in the joints. Next it was the wrists, a shoulder, a knee… my psyche was dropping alongside the health of my joints, but I mistook the gradual fade for normal wear and tear, chalked it up to a bad night’s sleep, or too much training, and kept pushing. I needed to still be psyched now, to justify my decision to stay back then.
By the end of March what had started slow suddenly began to snowball. An unseasonable heat wave tanked my psyche, I missed the pads bouldering and sprained my ankle, and I listened to Binks’ Brew one time too many, or maybe finally just enough times to realize that I was singing harder, louder, more passionately with each repetition to lyrics about leaving it all behind.
It had finally come for me, the worst burnout I’d had in years. Catastrophic, debilitating, liberating. In a heartbeat Moab went from my home to a gilded cage of my own construction, and I had never wanted to leave a place so badly. I didn’t want to look at the color red anymore, or feel a grain of sand in my sheets. At last, I had my answer, and it was the exact one I needed it to be: that I was still that person I’d always wanted to be, as wild as a pirate and untamable as the sea. As it turns out, freedom is a hard habit to break once you have gotten a taste for it, and I had spent too many years drinking straight from the source. The time had come for me to set sail for distant lands and legendary adventures.
Only, I couldn’t leave yet. I’d committed to teaching a clinic in May, and it was only April. To pass the remaining time I pointed the van uphill and didn’t stop until the service bars disappeared in the nearby La Sal mountains for the sport climbing area Mill Creek. Camped up there, finally out of a driveway was a breath of fresh air. I had just enough cell phone service to continue to load new pages of that influential pirate story that simultaneously provided an escape from reality and fueled my imagination for how I wanted my life to look next. There was one page in particular that hit me like a freight train the day I read it. Staring down the barrel of a gun, a character defiantly declares to his enemy that no matter what they do to him, his soul will live on; “For I… am a story to accompany your drinks…” he says.
To live a life that wasn’t just any old story, but ‘A story to accompany one’s drinks…’ now that was a thing to aspire to be! Wherever I needed to go, whatever I needed to do to make my life that, became my next heading.
With that desire in my heart, my mind frequently wandered to the place where the greatest stories of my life had all begun: Index.
The more I thought about Index, the more I couldn’t stop thinking about Index. I woke up thinking about it, I fell asleep thinking about it; in every spare moment my thoughts drifted back to Washington’s magical granite crucible where I always seemed to find what I was looking for, no matter what it was.
Finally, by mid-May I was released from any obligation to stay in the desert. My escape to Mill Creek had been a bandage, but Index was the cure. I high-tailed it to the Pacific Northwest, free at last. Moab had become so synonymous with this very specific version of myself, the one that only did mega-projects meant to curate my ultimate potential, and always trained, and always did everything right to optimize performance by eating the right diet and taking enough rest days, and getting enough sleep, and being the perfect athlete, and it felt so fucking good to be free of that too. None of that matters in Index, because the grades are a joke, and conditions always suck, and egos get you nowhere. Out there, the only thing that matters is the love of the game; the kind of heart and soul that forms the foundation of any great story.
Being back in Index was liberation in the finest sense. With minimal cell phone service, I was a proper dirtbag once again. Now detached from the cheap dopamine of doom-scrolling on the internet, time was spent making new friends, perfecting hacky sack tricks, picking wild berries, and dipping in the icy waters of the Skykomish river instead. The ticking of the clock slowed down in real time as the wilderness reset my attention span, and it was with a lazy pace that spring slowly turned to summer. The only cares I had in the world were the trivial logistics of rock climbing, like what was happening with the weather, or how thin was my skin. All of life’s answers felt within my reach.
No big projects, I had promised myself. Not an ironclad rule, but a strong suggestion out of fear that they’d only put me right back in another cage, grinding away at the esoteric hellscape of some ambiguously higher purpose. For now, I just needed to be free, and have my climbing reflect that.
The catch was that freedom wasn’t all I needed. I also needed adventure, and that is only to be found where there are either difficulties, or danger, and I’d lost a few too many friends recently to be much in the mood for danger. The problem with challenging climbing however, is that it often leads to projects. What can I say, I’m something of an addict.
Like a moth to a flame, I couldn’t help the embers of my imagination stir one afternoon as tales of immaculate hard climbing in an unforgettable position on the route Call of Cthulhu on the Upper Town Wall were described by my friend Stamati. A combination of technical face climbing and steep juggy roofs, plus plenty of classic Index wizardry… he had me at multipitch. At an attainable grade of 5.13a, maybe I could get the adventure I was looking for without committing too many days of my season to another endless projecting quest. It wouldn’t hurt to at least check it out.
I set out on my own, hoofing a ninety-meter static rope to the top of the Upper Town Wall just a few days later. While normally the sticky sweat soaking through the straps of my heavy backpack would have left me grunting and cursing, I was grinning like an idiot instead, having missed even the shitty parts of wall climbing. It had been too long.
Nothing short of mind-blowingly good climbing awaited me on the route, with not a single move in six pitches that wasn’t five stars. Of course that would be the case, this was the best wall at the best granite crag in the world, after all.
I posted a video of my sky cragging adventure on social media, secretly hoping to partner farm. While the freedom and feeling of self-reliance from top rope soloing alone is an excellent way to go climbing, I’d always rather be part of a team when it comes time to get on the sharp end. I almost immediately managed to recruit a Seattleite named Nick, whom I’d met for the first time just a handful of days prior. I barely knew more about him than his last name, but something told me we would make a good team. That something, was none other than City Park.
I thought I’d be done writing about City Park by now, eight years and countless blog posts later, but I guess all roads lead back there eventually for me. I’d never complain about still being so connected to the single route that most profoundly changed my life though. Nick had first messaged me a few months back, introducing himself as someone trying the route and looking for tips on how to manage his skin. I remembered doing the exact same thing when I was in his shoes: cold-messaging my predecessors with stars in my eyes, hoping they’d share their secrets on gobi-prevention.
I watched him send in abysmal conditions from a fixed line on an adjacent route, in a small weather window between rain storms. He slid out of nearly every jam, and yet somehow hung on, impressively determined to overcome the countless mistakes. Something about the way he screamed when he clipped the chains told me it had meant something to him, maybe even something as profound as it had meant to me all those years ago. The fact that he had reached out to me at all told me that he cared about the route’s history, the very thing that had forever altered the course of my own climbing when it introduced me to the profound wisdom of Todd Skinner that has become of the foundation of all of my climbing ever since. After shooting a selfie together he told me that it meant something for me to be there, and in that moment we became kindred spirits, now both carrying the torch of the legacy of City Park.
Perhaps now we might also both carry the torch of Call of Cthulhu as well.
We spent a day together working the route on lead, and to my surprise I came close to sending the crux pitch on my last try of the day. I fell on the final move, so surprised to make it that far that I messed up a technical foot sequence. As we hung at belays together and hiked to and from the crag we chatted about how Nick’s climbing had been struggling to find a direction after City Park, much the same way mine does when a meaningful project goes down. The sense of loss that comes from leaving behind all that passion and inspiration is always disorienting, and hearing him go through it made me more certain than ever that the way we interacted with climbing was one and the same.
Nick had plenty of big ambitions of things like El Cap and beyond, but had yet to open the door to hard multipitch climbing for himself. I couldn’t help but think that if we did Cthulhu together, I might be able to show him that he was much closer to those goals than he thought. He was already a good enough climber and someone willing to believe in bold dreams, he just needed a few more tools in his arsenal.
At the very least, our day of climbing had given him some much-needed psyche to remedy his post-project blues, so we made plans to try again together the next time he was free.
Trying to get things done in Index is always a delicate game of threading the needle with the weather. Show up too early in the season and you might be met with endless rain. Too late, and the south-facing walls endlessly bake in the sun, not cooling off until the sun has all but set. Some say Index teaches you that you can send your projects in bad conditions, but from my years living in Seattle I know how sticky the rock feels on a cold, dry day in the dead of winter, so tactile that the ridiculously sandbagged grades almost feel plausible.
This summer had been a wet one, but the frequent storms offered occasionally perfect days right before and after their precipitation. One such window was predicted to overlap with the days Nick could leave work early to climb, and after how close I had gotten on our previous attempt I decided it was worth giving myself every chance to send, taking multiple days off to farm skin and rest the body and mind.
On paper it seemed like an ironclad strategy, but the night before we were to make our attempt it completely backfired. As I lay in bed, trying to relax, my old demon insomnia whispered a devilish thought into my ear, ‘You’ve done such a good job at resting, getting everything right that is within your control, wouldn’t it be a shame if you failed to ever fall asleep tonight and ruined it all?’
My eyes were still open by the time dawn broke. No amount of caffeine could give me back the lost hours, and all too soon Nick was there and ready to go. I told myself that the thick cloud of brain fog would just be nervous-system novocaine, quieting my stress and allowing me to climb out of instinct rather than fending off performance anxiety. An unlikely silver lining, but I had no choice to but to hope for the best.
Sometime later we were once again piled on top of my small wooden belay ledge below pitch 3, ready for another round of battle with the 5.13 crux of the route. Having had my hopes end here on our previous attempt a week prior, this pitch had been haunting my thoughts ever since. If only I’d skipped the last clip, if only I’d used Nick’s dyno beta instead of my technical matches and foot swaps, would I have just done it back then? What should I try this time to not fall in the exact same spot?
In the end I fell off anyway. I changed my beta to the dyno, and fell off again. I changed it back to the technical beta, and fell off yet again, noticeably tired now. Three tries later and it just wasn’t happening. Despite strong readings on his Tindeq to test the freshness of his finger strength before we’d started, Nick had surprisingly fallen on both of the opening pitches. He would try the crux one last time, but we were just going through the motions now, the send dead and buried.
I could see that Nick was tired now too; third go on a 5.13 several pitches off the ground rarely yields results. As soon as he left the belay he looked like he was about to fall off, struggling through sections that shouldn’t have been hard. He was off-balance, off-sequence, off-everything, but he wouldn’t let go. Same fight I’d seen on City Park. Even when things seemed utterly hopeless, he still climbed with the kind of fire that makes you believe anyway.
With a grunt of effort Nick stuck the move that had shut him down thus far, disappearing from view as he pulled over the final roof. The only thing in sight now was the black rubber heels of his Katanas, miraculously still standing on the unlikeliest of slabby footholds with one move left to the finishing jug: the all-points-off sideways dyno, with hundreds of feet of empty space below his feet. It was an all or nothing, sink or swim kind of moment demanding full commitment where the consequences were more than just failure, but a hair-raising plummet into the void.
Nick didn’t have much experience with situations like this, very few do, but I couldn’t help but believe in him now. I blindly fed out armfuls of slack so as not to allow the rope to accidentally limit his momentum as he leapt. An elated scream of victory echoed across the Upper Town Wall as he latched the hold, having miraculously sent the crux on his third and final attempt.
After a brief moment of mutual celebration, reality came crashing down upon us simultaneously. Despite his success, neither of us were in a good position to send the route. What stood between me and sending was this crux pitch that I had expired my energy falling off of thrice already. For Nick, who had fallen off both of the first two pitches but now done the crux, it was every other bit of hard climbing on the entire route. There still remained difficulties above us to climb, plus quite a bit of easier terrain to navigate before we might at last reach the summit. The hour was late, and as long as the days are in Washington summers, nighttime was not far off and we were both running on empty.
Between the two of us we had only completed perhaps 30% of the hard climbing, but as we hung at those anchors, I had a vision. It could go, but only as a team. It was a gamble of long odds, but so was Nick sending City Park that day, and now the crux pitch too. He seemed to have a track record of beating the impossible, which is always my favorite game to play in climbing too. The worse the chances, the grander the adventure and the greater the story, after all. Wasn’t that exactly what I had been looking for? Perhaps today was the kind of day to dream an impossible dream, and see if maybe luck was on our side. I had a gut feeling that we should roll those dice and bet it all on black.
If I could follow the crux pitch right now, empowered by carrying the weight of both of our sends upon my shoulders, I knew I could lead the rest of the route successfully where Nick would likely not be able to. He had carried the torch this far; I could do the rest. Nick would have to find it inside himself to climb the bottom pitches again on the way down, probably in the dark, to complete the ascent. Such an audacious demand was unfamiliar territory for Nick, a more monumental demand than he had perhaps yet faced in his climbing, and the doubt was visible in his eyes. I’d done more with less before however, enough to know such a thing could be achieved with enough willpower. I’d seen the fire with which he had climbed, and I knew he had it in him. I just had to believe hard enough, loud enough, for the both of us, and he would believe too. That would be enough. It had to be.
I relayed my harebrained plan, and just the suggestion that there was even the faintest chance was met with the same reckless hope that I was feeling. This was going to work. I put on my own Katanas for a fourth, and final attempt on the crux, dripped liquid chalk onto my skin, and set off. As I stared down the final moves, the ones I had fallen off of so many times before, it felt different. It wasn’t because I was not on lead this time, it was because Nick was just a few feet away, cheering me on with all his heart. For both of us, I thought, as I fought with every ounce of strength I had left to finally latch the finish jug myself. I had done it, and now come hell or high water we pushed on, whatever it took. I racked up for the next pitch ready to climb like it was the only thing I’d ever been born to do.
The final hard pitch flowed easily for me, with the cool evening air and strong breeze from being high on the wall making improbable slopers feel more like they were holding on to me than me holding onto them. I’d rehearsed this well and knew exactly what to do. Nick however, had not touched this pitch in almost a year, having descended before this point on our previous attempt on the route. His beta all but forgotten, he quickly fell after only a few moves. Back to the start, up to the crux, and he was off again, and again. It was a race against his fatigue to remember his beta, finally making it through the hardest part only to heartbreakingly fall off right after.
I dangled at the hanging belay above, insisting again and again that it was okay, that he could do it, even as he desperately called out that he was starting to spin out. I kept my voice calm, my instructions clear, even as my toes went numb on the tiny belay ledge. My certainty did not waiver no matter how many times he fell off. He could do this, and he would do this. Finally, half a dozen attempts later, he successfully pulled through the first crux, and then the second and third, following my instructions as I reminded him where each hidden hold was in the forgotten terrain. At last, he reached my position, one less obstacle now in his way.
At this point maintaining the momentum was essential. There was no space for anything but enthusiasm for the success thus far, to keep his focus off of how much he had left to do. I quickly set off for the summit, navigating two long pitches of 5.10 linked into one before my headlamp at last illuminated the summit of the Upper Town Wall as the last light of day faded. Dressed in nothing but a tank top and short shorts, I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered as I waited for Nick, now climbing more unfamiliar terrain fully in the dark.
I was cold, hungry, thirsty, tired… but none of it mattered, because at last I had found what I had come here looking for: not just a send, not just one of the best routes I could possibly imagine, but a proper adventure, played out like something from a storybook.
It was ‘a tale to accompany your drinks’ at last, I thought, as the deepening night slowly became more star than sky over the sleeping town of Index. What a feeling.
Once Nick arrived, we spent only a few moments on celebration, knowing the true summit was down on Madsen’s Ledge. The send would be marked not by being at the top of the route, but at the bottom. A few quick rappels and I was off the route, leaving Nick behind to repeat the second pitch, and then the first. In the complete darkness I had no idea what was happening on the wall anymore, no longer able to offer much support from my perch far below. I had done all that I could. It was entirely up to him now to discover what he was made of up there.
Occasional sound bites echoed down to me, relaying the drama of one man alone on the wall exploring his limits and perhaps pushing beyond them as he fought against a dying headlamp and the tattered remnants of his skin on the razor-sharp crimps of pitch two. I strained my ears for any grunts or cheers before at last, there was a desperate cry of victory. Now there was only one crux left. He would later tell me how close he had been to falling, and how impossible another attempt would have been if he had. Before long the final pitch, the first pitch, was complete too and were finally reunited back where it had all begun.
Nick told me it was the deepest he had ever had to dig, music to my ears. How rare and beautiful a day it is that one gets to feel such a way, to go beyond the end of what they had known themselves to be capable of and venture forth into the vast unknown of possibility. I knew in this experience I’d shown him the door, and he had walked through it into a vibrant world of potential on the other side. Somewhere on those last dark pitches he became something he hadn’t been before.
It was the exact thing I have spent my entire career as a professional climber trying to inspire in people: the teachings I have learned from Todd Skinner, my idol since the day I sent City Park. Today we had done exactly what he believed in and listened not to what we thought was possible, but what we couldn’t say was impossible. I had showed someone how to see beyond the horizon, to dream the impossible dream, to take the leap of faith and pour their heart into their pursuit as if there was no tomorrow.
It was nice to PTRD (Put The Rig Down, as the dirtbag residents of Index call sending a project), but when I remember the Call of Cthulhu what I’ll really remember isn’t the holds or the beta, it’s the sound of Nick’s scream as he stuck the dyno. It’s the words he spoke to me right after, when I’d asked how it’d felt: that it was one of the top three climbing experiences of his life. What I’ll remember is a single day in which I can say with certainty that my climbing meant something to someone else.
All these decades of effort trying to follow in Todd’s footsteps, to build myself up into someone who embodies his mantras enough to pass them along, and up on that wall I had succeeded. Far beyond achievement in my own climbing, I had succeeded in moving the needle forward for this place I love, this sport that defines my life, a friend full of untapped potential, and the legacy of one of the greatest climbers who ever lived. Now that is a tale good enough to accompany at least someone’s drinks.
To read Nick’s account of our adventure, visit his blog here
