Every fall I’ve developed something of an annual bad habit. I bee-line for the Creek with no plan for the Creek with no plan other than to stay there until winter manages to creep its icy tendrils so deep into the sandstone that I have no choice but to leave at the last possible moment. Sometimes it happens early, like last year when heavy snow evicted me on Thanksgiving, but some years the cold sets in more slowly. Day by day nothing seems to change and endless sun makes it feel like a dedicated enough climber could stay all winter. Every night is just a little longer than the last however, and sooner or later even the most bluebird sunny day isn’t enough to cast off the chill.

I ran my desert season especially long this year, loitering in Moab for half of December. By the end I was hardly climbing; it was snowing, I had developed toe-hole on my feet and deep cracks on my hands from the skin getting just a little too weathered, and more than anything else my psyche was completely depleted from three months in Utah. I had arrived while it was summer, and now fall had come and gone, and I was still there, because I just didn’t know where else to go.

All year I had been planning a glorious return to Joshua Tree to be reunited with all my weird and dearly missed California friends, where we would party into the new year in style; one of my absolutely favorite traditions. It was with a very heavy and conflicted heart that I abandoned that plan once COVID shut down much of California, including much of J Tree. I entertained the idea of heading East instead, to branch out of my comfort zone and try something totally different, but one too many cautionary tales about winters of endless rain prevented me from ever committing.

I knew I needed to leave. I could feel the lazy indoor life I had been living at a friend’s house luring me into a melancholic complacency. Too much time in a city, even a small outdoorsy one like Moab, has a way of making me forget how much happier I truly am when I’m outside all the time. The safety and stability of an indoor life is a dark temptress that tries to trick me into thinking that I should settle for good enough. They say that a ship that stays in its harbor it safe, but that’s not what ships are for. My ship would spring a leak and slowly start sinking if I didn’t set sail soon.

Opportunity found me when I was contacted by one of my oldest (and simultaneously youngest) dirtbag friends Fiona. She had a few weeks off from nursing school for winter break and was looking for partners. It just so happened I was too.

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to hard trad, the kind of climbing I want to do, is often finding partners that either share your objectives or are willing to support you on them when they aren’t at a convenient crag. Cracks form in some pretty random places sometimes. With all of my partners from the fall either working for the winter, or home for the holidays, I didn’t know where to turn to find the right crew to start a new and hopefully productive season with. When Fiona messaged me I was directionless, partnerless, and feeling more than a little lost.

Fiona suggested Flagstaff, due to a potential housesitting gig, and for lack of a better idea I jumped on board. That, and for one other reason: East Coast Fist Bump.

—

I first visited the Sedona area in the winter of 2018 in something of a similar post-Creek season directionless wandering. I was only there for two weeks, but it was enough time to bag a few sandy towers, score big from a few local dumpsters, climb a few of my earliest trad 5.13s, and to watch my friend Reed send East Coast Fist Bump, a route he had been projecting since long before I showed up.

The route had been on my mind ever since, not because I had tried it and thought I could do it, nor because I thought it looked particularly cool. It didn’t even have a compelling history the way many of my dream routes usually do. This one stuck with me for a different reason: watching Reed work on Fist Bump until he eventually sent it was one of the greater displays of climbing passion I had witnessed. I saw glimpses of my own projecting process in it, and from all my experiences I knew that it takes a special kind of route to bring that out of someone. I couldn’t help but think that maybe it could bring it out of me too; that discipline, dedication, commitment, and above all else passion that comes from chasing a big dream.

Fist Bump appealed to me as a route in itself for that reason, but it also had the additional allure of one of my other dreams: to climb a 5.14 on traditional gear. Only a few women in the world have ever done it, and for as long as I had started pushing myself as a trad climber I fantasized of having my name on that list. I had publicly admitted as much on my Enormocast interview over a year ago (listen here), preaching about the romantic concept of “dreaming the impossible dream” and how doing that was mine. After all this time I had yet to really try to make it more than just spray; a fact that perpetually nagged in the back of my brain. Was it going to be one of those things I just kept putting off until I thought I’d have more psyche, time, strength, etc. until one day I realized my chance had long since come and gone?

One of my favorite mantras from Todd Skinner perpetually echoed in my head when I thought about my dream to climb a trad 5.14 route, because that number had been a dream to him too. “Everything you ever wanted to do is still possible. It’s only you who says it can’t be done. If there is something you want to do in life you’d better get on it; time waits for no one.” As my twenty-eighth birthday rapidly approached I knew I was no exception; time certainly wasn’t waiting for me. So as I agreed to go to Arizona with Fiona, I thought perhaps it was time to at least try.

—

As soon as I arrived at the Waterfall I fixed a top rope on Fist Bump and started swinging aimlessly around at the crux. Day after day went by and I couldn’t make heads nor tails of the sea of holds in the crux, each option worse than the last. The route mostly boils down to a long, difficult, low-percentage boulder problem that has been done differently by every ascensionist. It felt like a puzzle that I needed not to be stronger for, but that I needed to be smarter for. That, or just stubborn enough to keep beating my head against the wall until eventually I figured it out.

I struggled for psyche in the beginning, and not just from the lack of progress. Despite having a goal to focus on that logically checked all the boxes, I still felt lost. I had burned myself out on climbing by doing the same thing for too long, and my heart longed for the wild holiday parties from J Tree and the reprieve from trying hard that they provided. Normally this was my time to recharge, celebrate, and be with friends, so as my New Year’s Eve birthday drew closer I couldn’t focus on much other than my own loneliness. I often irrationally wondered if I should just scrap this impossible project and go west anyway, Stay at Home orders be damned.

Instead I forced myself to do what I always do when dealing with hardship: look for the opportunity. It was a strategy that had gotten me through plenty of heartbreak before at least. I was here. The weather was ridiculously perfect. I had an amazing partner in Fiona, and I had even been making enough connections with the locals to make it work after she had to leave. I even had someone to project with when the local crusher Lor joined my efforts. If there was ever a time to achieve this goal, the stars were aligning for it to be right now.

I used these logical tricks to build momentum and, and drew additional motivation from Lor’s contagious psyche and enthusiasm. I also used the lack of holiday parties to fuel the first serious training I had done in months. If I couldn’t be getting shit faced on NYE, I might as well be hangboarding.

I made it through a tragically uneventful end to 2020 with a sense of relief. I was finally able to discard the heavy combined weight of FOMO and nostalgia regarding the holidays and start looking forward. By that point I had started to piece things together on Fist Bump. I still changed my beta daily, but I could at least do all the moves now (I just couldn’t string them together into any kind of a sequence). It was a theoretical sort of possible.

With the new year however also came time for Fiona to return to St. George. As luck would have it, just as she left I connected with two other friends from the circuit: Erik and Kevin. They were psyched on the Waterfall’s unique blend of thin cracks, technical stemming and face climbing, and marginal yet bomber micro-cams and ball-nuts. Both of them brought new psyche for training and goals, as together we committed to dry January and regular bonus fitness.

I was starting to feel stronger already, and a week into January I finally committed to a sequence on Fist Bump that I thought would actually be doable on lead. I could stick the crux deadpoint about a quarter of the time when trying the move in isolation, and I could keep climbing past it about half the time from there.

I had frequent flashbacks to a day when Reed had been rope soloing it and I had been doing the same on a neighboring route called the Trident. We would both climb through our respective cruxes on the microtraxion, look at each other, and then with a grin he would yell “Again!” and we would lower back down for another rehearsal. He must have done the crux a half a dozen times in a row that day, and in my mind it always seemed like the most efficient way to work a route like this: top rope it until the body memorizes exactly how to do the moves every time so that it doesn’t feel low percentage anymore. If you can be one thing, you should be efficient.

For the first time the way forward seemed crystal clear and finally I was psyched. I lowered to the ground gushing to Erik, Lor, anyone who would .isten about how I had finally felt that magical transition from logically knowing I could do it to actually feeling in my heart like I was going to do the route; to actually believe, instead of just telling myself to have faith.

Two days later I was back and the move felt dramatically easier. Instead of a wild deadpoint to an openhanded two-finger crimp, I knew exactly how to move my body so that I stuck the hold in a much stronger closed-handed position at least half the time. It also eliminated the jarring wrist pain that hitting the hold open-handed had been causing. It was starting to feel close, but I wasn’t worried about time. I had accepted that it might take a while, and that this point I was willing to do the work.

Over the next 48 hours of resting I rehearsed the crux over and over in my mind, speculating what the gear might look like and how it would feel to climb above it. The crux would be well protected by a 00TCU and a nest of blue aliens, but once you were through all you get is the (very) occasional ball-nut or 00 for the rest of the more moderate climbing to the top. I felt like I had reached the point where I had a chance at doing the route clean on any lucky go, and I didn’t want that one send to be on top rope. At the same time, if I took too many falls on lead I risked damaging my gear; although it would hold, small cams take wear and tear easily. With both these things in mind, I decided the next would be my last day of top roping.

On Friday, January 7^th, Erik and I hiked up to an almost totally empty crag. The usually perfectly clear sky was blocked by clouds, chilling the crag but making an undeniable improvement to the friction on the slippery basalt. With a handwarmer in my chalk bag I set up the fixed line on Fist Bump and rope soloed up to the crux. My numb fingers bobbled the crux hold and I fell in my usual spot, but once I pulled back on I stuck the move once, twice… six times in a row.

Sitting on the ground after, I lined up the gear I had sorted out on top rope. Hardly anything bigger than a blue alien, especially where it mattered, and a yellow ball-nut being the only protection for the last move I could conceive of slipping off of before jugs and ledges take you to the top. I was either about to just go for it right now, or I was going to spend the next however many days in agonizing anxiety about leading the route for the first time. I’d been in this position before and I decided it was better to just get it out of the way now.

Expecting little, I left the fixed line running through a directional in the easy headwall, laced up my beta specific mismatched shoes (one TC Pro and one lace Miura), squeezed my handwarmer one last time, and went for it. I seem to have developed a reputation over the years for having a good lead head over small gear or being fearless in general, but I felt anything but. As I started up the climb I was jittery, cold and full of fear. By the time I reached the crux however, a calm settled over me. I was probably going to fall onto the 00TCU, and that was okay because becoming comfortable falling at the crux was the next step I needed to take in order to one day send the route. Only…I didn’t fall.

With half numb fingers I latched the crux hold, exactly like I had so many times on top rope, just never from the ground before, and definitely never on lead. In a rare moment of perfect flow, I grabbed the next hold, and then the next, and then it was as good as over.

The rest of the climb felt surreal. I removed the directional blocking the semifinal gear placement, letting it slide down the fixed line and revealing the tiny pocket where a 0.1 was blindly placed. It didn’t matter, I wouldn’t fall. I warred between standing at stances to enjoy the feeling of knowing I was about to send and wanting to enjoy it, versus feeling the need to reach the chains and make it real. I sat on the final ledge crying for several minutes as the sun finally emerged to warm my perch. A neighboring climber congratulated me from a few routes over, and I choked out, “this has been my dream for so long.” Finally I was ready to clip the chains, still not totally convinced this was real.

I had emotionally prepared myself to spend the next month falling off this climb and instead I had just done it on a day that I hadn’t even planed to lead it. It felt anticlimactic in a way, because I had been so ready to deal with a dramatic Stingray-style epic involving dozens of one-hangs, a desperate search for partners, gobis and split tips, bad weather, and all the emotional self-doubt that comes with a hard project. I had done my time already though, pushing through the mental hurdles at the beginning of the journey for once instead of the end. Instead I was rewarded with a rare gift of climbing in perfect control.

The clouds that had created such amazing conditions that day melted into a rare and beautiful sunset as Kevin, Erik, and I stood atop a hill near our camp to watch. As reds and oranges slowly faded to purples and blues, the two of them returned to camp while I stayed behind to try and process what had happened. After all this time my crazy dream to climb a 5.14 all on gear was that no longer. It turned out Skinner was right all along: it was only ever me that thought it couldn’t be done.

Climbing highlights from a long and fruitful season in Indian Creek

I often tend to wax poetic when I talk about Indian Creek, telling romantic tales of this place’s immeasurable beauty, unmatched and endless crack climbing, unshakable community, or the way all these things make me feel like I’m living out the part of my life that I’ll look back on as the time I truly felt the most alive. I came here as a novice trad climber for the first time two years ago, and instantly fell so in love that I’ve been hard pressed to go anywhere else in the springs and falls that have since followed.

When I first started coming here I sought out mostly finger cracks, but over time my love grew to include even more difficult sizes like that of off-fingers and offwidth. I started wanting to climb not just the things that suited me, but the things that would really challenge me and mold me into the best crack climber I could be. I’ve poured my heart into the striking red sandstone of the Utah desert these past few years. It’s changed both the shape of my body, and that of my soul. Toughened skin, swollen knuckles, sandy.. everything; it’s a small price to pay for the fullness in my heart that comes from battling a hard splitter crack and coming out victorious, then getting to share the evening with all of my friends around a burning wax box in Creek Pasture.

Indian Creek has come to define a part of me. So much so that over time I found myself maybe wanting to define a part of it too. One way or another, I wanted to write my own little chapter here that would add to the greater story of this place I care so much about.

With that goal in mind, the siren song of the Wingate Splitter called me back to the Creek towards the end of September after a long summer in Wyoming. My heart had been longing for the desert for some time, and I was willing to put up with a bit of pre-season heat to finally scratch the itch.

I rolled into Utah positively chomping at the bit as usual, with a tick list longer and more ambitious than I could ever hope to accomplish in a single season. It was a mix of unfinished business from the past as well as goals and dreams for the future. After a frustrating defeat on my summer project, I found myself called more to splitters than ever. I was tired of the finesse and crystal wizardry of granite, tired of falling not because my strength failed, but because I didn’t position my foot just right. I just wanted to physically try really freaking hard.

I found the first answer to my quest on the relatively under the radar mega-splitter Tricks are for Kids. Established by Steve Hong for the first 45m at 5.13b-ish and later extended by Didier Berthoud to nearly 70m and maybe a letter grade harder, it is what I consider to be one of the most impressive cracks in the American Southwest.  

Little information is publicized about this climb (and that which is on Mountain Project is far from accurate), partially because of its proximity to the rancher’s land on the valley floor, partially because it is one of only two climbs really worth doing at its wall (the other being Silly Rabbit, an awesome 5.12+), and partially because it isn’t in the shade long enough to handle a crowd if multiple parties were to try and climb it on the same day. It also requires a rack so heavy on certain sizes that all but the true Creek die-hards or gear junkies could even supply the 11 or so .75s needed just to get to the first anchors.

I was lucky that two of my best friends and regular climbing partners Matt and Nick were already psyched for the project and had fixed a line on the extension before I even got there. If it weren’t for them I probably would never have even tried it. We spent many a memorable day hiking out together and taking turns rope-soloing whilst the others listened to 80s disco music, solved crosswords, and waited for their turn. A Tricks lap even on top rope usually took upwards of an hour, so we built endurance fast through these workouts.

I sent Tricks to the first anchor on one of my first lead attempts that season (I had tried it once before in the spring), but fell in the extension. Matt was the first to clip the upper anchors, in what may have been only the second or third ascent. He sent in epic style, committing to a burly runout that became even more mega when he fumbled and somehow dropped his final cam still some 15’ from the chains. I bagged it a week later for what was probably the first female ascent, and Nick too finished it later in the season.

It’s hard to truly describe what it felt like to send that climb. After nearly an hour on lead and a full 70m rope length off the deck, the true redpoint crux arrives just before the anchors when the crack pinches down to fingers then tips with sparse to no feet until the final mediocre hand pods that signal that the end of the battle has finally arrived. You’ve already climbed a full 5.13 pitch of ring locking to the first anchor that would give even the best Creek climber a run for their money, and you still have to keep it together for the extension to claim true mastery over Tricks are for Kids.

When I clipped the chains on this incredible climb, one of the best I’ve ever had the honor of doing, what I felt most was gratitude. Gratitude for the privilege for every part of the journey, both on the send go, and over the past few weeks of projecting. Failure had never tasted so sweet as it did on Tricks, because it meant I got to climb that amazing pitch one more time.

When I sent the Tricks extension I was momentarily brought back to Stingray, my winter project. When my partner Prith had sent, he quietly thanked the climb for all of the lessons it had taught him; a stark contrast to my screams of relief upon my own send two weeks later. I understood now what I didn’t back then, as I thanked Tricks aloud for everything it had given me.

[For a video about Tricks, look at the end of this post or click here]

By the time we finished Tricks the weather was ever so slowly starting to cool down, as we were forced to chase shade less and less. Endurance had also been built during all those days of rope soloing, and the season was in full swing. Next on my agenda was one I had been saving for some time: Winner Takes All.

Winner had been on my radar since the previous fall when I had been entranced by tales of perfect fingerlocks and the solitude of the Disappointment Cliffs (aptly names for how few actual cracks fracture the Creek’s largest wall). I also knew this climb to be relatively straight forward, and thus a contender for a chance at onsighting. To do a 5.13 first try on gear had been a big goal of mine that had barely eluded me for quite some time, and I thought Winner Takes All might just be the perfect climb to finally break that grade barrier on.

The climb conveniently bakes in the sun for the entire day, thus I was forced to wait until I had put in my time reacquainting myself with sandstone as we waited for temperatures to eventually feel like fall. The leaves on the cottonwood trees began to change from green to vibrant hues of orange and gold, and then brittle and brown as October passed, yet by the end of the month we were still chasing shady walls (and quickly getting tired of them; most of the Creek has a better aspect for climbing in the sun).

Finally the forecast offered some reprieve from the heat as a surprise snowstorm crept onto the radar. It was supposed to hit by early afternoon, but before it did the day promised to be the first good sunny climbing conditions all season. As I walked to the bathroom that morning Nick came sprinting down from where he was camped in the upper loop of Creek Pasture to intercept me. Thinking he was trying to race me to the toilet (and knowing I couldn’t afford to wait), I took off running too.

“Want to go to Winner today?” he asked instead.

We were joined by Matt and Eric, neither of whom had been up there either. I won the Rock, Paper, Scissors over who got to go first, and nervously strapped on my climbing shoes. Having blown out one of my Cobra Ecos but not the other (my preferred shoes for thin cracks), I wore a strange combo of one slipper and one stiff TC Pro. They’re about as opposite of trad shoes as you can get.

The thing about onsighting is that you only get one shot. Ever. It’s always been a strength of mine, but still I was incredibly nervous as I stepped into the sandy dihedral at the beginning of the climb. The first few pieces are small C3s that have to be back-cleaned (removed) for rope drag, followed by a cruxy roof-pull that guards the main splitter. After that it’s just cranking out long moves between small pods and trying not to stop to place too much gear lest you let the pump get the better of you.

As I stared down the crack from a precarious stance after the roof, the nerves slowly drained away. There were no more tricks on this climb, just a pure test of what I consider to be my strongest style. Jitters turned to flow as I let go of the pressure, determined to do my best and not worry about the outcome; that was all I had control over. Any further fears were just distractions from climbing strategically. One move at a time after another and I soon found myself clipping the anchors, onsight and long time goal successfully complete.

Matt and Eric both sent the climb on their second attempts, climbing with fluidity and skill while Nick took pictures (having already sent it the previous year). We watched the storm brewing over Canyonlands as the day progressed, but it kept its distance for long enough to get a full session in and even walk over to scope the legendary Hong Kong Phooey. A project for another season perhaps.

Due to the seldom visited nature of the Disappointment Cliffs there is no trail, so we began our descent down a random patch of talus that looked as friendly as any right as the wind started to pick up. Threatening clouds had quickly gone from far away to right above us, the smell of rain was in the air, and we felt the pressure drop dramatically from one minute to the next. As we started glissading down the scree, half running back to the car I was reminded of earlier in the season when my backpack had decided to trundle itself from the base of the Optimator. Whilst I was packing up it had randomly tipped over and started rolling down the talus cone, spilling all of my belongings across the hill, breaking my phone and losing my keys in the process. Such experiences just go to show how valuable the trails are around here, and how important the work of building them done by the Access Fund and other volunteers is.

The snowstorm ended up being mild, and by Halloween it was warm and back to shady climbing again. Being my favorite holiday and having had a successful season thus far, I took a hiatus from projecting for a while after that, focusing instead on climbing as many 5.12s as possible until I started to run out of classics at most of the walls I was frequenting.

By mid-November I was looking for something hard to capture my imagination once more. I had a few things on my mind, but just like Tricks and Winner, they were mostly at obscure crags that became hard to rally partners for. It was around that time that I received an unexpected message from Karl Kelley, a long time Creek fanatic and the author of the widely used Creek Freak guidebook.

“Hello. We don’t know each other but, Karl here,” it began. He wanted to tell me about a route that might interest me that matched what I had been psyched on that season: off fingers of the .5 and .75 size. So much time in the desert this year had caused my fingers to swell significantly, making the tips cracks I used to prefer more of a challenge and causing me to diversify into this new realm that I have since grown to love.

“When I first visited this wall looong ago, there was just one route,” Karl went on to say. “We immediately started putting up routes.. back in those days it was fully TABOO to use fixed gear (besides anchors) on a route, so we chose not to do one obvious line that looked as though it would need a few protection bolts..” his message said. As the ethics changed over time he had gone back to put up the route, a 5.11 overhanging hand crack called Circus Tricks. It had an extension that increased dramatically in difficulty that his friend Steven had tried, but the first ascent remained yet unclaimed so now he wanted to gift it to me.

By that point another more intense storm had chased away most of the inhabitants of the Creek. In the campground our numbers could be counted on two hands; the dozens of vans bivvying down every dirt road or camped at the parking for every crag long gone. I had been trying to get people to go to this mysterious climb that I had been calling the “Karl Kelley Project” for some time, but when there’s a lot of people trying to make plans together it’s hard to convince them all to quest off to an obscure crag with you. The emptiness may have been my saving grace in that regard, because as I got down to just a few partners suddenly one day everyone was finally down to check out the Circus Wall (where the project was supposed to be).

I dragged my friends Katie, Matt B (there are many Matts in the Creek), and Alan up the 45 minute non-trail, hoping against hope that this would be worth what felt like the longest approach in Indian Creek.

Tucked away behind two equally obscure crags called the Prow and the Crypto Wall, the Circus Wall felt like something of an anomaly. Striking white calcite bands streaked across the walls, and rainbow colored hoodoos were sculped in the sand all across the hillside. At the base of the crag I immediately dropped my pack and took off towards where this climb was supposed to be while my friends went the other direction to scope some climbs from the guidebook.

As I rounded the corner alone, suddenly Circus Tricks came into view. There was no mistaking it, as my jaw dropped open in awe. There is a lot of variety in the sandstone in the Creek, from bullet hard black varnish to the soft chossy sand of recent rockfall, and everything in between. The wall was the lighter hue of softer rock, yet it was streaked by other colors and through it ran a singular crack that split the wall all the way to the rim (normally the rim requires multiple pitches to reach, but the walls are much shorter at this particular crag).

It was a perfect #2s hand crack to the first anchor just as Karl had said, but without the greasy rounded edges of the overclimbed and polished classics at Supercrack Buttress or Donnelly Canyon. It also was wildly overhung; the only way a hand crack would ever be as difficult as 5.11. Above that the crack narrowed down to what looked like .75s and got even steeper, almost so much so that it could be called a roof.

I was impressed to say the least. More than that however, I felt deeply honored. The climb looked like it should be a mega-classic; perhaps at a more popular wall it would have been, yet somehow after all these years it still remained unclimbed. I simply couldn’t believe that something like this had been given to me by a stranger and a local. I simply had to climb it.

By the time I got to the roof on lead I discovered it was both shorter and even steeper than I had initially thought from the ground. Ring locking through a roof doesn’t leave much room to stop and place gear, so it was a good thing the crux actually only ended up being about ten moves long (with my 6’2” wingspan at least). I managed to squeak it out on my second attempt, after a very lengthy session swinging around on my first try trying only semi-successfully to find places I could squish my hands into the crack instead of having to ring lock.

Karl had asked me to keep the name the same for the first pitch although there was no plaque nor was it listed in the book or on the internet. I was happy to do so as I liked to think the name Circus Tricks could be an homage to Tricks itself, the climb that had so inspired me earlier in the season. I called it 5.13-, though any confirmation or dispute as to the grade would be very welcome since it’s a style that can’t really be compared to anything else in the Creek.

The day I sent Circus Tricks was finally the last real day of climbing in the shade, and by that point it was the middle of November. It had been an unusually warm season, waiting for colder weather to start new projects at the sunny walls only to have it elude us up until it was almost Thanksgiving.

By then people had started to roll in for Creeksgiving, putting an end to the loneliness of an empty campground. We were back to party-cragging, aka rolling out to the crag with as many people as can cram into the van of whoever’s driving that day. It meant a return to the less obscure walls, where there are enough climbs to entertain a larger group of more diverse abilities.

Thus we ended up at the Reservoir Wall one day; a crag stacked with some of the best 5.12 finger cracks in the Creek: Left Crack, Middle Crack, Right Crack, and Cyborg. I had already done all of them, so I decided to check out a less classic 5.12 called Act Your Age. I navigated some bolted face climbing, only to take a surprise fall trying to transition to the crack higher up. I had ripped off a large handhold, sending it hurtling towards my belayer. It luckily just missed him, but I ripped out a blindly placed cam and hit an arete pretty hard in the fall. The rest of the climb was a shooshy (aka climbing poorly because of fear) endeavor. Breaking holds and ripping gear has a way of getting in your head and making it hard to trust the rock sometimes.

I lowered off the route with a bit of an acid-flashback look in my eyes and declared that I needed to go take a walk to clear my head, stripping off my harness and dumping it on the ground without even unracking all the cams I had just used. I wandered around the cliff hoping to scope From Switzerland With Love. It was a climb I had been interested in for as long as I’d been climbing at the Creek, thanks to footage of the first ascent by Didier in one of my favorite climbing movies Return2Sender. The idea of trying it had been my motivation for coming up to Res Wall in the first place, but I didn’t know how stoked I was after how poorly my day had gotten started.

It didn’t take me long to find the climb, and it took even less time for it to shake me out of the pity party mindset that I had adopted; it just looked too damn cool. I soloed up the 5.7 choss (arguably not a good idea) to get a closer look, and then climbed back down to the ground to return to my friends and see if I could convince someone to give me a belay. I recruited Nick and we each gave it a few tries, camping out on the blocky ledge at the base of the pitch until the sun had all but set.

After over two months in the Creek, my psyche had started to wane at that point in the season. I was feeling burned out, and my body felt like it was breaking down from being in the desert so long (or maybe I was just eating too many brownies and drinking too much alcohol to ever really recover on my rest days). I hadn’t cared about projecting anything in a while, but that night I felt the stirrings of motivation for the first time in weeks. I couldn’t stop thinking about the moves, from the savagely overhung finger crack, to the crazy sideways heel hook, to the dicey mantles protected by micro cams guarding the anchor. I was inspired.

As Nick, Matt, and I drove into town a day or two later, we first heard the news that felt more like serendipity than coincidence: Didier Berthod, the legendary Swiss trad climber who had put up From Switzerland with Love and the Tricks extention (not to mention many other legendary Creek test pieces), had just returned to climbing after a many year break during which he had suffered a crippling injury, became a monk, and much more. Maybe I was putting the climb on a pedestal, but who cares. You have to embrace inspiration when it strikes, and by now I really wanted to do this climb. In fact it was now the only thing I really cared about doing, especially since the Reservoir Wall is closed in the spring for raptor nesting making fall the only time to get on it.

We returned to the route shortly after, half to climb and half to replace the anchors and add another bolt to the belay. We made progress, but for something initially graded 5.13+ it definitely still felt like it. By the end of the second day I had unlocked a sequence that felt much easier than Didier’s original beta, skipping many of the face holds in favor of staying in the crack for a few moves longer.

I knew my Creek season was almost over as Thanksgiving came and went. The weather was still good, but pretty much everyone was set to leave in the days that followed. I wanted to leave too, but hopes still remained to give Switzerland one last effort. I had long since made peace with the fact that there wasn’t enough time nor psyche to finish everything I wanted to do this season, but with the spring falcon closures on my mind I knew if there was one thing left to keep trying, this was it.

I finally committed to loose plans to leave the Creek a few days into December. I had seen through my plan to stay in the desert from the beginning of the season until the very end, and at last the end had arrived. With one day left to climb, I returned to From Switzerland with Love.  

On my first go I made it through all of the crack climbing, only to fall on what I consider to be the last hard move. I tried the move several more times, never feeling like I had beta that would work when I was pumped and tired. I experimented with a number of different things I had seen people do in videos, eventually settling on something I hadn’t seen nor tried before but that catered to one of my greatest strengths: heinous finger-locks using only my two smallest fingers.

Second attempt had me falling at the same spot even with the new beta. It felt so close, but making a third attempt was hopeful at best with how physical the climb is. I had accepted that this would likely be my last day on it this season, so I decided to try again anyway after some rest and ibuprofen for my tender tendons and skin.

This past spring I had earned myself the nickname “Third Go Goris” amongst my friends after a string of back-to-back incidents in which I punted (i.e. fell in terrain that should be easy for me) on my second goes and then sent on my third. The most notable were Ultimate Crack at the Power Wall, where I fell in 5.10 territory long before any hard climbing actually starts, and Death of a Cowboy, where I fell moving off the jug that very distinctively marks the end of any hard climbing whatsoever. I don’t just have a history of third-go sends because of punting though, some of the most personally meaningful sends of my career have happened on a hail Mary attempt, whether it was the last go of a trip, a weather window, the season, etc. Maybe it’s the lack of pressure from having no expectations, or maybe it’s the increased pressure from feeling the final countdown. Maybe it’s a bit of both.

My third attempt on From Switzerland With Love was something of a last-ditch effort for the season. I had no expectations, so the nerves from my previous tries finally turned in for the night. For once I didn’t start climbing with my heart rate already doubled before even exerting myself. At the same time, I knew that it was pointless to even try unless I gave one hundred percent, so I committed to doing my best regardless of the outcome. Everything flowed perfectly through the crux and to the top, and it was with great honor that I clipped the newly replaced chains on what had just become one of my favorite and proudest desert climbs.

It wasn’t until a week or two after sending From Switzerland with Love that I remembered that my journey with the climb had actually begun not when I first laid eyes on it this November, but actually the year before during an unlikely conversation around a campfire. I had been climbing at the Creek long enough at that point to have sent just enough of the easier 5.13s to whet my appetite and make me start to wonder what I might be capable of out here. Talk had been going around camp that someone named Nick had just sent Fairy Tales, a 5.13 I had tried unsuccessfully a few times myself. I didn’t know him yet, but I was on the hunt for partners that wanted to try some of these harder climbs and rumor had it that Switzerland was on his radar too.

I brazenly strolled up to his fire that night, introduced myself, and immediately started pestering him about not just From Switzerland with Love, but every other hard climb I could think to name drop that he might be interested in. He later told me that at first he thought I was just some bleach blonde valley girl (maybe a climber, but probably not) that had come down to the desert to party and somehow forgot to leave. The first time we climbed together shortly after he belayed me on my send of Fairy Tales. A year later, he also belayed me on Switzerland. Serendipity once again, or maybe it’s just more desert magic; it’s just about everywhere if you stop to look.

To so many that came before me, to myself, and hopefully to just as many that will come after, Indian Creek has always been a place of adventure. Endless walls offer endless possibilities, and the longer I climb here the more I want to see them all. When I first started climbing at the Creek I knew so very little about many of the climbs that would one day mark these short chapters in the longer story that is my little part of Creek history. Some of them I didn’t know I would ever be capable of climbing and others I didn’t even know existed.

I remember walking under test pieces of every shape and size, from the Big Baby to the Optimator, barely daring to dream that one day not only would they be within my reach, but that I would be out there putting up some of my own. I looked at the Creek regulars and regular crushers with stars in my eyes, never expecting that they would become my best friends. I had heard tales of how the Creek changed people, but I never knew just how much it would happen to me. Thus it is with satisfaction, gratitude, and peace that my fall season ends, and with passion and hunger that I look forward to returning for everything left unfinished, untried, or yet undiscovered, because despite how every season the ranger tells me “you can’t live here,” the Creek will always be my home.  

There aren’t a lot of places where it can be eighty degrees one day and below twenty and snowing the next, but the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains is one of them. In a divergence from my usual summer station in the Pacific Northwest, I found myself in Vedauwoo, Wyoming at the beginning of summer looking for answers amidst both global and personal hardships. The end of the spring (see previous post) had left me feeling lost in a lot of ways, and I decided to try and find myself in the same way I always do: by throwing myself at as many hard crack climbs as I could find. I hadn’t been planning on spending the entire season there, but the weeks turned into months. July thunderstorms producing hail so large it smashed roof vents on vans gave way to blistering August heat, and I still hadn’t left the Voo. September finally arrived, but it was still sunny, hot, and smoky as wildfires blazed just across the Colorado border.

I was indulging my frequent habit of refreshing the weather for the third time of the day when something unusual caught my eye. The ten-day forecast had shown ten identical sun icons for weeks on end, but now one of them had been replaced by not clouds nor rain, but snow. It was still summer so naturally I assumed there must be some mistake, but as the storm grew closer the predicted likelihood of this snow not only increased but worsened. Forty percent became one hundred percent, and soon they were predicting up to ten inches of snow and a quarter inch of ice. This was actually happening, and we needed to plan accordingly.

For several weeks, my friend Kaya and I had been tossing around the idea of throwing a party for our small Voo crew. It wasn’t a party in the sense of simple drunken debauchery, but one with a bit more elegance. The term ‘dirtbag’ with which we define ourselves paints an accurate picture of the level of class most climbers have on any given day. We stretch amidst clouds of dust kicked up by playful dogs in the morning, we climb rocks all day, and then we let sparks from the campfire burn holes in our clothes until its time to retire to our respective beds that probably still have sand in them from last Creek season. We shower twice a week at best, proceed to jump in dumpsters to look for food immediately after, and there are far more fun things to do on a rest day than hang out at a laundromat.

I love this lifestyle. I love seeing my friends at home in the natural world around them, uncaring about the way society says they should dress or act. I love having the privilege to choose to be dirty.

I also sometimes like to be clean.

It was thus that the idea for Dirtbag Date Night was born. Kaya and I had been scheming about how we wanted to see all of our dirty friends dressed up, if just for one night. The clothes could be from a thrift shop, the decorations from the dollar store, the food from Wal-Mart or a dumpster, but no one was allowed unless they played along with the theme and got fancy.

With the now inevitable storm arriving sometime during the night on Labor Day, we planned the party accordingly. Knowing we wouldn’t be climbing for a few days while things melted gave us the perfect excuse to let loose, so we sent out the invitations.

There’s not much to say about the night itself, other than it was a damn good time. Delicious food, music, dancing, and of course the kind of revelry that only dirtbags know how to create. If you know, you know.

The days that followed were bitterly cold, with high winds and thick ice closing half the highways in the state of Wyoming as we were trapped in our campsite melting snow for water (since apparently none of us thought to stock up).

Cramming as many smelly humans as possible into whoever’s van is largest to wait out bad weather is nothing new, though I don’t usually associate such things with summer. Eventually the storm passed, but for most of us the event had marked the end of the Vedauwoo season. The Voo is a hard place to stay psyched forever, with stiff grades, sharp rock, and flared cracks beating down even the humblest egos. For some the holes in their shoes were simply too large to keep climbing there. We had all been looking forward to saying goodbye to this place in style, and now we had.

When I came to Vedauwoo, I never would have guessed that the highlight of my season would have been something like this. I thought I was coming here to take some giant step in my climbing career: mastering the most difficult style of crack climbing and sending the hardest cracks in Wyoming. I thought that that was what I needed to reset my psyche, and so for the first two months in the Voo I raged. I didn’t drink, I trained, and I projected. I focused on the climbing, because I needed to connect with that side of me: the athlete. Through all my hard work, I learned and I grew tremendously as a climber, but I struggled with a part of me that was still missing: the dirtbag.

So much of my passion for climbing comes from the community, and these two defining aspects of my identity are the primary ways in which I relate to the greater climbing world. The dirtbag is how I feel a sense of place, and the athlete is how I feel a sense of purpose and keep my passion thriving. Finding the balance where they co-exist is the crux; even moreso in current times. While I was succeeding in reconnecting with some good old fashioned try-hard, at the same time I spent most of the summer battling a residual anxiety that my partners would all disperse as they had in the spring, and I wouldn’t be able to find new people to climb with.

When I first hit the road two years ago, I had no problem showing up to places by myself. I knew I would meet people wherever I went, and I relished in the process of watching strangers transform into close friends. Watching so much hostility, criticism, and shaming within the climbing community erupt over the spring filled me with a fear of travelling alone I had never dealt with before. I assumed other climbers would not want to welcome outsiders into their groups for fear of the Coronavirus, and I longed for the days where I could wing it and know that partners would just work out somehow.

Vedauwoo isn’t like Squamish, Indian Creek, or Joshua Tree where climbers from all walks of life comingle in the same centralized campground or hang. Both the camping and the climbing is dispersed along endless dirt roads, and more of the people sleeping under the stars are there to ride 4x4s or have a family barbecue than thrash in offwidths anyway. From the moment I got to the Voo, I stressed about how long I could sustain my existence there. Friends came and went and I played it day by day, always making backup plans for where else I knew people to be out climbing if I had to leave to find partners.

I felt it in my heart that something crucial was missing, but over time I slowly started to meet some of the first new friends I’d made in months. As I continued to worry endlessly about not having anyone to belay me on my projects, the incredible people around me continued to prove me wrong by showing up day after day. As I worried about who would group stretch with me, they would continue to lay their yoga mats next to mine each morning. As I worried about when I would feel like a part of something again, they helped me plan a fancy dinner party.

Dirtbag Date Night was attended by a medley of people I had known from my previous travels and those I had met over the course of the summer. That night everyone came together in a community I hadn’t felt since last winter. On the surface level it was a raucous night of fun, but to me it was so much more. It was not a return to normalcy amongst travelling climbers, but rather it was proof that we can adapt to the current state of the world and find ways to still live the lives that make us really feel connected, passionate, and free.

“We’re on the run!” Wild eyed and grinning with adrenaline, N called to me out the window of his red Sienna minivan as we merged onto highway 211 leaving Creek Pasture. Snow flurries fell around our small caravan as we fled from the place all of us considered to be where we felt most at home. We were hoping to find somewhere safer to hide, not from the impending storm, but from the pandemic that had been sweeping the nation.

The Sheriff allowed us to camp one last night in Indian Creek before San Juan County was closed to non-residents. The setting felt apocalyptic as the snow flurries turned into a full-on blizzard outside J’s van where we had congregated. We passed around a bottle of whiskey, the burn of the alcohol helping to dull the anxiety that was reflected on every face. We had no idea where to go, but we took solace knowing at least we were in it together.

We were a misfit crew of crack loving van-dwellers, each of us with a different colored license plate and a different story to tell but one thing in common: none of us had anywhere better to go when we were told to “go home,” so we had come here. Home. Now we had just been told that we needed to leave. None of us begrudged the county for kicking us out; they were just doing their best to take care of themselves in hard times, same as us.

The next day we headed for the small and somewhat forgotten area of Dove Creek, just across the border in Colorado. We thought we would be the only people there and could isolate ourselves in peace, but that proved to be far from the case; everything went wrong immediately. Within twenty-four hours, first we got a van hopelessly stuck in the mud, and then we found ourselves at the wrath of a local who screamed at us for being where we didn’t belong. Wounded by the hostility and lack of compassion from a fellow climber, most of us including myself hung back and avoided the confrontation. A few well-spoken pacifists from the group rose to the occasion and managed to convince them that we weren’t a threat.

Discouraged by the incident, the next day the group split as our opinions differed on what the responsible thing to do was. For half the group it made more sense to stay, since travelling increased the risks both to us and those we came in contact with. For the other half including myself, we felt there wasn’t enough climbing potential in the area to justify our presence, and so we decided to try again somewhere else. Watching the group break apart so soon planted a small seed of a different type of anxiety that would grow over time: that we would all inevitably disband and I would be left to face this now seemingly hostile world alone.

Four of us left the next day for North Wash, a place deep in the canyon country of Utah that is home to vast amounts of undeveloped or forgotten wingate splitters (aka Indian Creek style crack climbs) and two infrequently climbed yet mega classic hard lines: No Way José, and the Trail of Tears. If Butch Cassidy and the other outlaws from back in the days of the Wild Wild West could hide out there in the Robber’s Roost, surely we could find our own sort of refuge to live out our days in peace without being criticized nor posing a threat to anyone.

As I started driving towards the desert and re-entered cell phone service, I was upset to find the local from before had tracked down my email address and had contacted me. They had once again had a change of heart and insisted I leave, claiming that as a traveler I did not contribute to the local community and thus had no place there. It broke my heart to read those words, because giving back to the climbing community is the very thing I care about the most. First the Sheriff (who was only doing his job of course), and now this. For the second time in less than a week I was being told that I didn’t belong in a climbing area, the only place I’ve ever felt like I belonged. Not only that, but I apparently did not contribute to the community, despite it being a pursuit I have dedicated a tremendous amount of effort and passion towards for my entire adult life.

It wasn’t the first time I had received criticism for climbing recently. Just a few weeks prior I had visited a local crag in Sacramento while my van was being repaired, and logged an ascent on 8a.nu. The next day I received a mysterious text message from an unknown number discouraging me from recreating. Shortly after that I wrote an article for Climbing Magazine about the dirtbag’s dilemma living a transient lifestyle during these unprecedented times, hoping to garner some understanding and helpful solutions from the community. A fellow Washington climber replied to it with a comment that stuck with me in the months that would follow, saying that “Empathy is still relevant.” In times when the world needed it most, I was starting to experience less and less of it.

I began to think a lot about the way the climbing culture was changing amidst the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis. So much of my relationship with the sport is built around my interactions with the community, as an athlete, a traveler, and just a person who has never really felt like I fit in anywhere else. Now I felt completely alienated from it. Were I to mention climbing on social media I knew that everyone with a less mobile ‘home’ would be quick to criticize and wouldn’t understand my choices, or far worse, would think I was setting an example they should follow and would go out climbing in an irresponsible way that might get someone sick.

My thoughts wandered to the early days in Yosemite, as they often do when I’m looking for inspiration from the people I consider my greatest heroes. I frequently reflected on Dean Potter’s voiceover in the documentary Valley Uprising, when he claims he “Just wants to practice his art,” after clashing with hostile rangers. Climbing had been a counterculture pursuit back then. So many of the climbers I idolize from previous generations had to choose to be outcasts and even outlaws in order to follow their passions for climbing. In my generation however, it’s become the complete opposite. Climbing is so mainstream these days that I even got a role in a Facebook commercial this winter for being a climber. Now it felt like climbing itself was becoming counterculture once more, but this time it was not from the world at large, but from the climbing community itself. Apparently empathy wasn’t still relevant from all those who found it easier to criticize than try and understand, as I watched toxic fights break out on Mountain Project and in local climbing forums. I even heard rumors of vigilantes patrolling crags to shame anyone they saw out recreating.

Well over an hour from any services, and affording us the ability to avoid any and all human interaction, North Wash did provide the refuge we had been seeking, for a little while at least. The adventure was high in the wild Utah desert, with no trails or beta for almost everything we climbed. We quested up many a sandy splitter, never knowing if there would be an ancient tat (old webbing) anchor at the top or if we’d have to haul up the bolt kit and put in our own. If it didn’t have one already, we would give them names and carve plaques for future adventurers, the first of which I aptly called, “On the Run.” I learned how to hand drill, and perfected my cairn building skills. I also scrapped my way up first No Way José, my hardest sandstone crack to date at 5.13c, and later celebrated a team send with N on the two pitch Trail of Tears, a 5.13b. Aside from one other pair, our small group were the only climbers for likely hundreds of miles.

Before long however, the outside world started to catch up with us. The RVs camped at the official campgrounds began to decrease in number until they were eventually all gone. Signs started to appear that more and more areas around us were closed. One day a small aircraft flew over our camp with the word “Patrol” written on the underside of each wing, and then it circled back and flew over again. Someone knew we were here. It began to get hotter and hotter, and the long and steep approaches in full sun made even the walls with shade difficult to climb at. We all knew our time was up.

For the next few weeks we struggled to find where to go next. The cool spring temperatures had given way to scorching heat in the desert, yet the mountains remained too snowy for troublesome vans to tackle rough roads. We tested the waters in a number of places, but there was no shortage of trials wherever we went. Crowds, hostility, lack of psyche, conditions… wherever the next escape might be, it remained elusive. At the same time, life inevitably began pulling some of the last remaining members of our crew in different directions as we each looked for answers to the challenges of the troubled world in our own ways.

For several months, we had found a sense of security and a feeling of home in each other as a little dirtbag family, forming connections stronger than even the most bomber hand jam. Eventually though, as unavoidable as the changing of seasons, one by one we disbanded until I was finally and inevitably forced to face the thing I had been most afraid of: I was alone.

Spring had come to an end, but with it so had the worst of the hostile attitude towards climbing and thus my time feeling like I was on the run. I had been running not just from the pandemic and my own fears of facing it by myself, but also from my identity within the sport of climbing itself. As the taboo on climbing finally eased, instead of driving west towards Washington, where I had originally planned on spending my summer working and climbing, I pointed my van in the opposite direction towards Wyoming.

Over time, all the moving and hiding had taken its toll on my psyche, since every time I began to get excited about a climb or a place, I would end up leaving. I hadn’t felt like my climbing had had a purpose in too long, but I had high hopes that I would find it once more on the dolomite pockets of Lander or Tensleep, the alpine spires of the Winds, or the granite cracks of Vedauwoo. One of my biggest idols Todd Skinner had declared Wild Iris the place he had traveled the world searching for, after all. I was looking for my own set of answers to life’s greater questions, and knew it was time to find myself again through climbing. The world was and continues to be changing, but I have to believe there will always be a place for climbing in it.

Stingray and a season in Joshua Tree. Because the climb was more than just the climb, it was everything that happened in between burns.

“Index isn’t known for splitters (perfect cracks). That’s okay, because I’m not much known for climbing splitters in the first place.” Almost two years ago I wrote these words in a blog post describing my ascent of City Park in Index, Washington, the iconic 5.13+ crack climb first redpointed by Todd Skinner in 1986. At the time I was a lost sport climber who decided to dive headfirst into the world of hard trad, in an attempt to solve a lack of direction that had been plaguing me for months. It caught most who knew me and my climbing by surprise because I’d barely climbed a handful of 5.12s on gear, and then all of a sudden I had redpointed the hardest trad line in the state.

The months that followed City Park changed my life completely. That climb showed me how much potential there was for me in the world of trad, but in order to see how far I could go I knew I would have to leave Washington, my home for the past decade. I moved into my car and hit the road that fall, touring North America in search of inspiration, adventure, and growth. I balanced my destinations and agendas evenly between sport climbing and trad at first, but as time went on I found myself gravitating more and more towards gear climbs as I fell in love with Indian Creek, Squamish, and of course Index. My love of finger cracks quickly grew as well to soon be a love of cracks of all sizes, from tiny pin-scarred seams to gruelingly wide offwidths and everything in between. By the end of 2019 it was hard to imagine a time when I ever would have said “I’m not much known for climbing splitters,” because now it was the thing I did best of all. 

My identity as a denizen of the deep forests, granite mountains, and endless rain of the Pacific Northwest changed over time as well, as I began to consider the desert as much my home as the northern swamps. When I say desert however, I mostly just mean the sandstone of the southwest. I had yet to put in my time anywhere else.

Thanksgiving of last year found me in Indian Creek, bringing with it an early end to the season as multiple snow storms soaked the fragile sandstone and dropped temperatures below what even the most insulated van-dweller would want to endure. More psyched on crack climbing than ever before, I made a last minute decision to head west to California instead of south to Mexico, where I had found refuge from the winter months for the previous two years. Lured by the promise of better weather, wild New Years parties, and a five star hang, I plotted a course for Joshua Tree.

I had visited Joshua Tree once before in April of 2015, just a few months before City Park. I was only passing through for a few days, during which the only thing I sent was the 5.5 free solo, the Aiguille de Joshua Tree (aka the Finger of Hercules), and I might have followed a 5.10 or two. I got completely shut down by every single other thing I tried. From 5.11 hand cracks to 5.12- sport climbs, it all seemed ludicrously sandbagged, sharp, crumby, and absolutely butt puckering. I had a hard time imagining that anyone actually climbed hard here other than Bachar himself.

After that experience, the prospect of returning to Joshua Tree was a daunting one, but I had done a lot of growing since then and was less afraid of having my ego checked as I had once been. It wasn’t the only thing that had changed in my mindset about climbing. Another gift that City Park had given me was a deep obsession with climbing’s history during the era of Todd Skinner, Alan Watts, and the other stone masters that were responsible for transforming trad climbing into what it is today. During their dirtbag days, Joshua Tree was where everyone on the OG circuit went for the winter. Now that I was living in my car and climbing full time like they did, I wanted to follow their footsteps into a new type of desert and work on my own “razor hone,” as Skinner called it.

I arrived in Joshua Tree alone, having failed to coordinate with any of my friends who were headed that way. I also had no guidebook, there was no cell phone service, and for some reason Mountain Project had deleted the state of California from my phone, so as the sun rose on my first day in the park I was pretty directionless. I knew the climbing rangers put out free coffee in the campground on weekends, so I figured it was as good a place as any to try and get my bearings. As I started talking to people, I overheard two guys, Prith and Greg, discussing plans to go to the classic 5.12+ finger crack called Equinox that day. My winter ticklist for J Tree contained exactly four climbs: the four most splitter and/or classic hard cracks in the park. That just so happened to be the easiest one on it. For lack of a better plan, I invited myself along. Might as well dive in headfirst.   

Now that I had become a pretty decent crack climber, I figured even sandbagged at 5.12c it couldn’t be that bad, could it? Yes, turns out it could, as I got a healthy spanking that day. Despite having climbed on granite for the better part of the year, it felt like my first time all over again because the grain was so vastly different then that of the northwest. I couldn’t read the rock at all, and even the most straightforward jams felt counter intuitive and off balance. It didn’t help that the winds were blowing so fiercely I could barely keep my balance on the small crystal feet. Perhaps my goals for the season here were a bit ambitious, I couldn’t help but speculate. I’d wanted to tick off first Equinox, then Acid Crack and Asteroid Crack, and then maybe, just maybe take a crack at The Stingray.

While the climbing didn’t play out how I’d hoped, the hang seemed to hold potential; my new crew was strong, psyched, and most importantly: hilarious, bizarre, and incredibly fun. We quickly went from strangers to friends and regular partners, as Season One of “The Greg and Prith Show Featuring Brittany” began. I met more of the locals early on, with new friends Josh, Ezra, Eric, and others introducing me to the unique flavor of weird that is the SoCal climbing scene.

We returned to Equinox, and I managed to fall from the top a few times before finishing it at the end of the second day. Greg, Eric, and Josh were trying it too, but Prith had already climbed it along with most of the other things I was interested in doing. He had even given Stingray an attempt the year before. Regardless, he never complained about waiting for the rest of us to catch up or spending his rest days in full support mode. This detail was not lost on me, but I had no idea just how critical of a role it would play in my season to come.

Asteroid Crack came next, and Acid Crack went down shortly after, as I started to get the hang of the peculiar style that is Joshua Tree climbing. With three of the four done, that just left Stingray. I hiked out to look at it by myself, overflowing with anticipation as I wandered the washes and rock piles of the Wonderland with a singular thought in my mind: Could this be the next project like City Park?

I wanted a real project. I wanted a climb so special it felt like I was in a relationship with it. A climb so beautiful I fell in love. A climb so challenging I would willingly make sacrifices for progress. A climb so inspiring that I would be willing to do whatever it took, for as long as it took, to break through and send. A climb so proud it would teach me new things and show me how to grow as a person. The kind of climb that takes you on a journey. The kind of climb that changes your life.

There haven’t been many. Fight Club was my first. It lit a fire in me for projecting that I hadn’t known existed. City Park had been the most powerful, because it so daringly toed the line between a realistic goal and simply a fantasy. That had been almost two years ago; a fact that had been nagging at me more and more recently as my 27^th birthday crept up at the end of the month. Was that the peak? My quarter life crisis voice likes to whisper when my guard is down. It had been too long, and I wanted to ride the roller coaster again. I was hungry for something big.

When I first saw it my jaw fell open. Perched high atop a slab and arcing to the very top of the Iguana Dome, the incredibly thin and wildly steep Stingray towered over the boulder strewn wash below. A singular weakness in the otherwise unclimbable overhanging face, it was the second most impressive crack I’d ever laid eyes upon, after the Cobra itself. “I think you can do it!” a recent message from my friend Jared, who had tried it the previous season, flashed in my mind. What if I could? I knew I absolutely had to try.

Prith, my friend Charlie, and I quested out to Stingray for the first time on December 21^st, just a few days before Christmas. We knew true project mode wouldn’t begin until the new year, but we had to start somewhere. With a goal so close to my limit, I broke it down in my mind into realistic goals that I would tackle one at a time. Prith and Charlie chatted about the idea of placing gear on lead, but I tuned them out and focused on the moves. The only gear that mattered right now were our directionals for top roping. Everything else would come much, much later. I did all the moves on the first day and managed to avoid ripping any terrible gobis. It was a very promising start, and Prith was committed to projecting it with me.

Around that time the scene began to shift into holiday mode, and I decided to give my agenda some room to breathe as I celebrated Christmas in the Park in the strangest possible way: as part of what we called “The Bunny Cult.” The day after that brought with it over a foot of snow, no thanks to a spell allegedly cast by Eric. The road became crusted in ice, trapping everyone’s vans in Hidden Valley. There was too much snow to scale the formations that provided a weak cell phone signal, absolutely everything was too wet to climb, and with sundown at 4pm, the days were too short to provide enough sun to really melt any of it. Thus, damp became the new dry as we sat in Josh’s and my vans for three days straight.

New Years brought with it debauchery on levels I never could have imagined, but by the time it wrapped up I was ready to take myself seriously again. I was ready for the deep dive into Stingray’s world. The mental transition was easy, but physically it was apparent in my climbing that I had not been in performance mode in quite some time.

After only climbing outside for the past year and a half, I’ve learned that training on the road is a lonely pursuit, especially in the middle of winter. At the end of a gym session it’s easy, but by the time the outdoor climbing day is over it’s dark, you’ve already cooled down, and no one wants to put off dinner or leave the fire to go punish themselves on a hangboard or the rings. No one, that is, except for Prith and Greg.  

On only our second day climbing together back in December I watched the pair of them assemble a homemade metal tripod they had built for holding a hangboard, and proceed to work out until long after the sun had set. They would train before every rest day, and motivated by their contagious drive, so would I.

As January progressed, Prith and I trained and chipped away at Stingray together, lost in our masochistic pursuit as the rest of the Joshua Tree scene moved around us. We were sometimes joined by Josh, Charlie, or local crusher Fan, but most of the time we were alone. On our walks to and from the climb, Prith filled my head with stories and dreams of Yosemite, and I in turn spun tales of Index and Squamish.

We came from very different backgrounds. He was 23, and I had just turned 27. He is 5’5”, to my 5’11”. His index fingers are the length and width of my pinkies. He had never projected anything seriously before, while I was on a quest to lose myself in a process I knew intimately. Where he needed to discover new ways to approach climbing, I had to unlearn old ones to quiet my ego and allow the learning process to unfold. We brought completely different sets of strengths and weaknesses to the project in every way, which gave us both an incredible opportunity to learn from each other.

We top roped the climb for four and a half days, at which point my best go was a two-hang, and he had done it clean. At first we’d thought we had to just quickly power through the moves in the steep crux, but it later became apparent that each hold needed an intimate knowledge of where each finger would settle to ensure we got the following jam right. Any mistake would disrupt the sequence and result in a fall.  

We worked out the gear, which was a Frankenstein mix of Prith’s cams, Josh’s, and my own, since most of the pieces needed were the same size (yellow alien/Metolius) to fit in the small pin scars. There is only one cam placed for the entire crux, a 0.3 that we would put in our mouth while resting on a ledge 15 feet off the ground, do four or five jams, place it, and then gun it another fifteen feet to the next lock decent enough to pause for even a second to place again. Seven cams in total, with only four left after the crux. After all the wear and tear, not to mention multiple upside-down whippers that both of us took, several of the cams barely worked by the end.  

We started leading it early on, because once we had sorted out the beta we theorized that we would only have to make it through the low crux once without falling, and would be so psyched we would refuse to fail on the pumpy yet delicate laybacking at the top. With a fixed line on the anchors, if a fall down low were to happen, we would transfer over, clean the gear, and lower to the ground for another attempt. Most of the time we wouldn’t even finish the crux, in favor of saving skin and energy for another actual redpoint go.

Prith climbed with his fingers mostly bare, whereas I adhered to a strict regimen of superglue and EuroTape that I would often redo between every other attempt.  Even a single go without it, and I would open the sides of my fingers into gobies. Sometimes I still would, even through the dressings. Prith mostly managed to avoid the carnage somehow. The difference possibly came from how we held the holds—with our dramatically different finger sizes, most of Prith’s locks were weighting the index fingers, with the pinky on top. For me, I only went thumb down on six jams on the entire route, three on each hand. The rest were all just cranking off my pinkies. Where the crack size may have been better suited for Prith’s small fingers than my own, I held the advantage when it came to the footwork. The crux is characterized by a short section with absolutely no footholds, with only the overhanging crack to attempt to toe in on. While I had to campus one move in that section, Prith had to essentially do several back to back one-armed campus moves to get through it. He would have to leave the last decent foot much sooner than me, as I stretched my 6’2” wingspan to its max to milk the ledge for all it was worth. To make matters worse, his shoes were desperately blown out.

Once we started to feel closer to sending, another one of the differences we experienced were the conditions. Over several weeks of trying it, I began to notice a direct correlation between the temperature and wind speeds, and my performance. The climb is in the shade the entire day, and while it may be calm on the ground, by the time you ascend the slab to the base even the lightest wind would feel bone-chilling, numbing my fingers before I could even start climbing. By the top of the route where it is most exposed the gusts would sometimes feel apocalyptic. My catch phrase of “I’m numbing out” went from a joke, to a nuisance, to my biggest limiting factor. On the cold days, which were most of the days, I just couldn’t relax enough to bring my full strength, and I couldn’t feel my hands well enough to get the locks correctly. It didn’t seem to limit Prith as much, aside from a bit less friction on the warmer days.

For weeks Prith and I traded leaps in our progress, taking turns feeling like we would be the one who would get it first. We had many long talks about our shared competitiveness, and how we were both at least partially ego-driven, and what that meant when we were sharing a project. We bonded over our shared fear of being left behind: if one were to send and move on while the other got stuck and still needed support. We agreed that the only option was to send on the same day.

Towards the end of January however, Prith pulled ahead. He unlocked something important; some sort of acceptance of how bad the feet were that he had to use in the crux. As soon as he committed to simply campusing and scrapping his way through it, suddenly he was gunning for the summit one day. Seeing as how it was the first time either of us had broken through that barrier, in that moment I was sure he was about to send. I was equally sure that I was nowhere close to it being my day too. You have to be peace with this, I told my competitive self as he neared the chains, and somehow I actually was. I was, up until the moment that his feet skated off the microscopic crystals at the top and I found my grigri arresting his fall.

The moment of glory suddenly turned to one of distress, as Prith announced that he had felt a pop in his ankle doing one of the jams. He was in too much pain to even get to the summit. There would be no more attempts by him that day. He commented that it hadn’t been meant to be, because we had to send on the same day.

Back at camp Prith trained like a fiend, resting his ankle and hangboarding, sitting in complete silence around the fire because his mind was consumed with rehearsing the moves over and over again to give himself every possible chance of success. It was harder for me to lose myself in the obsession to the same extent, because I still didn’t feel close at all.

With the ankle on the mend, we returned after a handful of rest days to give it another go. He appeared to be done falling at the crux, making it closer and closer to the chains on two impressive attempts that day. Meanwhile I was still stuck at the bottom, falling lower and lower as the cold temperatures shut me down. It was clearly only a matter of time for Prith, but his feet continued to slip as his toes all but poked through the ends of his thrice-resoled, blown out shoes. I had been urging him to invest in a new pair, and was sure he would send with ease the moment he did. After falling at the top three times, he decided it would be worth it.

On Saturday, January 25^th, we returned to The Stingray with fresh skin and fresher rubber. Prith was brimming with excitement to see how well his feet would stick. Instead he suddenly was stuck at the low crux again, as I found myself getting higher than ever before. It was only the second day we had been on the climb where the daytime high was over sixty degrees, and I felt amazing. In the end I still wasn’t there, and Prith was, and on the third try of the day he finally clipped the chains. He sat in silence on the top for several minutes, before finally descending.

Our hike back to camp was quiet. I grappled with mixed emotions. My partner had just sent the hardest route of his life, and I was ecstatic for his accomplishment. At the same time, I was crushed that we had not done it together. So far this whole journey had been one we went through together, and now I was on it alone. I said as much out loud, and Prith replied that he would keep coming back with me. I told him how badly I wanted him to be there when it happened, how I still wanted it to be our journey together, and he affirmed that he felt the same way. Neither of us dared to put a time constraint on it, probably because he believed I only needed another day or two, and because I was too afraid of the opposite: that I was nowhere close.

Two days of attempts after that it was finally warm again, and I at last found a way to stop falling off the move to what we called “the crux lock”. We had assigned a name to each of the jams after the 0.3 for reference. First was “the rattly lock,” where the right hand had to twist painfully to gain purchase. Next came “the tooth hold,” a left hand named after a small tooth-looking feature that formed the base of the constriction. After that was “the bloody hold,” because of an identifying blood smear from the very first day. Then came “the scar hold,” a jam next to a small rock scar, followed by “the crux lock,” which signified the hardest move in the crux. “The pinch lock” was last, requiring a desperate bump to get to, and signaling the end of the crux because after that you grab the pinch, get your feet onto something real, and finally relax just a little.

By the end of that day I was now falling off the bump to the pinch lock; as close as I could get to finishing the crux and still fail. I lowered down from my fourth try, and recklessly decided to give a last hail Mary “anger burn,” which meant pulling the rope and going again immediately without resting. Somehow I finally got through the crux for the first time. Too tired from the day’s efforts, I fell pulling out of the rest at the top. For the first time, I actually felt that I was close.

For Prith, endurance had been an issue on The Stingray, a challenge he tackled with relentless laps on the Gunsmoke Traverse until it no longer held him back. Endurance wasn’t my crux, and I was filled with fear that I wouldn’t be able to get through the hard moves down low again far more than I worried about coming off the top. Rest days were stress days, especially when I saw that the weather was about to take a dramatic turn for the worse. It looked like Eric might have cast another spell, because temperatures went from 67 and calm one day, to 40 with 30mph winds the next. If I didn’t get it in my next session, it would be at least a week until I could try again.

The next day on Stingray was the hottest day yet, and I felt amazing as I top roped the upper half of the climb as a warm-up. Everything felt like it had lined up perfectly. On my second go of the day, I found myself smoothly repeating the crux, not even pumped as I slotted my fingers into the jams leading up to the final rest. I floated higher than my previous high point, placing each hand and foot with perfect precision until I was in the final left hand fingerlock; a jam so good you could cut all three other limbs and still probably not fall. I fell.

The week of rest after that was good, because at this point I had started to notice a concerning swelling in my right index finger. It had ballooned to larger than my thumb, after repeated falls out of the “crux lock,” where almost my entire body weight hangs off that finger alone.

It was February now. We had been in Joshua Tree for a long time. It had started to feel like too long. Eric had left to find a job and some stoke, Ezra had gone back to school, Josh was about to spend a few weeks in Bishop, Greg had bought a ticket to Europe, and no matter how much he loved the park, even Prith was clearly ready to move on. I was too, but after how close I had gotten, I couldn’t leave without finishing Stingray. Not after how many tries it had taken me to learn exactly how to do each move perfectly enough to have a real shot, which was in the dozens.

All the pressure and nerves I had successfully quelled before had crept back in en masse, as I worried about partners, my still swollen finger, and another impending week of bad weather. I was faced with a potential reality where I ended my Joshua Tree season having fallen off the very last move and never sending. I had been reading my friend Steven’s blog, The Daily Nugget, for wisdom and perspective that week, and ruminated on one of the articles as I attempted to calm my frantic mind during a light jog. It was titled, “What Will You Regret?”

Will you regret not taking a risk to pursue your dream?

Will you regret having tried if it doesn’t work out?

I thought and thought and thought about my experience in Joshua Tree. I knew without a doubt that whatever happened, sink or swim, I would leave with no regrets. I had done my absolute best on and for this route, of that I was certain. I had given myself every possible chance at success. The time I put into it was not wasted if I didn’t send. I had made it possible for Prith, by supporting him through the process. We had both learned so much from the route and from each other. We had even started talking about doing a wall together this spring, because we worked so well as climbing partners. I found acceptance in that the entire experience did not derive its meaning solely from the outcome.

Regardless of my mental peace, fucking hell, I really wanted to send that friggin’ rock climb.

Completely aside from the climb, I had made such deep connections in J Tree, both with the park and with the people I had befriended here. As I ran through the yuccas, piles, and namesake flora of the park, I reflected on how much this place had given me, always in ways I would have never expected. My time here had been a profound chapter in my life, and I was filled with gratitude. I thought about how many times Prith had taken rest days to go back to Stingray with me after having sent, never once with anything less than the upmost enthusiasm. No one else ever gave me a lead belay on the route. I thought about how many times Josh had jugged the static line, dedicated to capturing aerial send footage. He only had a few days off from work each week, and had given so many of them away to be behind the lens rather than doing his own climbing. I thought of how much everyone I had met here taught me about what it meant to be a partner or a friend, a good person, and even sometimes a trash person (we had some very high quality dumpster dives, and had been otherwise mostly living off expired protein cookies that had been on sale at 8 for $1 at Grocery Outlet). I wanted to send this route for them, as my own way of attempting to return the favor.

February 7^th marked my next day on The Stingray after the week off. Greg joined Prith, Josh, and I as we trekked into the desert; an entourage ready for the next and hopefully last battle. I scrambled to the summit of the Iguana Dome to set up my usual top rope warm-up, and felt the chill of winds much higher than predicted on top. My fingers felt strangely slippery in the locks, and when Prith asked me how I felt afterward, the honest truth was ‘not my best.’

Nonetheless, I powered through the crux on the first try shortly after. I slipped off one of the last truly difficult moves at the top when flash pump set in, having apparently not warmed up quite enough. Things were looking promising. After losing badly to Greg at a game of Cribbage, I gave two more attempts and didn’t get through the low crux again on either one. Things were no longer looking promising. As I rested another hour for one last round of attempts, Josh and I took turns failing at juggling in the shade at the base of the route. “Juggling is harder than Stingray,” he declared, and I couldn’t help but agree, but Stingray was still feeling pretty damn hard too. It kept me warm, without draining my energy the way our long rests in the sun often did.

It’s hard to imagine a crack climb being low percentage, but Stingray always felt like it to me. Despite my best efforts, every attempt felt at least a little like a roll of the dice. Even after almost fifty attempts and weeks of getting to know each granite crystal in every lock, I still needed a bit of luck to get everything just right. As I stood on the ground preparing for my fourth attempt of the day, I tried to tell myself I would not fall during the low crux the way I’ve been able to in decisive moments on hard climbs in the past. My swollen index finger ached despite the higher-than-recommended dose of Ibuprofin I had taken, but I knew I couldn’t hold back to try and protect it, which had caused my mistakes on the previous two burns. Through the crux and back at the final rest, and again I tried to tell myself, I’m done falling on the next move. I had done these moves dozens of times, there should be no reason to fall anymore.

I had pictured what it would be like to clip those chains so many times that I was crying before I even grabbed the final jug.

“I’m free!” I yelled over and over again. I could finally let my mind and body rest. My finger desperately needed it.

I could finally celebrate Prith’s send. I could finally celebrate my own. It was a team effort until the very end.

I could finally work on other climbs or go to other places.

The next day was my last in J Tree. What was once a wild and rowdy five star hang in Hidden Valley had dwindled down to a bare bones (or friggin’ bonies) crew of a few close friends camping in the lakebed. Just a small cluster of vans huddled together in the desert that had made us. Made us students, made us mentors, made us dreamers, and made us friends. Still a five star hang, but we all knew our time here was up. We packed up our belongings and said our goodbyes to the park and to each other. With an “I have to poop tremendously,” Josh drove in one direction to LA, and Prith, Greg and I the other. The next day Greg left for Sacramento. I now write this from Prith’s parent’s house, where we are attempting to rest, because the next big thing is just around the corner waiting for us in Yosemite.  

Was it the next City Park? No. It was the first Stingray.

The Life of a Hand Jammie

“Closer to the skin is better,” my friend Nick teased on more than one occasion as I strapped on my rubber Ocun hand jammies (protective and grip enhancing crack climbing gloves) for another perfect Indian Creek splitter. Each time I would laugh, roll my eyes, and insist that I agreed, but needed to protect the healing gobis on the backs of my hands from earlier that season. I would stop wearing them soon, just not today.

Hand jammies have always been on the casual end of controversy in the crack climbing world, and even my own have been the source of personal drama from the moment I bought them. It was in Squamish in the spring of 2018, a year and a half ago, and I was still relatively new to both the area and to trad climbing itself. I bought myself a pair of jammies, planning to climb the ultra classic 5.11- #2 splitter on High Plains Drifter the following day. I whipped all over that pitch, partially because I didn’t know how to hand jam, but in my mind at the time it was mostly because the jammies were too small and they made me pumped out of my mind. I tried to take them back to Climb On! (the local gear store) only to be told that they had a no-returns policy on climbing gear. In frustration, I rudely snapped at the sales associate and stormed out of the shop. I regretted my childish behavior immediately and almost turned around and apologized, but I was still too worked up, or maybe just too proud, and so I drove away instead.

That fall I found myself not only back in Squamish, but frequently in the company of a large number of the staff from Climb On! The more we became friends, the more I couldn’t stop wondering if any of them remembered me from my shameful visit in the spring. I brought it up one night to my friend Cody, only to have my worst fears confirmed– it had been him, and my actions had not been forgotten, although until that moment my identity had. Now the cards were all on the table as I revealed myself to be the kind of person who is rude to people working in customer service. We laughed it off in the end, and have since traveled the world together as the closest of friends.

I returned to Squamish this past spring, a year after my jammies first found their way onto my trad rack. I had improved a lot since the previous season, and decided it was time for a rematch with High Plains Drifter. The first time I approached it via Borderline, a classic multipitch established by one of my closest friends from Seattle, Eric. It had been a bit of a micro epic, as we ran out of food and water halfway through the day, and took ages to find the manky fixed line hidden in the trees that leads to the base of the crack. This time I rappelled into High Plains instead, because I was already on top of the chief having sent North Star earlier that day (an experience chronicled in another post here). This time the 5.11- hand crack didn’t feel all that hard compared to my first attempt the previous spring, but I still wore those jammies.

As I got better at trad climbing over the summer and into the fall, I started using my jammies while crack climbing less and less. They seemed necessary in fewer and fewer situations, though still useful from time to time. Instead, somehow, I started using them more and more whilst sport climbing, because I started finding hand jams on routes that I would have missed back when I only clipped bolts. During my fall season in the limestone caves of Horne Lake, I found a crucial hand jam on every sport route I climbed. The rock was so sharp it would have been an exercise in masochism not to wear some kind of protection, but even using a properly fitting pair of jammies (that ironically belonged to Cody, the friend I had first tried to return my pair to) added enough extra pump that I mastered the art of putting them on right before the crux mid climb.

My Horne Lake season ended abruptly with a knee injury that caused me to shift my focus back to trad, since I thought it would be less strenuous on my meniscus as it healed. I headed to Indian Creek, not knowing what I would want to climb, how long I would stay, or if I would even be psyched. I had been pretty burned out on plugging gear by the end of the summer, and truth be told I had been struggling to really feel much of anything about anything at all since the distressing events surrounding my car getting stolen in August (separate post about it here).

Luckily the desert medicine kicked in almost immediately, and within the first 24 hours my grey world was finally on fire again with the bright red sand of desert crack climbing. It took a few weeks to feel strong again, as I transitioned from limestone cave climbing and taking time off for my knee (neither of which really prepare you for Creek season), but I was so psyched on every moment nonetheless, from group stretching and erotic planking in the morning, to easy warm up pitches, mileage pitches and project pitches, to wax box burning and naked dancing the long nights away.

The day after Halloween I stumbled my way up to Broken Tooth with friends Matt and Justin, so hungover that it wasn’t until I was at the crag before I realized I still had my sleep mask around my neck. With every pitch I felt a bit better, eventually feeling well enough to rack up for a 5.12- called Unbelievable. I put my jammies on, despite the teasing of the seasoned Creek vets that I was climbing with, and started up the pitch. I climbed about 15 feet up, placed a #2 and attempted to continue up, only to discover that my jammie had somehow become clipped to the cam, trapping me in place. The more I struggled to free myself the more comically fucked the situation became, as I got the rope wrapped around my wrist and started to laugh so hard I could barely hold on (not wanting to take and blow my onsight). That was what I got for wearing jammies.

I can never keep myself away from wanting to try hard for long, and soon after that I was throwing myself at projects left and right. Most hard cracks in the Creek are fingers or off fingers, so hand jammies are rarely necessary by the time you hit the 5.13 range, but I continued to don them whenever I ventured up a crack that looked like my hand might fit inside, and I continued to get teased for wearing them by more experienced climbers.

After watching two friends send the Optimator, the overhanging .75 and .5s crack namesake of its crag, I felt inspired to give it a try despite knowing it would be a very challenging size in which I had little previous experience. After a tradition of body shots following sends of the difficult climb, my friends hedged bets about what they would do if I flashed it, including promises of several handles of liquor of my choice. The one condition was that it didn’t count if I wore hand jammies. Also if I wore them I could only take 12d for it, they joked.

I definitely did not flash the Optimator, not even close though I sure gave ‘er the beans. I returned several days later, and after a bit of deliberation, decided I cared more about sending than what anyone thought. Jammies don’t make the cruxy bits any easier, in fact they probably make it slightly harder because the restriction of circulation increases pump, but they would enable me to rest much longer in several places where otherwise sharp rock would limit the amount of time I could tolerate the hand jam rests. I like to think that the better I get at crack climbing the less I wear my good old jammies, but they were sure nice that day.

Creek season ended abruptly, and together my jammies and I raced bad weather all the way to Red Rocks. I hadn’t been ready to leave Bear’s Ears for the winter yet and continued to pine after the Utah desert, so I made a Vegas tick list of the most splitter cracks, or single crack that would be in season after so much rain and cold. I set my sights on Desert Gold, hoping to tick it off as my 100th route of 5.13 or harder, and ventured out with my good friend Drew.

After aiding up the crack to figure out the sequence at first, I launched up it for a redpoint attempt. I successfully scrapped my way through the crux, and went to throw for a tight hand jam just below the roof, only to discover that my jammie had torn, and now hung loosely from my hand like a flag blowing in the wind. Every time I tried to shove my hand into the crack, the fabric caught and prevented me from sticking the move. I quickly pumped out and fell, cursing my luck. I taped it back together and fired the route next go for a proud number 100, only to have my jammie rip again when I degloved back on the ground. After so many adventures together, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a sign that I should finally retire them.

Psyche! Time to go buy a pair that fits properly! 😉

It’s called the Big Show for good reason. I so vividly remember the first time I laid eyes on it: a freshman in college visiting Canada for the first time and a gym climber who could count on one hand the number of times I’d touched real rock. It was the most impressive and intimidating natural wall I had ever seen; a perfectly flat piece of granite tilted at a fourty-five degree overhanging angle with a slab mirroring it below like a right angle tilted on its side. People must travel from all over the world to climb on this wall, I thought. When I looked in the guidebook and saw that the easiest route up it was 5.13c I was disappointed, but not surprised. Of course there was no way such a steep wall could boast routes within my ability. I was gym strong but lacked experience and more importantly perspective. Climbing any 5.13 route seemed like a pipe dream, let alone on something like this.

That summer I made my way to Tensleep, Wyoming where I crossed paths with a climber named Urs who was similar in age but about quadruple my ability. He was dispatching 5.14 left and right while I was barely breaking into the 12s, so naturally I was a little starstruck. Our interaction was brief, but I told him I lived in Washington, and he expressed an interest in visiting Squamish. Wanting to seem like a cultured local to this total crusher, I immediately told him he should get on the Big Show. It was far too hard for me, but this guy might stand a fighting chance.

Over time in the years that followed, my climbing ability slowly started catching up to my dreams. Once I had ticked off a few routes that were theoretically as difficult as the easier paths up the Big Show, I decided to take a crack at Freewill, the 5.13c that’s as close as it gets to an entry level route for the wall. Since the angle is so steep I just assumed it must always be in the shade, and thus a premium option for a hot summer day. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was thus that my first attempt at climbing on the Big Show was a sweaty disaster, in which I couldn’t keep my feet on anything, grabbed every single permadraw and freed none of the 5.13 moves. It was such a humbling struggle that after just one attempt I wrote off the dream of mine to climb on that wall as just too big.

In Mexico over the past winter I happened to reconnect with Urs, the kid I had met in Tensleep all those years ago. He wasn’t a kid anymore, but in all his travels he never had made it up to Squamish. Already making my own plans to return, I invited him to join me in the northern swamps of British Colombia I had grown so fond of. We had a different objective in mind for our partnership, but much like me he became enamored at first glance at the sea of chains, carabiners, and permadraws hanging from the Big Show. I had come a long way since we first met, no longer quite so dramatically outranked, but so had he. Luckily there’s enough hard routes there to keep anyone busy for at least a little while, so we started making regular pilgrimages to Cheakamus Canyon to feel the lactic acid exploding out of our forearms on the Show. He dispatched the easier routes up there quickly, and his psyche and incredible ability inspired me to step outside my comfort zone and try them myself. Even if I couldn’t do them, I was sure to get stronger trying. I had finally found the courage to give the dream a real try.

Not wanting to pay the skin toll of falling out of Freewill’s crux fingerlocks, I quested up a different route, Division Bell, with no small amount of trepidation. Had anything changed since the last time I’d thought this was a good idea? Apparently it had, because within the first two days I had done all the moves, broken a key foothold, and then done all the moves a different way. Not long after that I managed to one-hang it. Then one-hang it again. Then again, and again, and again… always in the same spot. No matter how perfectly I executed the moves, I would always leave the rest, do three moves, and then feel all the reserves of strength I had instantly evaporate from my body. What had initially seemed like quick progression turned to doubt. Did I still not have what it took? Would I ever? I had heard stories of friends one-hanging routes on the big show for years on end, or taking upwards of fifty tries to send their projects, and I feared the same fate for myself.

—

The more I climbed on the Big Show, the more my perspective of it began to change. Its sheer size and angle intimidated me less and less, and it began to inspire me more and more. Not only is the climbing gymnastic, dynamic, and straight up fun, but the wall holds a certain aura and history that has been a meaningful calling in the projects I choose lately. It’s home to Canada’s first 5.14, Pulse, and has served as a proving grounds where some of Squamish’s best climbers cut their teeth. There is another side to its reputation that isn’t as obvious that also added to my drive to climb there.

When it rains in Squamish (as it is known to do) there aren’t a whole lot of things that stay dry. The Big Show is certainly one of them until it starts seeping, but there are also a number of routes at the neighboring walls that are sheltered enough to provide options in more moderate terrain. That, plus the fact that the Circus boasts some of the higher quality sport climbs in the area, makes for a high flow of traffic through the canyon on the busier days. It makes for an interesting scene, with few people actually climbing on the Big Show, but many spectators excited to watch the sports action. Of the climbers actually working routes alongside me so many meters off the ground, none of them were women. When my good friend Tanager had been projecting Freewill last fall she also had been the only female up there with all the guys. I also received many comments from spectators that they had never seen a girl climbing up there before. Division Bell itself has only been sent by four or five women. Discussions with local friends further informed me of what was accepted as common truth: the Big Show was a boys club.

Knowing that others have or have not walked the path that lies before you can have an interesting effect on the psyche. For many it would cause intimidation, for others excitement at being a trailblazer, while for some there might be no effect at all. For me it added a fierce motivation. I had fought so hard to conquer my doubts and insecurities about being up there on the Big Show, that perhaps adding my story to its history might ease someone else’s battle, even if only just a little bit. The idea that the Big Show had a reputation of being a boy’s club didn’t sit very well with me, and I couldn’t help but hope that maybe I could help change that.

—

As the weeks went by climbing on the Big Show I felt not only myself getting stronger, but my friendship with Urs growing at the same time. The first time that I one-hung Division Bell was the same day that he did the same on Pulse, his project at the time. He sent many days before me, but when he clipped the chains he said it didn’t really count until it was a team send and I was able to celebrate my victory too. We had already shared many team sends such as Southern Lights and the Great Arch, but we had also shared plenty a beer, swim in the river, or lazy morning parking lot vortex over the course of our time climbing together. I had drawn drive and inspiration to climb on the Big Show from many places, but that random kid crusher I had sprayed about it to in Wyoming all those years ago was probably the most important piece of the puzzle. When I clipped the chains on Division Bell and then unclipped them for the most satisfying victory whipper of my life, Urs at the belay was yanked up to the first bolt with the force of the fall. It wasn’t me completing our story on that wall together, but the beginning of the next chapter because there’s a lot more routes up there, and in the words of Todd Skinner, we must always “Keep dreamin’, stay hungry, and remember that there is no finish line.”  

On the eve of the summer solstice I redpointed a climb called North Star that sits on the highest point of the Strawamus Chief in Squamish. While there were few actual stars to be seen with the moon almost full and the days so long, North Star itself couldn’t have been brighter that day and those that followed. It hadn’t been a particularly long term project for me, taking only three tries to send, but it was one of my proudest and favorite ticks in months for a very different reason.

              The way we approach climbing as a community puts a heavy focus on comparison. Grades are formed by consensus, which means not only comparing climbs to others of similar difficulty, but also constantly demands that we as people measure ourselves against others in order to describe the pitches we climb. It’s inherently there whether we like it or not, but I also consider it to be a personal weakness I’ve been working on for the better part of the last decade of my own climbing career.

              I have always found myself highly motivated and validated by the process of setting and accomplishing goals, but as a highly competitive person I often struggle when those goals are shared by my partners. Years ago, before I realized what it meant to use competitiveness for healthy growth, it nearly destroyed friendships and my own passion for climbing when I stagnated through a plateau while my friends went on a sending spree. The extent to which I was comparing myself to others reached a toxic level, and to this day remains the reason I lost psyche on bouldering. I reflect on that time in my life frequently, because it was not only a low point in my climbing, but in my ability to be a good partner and friend. It started me on a long journey of growth, as I’ve fought to learn from it ever since.

              Over the winter I found myself back in El Salto, one of my favorite places on planet earth. The limestone in Mexico is world class, yet I was there as much for the community as the projects I wanted to send. I’ve had more fun meeting and getting to know other climbers there than anywhere else I’ve been, and this year was no different. I was living in a house with a dozen people give or take a few, many friends I had both known for a while and some I had just met.

              The dynamic of that particular house was an environment of people psyched on projects, myself included. For all that we had in common as a bunch of climbers jazzed on working routes at their limits, I surprisingly found myself feeling somewhat isolated because while we all had aspirations, everyone had someone to share theirs with except me. The climbs I was trying I was trying alone, whereas everyone around me was working their projects with a partner. I felt a loneliness with which I had been previously unfamiliar, and I envied the shared experience I saw around me.

              It was for that reason that a few months later I found myself asking one of my best friends Tanager that if I came and met her in Smith Rock if she would want to project To Bolt or Not To Be with me. I wanted to seek out not only a hard project, but more importantly a person to work it with. Not just any person either, another woman, and someone who would push me outside my comfort zone in healthy ways.

              She eagerly agreed, and we dove into the process of breaking down the climb. She had climbed on the route a few times before, and while our height differences made some of our beta different, she walked me through the moves and I started piecing them together. As the days turned into weeks, Tanager pulled ahead of me, making longer links and falling on fewer moves than me. I immediately began to feel the familiar stirrings of competitiveness, wanting to stay on the same level or to be the one in the lead. As I struggled to work through those feelings I often entertained the idea that it would be so much easier to work the route by myself so I wouldn’t have to deal with this battle with competitiveness and the effect it had on my motivation. It was in those moments that I had to remind myself that I had chosen this path as an alternate to the loneliness of working a route solo; this was what I wanted, and I needed to tackle the challenge head on instead of shying away.

              I told Tanager that I was struggling with these feelings of comparing myself and my climbing to her, and that I was trying to work through them to be supportive of her climbing. She already knew of course; I wear that sort of emotion on my sleeve, but opening the discussion allowed us to work on it together. She was gracious and patient in dealing with my frequent grumpiness and struggles, and over the rest of the time we worked the route before it got too hot, it allowed us to dramatically deepen our friendship.

One of the thoughts that crossed my mind many times while working To Bolt with Tanager was wondering what it would feel like if only one of us were to finish the season successful. Could I be happy for her if she succeeded and I did not? Would the victory feel empty if it was only me clipping the chains? I made a goal to be at peace with whatever outcome the season brought. It was almost a secret relief when it got too hot to keep working the route, because I never had to face the music and deal with those inevitable emotions, but after I cleaned our draws off the route by myself in a post Cinco De Mayo hungover stupor on my last day in Oregon, I told Tanager that we would both be there to put them back up in the fall. We were in it together now.

..

              After I left Smith the next stop was a brief stint in Index, some work in Seattle, and finally working my way north to Squamish. Along the way people would ask me about my recent exploits, and I was proud to be able to say that while my time in Smith this year was challenging, it was equal parts rewarding because of what Tanager and I had gone through together. With day after day after day of perfect weather back in the Northern Swamps of the Pacific Northwest my season in Squamish kicked off to a fine start. I bagged a few challenging multipitches, and saw success on Eurasian Eyes, the most beautiful climb I have climbed in months, or maybe ever.

I had wanted to try North Star since last fall just based on descriptions from those who had tried it, so when I was asked to join on the quest by my friend Jared I immediately agreed. He had tried it a number of times before, and together we worked through the beta and gave a few attempts. It suited my style well, with flexibility defining the technical crux where the climber must exit a dihedral while balanced precariously above small cams and bad foot smears. The true crux however, is perhaps overcoming the nerves and jitters that come with projecting something so far off the beaten path both physically and mentally. Not only is the exposure at the top of the chief dizzying, but it’s not the kind of climb you can just casually ask someone to belay you on. It’s a mission that must be shared.

After the first day I knew we were both capable of doing the climb as soon as the next attempt, but it would be just as easy for the stars not to align, with conditions changing or mental fortitude not withholding. We returned a week later after a heavy thunderstorm, not even knowing if the route would be dry but hoping for the best. It was more than a little alpine on top of the chief that day, with high winds making my fingers go numb as I warmed up by rope soloing the crux. We commiserated that it felt harder than before for both of us, but energy was high nonetheless as we rappelled in and pulled the rope. The only way out now was to climb the route.

On my first try of the day I found myself feeling significantly less pumped than before, reaching the final rest before the crux and barely needing it at all. The three inch long tick mark Jared had put on the finish jug stared me down as I felt a rare calm pass over me. In that moment I somehow knew that if ever there was a perfect chance, it was right here, right now. When I clipped the chains I was treated to an excitement that was more than just my own as we celebrated the success together.  

Watching Jared’s next attempt I could tell that he had found the same flow that I just had. On moves that before had looked desperate, now looked like dancing, and I was sure that this was his moment too. When he latched the final hold it was hard to say who was cheering louder. We sat together on top of the Chief, but I felt on top of the world. I asked Jared if he had felt any added pressure to send because I already had. He answered that it had not added any stress, only motivation. Motivation that had clearly driven him to succeed.

..

Polaris, the actual North Star, used to serve as a guiding light for travelers back in the days where people spent more time stargazing than looking at Google Maps for directions or worrying about the nuances involved in rock climbing. That day North Star felt like a guide for me too, as I looked at who I had been, who I was now, and who I want to become. It made me think back to my experience at Smith Rock and the shared projects I’d been exploring over the past several months. On To Bolt I had wanted success for Tanager, but if I’d had to choose only one of us to send I would have probably picked myself. That was who I had been, even very recently. This time however, it felt different. If I had to choose between just me sending that day, or both of us slogging over an hour straight uphill for the rest of summer, if it meant we could eventually grab that finish jug back to back on the same day like we did, I would have been willing to do that heinous hike as many times as it took. That is who I am now, which is a big step forward in my desire to better support others. Collective success on climbs of that difficulty is so rare in climbing, that when the stars do align is a powerful thing. Knowing that the drive to make it happen came from inspiration and not competitiveness in my partner showed me the kind of person I want to be as well.

In this life that I’ve dedicated to climbing, I mostly measure myself based on the things I accomplish. I send some hard routes that I’m proud of from time to time, but the most meaningful ones are always when I know I came out of the process a better person than who I was going in. That incredible day on North Star made me feel like the best version of myself that I had ever been before in my mental relationship with climbing and myself.

Tanager is here with me in Squamish too, and days before she made a passing comment that she only moves forward in life, never back. Now I can’t help but look forward in my own journey, to a time when we can return to To Bolt together and perhaps one day share our own magic double send day. At the very least I hope to be the one that belays her when she clips the chains, regardless of when I do it myself.