I’ve always thought that the nice thing about being in your twenties is that you can be amorphous and that there are no set limitations on how many times you can change your dreams and goals. I had a light bulb moment when I realized that it didn’t matter when it happened. It could happen in ten years, maybe fifty. It could happen on a Tuesday.

Propelled with this new idea, I started making my way back east. The only way to help ease the pain of leaving sixty-degree weather in the desert is to go climb southern sandstone in the winter.  

Despite winter temperatures, this is the prime climbing season for Tennessee. I first visited last April for three days and having completely fallen in love with what little we had seen (and there is so much), I came back again in November. And now here in February, the murmur of spring days far behind us, you can still bask in the golden sunshine at the Twall.

When I got to the roof crux, I thought to myself: It’s just like a Gunks roof, right? Well, sort of. For a hot minute, I considered bailing onto another climb out right, but came back and committed to finishing the roof. Quite a bold section of climbing, in my opinion, but I know better than to expect anything less from Twall.

Rob Robinson, responsible for many of Tennessee’s first ascents, called me on the phone one evening. He told me about the first time he laid eyes on the beautiful cliff line, and for a brief moment, I saw what he saw. I felt what he must have felt, and understood why he was compelled to share it with the rest of the climbing community at the time.

And then he told me to keep going for it: “You can always desk it later in life.”

His words of encouragement meant a lot, and it meant that it was time for me to start questioning myself less and believing in myself more. If I keep second guessing all of my choices, I’m living two different lives. You don’t always get to play the “what if” game, and sometimes you have to take the free-fall.

Lately, I feel as though I’m at war with myself and I don’t want to be. Izzy said to me after Infinite Pursuit: “You made me realize that you are the primary piece of protection…and everything else is redundancy in the system.”

Everything else is redundancy in the system. I am the primary piece.

The fall is temporary; it’s just like anything else in life. It’s about having enough patience for the inevitable landing. I can’t do anything to change that. I can only worry about changing what’s in my control before then. So, what’s stopping me but myself from enjoying the view on the way down?

Sean has worked in film, mostly sport, for as long as I’ve known him. We lived together for two years in Brooklyn and even when we moved away, we remained close friends. He told me that there was a reason we stayed in touch all of these years. He admired the life I’d created for myself, and he asked me if I’d like to collaborate on a special project with him.

“If you put certain things out into the world, they come back to you. You are constantly surrounded by people who are passionate about what they do all of the time.”

Maybe it’s something I’ve taken for granted, but when he said that, I realized it was true. The more you that you follow your passions, the more that you find yourself surrounded by those who are equally as passionate.

Meeting Gašper Pintar was proof enough for me. Ryan Day Thomas and I had a good laugh on the phone yesterday when I told him about going to the Creek with this Slovenian kid who sent everything on my tick list.

Not only have I never met anybody his age with so much integrity and determination, I’ve never met a climber who learned so quickly. I remember when I began climbing and was at the gym. I would scrape my way up some boulder problem for a half an hour and then I’d plop myself on the mat and watch people climb as I waited for the feeling to return to my fingers. You can learn so much from merely observing, but you really start making progress when you watch with the intention to learn.

And so I furiously studied Gašper’s hand and footwork as he thrutched his way up Belly Full of Bad Berries (5.13a) at Critic’s Choice last weekend. Gašper sent Belly on his second attempt beautifully and perfectly, having corrected his mistakes from his previous onsight attempt. He said: “Fuck, is that only a 13a? It feels so much harder than 13a!”

Chalu Kim said the climb was like a prison sentence. Due to my height, I had trouble using the side wall to kick off of and had a really hard time getting to the ledge. It makes a difference for men with bigger hands who can fist through the first half. The entire 4 section was bad butterflies for me. It’s also much harder for smaller handed people because you wind up having to invert a lot sooner.

Saying that it was a struggle would be an understatement. It was a war, bloody and barbaric, and every couple of moves I could inch my feet was so painful that it made me want to scream. I eventually floundered to the top, finally listening to Gašper’s beta and committing my legs as far back into the crack as I could.

Two climbers walked past the wall and I heard one of them say: “Just looking at it makes me want to vomit.”

Well, there was no vomiting and only minimal blood.

Chalu told me that he thinks that the Creek is so magical because of the people. It was apropos that it was Thanksgiving and we were surrounded by like-minded folk. They all got it. They understood that the key to staying happy is to keep defining life by your own standards and being grateful for all of the people you share it with. Just being in a state of appreciation somehow opens the door for more people to walk through.

I think we often catch a spark of something in others that we see in ourselves or wish to see. It’s not always obvious, but the older I get, the easier I can recognize that spark. And sometimes, it ignites my own. The great Springsteen said it best: you cannot start a fire without a spark.

And when you keep ditching a tool because you found an obscure hand jam between icicles, it might be time to admit to yourself: time to trade in the tools and go back to rock.

Even so, the familiar feeling comes back to hit you in the face (and sometimes via chunks of icicles) to remind your body how to move. It’s mathematics, right? Kick kick, swing swing. Kick kick, swing.

The winter months have always felt hard for me. For as long as I can remember, the thought of first winter frost has loomed over me as I’d start to bite my nails in anticipation in October. Maybe you are solar powered, like me. When the temperature drops, I lose it. One year, I quit ice climbing for a whole season. The next, I almost quit climbing altogether. The lack of vitamin D in the dead of winter does something really horrible to my soul.

Then the next year, I lost my shit, drove to Colorado, and quit my job.

Things have seemingly gone back to normal, or at least, I’ve achieved some sense of normalcy in my life since then.

Vail is two hours away from me now, much like the two-hour drive from NYC to the Gunks. It’s really not too bad for all that it has to offer—and when I laid eyes on the amphitheater with Ted and Kendra Eliason weeks back, my jaw dropped. I practically sprinted uphill the last fifteen feet to stand underneath it.

I’ll admit that I’ve never done any proper training. People have asked why, and my answer is usually something like: “Who has time for training when there’s so much outside rock to clamber around on?”

This year, I think it’s finally sinking in: if training is the thing that will allow me to attempt the harder things I want to climb, then I can’t poo-poo the idea anymore.

There are plenty of things I wish I was better at when I’d started them (rock climbing, for one). I wish I was a better writer when I’d started writing. I wish I was better at filming and photography when Aly Nicklas and The Moth flew me to Africa and I picked up a camera for the first time. I wish I was a better business person when I started my road trip last year.

And then you start to look at anybody else in your field and you compare just about everything you can about them with yourself. From how skilled they are down to what they are wearing—I’ve even told myself: Well, I’m not as passionate about this as this person is. I could never be as good.

These little lies hurt us so much.

I don’t have the discipline.

I just don’t have the motivation.

Those are some of the excuses I’ve told myself for several years. If I asked myself honestly, the truth is that the thought of starting from the beginning is so unappealing that I’ve given up before I even started. But just because I don’t like where I have to start doesn’t mean I should never begin—it’s a matter of unlearning the words “I can’t”.

This is my first winter spent climbing in the southeast. Normally, I would be found cutting tools into frozen cascades in the northeast, but instead, I took a chance by quitting my job and leaving home.

I begin to ditch layers of clothing to welcome each little ray of sun on my skin. It’s a breath of fresh air; I embrace the change.

I’ve never stood beneath this climb before, and the overhang above intimidates the hell out of me, but as I squeeze my cam’s trigger gently, the motion puts me at ease. I place my hand on the slab of rock, expecting it to be an ice box, but instead, warmth radiates from it. Moving gradually in inches at first, and then a half a foot and then another, I feel my body bend, my bones and flesh rearranging themselves to fit inside the crack. I’m forming a new cocoon.
I don’t just break through the chrysalis I’ve been building for myself over the past several months; I shatter, split and burst (suddenly and violently). I do it in a single motion as I step up high with my foot, placing it along the tiniest rimple I can find.

This is where I have to launch off, because the crack continues on and every ounce of power I have left within me is needed. My legs stem across from one another, finding delicate grooves to perch upon. My back is arched and jutting out. The rock is scented; it’s soft brown color is an aromatic spice.

I know the direction I’m moving, and somehow this time it isn’t about the upward movement so much as the forward motion. You can always come back, I’ve been told. The job of traveling is to let go of our attachments. Letting go of expectations of what is to come is necessary in order to see the true gifts life has to offer.
Don’t think; move! I tell myself this over and over again as I swim through the sweet, smooth chasm, arms beginning to burn. Remember that it’s your body and mind moving together. Remember that it’s not the fall will kill you; it’s the sudden stop at the end. I am convinced that, somehow, gravity won’t catch up to me if I never stop moving.

The movement is slow and listless. It feels insecure the entire way. It seems terrible to hold onto something that is forcing me to let go.

I left New York City in a pursuit of a life where serendipity meets deliberation. For every day that I have been away from what I called home for four years, I feel a greater affection for creating makeshift beds everywhere I go.

The point of life is to find something that you’re deeply passionate about, because as frightening as it seems to wander off the beaten path alone, you start to see that everybody has their own pace they prefer to climb at and experience life by. You begin to find your own. At the end of the day, and at the end of my climb, it doesn’t really matter if I make it to the top or not. The point is that I’m willing to start, from the ground up.

]]> https://www.inkthemesdemo.com/wptheme/rock-climbing-club-wordpress-theme/2016/11/26/from-the-ground-up/feed/ 0 https://www.inkthemesdemo.com/wptheme/rock-climbing-club-wordpress-theme/2016/11/26/run-your-own-race/ https://www.inkthemesdemo.com/wptheme/rock-climbing-club-wordpress-theme/2016/11/26/run-your-own-race/#respond Sat, 26 Nov 2016 10:00:24 +0000 http://inkthemes.com/wptheme/rock-climbing-club-wordpress-theme/?p=82 Do you know that feeling when you’re leaning back in a chair, and then you lean back too far and start to fall and at the very last second, you catch yourself? I often feel like that. It’s that feeling of being on the verge of a big breakthrough and then the THING happens; anything happens. Life happens and disrupts the balance. You can either tumble into disarray and somehow figure out the best way to climb back up, or catch yourself at the last possible moment.

This week, I made the conscious decision that I’d much rather save myself a headache from smacking my head on the concrete floor.

Truth be told, I’d been starting to feel like most of the things I used to take the edge off of other things were becoming mute. Again, I’d like to chalk this feeling up to February because I vaguely recall the same thing happening a few years ago, and as soon as March rolled in, I bought a plane ticket to Las Vegas, hit the ground running and never looked back. It’s easy to lose momentum in the winter.

There are undoubtedly infinitely better things I can do with my time—I could read more, take more hikes with Shooter, or finally start that homemade compost bin (I’m embarrassed to admit that there are more containers of frozen eggshells and coffee grounds than there is ice cream in my freezer.) I keep putting things on hold because I think I’m too busy searching for answers and inevitably find myself spinning in the same circles as before. So many things keep taking a backseat in my life until I’m convinced that I’m standing on solid ground, ready to tackle the next big thing.

Then I realized, that’s like saying: “I can’t climb 5.10 until I climb 5.7, 5.8, 5.9……”

And that simply isn’t true.

I keep forgetting that things don’t have to happen in chronological order. Maybe I’ve watched too many shitty Hollywood movies that have portrayed false impressions of how certain things are supposed to happen (finding a career, falling in love, making lotsa babies). And who’s to say that any of those things are going to happen, anyway?

We’re all running our own race.

If I keep expecting these things to happen at a certain time in a certain way, I’ll likely be disappointed. It’s easy to look at people who have a seemingly perfect life and compare, but you don’t know everything about everybody. People who appear to have the “perfect” life probably worked much harder at getting to where they are than you realize, or it’s all a facade. Either way, you can only be you, and you aren’t everyone else. You’ve never been. Facing yourself is tough, but it’s more real than scrolling through someone’s Instagram page and wishing you were someone else, somewhere else.

And me? I may never be rich, but I can be happy and that’s something. And I’m usually where I want to be.

Before Christmas, I went back to work full-time for the first time in years. My last day was three weeks ago. I was utterly disappointed in myself, but I’m trying to morph that disappointment into encouragement. As much as I wished I could have stuck with one thing, I’m not the kind of person who can do something that doesn’t fulfill me. So when I find the thing, I’ll probably stick around a little bit longer. And until then, I can’t worry about the rules that didn’t come from me.

You can’t create your life first and then live it. You live it. I can’t sort things into a nice, neat sequential order and check them off a to-do list and expect the same satisfaction. When I was preparing to climb Fists of Fury a few months ago, I commented on how unshakable my partner always seemed.  Sam Latone, a paramedic dispatcher in the south, said:

“This is a lot like my work. You’ve just gotta go with the tools you already have.”

Chances are, you’re probably a lot like me and have more experience under your belt than you give yourself credit for. And a job isn’t a life. It’s only a part of one.

In life, there are so many moving parts and they only multiply as we get older. There will always be an infinite number of paths. As long as the one you find yourself on is led by love and not fear, things (in general) will be fine. If you feel confident in decisions that are made from the heart, you’ll be happy with any road you end up on.

But you are here, so saddle the fuck up because you aren’t going anywhere for two more weeks.

About halfway through, I started questioning why I said yes to an expedition in the first place. I was reminded: “You weren’t recruited for your aid climbing skills or your rigging abilities and you don’t climb 5.13 limestone. We knew you ‘suck at this’. That’s why you went—to experience something new. To take advantage of an opportunity that you probably would never have again, and that ninety-nine percent of people would never get in the first place.”

The psych was pretty high in the beginning. Traveling to a beautiful, remote island in Africa brought me back to memories of my trip to Tanzania last summer. My first trip to Africa didn’t change me in any of the ways I was expecting it to; it prepared me. Aly Nicklas prepared me to be uncomfortable, ask questions, listen, and be willing to learn. Upon boarding our first flight to Lisbon, I knew that this trip had already changed me. I had no idea at the time the truth of this statement.

The culture of São Tomé was rich, colorful, and chaotic. The entire island and its people had an organized chaos to it as well as a set of unspoken and unwritten rules. It was wild. I was impressed by the way that the people of São Tomé lived off of the land. Even small, basic tasks seemed so much harder. It was a primal way of living, much more than anything I’d experienced being on the road solo for a year.

The women, especially, in Africa are beautiful and bold in a way words will never do justice. They are warrior women, and as we charged down the narrow road in our beast of a Land Cruiser, I closed my eyes and wished I could be like that. They grew smaller in the distance as we drove on, babies strapped to their backs in colorful swaddles, heavy baskets balanced precariously atop their heads, and machetes that could cut your limbs clear off, hanging innocently at their sides.

Gaz Leah put an incredible amount of time and effort into this, his whole heart and soul, and was dedicated to something he utterly loves. I made a silent promise to myself to try my absolute hardest because I knew what this meant, and more than anything, I wanted to send that rig for him. I was feeling apprehensive but optimistic. After our first night at basecamp, I sat next to him and told him how I was feeling. He told me to throw my feelings of inadequacy out the window: “I asked you here because I knew what you were capable of.”

When we started, I was told many things: As a leader, take as much time as you need—but as soon as you get to the anchor, you need to move quickly. Have fun and trust in your support system—your team. It’s about partnerships and communication. Every skill that you acquire helps you move ahead, even if it’s only a little bit.

Everyone is afraid of big wall, I was told, and it was okay to feel afraid. Like everything in life, it’s about doing something enough to make it less unknown. I knew how lucky I was to have someone offer to teach me because so many have to go out and learn on their own. Ryan Kempf joked when I left and said: “You better be a badass wall climber when you get back.”

That was certainly the hope. Hiking out of the jungle one day, Gaz said: “You might not be a badass big wall climber when we are done. But you will be a big wall climber.”

Feelings of excitement didn’t start to sink in until the night before we left our oceanside basecamp. Everything started feeling real to me once we were finished putting bolts together and taking gear inventory. We were done having simple breakfasts that consisted of bread, avocado, and papaya at the plantation—we were ready to move. We made lists. Gaz was so prepared. I admired his foresight to plan ahead for disaster and that his number one concern was always the safety of his team. Throughout the trip, I thought about how Gaz is a natural born leader, and that isn’t a quality many people have. It was day three at the wall when he told me that I could roll with the boys, and I felt accepted and a part of the team.

Descending into the jungle to the wall, we first had a guide, Mito. The first hike was unbearably hard for me and I was embarrassed at how much I had struggled. I was dehydrated and hungry and tired, and was relieved to find that the following hikes in felt massively easier (in torrential downpour, the lack of humidity made it less of a struggle.)

We hiked with Mito, Torte, and Pasquel many times. In total, we hiked in and out I think nine times. The locals knew the path very well and did it gracefully (wearing flip flops instead of the Wellington boots we’d purchased for protection against snakebites), whereas I bumbled along the trail, lucky to have a pole for balance. I watched Mito cut through the jungle, making new steps for us with his machete, as the old ones had been washed away in the rain. Trudging through the thick jungle felt like vertical swimming. When I used to hike approaches with Jon Hutt, he would always warn me not to grab branches because you never know how stable any of them actually are. In São Tomé, even the ferns felt strong enough.

Mito helped me across the river each time. When he hiked with us, he insisted on carrying my backpack. I tried to politely decline each time but he would never take no for an answer. At the time of our final hike out to the plantation, I was exhausted mentally and physically and for the first time, I graciously let him. During the four weeks, not understanding Portuguese, I couldn’t tell if Mito and his friends thought it was cute or endearing or wildly hilarious that a small, Asian woman was joining these men on their expedition.

Gaz had plans to take the steepest, least vegetated line. He was committed to several days, close to a week, of sleeping on the wall: “Once you are on the wall, you are not coming down. Ninety-nine percent of big wall is morale. I have seen grown men break.”

But we didn’t have that kind of time. When the rain came, basecamp was soaked. Our clothes were soaked. Batteries were soaked. On the fifth day, the battery chargers were zapped and smoking and we packed and prepared to head back into the city. Big wall is about problem-solving: prevention and having a plan B. In addition, we were struggling with rope issues (as in, not having enough rope for fixed lines). By that time, progress was slow and everyone was starting to worry about falling behind schedule. It wasn’t a huge tension, but a slight concern on everybody’s minds. I started feeling sick on those windy roads back into the city.

It was somewhere around the battery charger malfunction that I started feeling that disconnect. It’s such a small thing, but the dynamic of being the only female started to feel like an inconvenience. I was physically far away from everyone I knew and loved and started feeling it. From a distance, we had scoped out the peak with binoculars and I remember watching the falcons floating through the sky; I have always wanted to be a bird (specifically a red-tailed hawk) and ride thermals all day, and in that moment, I wanted to be a bird and fly as far away as possible.

The entire dynamic of the group was shifting, and I felt it. There were other factors and things going on at the same time. I lost Internet when my cracked phone couldn’t take the humidity and occasionally would check messages on Matthew Parent’s phone. For the most part, I was alone and I started feeling it, heavy and burning inside of my heart.

One night, I was helping fill a container and some gasoline spilled on my hand. I mentioned that it still smelled, an hour later, and was told not to complain about things you can change. A part of me felt like saying: “Look at all of the things I haven’t complained about yet!” Instead, I meekly said that I wasn’t trying to be a complainer, and I was sorry. I went to bed early.

By Saturday the 21st, Tiny had finished bolting pitch three and Gaz started through the roof. We were short on time and I understood that. I wasn’t going to bolt any of the first four pitches; that much was obvious. It wasn’t really communicated, but I knew what I wasn’t being told. They were hard aid pitches anyway, and Gaz was certain they went at 5.13. We were running short on time and there really wasn’t any extra to waste on showing me things I wasn’t going to get the first time, anyway. Instead, I was shown how to jumar.

I have never jumared before, with the exception of one time in Yosemite many years ago. Frustrated at how slow I was, I was assured that I should move slow and learn the technique rather than move fast and be sloppy. That day I cleaned a half pitch.

And from that point on, that’s what I did. I jumared and I cleaned pitches. I started looking at it like a job, where you have to begin at the beginning and work your way to the top. Nobody gets promoted immediately, and you have to work to earn your place. I kept finding small comforts in things, such as a piece of candy I’d placed in my pocket that morning or thinking about a familiar love, far away. I kept my self-talk upbeat and kept doing what I thought I was supposed to be doing.

And on Sunday the 23rd, I began to slowly realize that there is a difference between feeling twelve steps behind everybody and being left behind.

Accompanied by Matt Parent and Tiny Almeda, we will be on a plane tomorrow morning to São Tomé Principe to achieve a dream goal of Gaz’s: establish a new route on Pico Cão Grande.

Struggling through a bulletproof jungle and drilling bolts into a rock face while sitting on hooks aren’t necessarily fortes of mine, but when Gaz invited me on his expedition, I couldn’t let myself be swayed by fears of the unknown. When I’m eighty years old and reminiscing days past, I won’t regret any of my decisions.

It did mean disrupting many facets of my life. I’m still not sure how I feel about that part, honestly. Having just fallen into somewhat of a rhythm of my version of “work/life” balance, I was starting to feel good about being in one place. There is a part of me that wishes I could be the kind of person who could stay in one place all of the time, but I’m nomadic at heart.

Fear of what others might say. Fear of the unknown. Guilt. Lack of money, lack of time, lack of confidence. These are all reasons to have said no. They’re also all of the reasons I said yes. Unfortunately, living life in a bold and passionate way inevitably comes with disappointment and it’s something I can’t pretend I’m not guilty of.

In the end, I can’t control anybody else’s feelings, reactions, or choices, just as they can’t control mine. Gaz’s advice was to simply be brutally honest about what you’re doing and who you are. I have always tried to be honest with people about that, and sometimes I have succeeded while others, I have failed.

It’s something to keep working through and work on, and truth be told, if I didn’t have something to work on, then I couldn’t become a better version of who I am. Learning is never finished, and I’m grateful for that.

Gaz told me before our departure: “The rule is to have fun. I don’t care how many fuck ups you have, because as long as you have a good attitude, I’m willing to teach you. You can’t teach attitude.”

I’m grateful for that, too.

The Creek held so many great memories for me in the past several years, and while I was excited to get back to the desert, I was also feeling slightly underwhelmed. Truthfully, I was feeling a little burnt out on the Creek a few seasons ago but was hoping that with this coming season, that would change.

People associate burnout with the stress of a full-time job, but really, too much of anything can manifest it. In general, it’s a combination of too much emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion. I think that I was putting too much internal pressure on myself again. Every time I go back to the Creek, I get my ass handed to me. Remembering some all-time ass whoopings of mine was killing my motivation.

You don’t have to think about route-finding or technical climbing. You just move straight up a fucking crack for a hundred or more feet. And that was one part of the problem. The thought of a hundred feet of .5 was disheartening. Where I didn’t want to climb a hundred feet of 1s and 2s (which are good hands and cups for me), I also didn’t feel like having my ass brutally kicked on anything else.

And then there is the climbing angst.

Luke Mehall, dirtbag author, and I went climbing in Clear Creek about a month or so back. He was in the Front Range for a wedding but had an afternoon off, so we met for coffee (tea for him) and then headed over to Golden to work on a route he’d tried the other day. Later that evening, he said: “Thanks for getting out with me—it really helped my climbing angst.” (He was going to be tied up in wedding functions and dinners over the next few days.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about his climbing angst. I get that too; I think most climbers do. But where Luke’s angst showed up if he didn’t get a few pitches in, maybe mine made an appearance when I was climbing too much. My angst-driven mood seemed to surface the most when I was neglecting the non-climbing related parts of my life.

When I lived on the east coast, I used to feel guilty about taking time off to tend to non-climbing related things. Even something as simple as a city day (a trip to the museum or a day spent curled up in the park with a good book) felt foreign but was ultimately a necessary little break. Now, living in Colorado, I try not to feel so guilty with so much so close.

Burnout happens when your efforts fail to produce the results that you expected. And, like I mentioned, I was expecting too much of myself. It was starting to feel like everybody here was a 5.12 climber. I thought that was the norm, and I didn’t quite add up to the standard Colorado climber status quo. Was I responsible for creating my own climbing angst? Probably. But I was also responsible for overcoming it. Burnout isn’t something that happens overnight. It’s a natural progression, like anything else, so it would naturally take some time to overcome. The good news is that you can beat the burnout.

One following weekend after the Creek, I said “no” to two separate invitations to go climbing and it felt…well, amazing. I deliberated long and hard because a part of me really did want to go back and work on those .5s. But I also knew that a weekend of self-care wasn’t going to kill me. The desert will be there all November.

Taking a few self-care days let me focus on reinforcing the effort and not the outcome. If I’m constantly running on fumes, I’m just going to keep spinning my wheels and never get anywhere at all. Getting back to the things that matter the most to me needs to be on my own terms. Getting back to climbing has to be on my own terms.

The last thing I want to do is to take a step backward, but sometimes it’s the best way to move forward.

When that 5.9 (you know, the one that feels like 5.9+) that you’re about to chuff all over was put up, that might have been at the limit of what climbers were doing at the time.

Anyway, what the hell is a “sandbagged” climb supposed to feel like, anyway? Does it mean that the route felt hard when someone gave you the impression that it was supposed to feel easy? Do you have to be climbing at a fairly similar level for an accurate spray down? I’ve been climbing about six years now and I still don’t have a clue (and it all feels sandbagged.) From the ground, everything looks reasonable until you’re halfway up the route with uncontrollable sewing machine leg. While you struggle barge the rest of the way upward, maybe you can take some solace in the fact that the FA was done in steel-toed boots and with pitons.

Truthfully, both Seneca Rocks and Vedauwoo felt sandbagged to me because, at the time, I’d onlyclimbed in the Gunks and therefore, had only been exposed to one style. Since then, every place I’ve traveled to, I’ve accepted local advice but I have also learned to take it with a grain of salt. Climbing routes will always feel either much easier or much harder than what you are used to, because of what you are used to.

And so, for many climbers (including myself) who cut their teeth on the white quartzite conglomerate ridges of the Gunks, those cliffs might not seem quite so “sandbagged”.

Climbing, in general, can have a steep and slow learning curve, and when it comes to its distinct style, like most areas, the Gunks is no different. This can be especially true for out-of-state visitors—but if you’re paying a visit from out west, there are certainly more than a few crack climbs that nobody talks about. You’re almost guaranteed to have them all to yourself, too.

I figured that this would be the case as I had plans to finally undertake the big roof crack of Disco Death March (5.10d) in the Trapps. In all my time climbing in the Gunks, I don’t think I’ve ever seen another person on it. Its giant gaping chasm has stared at me, time and time again, as I passed it on my way to other walls. Before I even owned a number 6, I’d wanted to try it. After considering the fact that I had no 6, no offwidth technique, and watching a burly video of Thea Blodgett-Gallahan sending it with style, I chickened out—I mean, I never got around to it.

Well, now I own three 6s and had no excuses (except that I thought I’d packed the third one and made Sam run back to the Trapps parking lot to retrieve it). Chris Vultaggio, photographer and Gunks local, had suggested some brilliant climbs in the 5.10 range that would get great light, some of which I had never tried and wanted to, but I remained unwavering in my decision. Chris kindly humored me, as did Sam.

There was no chickening out, this time.

You don’t really need a lot of gear for this route, but you do need big gear. It’s been done with two 6s, which I tried during my first burn, bumping my second piece again and again. Having three made me much happier and much more confident, in both the gear and movement, during the second round.

Over birthday sushi the night before, I told my best friend, Scott Albright, that I thought it was a good idea to try it inverted. Bashfully, I said: “I know, I know. It might be dumb. It might not work.” And he told me that I should absolutely do it in a style that was right for me. So what if nobody had tried climbing the crack, legs first? It didn’t mean that it wasn’t going to work, and I wouldn’t know until I tried.

And so, after placing a Yates 6, I buried a right hand into the far crack and established a good left chicken wing. My feet scuttled across the rock for a moment as I hoisted myself up and into the crack, pushing further and further for eventually what would be two good feet. The heel/toe cams crushed my left foot, and I cursed every second I held it—but I managed to hold it. Previously, the crack that leads all the way to the lip of the climb had been done by traversing and underclinging—basically, one long and strenuous layback.

I argued that laying the entire traverse back seemed exhausting, not to mention that the undercling didn’t feel supremely great. Also, being 5’, my feet came nowhere near the tiny foot rail. I thought that if I were to layback the crack without decent feet, my shoes would for sure skate and I would pop off. And while a combination of butt scooting, mantling, and chicken wings (for rests and taking weight off of my previously injured left foot) were also exhausting, I felt confident that this was the right way for me to approach the route.

Maybe this classic 1977 line was not done the same way. In fact, it’s unlikely. But after spending some time climbing out west, I came back to Disco Death March and saw an entirely different route. I’ve started seeing a lot of things differently since I’ve been out west, because with each new experience, our current perspective shifts a little bit—and then a lot. Our standards are set by our own personal experiences—so don’t let people sandbag you. Or rather, don’t allow yourself to feel sandbagged by others. You can be attentive to what people have to say, but remember that their experience is absolutely and perfectly their own, and so is yours.

When I left the east coast to stretch my legs out west a bit, I had the intention of becoming a more well-rounded climber. I am not the greatest climber, but sometimes, I am successful. I have been the most successful when I have been able to apply technique learned from other climbing areas, as unconventional as it may feel. But in climbing, what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. My beta might not be his beta; what feels sandbagged to him might not feel sandbagged to her.

Initially, I felt afraid and silly to try something in my own style, but the truth is that you don’t have to make decisions based on how things were formally done. Don’t let others tell you that things must be done in a certain way, because they really don’t. Don’t let people tell you how hard or easy something is going to be—go and see for yourself.