Joshua Tree, Phoenix.

 

Joshua Tree, Phoenix edition. October 10-20, 2012

with John Ely and Todd Bradley. Weather: virtually perfect every single day.

From The Odyssey, trans. E.V. Rieu, rev. D.C.H. Rieu 1991 Ed., Penguin Classics:

Book 5, line 269:

            It was with a happy heart that the noble Odysseus spread his sail to catch the wind and skilfully kept the raft on course with the rudder. There he sat and never closed his eyes in sleep, but kept them on the Pleiades, or watched the late-setting Boötes slowly fade, or the Great Bear, sometimes called the Wain, which always wheels round in the same place and looks across at Orion the Hunter with a wary eye. It was this constellation, the only one which never sinks below the horizon to bathe in Ocean's stream, that the wise goddess Calypso had told him to keep on his left hand as he sailed across the sea. So for seventeen days he sailed on his course, and on the eighteenth there came into view the shadowy mountains of the Phaeacians' country, which jutted out to meet him. The land looked like a shield laid on the misty sea.

            So everything was going right for once. Odysseus had lost all his companions and all his ships, and been to the land of the dead and came back alive, and was now sailing his raft on a true course for home. Incidentally, another translation specifies Arcturus, the brightest star in the constellation Boötes, rather than the constellation itself; I don't know why. The original apparently specifies the Ox-Driver, or Plowman. But anyway, you really can't relax on these epics until you've actually taken your horribly filthy boots off by the fireside in your own home, and sometimes not even then. The tale continues:

            But now Poseidon, Lord of the Earthquake, who was on his way back from his visit to the Ethiopians, observed him from the distant mountains of the Solymi. The sight of Odysseus sailing over the sea enraged him. He shook his head and said to himself, “Damnation! I had only to go to Ethiopia for the gods to change their minds about Odysseus! And there he is, close to the Phaeacians' land, where he is destined to bring his long ordeal to an end. Nevertheless I mean to let him have a bellyful of trouble yet.” 

 I must go down to the rocks again,

to the lonely rocks and sky

and all I ask is a stout rope

and a star to steer her by. 

           And all because Odysseus had made the perfectly reasonable mistake of defending his life against the cannibal giant Polyphemus, one of Poseidon's numerous unpleasant progeny. I see Odysseus muttering to himself, “You can't win for losing,” as he saw the wind begin to howl, and the giant waves rise up. The gods knew he'd make it home, but would they tip him off? No. He cursed his fate many times as the epic dragged on, but he never quite lay down and declared he'd had enough. He always crawled naked off the beach, looking for a stick, a stone, a pretty girl – anything he could use to keep going.

There it is - the Crack of Weirdness that runs through Reality, from here to the bitter end.

           So: here I stand again in Hidden Valley campground, looking up at Orion and his companions through the crystal midnight of the desert. It has been a long two years since my last visit, with terrible events chronicled elsewhere. I went briefly to the land of the dead, though not long enough to talk to Achilles, and I came back and walked again on this earth. The mountains and the rivers look the same, but they are not. My eyes are different. But I came back to the desert to tell myself that I am still a climber, changed though I may be; and the granite still flows under my fingertips. If poetic language offends your ear, I am sorry, but there is no other language that can do this job.

 I got your Tabula Rasa right here, baby.

From my notes:

Orientation – walked to bathroom by starlight; returning, I knew the position of the stub of iron post sticking out of the ground an inch and a quarter, having hit my bad foot on it last night.

Galaxy overhead – to the east, one stream, but overhead it is apparently bifurcated by interstellar dust clouds – as if an illustration for primitive cosmogony: life begins as one unified stream of infinite force, then splits into yin and yang, consciousness and non-consciousness.

           Returning to Joshua Tree is, for me, returning home, to a place where I know my orientation, from the micro- to the macrocosmos. At the very center is the Eye of the Cyclops, from whence spews the electrifying, all-embracing torrent of consciousness itself. Looking outward at sunset one may see great mazes of granite ridges in the west, and the bowl of desert surrounding in the other three directions; the walls of of the bowl are a pale pink, often. Above is the Galaxy, around whose center we revolve, out near the rim. Providentially we are able to see far in all directions, not buried in monstrous dust clouds, nor blinded by infinite brilliance near the galactic center. We can see far back in time – not to the instant of Beginning, but near enough to imagine it, to see it in the mind's eye, which is an infinite field, looking inward.

 The Cyclops Dihedral, looking almost straight up.  The Eye is at the top, of course.

           Of course, my home – house, family, books – is also home and an orientation equally valid and potent; the interface to the human world. But that interface can swamp all else – the people we know, the work we must do, the potent stream of culture, the rich stew of friendship, love, pleasure and pain - they blot out the silence and the stars, the slow breeze drifting through sagebrush, the expressionless eye of the raven.

  A nice spot to shelter from the glare.  Or is it?

           Memorable incident from this trip: the almost obligatory Dave Almost Steps on a Rattlesnake trope. This would have been completely unmemorable, given how remarkably common this type of incident has been in my life, except that, for the first time, I exhibited a 'normal' autonomic survival reaction. Ordinarily when I walk obliviously past a rattlesnake, and have it pointed out to me by a companion, or see one in the trail nearby, I observe it with pleasure and take the appropriate action to avoid it, perhaps snap a picture, and pass by. Once at Old Rag I was walking through dense ground cover and cautiously parting the vegetation with a stick as I went, and I saw a black timber rattler about two feet away, awake and moving slowly, and I calmly let the foliage fall back into place and walked smoothly backwards in my tracks, feeling no special excitement. On this occasion, however, as I was walking through some brush between large boulders out behind the Headstone, I heard and briefly saw a rattlesnake immediately at my feet. The snake warned me, and the reptile annex deep in my medulla oblongata instantly exerted total control over my body, like a savage dictator suddenly seizing control over a country in times of extreme danger. My body lunged away from the snake far faster than the sluggish conscious brain, overloaded with useless garbage like Shakespeare, algebra and Oingo-Boingo tunes, could have made it go. Still tracking, but unable to influence the body, the cerebrum got taken for a ride as the body slammed over a low boulder and dashed the big-brained head into a low-hanging Joshua tree arm, whose ends resemble the medieval mace with more spikes. A gash on my left shin proved to be not the work of the snake; he just wanted to express the quintessentially American sentiment which is in fact the motto of all rattlesnakes: “Don't tread on me, motherfucker.”

           It is oddly reassuring to know that our little old reptile brain is still back there, never sleeping, always alert for reptiles and loaded for T-Rex. The millions of years of ancient programming endure, and the Dude abides.

Not long after my Rattlesnake Depantsing, John led this small unnamed climb; after placing the first piece, he somehow left the ground without the rest of the rack, so we tossed it up to him.  Somewhat funnier because his personal style of leading requires that he take at least twice as much gear as I would, on any one climb.

Pinhead Boulder and Crack at sunset.  No snakes nearby, probably.

           Just for posterity I should set down The Terrifying Incident of the Rattlesnake Under the Pigpen Boulder, as told by Drew Frye. We visited Jtree some ten or twelve years ago for a couple of weeks or so, and one afternoon we were pursuing separate avenues of leisure or indolence, and Drew went bouldering by himself, looking up some of the well-known problems. He found the hand crack in the ceiling of the cave-like space under the Pigpen boulder and decided to jam it as far as his strength might hold out; very difficult though it is, even an unexpected fall will only result in one's ass getting dusty as one drops to the gritty granite sand. A worse danger is pulling a shoulder or tweaking an elbow. You can guess the rest: halfway through as he was getting tired and about to let his legs drop to the ground, he heard the warning rattle immediately under his ass. His body filled instantly with high-octane adrenalin, but instead of panicking and spasmodically thrashing out of the cave, which would have certainly resulted in an unpleasant fanging, he experienced the best of what his body and mind could do: he jammed with rock-crushing, atomic force in his hands and finished the problem, his brain still in control as his body climbed into overdrive, beyond all normal limits. One can almost never summon up motivation on that order of magnitude at will, but under real pressure it sometimes does appear.

 On the Horns of the Minotaur

Q.: is “existence” a worthy philosophical topic? Or just take it for granite. Is “consciousness” a more interesting question, or equally tautological? John: universe has inherent moral dimension. Me: why? Or is it just a property or aspect or component of consciousness, just an emotion, essentially?

Me: consciousness could have arisen as a purely mechanical consequence of life/evolution. Morality just one expression, not an objective law [like law of gravity] - no evidence.

The Gates of Valhalla?  Landing zone of the Mothership?  Or just some of that good old Cosmic Debris?

           As we had the great luxury of free time, we sometimes took to arguing for the sheer pleasure of it, while at the Saloon or just sitting around the concrete picnic table. I can no longer reconstruct in any detail the discussion indicated by these brief notes; nor is there any point in doing so; the iterations and arabesques of thought intertwine and then fade away like breath-mist on a cold morning. I think I maintained that the “problem” of “existence” is not worth pursuing. Why is there something rather than nothing? The question is a massive red herring, given that any philosopher worth his stones can question whether there is in fact anything. Without our accepting as givens the basic ground conditions to our argumentation, we cannot meaningfully assert anything at all; we are just waggling our jaws and causing the air to vibrate a bit, just as it does when the proverbial Joshua Tree gently falls to the sand. John of course pointed out that people have been considering our “existence” a problem for all of recorded history, or thereabouts. (I must put words in his mouth, and I am quite sure that he would dispute every one of them; but this is “now” and that was Zen, as the saying goes.)

John in deep contemplation or perhaps just a snooze.  Or both!

           He asked me what I thought would be an important problem to consider, and I said I was interested in consciousness itself. At least it has apparent qualities that one can examine, however tautologically, and in considering it one might, or might not, be able to pin down a tiny portion of “existence” to our experience as self-regarding beings. Naturally, nothing of it can be proven in the same sense that a scientific proposition can be examined, tested and proven to a certain standard of likelihood; but we can elaborate a framework of hypotheses that gives the appearance of plausibility, and that is not obviously lacking in internal consistency. The moment one demands a more solid and dependable structure of explanation, one is thrown against conflicting but equally solid conjectures-masquerading-as-certainties.

We dance on a ridiculous, invisible knife-edge, every second of every day.  The odds against us assure us that we simply aren't here at all.  So: dance!

           Somehow we segued to the idea of morality; John asserted that the universe possesses a moral dimension or structure, one that would exist independent of human consciousness; I demanded actual evidence of some sort. I made an loose analogy to the existence of gravitational force: although we do not know how gravity actually exerts force across space (or even if that is a correct way to express what it does), we have powerful physical evidence that allows us to measure it with extreme precision, and the mysteriously opaque nature of it leads inevitably to the inarguable T-shirt slogan, GRAVITY DON'T HAVE NO MERCY (see Delaware Water Gap, the climb Death Don't Have no Mercy). Morality, by contrast, seems to vary immensely depending on who you ask, or what you want, or whose ox is being gored, and so forth. To me it seems like merely one of many dimensions or characteristics of consciousness, and hence of little larger interest. But John was quick to dismiss my purely mechanical view of the universe, as starting at the wrong viewpoint altogether, and thus depressingly limited. And I probably shouted au contraire, mon ami! in my riposte, wherein I asserted that there is no proven obstacle to the possibility that life and then consciousness have arisen purely as a statistically necessary consequence of basic physics, and the mathematical probabilities inherent in a universe of this size and age, with this many elemental particles whizzing around in it and sticking together in gravity wells of various sizes. If you break a rack of balls on a pool table, using your cosmic cue and your special magical tip-chalk, over and over andoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandover andoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandoverandover-----

Hey - who "carved" this granite?

...until even your Godlike arm is tired and all the beer is gone, a time will come when all the balls go into the pockets on the break, and you're in business. Anders Osbourne, the bluesman, has a nice line, from another context: “Never is a real long time.” And in that real long time the universe did emerge (I think) and after another real long time the Promethean fire of consciousness ignited, and here we are (apparently), thinking long thoughts and climbing tall rocks, to equal (that is, unknown) purpose. I have no complaint! 

From the Wikipedia page on cosmogony:

One problem in cosmogony is that there is currently no theoretical model that explains the earliest moments of the universe's existence (during the Planck time) because of a lack of a testable theory of quantum gravity. Researchers in string theory and its extensions (for example, M theory), and of loop quantum cosmology, have nevertheless proposed solutions of the type just discussed.
Another issue facing the field of particle physics is a need for more expensive and technologically advanced particle accelerators to test proposed theories (for example, that the universe was caused by colliding membranes).
Developing a complete theoretical model has implications in both the philosophy of science and epistemology. For example, it would clarify the meaningful ways in which people can ask the question "why do we exist?".

Needless to say, I did not take this photo.  Galileo took it, and everyone who came after him; it took our whole civilization to realize this image.

           This brings up more questions – in fact an endless string or loop of vibrating questions. Just the fact that we, like the children we are, can continue to ask a series of questions indefinitely, seems to indicate that no final answer can exist. But, more specifically:  What would an explanation of the earliest moments of the universe's existence look like? In what terms would it have meaning? If we have to invent a theoretical model full of infinitely complex and arcane involutions, will the result have meaning in a way comparable, for example, to the current scientific explanation of the formation of the earth, and the evolution of life upon it? All explanations build upon some foundation of assumed existing elements which combine to produce the new thing that needs the explanation. We are here instead searching for the foundation cause of existence itself – the very definition of a tautology, ain't it? Only a particle accelerator big and strong enough to spark the creation of a new universe would really satisfy this scientific quest, but we'd have no time to enjoy our triumph, would we?

 Shadow-dancing with the Weird Interior Spirit.

           In this one extreme case I recommend that we adopt the wisdom of one T. Geisel, whose brilliant fable regarding the mysterious generation of 500 hats, each a little more splendid than the last, ends with no pat explanation, simple or arcane: it just “happened to happen”, and that was enough. In all post-Bang investigations, however, I am in favor of untrammeled reason rampant, and science unchained (tempered, one devoutly hopes, with wisdom, humanity, compassion and so forth as might be feasible).

The Aguille de Josh - an excellent soap-box from which to hurl your abuse at the gods.

           I mean, really – if the universe began because of a collision between some membranes – then where did those 'membranes' come from? What were they made of? Why did it set off a Bang? And so forth. No matter what explanation is given, I can always ask another question about it. And to give an arbitrary Name for the First Cause is just a cowardly flinch, turning a blind mind's eye on it.

 Hey - we're here.  We exist.  And not only that: don't tread on us, motherfucker.

           The Joshua Tree Saloon is a friendly dive on the corner with ten beers on tap, one pool table, three or four moderately sized screens generally tuned to football and baseball, a long bar and a few tables and booths, and a tiny little stage at the end of the bar, nothing more than a small raised section, for the karaoke club to wail from. And of course there is a jukebox. The standard burger lineup was well done and generous in portion size, and between that and Santana's, the all-night Mexican drive-through, we failed to lose any weight on this trip. Todd of course is already as lean as a stick from mountaineering all over the West, and cannot eat gluten in any case; but John and I are at risk for the predictable middle-aged spread, and must run very fast just to stay where we are.

 The gear manager, constantly struggling to tame the chaos of John's rack.

Todd leads a nice hand crack somewhere way out back of beyond.

           One night we went to the Saloon to watch the Nationals in the final game of their season, losing a heartbreaker in the last inning to a more experienced team; one could see their beaten body language as they took their last three at-bats, flailing at phantoms and staring at strikes. The beautiful dream had ended early, and waking, we all grimaced and stretched, trying to recall, just for a few more moments, the glorious story line, the girl just now turning toward us with a rising smile, the last few feet of the wonderful rocky trail in the hills... evaporating into the null state between stories. Though I love the beauty of the game, I am no fan; I shift my shallow allegiances shamelessly, and have only sketchy knowledge of the characters and teams and history.

John leads the right edge of Headstone.

And Todd leads the left edge.  The Headstone floats magically just above a coarse pile of large rubble.

           On another night it happened to be karaoke night. We watched, mesmerized, as four or five wildly mismatched individuals took turns crooning, belting and mumbling various random country-western standards, to near-complete indifference from the room; the performers were not a bit discouraged, any more than they were ever even in the same state as being on key. A sort of wispy wannabe cowpoke in his late eighties mumbled happily through every verse of “I am my own Grampaw”; the others were females, difficult to describe and even harder to watch, trying hard to summon up a tiny spark of Patsy Cline's ghost, and failing. I would describe this far more vividly, but I had to drink ever more Fat Tire to endure it at all, and so much grandeur is lost forever. But you could go there; you could wander in on some fateful Thursday night (or was it a Wednesday? Only the ghosts can say...) and see them all still there, trying their best to sing, summoning the courage to stand up in front of God and his lowly Bar Patrons, and gently waving their arms to the music. Todd did his best to get John and me to put together a song for the next week, but we were too old and crafty to fall for that. It would have taken superhuman efforts by the superb blond waitress to convince me that I am like unto a young Elvis, a demigod who can mesmerize with his gaze and his perfect voice – that and so much beer that I would fall down after the first chorus of “Hurried Romance, Low-Rent Rendezvous”.

 The leader dwindles into an illusion of distance.  The climb is a very easy 5.8 called "Parental Guidance Suggested", located not too far from the edges of...  the Twilight Zone.

Finishing "Fun Stuff", another easy 5.8.

My three leads:

           Poodlsby is a pretty nice 5.6 a little right of White Lightning; it is a fairly long pitch with a lot of variety, reasonable protection and not much strain. It was my first lead since my fall almost 18 months before. I felt ready in a purely physical sense, but I was completely unwilling to fall, and therefore my protocol for the climb was very much like a soloing protocol: test everything, trust nothing, overprotect, think all moves through in advance; plan and execute with total deliberation. And doing that, I finished out with very little fear and much satisfaction.

 Right up the center is the well-known 5.7 called White Lightning, which offers a rather stiff offwidth start, to electrify your day.  Poodlsby is to the right, starting in the large shallow chimney.

           Spaghetti and Chili is a fine 5.7 of perhaps 80 or a hundred feet, that I have led before and recommend as a fine practice lead, with a genuine, though straightforward, lead move – the type of thing that you must force yourself to initiate, because while your reason tells you it is simple and safe, and well within your proven ability, your hindbrain, the one that (usually) prevents babies from crawling off tables, is telling you in no uncertain terms that, no, it ain't. The name refers to the two very different, mismatched cruxes. The first is a classic traversing, then rising layback on friction footholds, right at the true start about 20 feet off the ground; you have all the time you want to place as much pro as you want in the undercling crack, and when you're finally unable to pretend any longer that the placements there could be improved by further dithering, you have to launch out and up, on your arms. Weak as my left arm is, I still felt that this move should not intimidate me, and yet I did hesitate longer, and protect more, than I had done two years ago. The other crux is right at the top, a short, somewhat overhanging crack that requires nothing more than a couple of simple hand jams and a pinch of determination; the entire middle section is trivial. But it felt really good to pull it off.

 First, the spaghetti...

and later, the chili.

Ranger Danger, 5.8 smooth.  These 3 shots by John Ely.

           Ranger Danger is a short 5.8 slab climb, on the joint formed with a vertical dihedral wall. Short as it is (maybe 30 feet of actual climbing), it presents a real problem. The start is tricky friction; about 12 or 15 feet up one finds a narrow, short crack next to the wall which can take a little pink tri-cam and a .25 black one as well, which Todd lent to me for this purpose. And that's all you get. Two years ago Chris led this and we all followed, and I thought it remarkably easy, which just illustrates the great mental gulf between leading and following. Here on lead, frictioning above my two little pieces and missing an obvious bucket on the left wall, I had a moment or two of real leader tension, but, regardless of my physical ailments, I knew that a slab like this must yield to me, as they always do, when met with the proper mixture of patience and intensity. As the slab ended I put a nice big blue tri-cam into a hand crack on the left and went on up to the belay with ease. And I felt good belaying on a magnificent 3-piece equalized anchor, idly watching the endless mare's tails spin out across the sky, west to east.

 If Aeolus lends you the West Wind, be careful, don't let some numbskull in the crew fool with it.

Book 21, line 404:

           While they were talking Odysseus, master of stratagems, had picked up the great bow and checked it all over. As a minstrel skilled at the lyre and in song easily stretches a string round a new leather strap, fixing the twisted sheep-gut at both ends, so he strung the great bow without effort or haste. Then with his right hand he tested the string, and it sang as he plucked it with a sound like a swallow's note. The suitors were utterly mortified; the color faded from their cheeks; and to mark the moment there came a thunderclap from Zeus, and Odysseus' long-suffering heart leapt up for joy at this sign of favor from the Son of Chronos of the devious ways.

            One arrow lay loose on the table beside him; the rest, which the Achaean lords were soon to experience, were still inside their hollow quiver. He picked up this shaft, set it against the bridge of the bow, drew back the grooved end and the string together, all without rising from his stool, and, with a straight aim, shot. Not a single axe did he miss. From the first handle-ring, right through them all and out at the last the arrow sped with its burden of bronze.

 There is order in the universe.  Some, anyway.  One draw is missing, I think.

           That's when he finally knew he was home and safe. All that remained was to take out the trash and mop the bloody floor, and get straight with the wife for being out so late. One of those stories that never really ends.

The music of pure granite...

Eichorn Pinnacle

 

South Face of North Dome - September 2007.

With Chris Mrozowski.  Photos of me are by Chris; the rest by me.  Essay finished early in 2008. 

                                  Twenty-eight years ago Frank Zappa released the album Sheik Yerbouti, with the classical masterpiece “Yo’ Mama” on it, and I have no idea how many times I’ve played it. It has accompanied me through my long journey in the same manner as a few other works: Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony has never once failed to lift my spirits; I can never resist singing along to Don McLean’s “American Pie” when it comes through the radio; and Grieg’s “Solveig’s Song” from the Peer Gynt Suite, played on a fifty-year-old, heavily scratched piece of solid bakelite, always transports me to a simple and beautiful world of snowy mountains and pure, abstract sorrow. And there’s always Debussy, dancing with the fauns in the morning. 

Vernal Falls on the Merced

 

                                    “Yo’ Mama” begins and ends with some lyrics which are not so much silly as perfectly absurd; they follow the main melodic theme without giving you a single thing to think about, so their only point is to fill space with voice while the real music assembles and begins. The next ten minutes are all instrumental: electric guitar, trumpets, synthesizers, what have you - melody is developed slowly and patiently, with glorious non-jazz randomness, and builds to the sort of logical yet only slowly unveiled, complex climax I associate with Brahms, and, yes, Debussy. As far as I know this piece means little to music lovers in general; perhaps it is too quirky, too unique, too disconnected with any obvious tradition. I associate it with leaping into the gorgeous unknown, maybe into Petty’s Great Wide Open, on an aesthetic level. And maybe it’s just ear candy and I have naïve and simplistic tastes - I just don’t care. More highly refined aesthetes than myself may now leave the theatre and decamp to the nearest jazz coffee joint.

Highlands near Cathedral Peak

                                   Sometimes songs play themselves in my head when I am leading a fine climb, and they seem to connect to the climb thereafter. Only later, several weeks after having climbed the South Face of North Dome (in Yosemite, opposite Half Dome, for non-climbers) did “Yo’ Mama” suggest itself as the proper musical counterpart to this climb: beautiful, complex, long, but still accessible to the merely mortal man, if he is willing to listen hard and stay with it. Here’s how it goes: 

 

                                        We got up before dawn and drove the thirty-odd miles from the Valley floor to the Porcupine Flats trailhead on the road to Tuolumne; we saddled ourselves with ropes and gear and walked the well-worn trail about five miles, mostly fairly level, as the morning rose around us. Then we cut right, down the drainage to the west of the dome, following a faint but unmistakable climber trail that meandered down through dry, scratchy, grasping scrub, along the narrow and winding dry creekbed. This section had been advertised as really nasty bushwhacking. Well, I’ve done worse; compared to real Old Rag belly-crawling, nettle-stinging, bramble-scrambling, rattle-snake-annoying, poison-ivy-infested, wasp-filled rhododendron sweatfests, it wasn’t real bad. But the predominant bushes we had to whack through were very grabby indeed, and we had small packs, with most of our gear on our harnesses - not the best strategy. Hence the last half mile seemed endless, as we struggled down, craning our necks to the east to find the elusive traverse to the base of the clean granite slopes we craved.

From west slope of Half Dome, we see North Dome across the Valley.

                                          Finally the pointless lyrics cease and the pseudo-trumpets and the guitar, spangled with a few sequins synthesized from the ether, enter the clear morning air and begin building a graceful substructure in the sky. We flaked the beautiful new twin 60s, roped up at the base, with Half Dome’s NW face glaring at us like a Paleolithic god from directly across the Valley, and Chris led off up a winding line on moderate slopes, on variable friction and a pure and smooth layback to a tiny tree. Protection was sparse but adequate; there are no bolts anywhere on this climb. I led the second, another pure layback demanding care and patience despite the low rating, as the granite was polished, white, unforgiving. I belayed behind a bigger tree and Chris came up, looking ahead apprehensively to the routefinding crux of the entire climb. This involves finding a way rightwards up and over a gigantic overlap forming a vertical wall just to our right of ten to fifteen feet; the rest of the climb takes place on the outer layer of granite thus attained. Chris puzzled out the few words on the topo regarding this, and went up the dihedral a little way, crawled up onto a large sloping shelf, and did a creative crabwalk back down a few feet to a weird ramp whose surface was hidden from the belay station; zipped up the ramp and over the edge of the great overlap and disappeared altogether. He had negotiated peculiar chord and key changes and broken out into unknown new realms, perhaps, from my fixed point of view under the tree. Much rope ran out fairly quickly and to my surprise I could still hear him call ‘off belay’. Having seen him do it, I did it a bit differently and more easily; the whole difference between the known and the unknown; I envied him having done it virgin, so to speak.

Chris on the summit of Cathedral Peak.

                                       But my turn came very soon. After a short friction traverse though the suddenly fierce clear wind driving down the valley (we had been becalmed in the lee of the great side wall for the first two pitches) I climbed a long easy crack, many feet to the belay, and continued on through with little pause, leading up the fabulous fourth pitch.

Sisyphus in a rare moment of levity.  Of course what he really needs is levitation.

                                       This pitch is clear trumpets arcing through the clear sky, pure fourths and fifths easily understood by a stone; the crack continues at a mild angle, jumps over a small overlap and starts to narrow, gradually but inexorably, offering fewer placements, and not far ahead I could see where it narrows to the width of a small woman’s little finger, then to the small end of a chopstick, and then nothing; I put in a final small wire, a #1 DMM, totally solid, and then I had to, so to speak, step into an invisible coracle, out onto the trackless, holdless granite, and traverse right, out and up what seemed like a very long way, to get to the large ledge and clump of bushes, that looked like a hotel with a nice champagne bar from where I was crawling, my mouth so damned dry. Each foot placement, as you may well imagine, was the subject of careful scrutiny; but I had enough brain function left that I began to whisper a silly little mantra under my breath, and it seemed to smooth out the little bumps of fear that could conceivably disturb my concentration. The mantra was: “Stick like a fly, boy, stick like a fly.” And in good time I came to the prickly bushes and found a fine stance and set a fine anchor and drank some fine lukewarm water, and brought Chris up. 

Tuolomne

 

                                     Suddenly the music gets gnarly and proud; deep bass lines grind low but cleanly, without weird distracting textures or complications. We are faced with a chimney. It is Chris’ lead; neither of us has led or followed a chimney for decades. After some discussion we decide to try it with our bullet packs hanging between our legs, dragging on the rock, rather than risk other weirdness by hauling them. The chimney rises some fifty feet to an abrupt end, beyond which we cannot see. It is a somewhat flaring, mixed-technique affair with a tantalizing outside edge that only sometimes offers assistance; not a straightforward heel-and-back-and-palms sort of deal - not agonizing if one has done a few chimneys recently. Chris made slow but steady progress for a while, though at one point he said, “I think I’ve done some damage.” I should have asked him what he meant, but did not. After a complicated struggle he exited the top of the chimney and disappeared into the ether again; a lot of rope went out as he did some classic 5.7 laybacking in a good sharp crack to another big ledge. I followed, starting with my back to the wall and my palms on the giant flake that formed the chimney, and at very much the same spot where Chris had mentioned doing damage, I did some damage as well: my left palm slipped out and down just a little bit, and I found that a nickel-sized patch of palm skin was now flapping, attached by a thread, and the underlying flesh, though not scored or bleeding, was naturally a bit sensitive to the prospect of any more friction chimneying. Well, ok, suck it up, ya crybaby. In a few feet I had a stance and I got some tape out of my pack and taped it up, and went on. At the belay I saw that Chris had exactly the same patch of skin missing on the same hand, but he had not taped it, so we did that.

After the Snake Dike.  "From here we walk."

                                       Okay, kids! Got the nasty chimney out of the way! And it’s my lead! What have you got for me, North Dome? I’m ready! Oh, crap - another chimney, weirder than the last one. Chord changes upside down and backward. Have to start back to the wall and then switch around at some point. And on and on. Began laybacking, and the foot friction turned to polished porcelain. I remember putting in a piece from a very weird position and making a note to apologize to Chris for it later. It was a good medium-small tricam. As before, the pitch seemed to end abruptly at a turn in the crack into blue sky, about 130 feet out, perhaps; but when I got there, having had a brief reprieve from the slickness with a patch of good friction, I found that it just kept going. Not knowing from the wonderful Supertopo that most people set a hanging belay here, just before the 5.8 technical crux of the climb, (listed in Meyer's 1982 guide at 5.7, though) I just kept on plugging, thinking, this is harder and harder, and WTF as the kids all say. It also got slicker; the layback holds grew more rounded, and farther apart, much of the crack being invaded by vegetation. Some decisions made in haste and anger: what do I need more right now in this spot, a piece or a hold - choose one and choose it fast. The music working its way through problems and obstacles, toward an ecstatic idea, a connected and meaningful resolution, a place where much that had been obscure and gestating is now visible and takes a noble shape, something like truth. And here I am at a small overlap, still laybacking like a maniac, almost at the end of my 60 meters. 

p.1 of “Darth Vader’s Revenge”, 5.10a at Low Profile Dome.

                                       I set a hanging belay with two good medium cams and two questionable small cams for backup, and began belaying Chris up, thinking black thoughts about the hard last pitch that I thought was still ahead of me. I had wasted many long minutes all day on my sloth-like caution on lead, and now the sun is planning to set on its usual schedule, and no one can persuade it to wait even a half hour. We still have sunlight, but how much? At least I am sure that Chris will lead the crux successfully. The last few days have hardened him up, as he and I both harken back to our youth, and we set our faces against the menace of the granite and we just go on ahead regardless - which one must so often do, in this world.

Heading down the long punishing trail to our camp on the Upper Merced.

                                  He is halfway up, still out of my sight, and I am gazing eastward at the sky, over the great curving slope of North Dome, and a bird flashes up, soaring, a raptor, grey, wings bent in the characteristic shape of the peregrine falcon, and it curves in a perfect arc outward and back down and out of sight, and I don’t see it again. My black thoughts are gone as if they had never existed. Is there somewhere in the world right now that I would rather be? Is there something better than this - better than being young (sort of) and strong (enough) and at the summit of the sublime as defined by this moment alone? Certainly, there are equally wonderful things in the world, of various kinds. But they are all either in the past, having only a shadowy, pale glory, or in the future, having no substance but probability. This moment alone; this is all I have and it is enough, and much more than enough. We are soaring; every day we soar but most days we don’t know it. The gift of consciousness is to soar and know it, to ride the infinite wave of music and thought on the frail surfboards of our finite lives. Yes, just for a little while, but that is not important. The important thing is to fling your hand up onto a marginal hold, just gambling, make it stick, lock it off, and soar up the rock moment by moment. 

Looking west down the Valley from high on North Dome.

 

                                       Chris came up and we puzzled out the topo, saw that the rest was fairly easy, and he cast off and ran it out to the angle of incline where walking is feasible. We took pictures as the sun hung two or three diameters above the horizon, and walked up to the real summit and took some more. We had run out of water, but felt fairly good. At the summit we found three young men all dressed in enigmatic black turtlenecks; they volunteered nothing of why they were lighting a small bonfire up there, and we did not ask. 

                                       The five mile hike back to the car was not extremely painful; the stars came out and eventually the Milky Way and all the others shone as usual through the tall trees. The last half mile was not good to me; try as I would I could not keep up with Chris, and he was just walking normally. But we drove to Curry Village that night just in time to get a beer at the pizza joint before it closed; I was hobbling from a blister or two, and our palms bore the identical mark of the coin we had to pay to enter those realms; but that beer was very sweet. My brain was guttering like a candle, and I proposed a toast: “To not being dead!” But we were tired enough to feel within spitting distance of dead.

"No matter where you go, there you are." - Buckaroo Banzai.

   

                                       It was a good day. Is there something, really, truly better than this kind of thing, this life lived in the sky, on the earth, swimming in the clear stream of time?

                                       No: there isn’t.

Leading on the Wissahickon Schist

                                             This is a controversial topic among Mather Gorge climbers, and one of rather specialized interest; perhaps my store of experience in this area could be helpful to younger trad climbers, first, in deciding whether to even do it at all, and second, to approach it with knowledge that will make it safer and more enjoyable. Of course, when I was younger, safety was not the top item on my list, and the opinions of experienced climbers held little interest for me. Go jump off a cliff, you fusty old farts! What kept me alive while leading a fairly long list of Mather Gorge climbs was fear of death, plenty of cautious preparation, decent ability in placing traditional gear, and good familiarity with the peculiar rock of this area gained through much bouldering and toproping. And, I freely admit, my share of luck, when I made some foolish bets at the Life and Death Casino and barely squeaked by the house odds.

The beautiful polished crag Spitzbergen, where teenage boys leap off into the great, grey, greasy Potomac River and emerge as young men.  Stupid young men, but still... Several fine, hard  5.10s are here, including the AAU Crack, starting on the water, which could certainly be led by a skilled and determined individual.

                                             Leading in the Gorge has a bad reputation. The quality of the rock is unusual: it is semi-metamorphosed, half-melted, very hard and often very smooth, with random quartz inclusions, weird incuts here and there, and some cracks that are rough and nasty while others are parallel and polished. The classic true story that illustrates the apparent danger is well-known: a climber attempted to lead the short but muscular overhanging 5.9 dihedral called Armbuster, fell near the top, had at least one cam fail in flaking rock, and cratered. He was seriously injured, and gave up climbing, according to accounts. It was this very incident that caused me to consider the problem of leading here, and I then continued to lead occasionally whenever I thought a climb would go, and sometimes when I wasn’t as sure as I ought to have been. Such is youth. However, with the perspective of more than a quarter century, I feel qualified to bombastically pontificate as to which climbs can be safely led and which should not be attempted except by stronger and crazier climbers than myself. Take that as a total disclaimer: I am no more an ‘authority’ than anyone else; you must be your own authority in the end, as with all climbing. 

                                              The basic knock on the schist is that cams will skate out of the hard, parallel cracks; some say the teeth can’t bite on the surface of the rock, and others that the intense forces of a lead fall can cause the surface of the rock just under the teeth to become powder, thus allowing an instant Astro-Glide right out of the crack. I can't be sure which of these theories is correct, but I am forced to accept the possibility and allow for it in my placement strategy. When the locals at Wingate tell you to get yourself two sets of fat cams, you'd better just do it. But if cams are totally suspect at Mather Gorge, you need to go retro, and use only nuts, and, if you know how to use them, Tri-Cams. (Advanced gear-heads have been known to use the weird and exotic Ballnutz to good effect.) As it happens there are many excellent placements to be found on some of the more classic lines, and when you slot a perfect nut, properly oriented to the appropriate force vector and tugged to be snug, there is no reason that the schist will spit out the piece any sooner than in any other type of rock.

These equalized Tri-Cams form a directional anchor at the base of Armbuster.  I wanged the sling up, down, sideways and every which way with enthusiasm, and they didn't budge.  

                                                   Reasoning thusly, I went down to Armbuster one day and led it on a few excellent Tri-Cam and nut placements and one totally bomber medium wired nut just before the crux at the top. Although I was in good shape, I was not so strong that I was absolutely sure of making that last move. But in this instance I did not fall, and my placements were not tested.

A perfect nut crack, not far up Armbuster...

...and another one; both of which can take several sizes.

                                             This is a safe lead, assuming as always that you size and place the Tri-Cams properly, so that the point cannot skate out, and that you remember to stem the dihedral's middle section so that you won't be painfully hanging on a jam, wasting grip, while trying to get the gear just right. In the Gorge I am not a true trad purist; I had already toproped all my leads at least once, and before embarking I usually examined them closely on rappel to plan the whole gear sequence.

The last good placement before the desperate final push.  This one is strong...

...but this smaller one, equally strong, leaves more room on this key hold for your hand to grasp it.

                                                    By the way – if you have just arrived from Latvia, local custom forbids the placing of bolts or the use of pitons. One or two feeble attempts to establish bolting have happened in past years, but they were quickly suppressed with a heavy hand. The rock is just too limited in scope, and valuable in its original configuration. It is true that the climb Lost Arrow/Terrapin Station was originally made possible by pin scars, but no one has proposed that that would justify any piton use now. Sometimes aimless talk arises of the parks installing bolt anchors for toproping, for safety and to spare the trees, but nothing seems to come of it. Most of the climbs have healthy tree anchors readily available as well as opportunities for good gear anchors in cracks. For detailed blathering about proper toprope anchors at Great Falls, consult the 2001 edition of the Climber's Guide to the Great Falls of the Potomac, page 17. What a crusty old Victorian relic the writer of that essay must have been! I can see him in knickers and nailed boots, carrying a piolet about four feet long and wearing a bowler. Nevertheless his pithy advice is reasonably accurate. 

                                                    I have not yet fallen on lead in the Gorge, nor will I, as I've done all the nice leads within my ability range. So my placements have not been tested by fire; but I've fallen often enough elsewhere, and they've held up; and I've learned better placements, more patient craftsmanship, from those embarrassing incidents over the years when pieces spontaneously fell out. The worst of these is probably the time I led the short, pretty 5.9 called Possibilities on the lower tier of the Juliet's Balcony area.

A #2 DMM nut in a fairly good placement on the climb Possibilities, but only good for a downward pull.  Notice just above a flake with a shell in it; you could remove the shell and slot a nut very snugly behind the flake.  This is a death trap; the flake will fail.  Listen to what I'm saying to you.

A medium-sized DMM nut in a seductively-good-looking-but-treacherous placement.  It is inserted in a triangular hole and the upper end set behind an overhanging projection.  If you have nothing better, use it, but don't trust it; and in fact, on this short a climb, just don't use it.  Self-deception kills.

Another strong nut for downward pull only.

                                              I had an anchor at the lip and had scoped the pro with intense concentration on rappel; I then led it without falls or hangs on about 5 small to small-ish nuts, all of them satisfying placements, clipped the rope into the toprope anchor to be lowered, and of course, when my belayer tightened up, he being just a few feet out from the base, all the pieces zippered instantly and slid onto his belay device. I had neglected the most basic tenet of trad leading: get a good directional at the bottom. If you wish to lead this climb, do not skip that step! It would not be good to just have the belayer directly underneath, either, as this climb demands strong fingers and some ingenuity almost right off the deck.

                                               It is quite possible to learn trad leading in the Gorge, but I do not recommend the system I employed in 1980 with a couple of partners hardly any more experienced than myself. We (out in Washington State) would go out and fiddle around as much as we dared, using slipshod research, mostly avoiding too much bravado and risk, experiencing trial and error in the typical pattern. Much better, regardless of the rock you have to learn on, is to work with an experienced leader, practice as much as you can at a level that is quite easy physically for you, get real expertise to answer your questions, and if you like have a toprope backup so you can really test your techniques. Here are a few excellent practice leads for those who find 5.8 toproping reliably easy:

Epigone. 5.6. Short, easy, good hand jamming. As much pro as you want. Rough texture.

Romeo's Ladder. 5.6 with nice vertical finish. Takes large pieces in quantity; teaches one not to place gear in the best jams at the top. More strenuous when led, like many climbs. One thing that toproping doesn't necessarily teach is finding rest stances from which to place gear.

Last Exit, 5.6. Wanders enough to help teach rope-drag management through sling lengths. Take a full set of nuts.

Snowflake, 5.6. Gobbles up large and medium nuts; good practice for setting a multiple-piece equalized hanging belay just before the end if desired. 

When those seem simplistic, go on to Bird's Nest (seriously sidewinds, can be used to teach double rope techniques as well as dealing with rope drag), 5.7.

                                                            When you've mastered hand jamming and can easily toprope 5.9, try leading Backslider, an unusually stiff 5.7. 

This #8 DMM nut on Backslider would hold an elephant, or at the very least a hippopotamus.

                                               But proceed with great caution at the start, where the crack is very smooth and somewhat flaring, and the first move peculiar; a great place to sprain an ankle, or worse. Crack takes large stuff and often needs gardening and cleaning beforehand due to the high water of winter filling it with sticks and whatnot. 

Another large and perfect nut on Backslider. If you don't trust this one then maybe the trad leading game is not for you.

                                                     Now that your nerve is a bit stronger, lead Cornice, the king of 5.7s. The start is slightly run out; be patient setting a good piece for the first crux down low, through the tiny chimney. Then just below the main overhang you have plenty of time to set large Tri-Cams and other pieces in a fine equalized anchor in the center crack before moving left a few feet to pull the hang.  There is also a horizontal placement available a couple of feet to the left, a bit harder to place.  Don't make the slings too short, of course, or the rope might bind against the lip as you are climbing above it. Resist the temptation to crouch on the ledge out to the right; setting pro from there is very awkward. Above the hang there are nice medium/small placements to protect the exit, and if your follower agrees, you can set a good nut anchor at the top to belay him up. Pretend there are no trees, and get a good strong anchor in the little vertical crack or farther up around boulders.

                                                    There are good leads across the river at this level, especially on the Knob, with variants, and Rock and Roll, 5.7, at the north end of the Rocky Islands. Creative moves and placements on the Knob on exceptionally polished rock, but lesser physical stress; Rock and Roll is thin jamming, fairly steep, a rough crack that takes gear well; here give care to anchoring the belayer as needed, just as anywhere along the river if the base is chaotic in conformation.  The base is best accessed by rappel or by boat; there is a rather nervy and non-obvious downclimb, with a handy deathfall for the suicidal.

                                                     The best practice for multi-pitch technique in the region is the Ducks Traverse running along below Cow Hoof; not feasible if the river is unusually high. A fine three-pitch traverse at varying heights, teaches technique such as protecting the follower; the finish is a vertical, often dirty climb up into the woods, which has fewer good placements than you would want. One can also continue traversing downstream if that section is too dicey-looking. Supposedly 5.7 but a pretty nervy enterprise, especially turning a sharp corner after crossing a sort of garage-door alcove; weird move tosses people into the river here. Now you're starting to get a bit of genuine adventure in the tame old Gorge. I once found an old hard-shaft Friend deep in a crack here; after manufacturing a retrieval hook with wire I got it out, but never used it. Even then I was prejudiced against using an expensive all-purpose piece that can walk itself into trouble, but which seductively invites you to just shove it in quickly and carelessly. I do like some of the newer designs, (Omega Pacific Link Cams for example) but I just cadge their use from my friends.

     

                                                    When you start getting into the 5.8 leading level, you need to refine your placement skill, your equalization strategy and your overall judgment. For example, the River Wall at Purple Horse is a wandering small-hold and small-crack slab climb on a very smooth and very hard face, and demands creativity, strong fingers, precise footwork and nerve; but I consider it safe for anyone with these skills. But I once led the Seclusion Face, a thin 5.8 with good friction, which I had checked out for protection possibilities, but carelessly, with arrogance in my heart, because after all I had soloed it a couple of times. On a cold day I got to the crux under the little overhang with a questionable small nut probably 8 or 10 feet below me, and I had no protection worth mentioning at the hang, and spent so long fiddling hopelessly with a shallow, flaring little crack that would not have held a chihuahua on a leash, that I ended up almost running out of strength and just went up and did it, faking my way into the death zone like a moron. Well, these things happen, and we either learn from them and strengthen our characters, and correct our mistakes every so gradually, or, eventually the House wins, as we repeat our mistakes once too often.

                                                    Another climb much like that is the Dancing Climb at Boucher Rocks (now seemingly off limits) which is a very pleasant 5.8 friction/face slab toprope. DO NOT LEAD THIS CLIMB. If your particular mental disorder demands that you solo it, do so, but don't pretend to yourself, as I once did, that you are leading it as you fake your way up with three or four tiny, worthless wires. Just to the right of it, by the way, is the excellent 5.8 corner-crack called Long Corner, which is a fine and safe lead. Note: arrogant rich landowners above claim that this stretch of river is theirs, although the 'flood plain', as I understand it, is actually public property. They have a point, because unfortunately this has long been a party spot for yahoos to crap up. But perhaps it will open up again someday. If so be warned that the poison ivy is extremely menacing there.

                                                   Other 5.8s I have led: Center Ring is unexpectedly good for leading, small Tri-Cams useful, as they so often are; and it would not be considered cowardly by any means if a strong piece were to be set into the Rock and Roll crack just to the right at the higher crux.  Caliban is moderately strenuous but straightforward, mostly medium and large (check for yellow jackets on top beforehand); and The Man's Route is short but steep and hard in the first half; this kind of climb demands that you work out your first and second placements before really committing yourself, if possible by a short up-and-down recon. No law says you can't climb three feet, place a good piece and immediately climb back down and think about it some more. The law just says you can't hang on it. In extreme cases like this I have been known to clip the first piece to a sling and onto the rope at my waist, and hold the piece in my teeth until I'm ready to drop it in. The second half of the climb is easier but runout, so step carefully. 

                                                 Getting into the 5.9 arena we are accepting more risk and using more skill and strength, not to mention nerve; but the only reason that these might be considered more dangerous than 5.9s elsewhere is that they are short. You don't have the luxury of having several good pieces in the first thirty feet of moderate climbing, so that you have a nice cushion of rope and space if you fall, as, for example, you do on the perfect granite of Strawberry Jam at Old Rag. Instead you are already burning too much grip ten feet up with a piece at your feet and you'd better have a plan for getting that second piece in PDQ, as we old farts say without embarrassment. I've already talked about Armbuster; for that it's best if you can do ten pullups, know how to jam, layback and stem, and have the final piece already on a sling and easy to grab when you drop it in the beautiful slot. You still don't have any rest there, but at least you can blast for the giant finishing bucket with the last of your grip without crapping your pants about the pro. 

                                               Sickle's Edge is a very nice 5.9 that is completely different; the upper section is classic smooth friction and face climbing, not quite vertical, well protected by a few very specific pockets; the faster you solve the tricky little cruxes the less strenuous it will be. When you master the footwork for this climb (hint: work on Butterfly and Merv's at Carderock to tune up the toes) you will find friction work elsewhere on real granite to be laughably easy.

                                              Pocket Pussy is a safe but nerve-racking vertical lead; the angled, jagged first half takes a couple of big pieces, like Romeo's, but then you are in a mini-cave looking awkwardly up at a smooth bit of crack with a couple of tough pocket-jams; you can't put your pro in those jams, remember.

                                             Rock and Roll is an exciting lead with an overhang crux near the base, with some real oddball pro setups; check this one out very carefully before committing to it.  I recently visited it (Rocky Islands North is one of the prettiest areas on the river) and was sobered to read in my PATC guidebook that, although it is listed at 5.9-, I had revised it for myself as 5.8.  This is a clear incidence of arrogance and self-deception, done when I was much stronger; my partner toproped it and we are convinced that it is harder than 5.8, though easier than some 5.9s on the river.  The lesson is obvious and well-known: subjectivity can creep in anywhere, even into well-done guidebooks at times.  It is up to the climber to apply a safety-margin adjustment tailored to his or her circumstances.  In addition there is the problem of the unreliability of memory itself.  Over and over, as I revisit climbs last done (by me) in decades past, I find that the climb is very different from whatever tags I had placed on it in my head. 

                                               F.I.S.T. at Cow Hoof is one of my favorite leads on the river. Strong, awkward vertical hand jamming at the start is protected by a couple of well-set big Tri-Cams (3 to 5); fight through that, taking care not to dislodge your pieces as you go, and then rest as long as you like on the large grassy ledge, looking at the intermittent finger crack that splits the Hoof above you.  It's nice because from here you can walk off if you don't feel like doing the scary final moves.

Large Tri-Cams protect the start of F.I.S.T.

                                                  You will be able to set more than one excellent nut here; slot your left fingers in the spot with the blade in the bottom, chalk like an addict and go high with the right to small face holds and then to the lip. A classic lead move.

                                                  I am now assuming that my readers at this level will employ good craftsmanship with setting and equalizing nuts. I once watched a stronger climber than I lead Lunging Ledges, patiently setting and equalizing two small nuts in the small flaky cracks. I didn't follow, but I am pretty sure that was a safe lead even though the climb was easy for this guy. If you can pull the climb on toprope ten times out of ten, rap down and look closely at those flakes, and you might find it worth doing. 

                                                  I'll finish up this essay with three climbs that have more complex issues, climbs that perhaps I should not even have attempted. I led Eagle's Nest, 5.9+, on a hot and humid day. Getting to the alcove with a few more-or-less good nuts was not too bad, but the crux of course is traversing left, out, around and up on a weird boulder problem, which I had done only once, years before. AND protection at that point is not nearly as good as what you might like. A fall there will slam you back down on the right wall of the dihedral, too.  I spent a long time just finding a funny contorted rest stance, and then a long time putting in some bullshit, and then even longer whipping my nerve into a froth so I could start the move. My belayer was sorry he agreed to belay me, and the whole experience was bogus, let us say, even though I ticked it. But we do get bored sometimes after a couple of decades at the Gorge, and want some new and stupid sensation.

                                                  Then there was the time I decided I could lead Bridge Too Far, a lovely one-move 5.10a. I used a whole group of shaky rationalizations to justify this one little move, and I succeeded in leading it, but I can't justify it, and I don't recommend it. The crux is fairly low down, but not a place you want to fall from, and it is protected by one rather tiny wire in a very smooth little crack. I instructed my belayer to stand to one side and be instantly ready to yard in one arm's length of rope if I fell, perhaps to reduce some of the acceleration as the wire pulled out. The move is smooth and weird. The rest of the climb is easy and well-protected. But don't lead it, it ain't worth it.

                                                 Years before that I led Two Lane, the classic 5.10-. I still regard it as one of my best leads ever, in spite of certain flaws. My preliminary examination was a little too cursory, and when I arrived at the last rest stance before the strenuous exit sequence, I found that the peculiar flaring crack I had assumed would be fine for a nut was not. It was pure creepy geometric hell. I finally nested two nuts in some ridiculous way and went for it. I knew very well that I would not have the strength to stop and put in a piece in the final finger crack, and that if I peeled off, those two nuts would snap out of there, and I'd fly a fair ways farther before my next piece, a strong one, would catch me. It is a very vertical climb, but I did not want to fall, and I also did not want to admit that I'd really like to be rescued with a rope from above, thank you very much, so I went for the finish with everything I had, in fear and trembling, but with all my power and what skill I had way back then, and I made it. I felt both triumphant and a little shamed: I had taken the risk and won my bid, but was it really worth it? Lying to yourself saps the true enjoyment of your triumphs; if you don't learn better, things just end up hollowed out.

Where is the hard truth, behind the cluttered screen of emotion, under the smooth and perfect surface of the river?

                                                As with all the rest of these climbs, but especially with Two Lane, I strongly recommend that the climber know what the hell he is doing before he starts. But life is never perfect; our control, our judgment and power and skill are always flawed; we just have to do the best we can with what we have, taking full responsibility for ourselves as individuals. That's what climbing is. It isn't a sporty club activity with a safety code and a merit badge. It's you and your life, and me and my life. We watch out for each other, but still we each have to watch out for ourselves, which is the trickiest thing of all. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the coolest climber of us all? The mirror can and does lie. 

                                                I did a nice lead of Sciolist, 5.10+, once, not too many years ago. It is short and bouldery, and the only reason I don't call it a tick is because the last piece, which I needed, had to go in a finger-lock which I also needed, and being in there as I used the hold, it made the move somewhat easier. But you can't relax for a moment even on this short a climb, because if your pro is crap and you crater, you will bounce off the ledge you started from and go another nasty twenty feet down to the river's edge. Two craters for the price of one.

The Treacherous Potomac River which drowns several incautious people per year.  It should be ashamed of itself.

 

                                                        At the far other end of the scale, Peg's Progress is a very nice and dramatic 5.4 that makes a fun beginner lead.