Death Grip (20 page)

Everyone, apparently, has his vice.

Thudd-idd-bupp.

A
fter six years of the long-distance
dance, Luisa and I end it. She's a city girl and wants to be in Torino or New York, and I'm a misanthropic urban-agoraphobe. We still love each other dearly, but it will never work. I put her on the bus to Denver International Airport; it seems simpler this way, no hour-long drive full of “what-ifs” and “I'm so sorry, amore.” The pain is startling, a suture clear to my heart. I've taken a job as an HTML coder, sipping Theraflu at my desk for a sneaky office-drone high, strapping on earphones, trying to tune out the thirty-odd telemarketers with whom I share space in a big, open office in downtown Boulder, trying not to cry when thoughts of Luisa come crowding in. The end of your first love: It's a grief like no other. I've started coming back to my climbing roots, the so-called “traditional” climbs in which the leader places removable protection—nuts, cams, and so on. In sport climbing, the only mental battle lies in psyching yourself up to try the same climb repeatedly, because every fall is at essence safe—onto a preplaced bolt guaranteed to hold thousands of pounds of force. But in trad climbing, the
head,
the
nerves
, are everything: You have only yourself to rely on to protect a lead and in cases where you must “run it out”—climb great distances between available points of protection. You also need to develop technical proficiency at quickly sizing up and placing the gear, which hangs in a “rack” off a padded shouder sling, and at hanging out in strenuous stances—sometimes by the fingertips of one hand—to tinker with placements. Even then protection can fail; the rock can break or the gear can skate, or you can have neglected to put a long sling on a piece around a sharp arête and your rope might sever in a fall. There are so many variables. It's like chess mated with Russian roulette: skill and savvy
+
a dash of dumb luck. For this reason, I know 5.14 sport climbers who refuse to lead 5.11 traditional climbs. I take up with trad friends, aficionados of Eldorado Canyon, the local sandstone bastion known for its death routes—climbs with legendary runouts. Something about the calculated nihilism these climbs require appeals to me, of panting twenty feet above micro nuts smaller than pinky nails, committing to a shaky reach off some embedded crystal as I plead with my belayer to “Watch me!” I lead climbs like
Night
and
Inner Space
and
Clear the Deck
, barely protected 5.11 horror routes that might go years without an ascent, collecting dust and bird droppings. Other friends and I get into highball bouldering, trying difficult problems twenty feet or taller over a nest of crash pads, flying to earth when we fail, pounding the cartilage out of our knees. I'm smoking weed nonstop, speeding down Boulder's thoroughfares without a seat belt, cruising home from friends' houses fucked up, downing three glasses of red wine a night, not giving a whit about personal longevity.

And I'm free soloing. I'm taking Ativan, smoking dope, and free-climbing without a rope.

Free soloing is climbing at its purest and most fatal: Alone, without a cord, you free-climb the rock, risking a fall to the ground should anything go wrong—should you get pumped and slip, miscalculate a move, or break a hand or foothold; should a rainstorm slicken the rock, or a pigeon fly from a crack and thump you in the chest, causing a startled release. Climbers die soloing, even the best. Most ardent soloists will at some point either quit, realizing that they can't continue to tempt fate; have a soloing accident but survive only to dial it back; or perish in the act. Soloing polarizes climbers like no other discipline, with some celebrating it as the highest form of vertical poetry and others reviling it as pointless, juvenile, selfish, and suicidal. I once had a woman, packing up to leave below a 5.8 crack I'd been waiting to solo, tell me, “Hold on, I want to get my backpack out of here before you splatter blood all over it.” It's impossible to watch someone soloing and not have a reaction: The act is so
naked.
I'd dabbled with soloing as a teenager, in that vulnerable period in any young climber's career when experience has not yet taught you that you're mortal. I quit my senior year in high school after witnessing a friend, Pete, nearly fall what would have been 150 feet beside me in the Sandia foothills.

In 1998 and 1999 in Boulder, I took to it again, mainly in Eldo and the Flatirons in a disinhibited demi-deathwish frenzy. Many of the solos were onsight—sans prior knowledge of the climbs' particular nuances and sequences. In other words, unlike the “safer” brand of soloing in which you first practice a climb on a rope, I'd go for it with limited foreknowledge, heading up after a cursory glance at the guidebook. I had an oversized gray chalk bag with a bottom zipper pouch for holding sundries like car keys. In here I'd also shove my Ativan bottle and a one-hitter. If anything went wrong, went the reasoning, I could swallow a pill or find a ledge and get high(er). The drugs were my “belay.” I never did anything world-class—my solos were in the 5.9 to 5.11 range, though often on slippery, licheny, pigeon-droppings-covered friable rock. I never catalogued or documented any of them; I don't keep a route journal like some climbers. This commando approach often landed me in trouble.

In spring of 1999 I set out to free-solo a 5.10 called
The Serpent,
which meanders along a hanging arch on Redgarden Wall, which, at eight hundred feet, is Boulder's highest cliff.
The Serpent
is a two-pitch route, but I'd only ever done the first pitch, the 5.10 crux, which made a series of undercling moves along the belly of the arch, your feet dancing across tiny rugosities below. The guidebook confirmed that the second pitch was “only” 5.9, so I paid little attention to where it went. Screw it—I could sort it out when I got there. I climbed through the first pitch to a ledge separating the two ropelengths, regrouped, then set off along a layback crack that dead-ended at a blocky overhang—a “roof.” From the crack, I could extend up to a poor, downward-sloping hold over the roof's apex, but saw nothing above, only blank lime-green sandstone. I moved up repeatedly, matched hands on the sloper, stabbed my right foot onto a crumbly red sugar cube of rock, and groped blindly for hidden grips. Nothing. I was starting to get tired, my forearms tight, alone one hundred feet above a tilted ramp that sloped down to a three-hundred-foot plunge to the base of Redgarden Wall. Climbers die this way, in stupid situations like this, and then mountain rescue has to come along later and piece together what happened from the chalk prints and bloodstains. I soon steeped in a hot rush of fear, what climbers call “getting gripped.” When fight-or-flight hits and you're unroped, you become keenly aware of your surroundings. You leave the “bubble” of concentration you've so far cultivated as a buffer against your naked peril. Time slows, and you must let the moment pass before continuing. I call this the “sea of rock” effect—a sudden realization that you're trapped on this unnatural vertical plane, surrounded in all directions by nothing but cold, hard, unforgiving stone; a tabula rasa forged eons ago beneath the planet that could care less if it sees your limbs ragdolled and brains spilled across its flanks. The shadows deepen, the calls of darting swallows echo on into infinity, lichens grow more vibrant, vertigo spins the ground ever farther away, and you can
feel
each air molecule around the cliff, the cooler, emptier ethers climbers associate with exposure—with the drop-offs we fear just as instinctually as everyone else. Then come the thoughts:
Man does not belong here. You're walking on the moon without oxygen. Get down NOW!
But you must shove them into the background and move into autopilot to find a quick exit, be it up, down, or sideways.

Up-down, up-down, up-down, up-down: I grew ever more gripped, suddenly, painfully, cognizant of the cruel red slabs, lightless maroon corners, and bottomless black huecos all around that mocked my plight,
Ha ha ha ha ha! Die die die die die! Die, loser, die!
This seemed
way
harder than 5.9; maybe I was missing a hold. I shook out each forearm, chalked up, and reached to the lip a final time. As I came halfway over my right foot, my quadriceps started to quiver with “Elvis Leg.”
No, no, no, no, no.
I had no right to be here, threshold-soloing like this; I was going to crater and die
right here right now
. I reversed from the roof in a chattering frenzy, and sprinted down to the ledge like a rat fleeing floodwaters. Perching my buttocks on the sloping platform, I sat, took off my rock shoes, and popped an Ativan, letting it dissolve on my tongue. The pill tasted sweet, like a Smarties candy. I must have rested that way for fifteen minutes, an owl on a tree branch. In time, I spotted an escape left onto an easier climb, a 5.8, and moved across until I could reverse to terra firma. I asked around later and learned that
The Serpent's
second pitch went hard right, and that the roof I'd been trying was unclimbed, a possible 5.12. I wish I could say this was the only time like this, but there were others—like the day I came
millimeters
from falling fifty feet to my death alone in the Flatirons, barely catching a fingertip slot as I, quivering and off-balance, began to “barn-door” (swing) off on an unfamiliar 5.11c I had sequenced poorly due to fear-fueled haste.

Thudd-idd-bupp. Thudd-idd-bupp. Thudd-idd-bupp. Thudd-idd-bupp.
Your heart can only handle so much adrenaline.

Two
questions you probably want
to ask are, “Were benzos performance enhancers? Did they let you try climbs you otherwise never would have tackled?” The answer is complex: It's both “yes” and “no.” “Yes” in the sense that, like marijuana, Ativan can be disinhibiting: It removed certain barriers to self-destruction that might have otherwise remained in place. And “yes” also in the sense that, in these early months of daily benzo use, the drug—at least the first dose of the day, which always came on stronger—had enough of a sedating, anxiolytic effect that it did dampen fear … at least until early afternoon when the pill wore off and I felt panicky with interdose withdrawal. And “yes” also in that there were a select few climbs for which I took extra benzos, knowing how much fear I needed to face. In 1998 for example, at Hueco Tanks, a few of us crossed into Juarez and purchased ninety Valium directly from a crooked pharmacist. I burned through my allotted thirty pills by the second week, when we found an untapped labyrinth of caves and boulders atop West Mountain, Hueco's tallest mound. We called this area The Realm, both for its surreal, otherworldly feel and for the mentally foggy “realm” of substance abuse in which we dwelled. All day at the boulders it was pills, homegrown crippler and hashish, and Carlo Rossi jug wine. We climbed boulder “problems” that were fifty-foot miniroutes over black, yawning chasms, over lightless caves that spilled off cliff edges, over tilted, ankle-shattering slabs and punji-stick dead trees. I believe that two of the first ascents I made, difficult “super-highball” problems called
Chewbacca
and
Big Right
, remain unrepeated. The former climb is a thirty-foot flat brown face cooked into terra-cotta plates, your only holds the minuscule razor-crimps at the joints. The landing is a canted rock ramp, and once past the overhang you must steel yourself for a thirty-foot 5.10 slab, dancing from declivity to declivity, the void at your back. I'd been so out-of-body gripped as I lunged for an incut flake near the end of the difficulties, at twenty-five feet, that I'd had to scream at myself—“C'mon, Matt!”—as if in the third person. The latter problem,
Big Right
, navigates an overhanging slot from which the landing drops catastrophically, with the hardest moves—dynos to flat, bricklike holds—coming over the worst possible fall. Both problems were done drunk, stoned, and pasted on Valium, in a fearless fog so thick I had to jump-start each morning with a “crappuccino”—a one-liter Nalgene bottle filled with four tablespoons of instant coffee, four tablespoons of nondairy creamer, and four tablespoons of sugar. My friends thought I was nuts.

I wrote an article—the basis for this book—that appeared in the June 2010 issue of
Outside
. In it I asked rhetorically, “Can an acme be a nadir?” in particular reference to
Primate,
a 5.13 death route I established in the Flatirons in 2000. Because
Primate
climbs a crackless, overhanging wall that's off-limits to bolting, I did the climb in a style called “headpointing”: top-rope rehearsal in anticipation of a dangerous lead, with the idea that you must not fall. (The word is a hybrid of “heady” and “redpointing.”) With my friend Steve, a crusty, old-school Wisconsinite carpenter who abhorred sport climbing and would even go around removing bolts he disapproved of, I spent three days rehearsing the line, then led it while Steve belayed and my then girlfriend, Haven, took photos.
Primate
follows a black water streak splitting rainbow-hued rock, and the crux, a series of tenuous moves on fragile crystals and crimpers, comes sixty feet above a VW-sized boulder we jokingly christened “the Pillow.” Your fate rests entirely on an expanding tube chock called a Big Bro (think giant, spring-loaded toilet-paper tube) jammed diagonally against a small overlap. Should the Big Bro skate out at the crux, you will land on the Pillow and ram your legs through your skull. Before I set off to lead
Primate,
I snuck off into the Ponderosa and took four Ativan—twice my usual daily dose—returned, took a slug off Steve's ubiquitous hip flask of whiskey, and then donned rock shoes. That was just how it went in those years.

But the answer is also “no,” the benzos didn't aid me as a climber, because I surely would have gone through this risky period anyway, being a nihilistic twenty-something male recovering from heartbreak. (There is a longstanding tradition in the climbing world of young men pulling off crazy, often solo feats after failed relationships.) And “no” also in the sense that with each passing month, as I built tolerance to the Ativan, it began to elevate my overall anxiety level such that I had to take the pills just to feel
normal
—that is, primarily to stave off withdrawal symptoms. Which is certainly consistent with Dr. Ashton's finding that tolerance to benzos' anxiolytic action can develop over just a few months, with clinical observations showing that “long-term use does little to control, and may even aggravate” the condition.”
6
And finally “no” in the sense that, as the years wore on, the pills in their ever-escalating doses made me uncoordinated, slow-minded, fat, and increasingly fearful. By 2003, on three milligrams of Klonopin a day, I'd become a full-on liability at the cliffs. It was that summer that a partner, the late Michael Reardon, caught me pill-popping—at the Needles, California, an eerie beetling of granite spires high over the Kern River Canyon in the Sierra foothills. I was there with Michael, a Hollywood producer, notable free soloist, and onetime glam-rocker with a proud blond mane, to sample the area's legendary trad climbs. Halfway through the trip we tried
Don Juan Wall
, a beeline of thin cracks and bald corners on the cleaved southern edge of the Sorcerer Needle, the Kern River spinning in the mix a mile below. The third pitch, a blank stemming problem with micro protection, was my lead, but locked in mid-afternoon tolerance hell I remember being loath to commit. I dithered at the crux until my legs quivered and my hands threatened to slosh off. I downclimbed twenty feet back to Michael's ledge in a panic, tugging out the gear as I went, and said the thing you never want to hear your partner say on a perfect, bluebird climbing day: “Man, I don't think I can go any farther.” I slunk off to the edge of the ledge, took the bottle from my windbreaker, popped a Klonopin, and then saw Michael looking at me.