What would stop you from climbing? As in, what would make you retire? And would you be okay with stopping?

Stopping climbing is not like trading softball for golf in your 40s. People stop playing baseball, softball, and football at a point everyone commonly accepts, when the new “kids” joining are faster and can drink you under the table. Climbing doesn’t have the same convention because climbing is also entwined with a lifestyle who’s ethics are about being scrappy and overcoming hurdles.

Except everything comes to an end and hopefully it’s by a conclusion of our choosing. However, even for the dedicated climber, the end of climbing can be quite subtle. Now I am worried that I may have inadvertently crossed some sort of invisible threshold.

HOW LONG CAN YOU GO?

Of course, there are lots of people that climbed into old age. Fred Becky is everyone’s favorite example. Don Mellor said he never thought of himself as old, which is why he told him he even thought of becoming a schoolteacher when he was in his 70s. Gary Bloch, a man who climbed throughout his lifetime, went up El Capitan at age 81. Not too far off in age, Tom Choate summited Denali at age 78.

They are inspiring examples, but they are also outliers. Most climbers are active in their 20s and into their 30s. Then again, perhaps today more climbers are active in their teens and 20s, due to the growth of modern climbing gyms and organized climbing, which wasn’t as prevalent a 20 years ago.

I sometimes meet people that say they used to climb. Sara, a close colleague in Washington about ten years older than me, blurted out one day when they learned I liked climbing, “I used to climb at Cochise Stronghold.” We talked about how she had climber friends in college and she just tagged along. She didn’t climb back East, so it was a college thing. “But I’d love to go back,” she added.

Injury is such a fickle excuse. Sometimes it’s final and sometimes we treat it like it’s final when it’s temporal. It depends on the injury, but even losing a finger to a circular saw making homemade shims (read up on Tommy Caldwell for more on this) doesn’t stop people, they adapt. Injuries that result in a handicap seem to just present a new hurdle to overcome.

Another friend, we’ll call Kerry, had her first serious climbing injury at Earth Treks in Crystal City (that’s National Landing to those new to DC.) She tore a shoulder tendon and between surgery and recovery, she wasn’t climbing for 18 months. (Or should I say a mere 18 months?)

Health might be the real show stopper. Anything effecting energy levels and strength can sideline someone significantly. I suffer from eczema, and there was a time when the holds in the summer and the chalk was making my arms turn red and itchy. But that was brief. Cancer and other serious diseases, and their treatments, can really keep us from climbing.

The late great David Roberts stopped going to Alaska around the 1980s. He said he was often asked if he still climbed and his answer is no, or not like he used to. Roberts explained that it was too hard to stay in climber shape and too scary to climb the routes like the ones he established. He replaced the time he devoted to Alaskan pioneering to exploring the American desert southwest, and even wrote books about it.

For me, Wednesday, March 11, 2020 was the last day I visited my gym to climb because the next day, my organization felt the coronavirus was emerging as major threat and I was writing up contingency plans to on how to shutdown our nonprofit’s operations. After that I didn’t go anywhere except the office to hang a sign on the door, “We’re closed; please call or email us.” I took on an understanding attitude about everything, but privately I mourned the disruption to our community and not going to the gym to climb. I wondered: How would I fill my cup now?

FORCED CHANGE

Without work, my commute, and climbing as part of my weekly routine, how I spent my time for work, family, and to maintain health and wellness had to change. For a while I just rode my bike and took more walks, but that wasn’t anything like the physical and mental puzzle climbing offered. Eventually, I took a golf club outside and dropped a Wiffle ball on our lawn and practiced my swing. Then I made a game of going around the house in as few shots as possible.

Schnickelfritz got his two-and-a-half foot club and joined me. We had such a good time together, we did the next natural thing and visited the golf course just a couple of block away from our home. Though it was closed by law, we would play a hole or just hit a sleeve of balls as far and straight as we could down a fairway. When golf courses re-opened, they became a safe outdoor meeting place. Before I was conscious about it, golf was taking up some significant space in my life.

It is ironic to me that golf has re-emerged in my life now. This blog was the result of some practicality. In 2010, at the cafe in Middlebury, VT I was trying to find a way to use my free time back home in DC to bring me more joy. My first idea was to play better golf. I would take lessons and play every Saturday. Except, Natalie and I shared one car, getting to the affordable courses were not convenient, we had an expensive mortgage and were planning a family. Oh, and I traveled frequently for work, so taking another five to six hours (with commute) to get a weekly round in was exorbitant. I would be sticking with the status quo of playing in golf once or twice a year when invited to fill a foursome. But writing this thing called a blog about the books and interests I had in mountaineering seemed like a smart path. This brings me joy. 

Will I climb again? I don’t see why I wouldn’t. I might become the regular golfer and the occasional climber. I will always hike and peak bag via less vertical routes, Lord willing, since they require less fitness maintenance. All I know for sure is that the space for reading and writing about climbing hasn’t been overtaken (and it has been nearly impossible to replace!)

HOW DO YOU FILL YOUR CUP?

You’ve probably heard those analogies involving a cup and how it pertains to you as a person. I don’t know how the one I am using here, in the header, and this blog post, originated. There are two I am intimately familiar with. First, Jesus prayed to His Holy Father that this cup pass from him if possible, meaning the job of being crucified, be given to someone else (then he also prayed, Your will be done, and it was.) Second, Buddhism has a story that explains how a student should come to a teacher, and if the student’s cup arrives full, everything the teacher shares will just end up on the table and floor in a wet mess.

For some reason, life coaches everywhere on the Internet use this one: You, like every person, has an inner cup that can hold all kinds of things, and they teach that you should fill it only with good things that give you joy and make you well.

Years ago, I asked Banff winning author Chris Kalman what makes a full climbing life? He saw the fallacy of my question, and politely tried to explain: “To me, there is no full climbing life, there is only a full life. And a full life is not a destination, or an end-goal, but a process and a pursuit.” Kalman knew that there were not multiple cups that made up the cup of life. It’s what you fill that one cup with and how you fill it.

Both Sara and Kerry had transitions placed upon them. One moved. One had an injury. Both could have been overcome, yet they embraced a different set of circumstances. Sara had a family and developed a career. She was healthy and happy. Kerry still climbed but the first thing I thought of her now when catching up through her social media pages, and seeing her at conferences just recently was the standup comic performer. Kerry will tell you that she wouldn’t have gone to the comedy clubs to make people laugh, rather than to laugh, without the change after her injury.

Sara, Kerry, and Chris all gave themselves some liberty in how they define themselves: Although they all climbed, and they called themselves climbers, they didn’t define or identify themselves solely by their climbing. I don’t think they would define themselves solely as professionals or comedians either.

Perhaps the end of climbing is all about how you are presented with the occasion and what you do next. The end would be worth mourning if it meant your death, if that was how you identified yourself. But if you have something to replace it, and it is a thing of quality, then perhaps there won’t be a hole in you, or empty space in your cup. I pray that if the end of climbing comes for you, that you have or find what you need to continue with a full cup, a full life. But please don’t stop reading about it, because that wouldn’t be life to its fullest.

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During my 15 years in Washington, DC I would measure my recreation by being a climbing year or a golf year. If I climbed more days than I golfed, it was a climbing year. I haven’t been back to my climbing gym since March 11th, due to the pandemic, and since working lunches have been replaced by nine holes of golf with some colleagues and partners, I am already calling this a golf year.

In DC, I only had two solid climbing years, actually, and that was all thanks to Sportrock Alexandria near my home. Of course, if I count all summits on a family hike, then every year might be a climbing year. But I am mainly referring to roping up on technical terrain and bouldering.

Why did I measure my years as climbing or golf years anyway? Because you, or most of you, have a distaste for golf. Golf’s stuffiness and elitist ways are everything golf is not, and climbing is humbler, more in tune with nature, a greater physical challenge that leads to great enlightenment, right? This has been a silent war, especially for climbers that actually enjoy golf. And, as a golfer, they enjoy it for things you enjoy too.

Golf has a bad reputation among most climbers. To climbers, golf is for rich people without enough responsibility, traveling around the world with expensive hardware and fancy clothes, chasing a white ball along manicured landscapes. And they think golfers are snobs.

Of course, the two generally don’t get along. To golfers, climbing is for grungy people without enough responsibility, traveling around the world with expensive hardware, and fancy clothes, going up mountains the hard way unnecessarily in dangerous landscapes. And they think climbers are crude.

Although, culturally, golfing and climbing are distinct, there are some uncanny similarities when you look at what a climber and a golfer wants that is serious about pursuing it. Both require an investment in expensive, technical gear. Improving at both often becomes an obsession. Both are intrinsically connected to the natural environment, and is a common attraction for climbers and golfers.

Wait, is golf natural? Hitting a ball with a stick is ages old and seems like intrinsic child’s play. But what about the course, doesn’t it use valuable resources excessively? It depends on the value you give it. Golf alone, maybe not. There is new research demonstrating the value of public and private land used for golf for the surrounding community, being lead by the Brian Horgon, PhD of the University of Minnesota. The national golf association is working with him and course owners and public mangers to expand the perspective of the current land use and enhance its value. These plots of of land are green spaces (best when tree lined,) rain gardens and recharge ground water, support darker night skies from light pollution, and, if arranged properly, can support foraging for pollinators. Like a nonprofit, there is a double bottom line here.

For that matter, is climbing natural? I don’t mean the act of climbing, as it is also very much intrinsic child’s play at least in some format, such as climbing a tree. But what about our impact on the crag, base, and route? Some of us are better than others at leaving no trace. But the impact of pitons, cams, and bolts are a little subjective. In fact, there is a new study on climber’s negative impact on some ferns and mosses. Elevated build-up of climbing chalk can be significant even if it’s not visible to our eye. I think we will all be better, as a starting point, if we all sign and follow the Climber’s Pact; I have.

There is, of course, no need for a peace accord or even a detente. There haven’t been any attacks either way, so far as I am aware. But golf, below the tour professionals, and the exclusive American country clubs, golf is a game played among friends and strangers made into playing partners with a common bond and purpose, trying to do the silliest thing with a bunch of sticks and a little plastic ball.

My gear is humble, old, and often acquired on a discount. My golf balls were purchased on a Black Friday special 10 years ago, so when I lose one in the pond, it doesn’t hurt so bad. I play inexpensive courses, or on someone else’s charity. I play as often as possible and enjoy it whenever I do. Yeah, golf has it’s humbler qualities too.

I met a couple of avid climbers that take golf seriously, or at least as seriously as I do. As seriously as I do means they care about how they play and practice, though they don’t play as often as folks with a golf club membership. Interestingly, they all look at climbing as a thread of a saga in their lives. They work to improve, progress, or just see what new challenge or destination their journey might take them to. I’ve got a tee time for work tomorrow, but I am looking forward to visiting Mount Gretna again too.

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I like to work from home; jeans, no shoes, and a baseball cap all the time. I like to to see my wife and kids often; I don’t get tired of them. And if the reason I was at home were more like a snow or ice storm, while self-isolating at home, would have been a pretty nice week.

On the other hand, I’ve been home working longer days to run our local Habitat for Humanity affiliate, We reluctantly made the very painful decision to furlough most of the staff because all non-essential businesses closed in Pennsylvania and even all residential construction (Habitat’s specialty) was ordered to stop. I’ve been busy handling financial options, considering the future’s permutations, and setting communications strategies that adapt.

Related, I also made a discovery about my eczema flair ups, thanks to my more efficient nutrition plan: One beer over several days won’t spur a flair up, but one beer every day for three days will! The stress of cost cutting probably egged it along. I won’t be having a beer a day any longer; it was probably a frivolous craving in this time regardless.

As comes with self-isolating, the kids are home with us all the time too, sometimes plodding through work from their teachers. I wonder if this is what homeschooling is like. Natalie and I are still figuring out how to juggle work and parenting. Both of our gyms closed, which affected Natalie more than me because she likes the sophisticated gym equipment and the amenities; I can’t blame her. I workout in the basement with just a yoga mat, a couple of free weights, and a hangboard; I put all my gym allowance to belong to a gym with ever changing puzzles arranged from plastic holds. And despite my general dislike for running, I am jogging more often, especially after weighty conference calls.

I paused from reading Found by Bree Loewen for a moment to get through a library book. I am reading a book on baseball, which I borrowed on my birthday, the day Major League Baseball announced that the season would be delayed. So it’s filling a void and a different escape. I’ll be back to Found later this week. Since I last posted I added two books to my list: 1) Troll Wall by Tony Howard (2011,) and 2) My Life in Climbing by Ueli Steck (2018.) Troll Wall was recommended to me by David Price and I am glad that he mentioned it. Steck’s autobiography is actually for a question that I have been pondering for over a year and instead of just diving in and writing about it, I am doing more research (and really looking forward to read it after I finish Loewen’s book.)

Soon I’ll get restless, I suppose. Normally, when we deal with crises or natural disasters, I am donating money or directing some of our gifts at Habitat to tsunami relief or a post-earthquake home build project in Nepal, and my kids make care packages. But this crisis asks us to be inactive, stay at home, and stay away. I never imagined or could have imagined this happening throughout America two weeks ago, even as I read the stories from Wuhan or Italy.

It’s also odd in that we are not looking to rebuild homes or defeat a moral enemy, like the Nazis. We’re dealing with existential challenges to our freedom and our ability to roam freely. I can wait a little longer to go to the gym and visit Mt. Gretna again. I can dash into a grocery story just to get what will feed my family of four. Heck, I don’t need beer or coffee like I used to. Maybe God was preparing Natalie and I for this? This takes a fortitude of a different kind, and it hasn’t gone long enough for me to know what it is supposed to look like.

Although I put on a strong face for my staff, board, family, and parents, I am pretty scared deep down about the short term. I don’t want to get sick and don’t want anyone to get sick. I don’t want to die and I don’t want anyone to die from this virus either. I pray daily (I always have) and have faith, but, like so many things, there is a lot out of our direct control. I am self-isolating with compliance but I miss the climbing gym, and getting in the car for fun destinations on the weekend, dropping into my favorite burrito shop, and hugging colleagues in greeting and slapping high fives when we solve a problem or help improve someone’s life.

I’ll keep doing what I always do, but from home instead, with a little more courage than usual. Stay safe and healthy, my friends.

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These days when people learn I love climbing and have this blog, they inevitably say one of two things:

“Have you seen Free Solo?”

And,

“You must be thrilled that climbing is included in the Olympics now.”

In short, Yes, and, Eh.

Yes, I have seen Free Solo. The climb was incredible, but no, my hands didn’t sweat. Maybe because I wasn’t there filming it. I remember when social media exploded with the news Alex Honnold climbed El Capitan alone without a rope. I read about it a ton. It was spectacular. In fact, I even waited to watch the film until after I read Mark Synnott’s book. (I suspect I was the only person in the world to do this.) And I still liked Jimmy Chin’s Meru more.

And as for the Olympics, I am actually indifferent. I’ve never gotten excited about the summer Olympics and I don’t enjoy competition climbing. Although I climb indoors for fitness and center myself, comp climbing is its own discipline.

In fact, the Olympic comp climbing doesn’t fit into my scope: Here are my guidelines I follow (and regularly break for a rant:) Focus on the essence of the alpine experience, Draw on the power of the mountains, No Mount Everest, No sport or comp climbing.

I’ve heard that potential competitors aren’t pleased with the format. The Olympic Committee requires the 20 male climbers and 20 female climbers to compete in all three events, including lead climbing, bouldering, and speed climbing. All three events are unique, especially for the climbers. The training and preparation for each event is different. We’re all specialists, or at least we’re specialists at one discipline at a time. Speed climbers are usually just speed climbers and the lead climbers won’t be competitive at speed climbing. Either way, the winner will be the best overall. But even then, it’s not just comp climbing, but Olympic comp climbing.

TSM aside, I think the Olympic adoption of climbing events had plenty to do with the growth of climbing gyms worldwide. In Buffalo, where I grew up, I didn’t have a gym in the 1990s. I had to drive north to Niagara County for an odd climbing gym that only had preset knots in carabiners ready for a harness. Now, Buffalo has a large, upscale Central Rock Gym, like those in the greater Boston area. In fact, for a while, the climbing gym industry was seeing 40 new gyms a year being added across the country.

Climbing’s popularity has grown exponentially and fostered more competition events, coverage on mainstream television stations, and I suspect one day soon I will be buying Five Ten climbing shoes (now owned by Adidas, by the way) for my kids at Dicks Sporting Goods, or — gulp — Target.

I think that the growth in climbing gyms has been wonderful. Again, it goes to my general point and value statement that climbing matters. Whether we want an escape from the urban or suburban wasteland, a vista from a summit, or just found a way to get our body engaged with nature, whatever we seek has been met with climbing somewhere, somehow. Even, for some of us, in the Olympics.

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The other day I was rearranging my bookshelf to put the guidebooks all in one place, the narratives in another, and box up some that I use less frequently. The shelf is stacked from floor to ceiling inter-mixed with an old piton, an old belay device, broken altimeter, thank-you cards from Banff, and the knife from my Uncle Tom. I came across my oldest set of climbing magazines from the early 2000s and two books from the early 1990s. They affected me how they always affect me; a flood of forgotten feelings, including an impulse drop everything to go to the Adirondack Mountains, came over me like a wave.

Later that week, I realized that I wouldn’t be who I am today without the experiences those climbing magazines and books gave me. It wouldn’t have happened without the arrival of a new bookstore in town.

Although I have been told I watched a lot of television when I was a kid, what I remember most about growing up in my home was my mother, father, and siblings reading. They read the Bible, The Buffalo Evening News (when it was still delivered daily around five p.m.), magazines, Reader’s Digest, books from the library and the bookstore at the mall. I remember reading The Young Astronauts series and how it ; my imagination was strong and while I muddled through the school day, I could always come home to read and then go out into the six-acre woods behind my home to play out exploring the Martian surface. Outside the enchantment around my house, everything seemed lackluster.

Everything except for the high peaks of the Adirondack Mountains, a six-hour drive away that until college, we only made the trip for a week once a year. The breeze on a bald summit, the edge of a flat-water lake, the silence on a trail surrounded by mossy boulders and evergreens, and the remote rock faces were beyond the scope of my imagination. I was awed by it all. One week in the ‘Dacks filled my cup for a whole year.

Around 1998, the sleazy bookshop at the mall was unseated as the great local bookstore. That’s when a Barnes & Noble opened up in my neighborhood of Buffalo, NY. The one at the mall was the place anyone at the mall seemed to hang out who didn’t have money to spend but needed somewhere to go. The loiterers endlessly perusing magazines and trinkets; they rarely entering the two long narrow aisles of books. I visited the American history section mostly, seeking interesting stories of people rising up to do important things.

Until the arrival of Buffalo’s Barnes & Noble, the only climbing book I owned was John Long’s How to Rock Climb: Face Climbing (1992), which I bought at the Eastern Mountain Sports in Lake Placid. I had stumbled, without knowing it, into bouldering on mossy Adirondack glacial “pebbles” the size of pickups and box trucks strewn through the Adirondack High Peaks. No one was there to teach me so I hoped this book would unlock some secrets. It did, by teaching me different foot positions and even introduced me to the technique and joy of slab climbing, which is abundant in the Adirondacks.

I suddenly had access to publications, like the American Alpine Journal that demonstrated what a serious and detailed group many climbers were, Climbing Magazine, which taught me skills, and Rock & Ice, which had fascinating features about people that appeared to have surrendered themselves over to climbing. I peruse these issues every few years, often when packing or unpacking for a move, like when we went from Alexandria, VA to Lancaster, PA. I still get this urge and sense of suddenly being unsettled, and feel the need to load my backpack with my helmet, put on my boots and drive to the Adirondacks or White Mountains in the dead of night to be there by morning and hit a trail to a peak or a hidden (always hidden) crag.

I also discovered David Roberts’ books in that bookstore. I bought a copy of Moments of Doubt, a collection of his articles. I have two memories strongly associated with finding this book. First, I was laying in bed before going to sleep reading the essay “Five Days on Mount Huntington.” In the introduction to the article, Roberts wrote, “I have never lived through a five-day span or comparable intensity.” I read on, as if I were a silent partner traveling with Roberts and Ed Bernd on Mount Huntington, even after Bernd’s mysterious accident that left Roberts alone, high on the mountain, to endure days and nights of storm. My eyes widened, I held the book tightly, and I felt my mostly-dark bedroom was a tent on a snow-blown mountainside that was horrifyingly stormy. Bernd was certainly gone, but Roberts was also certainly aware and the wisdom of his experience was like a candle lit in my dim suburban neighborhood.

The other memory is thinking that I had a treasure. The climbing genre books at 796.522 next to the baseball and hockey books were deep. It wasn’t about breaking sport franchise records, or the final scores, or even changing the world or important things like ending poverty. I have always been into religion and theology and the human experiences of climbers written by climbers were the closest things that I related to and connected with from my experiences in the Adirondacks. They were human, emotional, at times egotistical, often impossible to put into words, and yet more enlightened about life and being alive than I have ever read. I had found literature that wasn’t about insight into the every day, I found people that came from the every day and transcended the every day. They found the mountain high and the peace and clarity that comes from the heights. I felt it before, but I thought it was reserved for church and prayer time and maybe after my mountain vacations, and yet, I found it reading these books by people doing something… seeking something, though they rarely ever said what they were seeking. I connected with them.

And I kept the treasure, the books, and my mountain climbing, a secret for a long, long time. It was too personal, too important, to share. Peakbagging, ice climbing, and bouldering gave me power; today I call it being centered. I didn’t share it, I think, because I  thought that if I shared my love for climbing books and climbing that my secret power would be diminished. I had been bullied and picked in elementary school. In defense, I learned not to bring up things that would make me vulnerable. In Buffalo, I had a fire in me, but I felt like very few people supported keeping it lit and a few wanted me to put it out. I don’t know why, even as I turned 40. When I graduated college, I left for Washington, DC without a job, without a cell phone, a bag with three suits and several neckties, a laptop, my Bible, and a box of climbing books.

By 2004, I was established in a job working for my hometown Congressman. One night while watching C-Span from the office, I was emailing the boss with recommendations on how he ought to vote on all of the procedural amendments to an appropriations bill. In between votes, during drawn-out remarks by other members of congress, I was exchanging messages with my former colleague who quit Capitol Hill gig to live and work in Alaska just a few months ago. Because of Moments of Doubt, and egged on by stories in those magazines, I decided I had to go, and now was the time to make a pilgrimage. That summer we saw Denali on the clearest day of the year, took in the Harding Ice Field, and even got thrown out of a bar in Anchorage.

I look at the magazines in the stacks these days and compare it to how I feel looking at a new issue of Climbing or R&I and realize I don’t get that feeling. I don’t feel compelled to participate the same way. I suspect that it’s the level of responsibility I have accepted and embraced since then; I can’t simply pickup and nonchalantly go on some adventure with aplomb like I once did.

While I remember the uncontrollable urge to go climb in the Adirondacks when I look at my old climbing magazines, I also know in the here and now I don’t feel it. I am somewhat content. (I say somewhat, because there are always improvements to be made in life, right?) The weird part is, while I am nostalgic, I don’t even feel like I am disappointed at my contentment. Perhaps because I like where I am. In fact, since Natalie and I had our little Wunderkind and Schnickelfritz I have gone on only short hikes but seen more if not just as much as I did on my 22-mile day treks high above sea level. Sometimes I miss the view and breeze atop the bald summits, yet the interest in the streams, a salamander, or a red fox, and bird watching has been truly magical. While wilderness might be far, nature is all around, and it is more rewarding than I ever realized before.

Now, my hikes with my family and my frequent trips to the climbing at the gym are the things that both center my mind and keep me physically fit. I don’t know where I would be as a partner to Natalie and the kids without either of those activities.

Natalie recently reread the biography of Maria Von Trapp, as in the Sound of Music, which we both read with joy before we had children. She recently reread it and read outloud some portions to me; it felt like we had overlooked entire sections and themes. I suppose our lenses have tinted since then.

I think most literature, but particularly books, is the same way — dynamic. My climbing books can be elastic and strike me in different ways depending where my experience has taken me to open new doors and windows into what the author put on paper. Maybe it’s time I reread some of Moments of Doubt. 

Still, it’s not that way as much with magazines. In looking through that old stack of climbing magazines, I can still see clearly who I was and how much I have changed because of them.

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