Sometimes I’m brave when I climb. I don’t worry about falling, and I don’t think about what will happen if I do fall. I trust every piece of gear I place, and getting hurt never crosses my mind, even if it is a possibility. I’m free to focus on executing the moves, and more often than not I climb whatever is above me like it’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Most of the time, I’m just me. I worry about falling and think about the consequences. I evaluate the gear and trust what should be trusted. I push the fear to the back of my mind and focus on the climbing without being reckless, and I usually succeed. Sometimes, however, I’m a complete-and-total chickenshit. I worry about falling and assume that any fall with be catastrophic. I think every piece of gear is suspect, even when I know that it’s bomber. Everything feels steeper, every move feels harder, the rock seems worse than it actually is. This is pretty rare, but there are two things that can trigger it. Cutler and aid climbing. So, this weekend when Jen and I decided to do a three-pitch aid route on a Cutler Sandstone tower just over the hill from the Fishers, I knew it would be a possibility.
After some mountain biking Saturday morning, Jen and I went over to Wall Street and found two adjacent routes where we could rig up a tension traverse, so Jen could learn to follow the one we would do the next day. After her crash course, we hung out with our merry crew in camp and woke up the next morning to a beautiful sky. We drove up Onion Creek, hiked a bit, and found ourselves racking up at the base of Hindu Tower. Everything went to shit pretty much immediately. The aid crux comes right off the ground, with the possibility of a ground fall, so I was already rattled before I even got to the thin gear. By the time I was pulling on a 000 C3 in soft sandstone, my brain was fried. This was the first aid climbing I had done in quite a while, and I could not relax even though every third placement was bomber and any fall would have been short and clean. None of that seemed to matter, and by the time I was stepping out of my aiders to make the last free moves to the anchor I was a mess. I hung out while Jen cleaned the pitch and tried to think rationally, but all I could focus on was the fact that you can’t really bail after you start the second pitch. Not wanting to commit to more muddy aid, I looked to the ground for comfort, and we bailed.
The second my feet touched the ground I knew it was a mistake. There wasn’t anything above me that I couldn’t climb, and I knew it when I made the choice to come down anyway. I don’t mind failing. You learn from failures. If you fail because you’re not strong enough, you go home and train. If you fail because of the weather, you check the forecast more carefully and come back again. But when you fail because you didn’t try, you don’t learn anything. I can’t wait to come back and try this tower again, so I can either fail properly and learn from it, or top it out and move onto the next one.
After I tucked tail and bailed, we hiked back down to the truck and looked for another adventure. Instead of driving the road back to Castle Valley, we decided to go the other way and see where it went. It was a stupid thing to do. Despite the distances on the map being relatively similar in either direction, our way took nearly two hours before we got back to pavement. Some of it was really cool, but we were definitely nervous when we started plowing through axle-deep snow and still had no idea where we were. Luckily it worked out, and we know to never go that way again.
