The Honeymoon is Over

Yesterday after we finished Nutcracker, Morgan and I drove to El Cap Meadow and ogled the Capitan. The sun was sinking below the walls and lit up the West Face in a golden glow and split the Northeast face off into shadow. It was beautiful and exciting to sit and watch the wall. Some people had chairs, and I’ve seen people out there with a spotting scope. We sat for a while, comparing lines in the book to the ones on the wall, picking out features like Boot Flake, Texas Flake, Hollow Flake, the Sickle, Changing Corners and the Great Roof, North America…This wall has so many lines on it, yet it’s so massive it’s hard to see all the parties on the wall. It’s not obvious that there are probably a hundred people climbing that wall at once. I assumed there were many I couldn’t see, hadn’t yet picked out, and I ached for a pair of binoculars to scan with.

Instead, we took the long way around the meadow, following the trail girdling the outside that gets progressively fainter and weedier the farther West you go. Well, the trail petered out, so we cut along the stream back to the road, through the fiddlehead ferns and prickly brambles to the line of cars parked. A crowd had gathered and was staring at something in the meadow. It was about dusk, time for deer to be out, so I figured it was a herd cavorting for the tourists. Morgan pointed out the crowd that I’d just dismissed as being townies from LA. Well, he got me to look and there was a good-sized cinnamon-colored black bear sitting under what I think was a spreading oak tree. I got the impression it was a female just cause she sat, sometimes wandering around the tree, never going far. Cameras flashed, cars pulled over willy-nilly, (Memorial day Monday and a bear stops traffic flooding out of the park), too excited about the bear to park off the road. Morgan and I watched this bear thoroughly enjoying its life, throwing its head around, simply sitting on the ground and hanging out. As we began walking back to the car, we stopped and looked periodically at El Cap rising above us, still picking out lines, monitoring the parties we could see on the wall, and we decided to walk up to the base. I’ve never been, and Morgan said it was a short hike. So we went, fighting the skeeters, and ended up at the base where we talked to a couple of guys who’d been blown off Freebase.

I touched the start of the Nose, a shallow flared fingery crack, and imagined myself starting up for a three-day suffer-fest. Hauling hundred of pounds of gear, sleeping on ledges, no escape from the wind or cold or storms or other parties or even myself, losing sight of the ultimate goal of finishing instead being caught up in doing the King Swing and hoping my rope doesn’t get eaten by the flake and bickering with my partner and eating ravioli out of a can.

Hey, I can do that. Rack that’d be fun!

What a goal. What a fix. What a lot of work.

Can you imagine the crap you’d have to take with you to make it up there? Hauling that much gear with one other person makes for an intense experience where you’re learning how well you work with this person, what they sound like in the morning when they’re sore and tired, when they take poops, what you do when you’re strapped for water or low on food.

I want it. I want to do it. I want to experience the line, to get comfortable with this wall the same way I’m comfortable at Smith, knowing every area, every feature, knowing stories of the history and the epics and the shortcuts and the innovations that made the climbing possible. I am fortunate in that I call the birthplace of sport climbing my home crag. I got a sense of the development of the sport, the experimental nature of climbing in the ten plus years I’ve been at it.

Sitting up there on the terrace with Morgan I could see across the valley and scope the Cathedrals – and I could imagine myself on the Nose. I can imagine it would get hard, once the honeymoon period of actually being on the wall wore off, to the point that you are immersed in the work, feel nothing but tired at the immensity of the task ahead of you, can’t see the big picture anymore but are only an ant on the wall, trudging up unrelenting granite.

But I won’t know this until I try it. And I really want to try it.

Wow. Climbing. There is so much more to it than just going up.