Background

Sleeping in.
PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Earl

In a rare show of calm, no wind to tears across the sedimentary ridge-line. Having expelled its atmospheric lungs, the weather now rests in a lull between inhale and exhale. The ridge whistles quietly and the sun-line creeps around the north corner of The Priest.

We sit on a small ledge. Superfluous talk. Against the timescale of the ridge and the valley, our rhetoric measures up to empty dialogue shaped by trite morality. Our heaviest choices adding up to dust against the background.

Our ledge situated high above the crumbling ridge-line. The tower we ascend, anomalous against the plains of the desert. A short-lived outlier slowly normalized to the flat background, subtracted from the skyline. Do we climb towers because their life-spans more resemble our own?

Two pitches (200'), no falls yet. Three more to the summit. The remaining height of the tower displays itself above, leaning over us like an invitation. We busy ourselves with the rearrangement of ropes and frictional systems, a process made tedious by the small ledge we sit. We carefully rearrange ourselves and I start up the sharp, outside corner.

The climbing is harder as the features become subtler. My attention is necessarily focused to small details which dictate the shape of my upward movements. I reach the top elated, my forearm veins engorged, flooding the muscle fibers with oxygen-saturated blood.

A rare day of climbing with no falls.

But rare days result only as thin laminations, immeasurably small in the massive layers of tabulate strata.

First pitch of Touchstone Wall, free variation. From 2015.
PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Earl

She walks now. And it’s as if she always walked. Walking has overprinted crawling, rolling, helpless whining.

She walks through trunks of adult legs, clustered and differing shades. Her feet are bare. Her legs are bare and white with fat and her feet make little slapping sounds against the linoleum floor. Her little belly sticks out in front.

Murmuring of conversation fills the space, a home where people gather. The accumulation of their voices become white noise: background. Wanders in a forest of legs towering over her head. She stops and rests her hand against one of the many trunks. It responds. A piece of the conversation detaches itself from the murmur, directed at her. She finds the familiar set of eyes. Sees the cues in the wrinkles and shape of the nose and mouth. The shapes are associated with feelings and outcomes from past interactions. She is a self-referencing loop.

Relaxing on our portaledge while the sandstone walls cool off from the day's baking.
PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Earl

This time, the horizontality is disrupted by the incision of a canyon. Massive walls bind the sinuous river. Bushes of desert holly grow on ledges in the collected mounds of sand. We sit in our sweat, shaded by a precarious, free-standing pillar called Rebozo’s Pinnacle. I keep wondering about Rebozo. He must have had a huge penis. We are three hundred feet from the valley floor littered with yellow Fremont Cottonwood trees. Little weeds from our distant vantage.

Andy fills a canvas the size of a postcard with watercolor paint and descriptive ink lines. Brent is asleep or trying to sleep. I lean against Rebozo’s Pinnacle and think about my raw fingertips.

Around 4:30 p.m. the sun sinks beneath the canyon walls and we are left with forgiving shade. Now we wait while the heated wall cools into background. I glance down at my fingertips. They continue to ooze sweat.

The wall expands above with a cryptic, wandering line of edges which must accommodate our fingers. Connect the dots with our limited reach.

As I tie into one end of the rope and stem to the top of Rebozo’s pinnacle, I do not think of the tiny slapping feet. Or the pink, delicate fingers. Altogether I forget the constant pull of their expectations as their presence fades into the less relevant corners of my brain.

Stepping off of Rebozo's Pinnacle and onto the main wall.
PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Earl

Hands and feet move in deliberate sequence of edges with pull and pressure and a careful precision, I have already forgotten about preschools, and pink tricycles. Cartoonish ponies with bashful, alien-sized eyes. I forget that I see the roof of her mouth when she throws her head back in cackling laughter.

Silicate grains bite into the skin of my raw fingertips, but my brain does not remember. Remembers only the cyclic peaks of inhale and valleys of exhale and the contracting-relaxing pattern of muscle tension.

Oblivious to the shaping canvas of time and waning sunlight. My acute attention holding back an enormous wave of thought and stimulation.  

The start of the crux sequence, the name of the game here was precision. I can not recall ever using footholds quite so small. PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Earl

Brent and I then trade places as dusk settles into the canyon. I watch him execute the same sequence of moves, the LED halo that encircles his position starkly contrasted against the murky smudges of the immense wall of sandstone. A halo holding against the background. Stars begin to position themselves up in the dark, providing a measure of form to the void. Andy’s clicking shutter sends crisp soundwaves through the still medium.

Brent climbing inside the orb of light.
PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Earl

The strange loop that is my daughter walks to me easily so that I believe she always walked upright. Crawling, rolling, helpless whining: amorphous memories that she will not remember. Those memories are for me. How much of the collective human psyche is used up on memories of our children, of our precedent generations, our evolutionary ancestors that crawled on all fours?

A balancy rest just after the crux on Spaceshot. PHOTO: Andy Earl

I wrap her torso with my hands, lifting her with such ease. Now they are strapped into car seats and driven away with Grandma. I get into my truck, feeling their absence. I am familiar with the necessity of betrayal. With my responsibility to neglect. My daughters resent me for working, for climbing. They have so many wants that are incompatible with their needs. My girls can’t trust me to be their father because I am their provider. Each time I leave them out of love, all they see is me leaving. They see past the kisses and hugs I heap upon them as distractions. I suppose kids are less practiced at lying to themselves. I suppose it takes an adult to ignore all the shit. Subtract it from the forefront. Push it into background.

The Second Ascent of The Phantom Wall

May 1991

Third attempt on "the illusive Phantom Wall" Jay Smith and Paul Teare stand on a clear, windless summit. Smith takes out his bic and, removing his gloves, lights it. 

The flame rose straight to the sky. In all directions the shimmering peaks of the Alaska Range glistened like so many silverfish. Two years of effort had rewarded us with one of the finest routes we have ever climbed. (1)

26 years later, the route was unrepeated.  

May 2017 

We spent nearly a three weeks on the Tokositna Glacier, below Mt Huntington. Snowed in, waking each day to a buried tent door and a headache from mild asphyxiation. We watched looming clouds break over the immense granite pyramid, spilling over base camp, a dense, white haze.
       

Then, a window of opportunity: the weather forecast called for three sunny days. Now we loaded our packs and trudged toward the Tokositna Icefall and Death Valley. It was 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 8.

Thigh-deep snow from base camp through the Tokositna icefall. Photo Credit: Jackson Marvell

Dark fell at midnight and we dropped into Death Valley's silent bowl. Looming all around were icy walls caked with enormous globs of snow. ticking time-bombs that would come crashing into the valley from the coming warmth of morning light.

It was an anxious kind of sleep we had in our little tent.

My alarm sounded at 5:00 a.m. We put on our boots and opened the tent door. Our nose hairs immediately froze.

We ate oatmeal and shared drinks of coffee from the stove pot while the massive walls surrounding our camp maintained their silent composure.

Waking up below The Phantom Wall. Photo Credit: Jackson Marvell

A girdling crevasse called a berg-shrund guarded the Phantom Wall at its base. Despite receiving advice from a fellow climber that the shrund was impassable, we crossed without major incident. 

The snow steepened and we climbed through two small bands of rock. Up and to our right, a cerac and bus-sized ice blocks scattered below it. We cut right and crossed the icy carnage, climbing into steeper terrain.

The long slog before the crux pitches on the headwall. Photo Credit: Jackson Marvell

At the base of the headwall, we dug a bench in the snow and ate expired Mountainhouse meals after which, we climbed a hundred feet of ice and overhanging snow. There were very few options for protection here. The ice was thin and discontinuous, the shallow snow lay atop featureless granite.

By now the sun had long crossed to our side of the mountain and baked the walls surrounding Death Valley. We heard the rumble of massive slides far below.

We climbed 600 feet of technical ice and rock swapping leads, following the path of least resistance.  We crossed sections of barren rock with little to no protection. My frontpoints skated for purchase across the smooth stone. God I missed my climbing shoes!

Not a photo from The Phantom Wall but accurately portrays the quality of rock. Just imagine a few thousand extra feet below and you basically have it. Photo Credit: Jackson Marvell.

It was getting late. The steepness of the wall provided no spacious ledges to pitch a tent. Around midnight we chopped little platforms out of the ice, spread our bags, and slept tethered to an ice screw.

Carving out a ledge to sleep on. Photo Credit: Jackson Marvell

Dropping temperatures sent spindrift flowing down onto us from the icefield above. We were completely exposed. After four hours of sleep, sunlight reflected off the frozen peaks to the west. We inched out of our ice-encrusted bags and made breakfast.

The last hard pitch loomed above us: a granite wall split vertically by a small seam. I hacked at the ice built up inside the crack to place protection. After an hour of climbing, I equalized a belay  off of several stoppers. I can’t imagine how Jackson’s toes were doing by the time he started climbing, but he was able to toprope it clean at M6.

A few more pitches of rock and ice brought us to the upper ice field: a 70 degree face of bullet-hard ice, extending to the summit. Jackson led three pitches consecutively until I was certain I would shit my thermals if I didn't relieve myself. I hung my weight on the rope and dropped drawers.

I offered to take the next lead feeling quite renewed.

The ice stretched upward, seemingly endless. Our arms and legs cramping from the monotonous swing and kick.

The Summit Icefield and the vertical cap many meters above. Photo Credit: Jackson Marvell

Finally, the last pitch loomed above us. It was a mere 40 feet of vertical ice. No big deal. But the culmination of every foot of rock, ice and snow of Mt Huntington's west face lay below us. Barely eight hours of sleep over the last two nights. Our brains and bodies were fried.

Jackson led the pitch to where the angle lessened and, exhausted, pounded a picket into the snow. I followed slowly, every swing feeling like a last ditch effort. I grovelled up the last 60 feet of low angle snow to the summit.

The thin air whipped about us, blasting our faces with icy flakes. The sun was visible through the thin cloud that enshrouded Huntington’s peak. All around us the disembodied summits of the Alaskan Range floating in the haze. It was about 5:00 p.m.

If I look pudgy, it's from all the bacon pancakes I devoured while we sat around for two weeks in a storm. Photo Credit: Jackson Marvell

As we descended, my thoughts fell into a rote pattern of food fantasy. I recall the image of a bacon-stuffed quesadilla as one of the single most arousing images my young mind had yet conjured.

Around 11:00 p.m. we walked into base camp dragging uncoiled ropes in the snow. Greeted by someone holding out a skin of water, he said, "So I guess this means you're not a mollusk"(1).

We took gulps of water as we talked about the route and stripped ourselves of pack, crampons and harness.

In base camp we found victory snacks of candy and beer, left by fellow climbers who had since flown out. I was mindless with craving as I fired up the camp stove, chewing away at something sweet and gummy, melting butter in the pan and breaking apart frozen tortillas.

REFERENCE:

1. www.alpinist.com/doc/ALP20/sidebar-huntington-smith-1991