I don’t know what to say about the rock climbing in Vedauwoo except that I had no expectations coming here. July scared me because it was an entire month in a state that I’ve never been to and I didn’t really have a game plan. So far, this is what I’ve learned about Vedauwoo: It is always windy. The rock is always sharp. The rock here greatly resembles Dr. Seuss poop. And as the locals put it: “The climbing here weans out the soft, the weak, and the spineless.”
One of the reasons I came out west was because I really wanted to learn how to climb offwidths. In the Voo, everything is working against you and all at the same time: the flare, the lean, and the size. Heel toes, stacks, and wings started feeling a little more secure, which is about as close to feeling “nice” as you’re going to get.
Grit is an interesting thing. You grit your way through growing up, through high school, college, relationships and so on. Grit can be the key to success but is often an unpleasant thing. And that’s kind of how I feel about wide cracks. Pretty much at the end of every day here, I’ve told myself: I’m leaving. This suchs. And I want to go home. Every. Single. Day.
Last fall in the Creek, I tried to climb Big Baby (5.11). Because 4s are my absolute enemy, I bailed and had a meltdown. Because I suddenly wasn’t the “strong” climber, and I knew it and everybody was there to witness it. As friends dispersed, I lagged behind and cried. Erick stayed and tried to comfort me, which probably made me cry even more. I cry, a lot. All of the time, in fact. In parking lots and at bases of climbs and every goddamn Disney film ever made. I know, I know. I’m a real girl these days.
Offwidths are for girls
Climbing these kinds of cracks has taught me about humility and perseverance, and I think that when we test ourselves in challenging ways, we start to see our self-worth. Going up some rock has nothing to do with the person I am; it’s more about the person I have been becoming. It’s about the person I’ve spent four years molding, learning how to define my own limits, push past fears, and make mistakes.
Vedauwoo might take a little bit of grit. Every day that I tell myself I’m going to go back to Colorado, I make the conscious decision to stay and try. It might take a little bit of blood and skin, but there are s’mores and friends with endless stoke, and honestly—at the end of the day, my dog doesn’t care if I can flail up a 5.9+ wide crack or not. So, if Shooter doesn’t care, I don’t care either.
“The girls climb harder than the boys, here. They puff up their chests, braced, alone but staunchly, brutally forging ahead.”
Camping underneath Wyoming skies. Photograph by Aly Nicklas
Ted and Kendra Eliason spent a gray morning with me at a coffee shop, waiting out the potential hail storm. Kendra and I snickered over an article titled “Why You Should Never Date a Rock Climber”. Number five had us rolling in laughter: “If you’re the jealous type, forget about dating a climber chick. You love it when she sports that tight, skimpy Spandex while working up a hot sweat. But dude, she does the same thing when you’re not around, in front of all the other guys. A few of them, BTW, are hotter, stronger, smarter and richer than you are.”
I lament over my personal dating life occasionally, when things settle down and I have some quiet time to myself. When I lived in Brooklyn full-time, I had trouble fitting dating into my life. I used to casually date but ultimately felt guilty because I was leaving the city often, and usually for days in a row. I didn’t have the time to dedicate to a relationship unless they wanted to come with me, but that didn’t happen because, you know, reality.
Recently, I discovered that my last three boyfriends were married or soon to be, and it hurt in the way that you would expect it to. They moved on. I guess that I moved on too, but not in the same way. I chased mountains. I followed the weather. I wanted to go climbing as much as humanly possible and I was moving around so much that there was no way that any boy could hurt me. He could get attached and I could move on–I told myself that it kept me from getting emotionally clobbered. And I just didn’t want any attachments.
I’m a pretty cautious climber because, from my experience, it’s the fall that hurts the most. Most people genuinely enjoy the early stages of a relationship, but I exercise the same caution when it comes to dating. The simple truth of the matter is, I get terrified when I think about the rug being pulled from underneath me again. We use pro is there to keep us safe, right? And at the same time, I crave openness and love at the same time. Just like a bold climb, part of the scariness can be really beautiful. But the scary part of a rock climb is falling and injuring yourself. The scariness of grown-up relationships is the transparency of it all. You’re advertising to the world, it seems: This is me! This is who I am, here is a shortcoming between us, and please don’t judge me. Please accept me.
Ted and Kendra have been married for several years, and they told me that climbing isn’t the only thing that connects them. I think that’s beautiful. In my naivety, I have only wanted a climbing partnership in the past but that was when I was a more selfish person. I’d like to believe that I’m not as selfish as I used to be.
I was scared to take the plunge, to leave NYC indefinitely. But I felt backed into a corner so I held my nose and jumped. This winter has taken me to some pretty wild places and I know that I should feel rich in experience right now, but if I can be honest for a moment? I don’t entirely. I’m scared of not having money or a back up plan or, you know, a job. How do people support themselves on the road?! I’m scared of not having friends, of being alone, but most of all, I think that I’m scared of starting over.
I’ve always thought that the nice thing about being in your twenties is that you can be amorphous and that there are no set limitations on how many times you can change your plans. But fuck, you’re really out there.
I just made it back to the east coast. Despite winter temperatures, it’s now prime climbing season for Tennessee. Even though it’s February and the murmur of spring days are far behind us, you can still bask in the golden sunshine at the T-wall. I’ve been a ball of anxiety lately, and I needed some happiness. T-wall is one of my happy places, so I beelined south.
Rob Robinson oncde told me about the first time he laid eyes on the beautiful cliff line, and I thought about what he must have felt, how those orange cliffs captivated him. And then he told me to keep going for it: “You can always desk it later in life.”
I go back and forth about my decisions, as we all do. But if I keep second-guessing myself, I feel like I’m living two different lives and I really hate that feeling. In life, you don’t always get to play the “what if” game, and sometimes you have to take the free-fall. In trad climbing, you’re the primary piece of protection…and everything else is redundancy in the system. You are the primary piece.
I originally thought that I was a big fish in a small pond, but when I came out west I realized how wrong I was. I’m actually just a tiny sea urchin in a vast ocean. I’m barely kelp. So, Kathy things: I wasn’t planning on it, but I quit a job that wasn’t working for me anymore and now I’m detouring to Salt Lake City with no savings, no plan, and I’m a little in over my head. Cool. I’m trying to remind myself that it’s okay to be the little fish in a big pond because I don’t think the goal was ever to become a shark—and let’s be honest, I don’t have that kind of edge. Maybe a very tiny and magical seahorse—I think I could probably be a seahorse.
Every time I ask myself why I quit my job I keep telling myself it’s because I want a 5.13 life. With that pursuit in mind, I’m being forced to deal with a lot of things head-on, which feels kind of hard and scary right now: the love of challenge is what triggers my insecurities as much as it feeds my soul. Ah, juxtaposition.
Photograph by Jon Vickers
Anybody can have a 5.13 life. It’s about not getting stuck in cycles and unraveling the pattern so that you can understand the way the world works around you, and then how you can work with the rest of the world. A 5.13 life is about waking up motivated, even though some mornings you don’t want to get out of bed. A 5.13 life is about allowing yourself to feel emotions (even the shitty ones) and letting other people feel what they are going to feel (because they are going to, regardless) and making peace with that. A 5.13 life is being afraid and going ahead with it anyway because even if you’re scared and even though it hurts, you’re growing. You’re changing. You’re evolving. You are facing problems and being forced to solve them.
A 5.13 life is not about making money. It’s about making art. It’s about getting off route sometimes and finding your way back, with a better head and more fight in you. A 5.13 life is about being good to you.
This was really all just a reminder for myself, but maybe it’s a reminder for you, too.
Last year, I wrote: “Sometimes, we have to take our plans and scrap them. Start from the beginning, wherever that may be. Lose that control. That was what moving to Brooklyn was for me. Climbing was my new chapter, and Brooklyn helped me find it. I don’t want to fall into that trap again. You know, doing things because they make me feel safe. It’s important to have a plan (and then sometimes plan B), but more important to always be ready for the unseen obstacles that inevitably come our way. And hopefully when those obstacles come, know that it’s okay to tear down the walls and forget the tough guy act for a little while, let your ego step aside and learn to be more vulnerable.”
Six months between then and now, and I’m slowly learning that sometimes, there is no plan B.
I’ve got a good support system: those who have been with me since I tied my first figure eight, the ones I have met on the road and then, of course, the ones who can still remember when I was climbing out of my second-floor window in high school and scaling buildings downtown.
The most important thing I am learning on this trip is that it’s okay to fall apart for a little while. I think we all spend too much time trying to convince ourselves that we need to be strong when we really just need to be ourselves. I left New York with no agenda, and because of that, I have found myself falling apart, letting go, and putting the pieces back together all at once. I am taking things slowly and moving in the direction I am meant to, I think. It’s a cool process.
I am realizing that there is no single person in the world capable of flawlessly handling every punch thrown at them, but we aren’t supposed to be able to instantly solve problems. That’s not how we’re made. The whole purpose of living is to face problems, learn, adapt, and solve them over the course of time. This is what ultimately molds us into the person we become. And I guess I’m kind of excited to see what kind of person I become on the other side of this.
If you know me in real life, then you know I am kind of a spaz. My old bosses used to tell me I was part a hummingbird, always flitting around from one thing to the next, often without finishing the first thing I started with. So there is something really calming to me about driving for long hours alone in a car. I’ve sort of embraced it as my form of meditation. I think that’s why I took to climbing so quickly. My mind is constantly going a thousand and four miles an hour, but when you give me a task that demands a clear head, I am forced to be in the present moment.
I had a twenty-six-hour drive ahead of me from Brooklyn to Denver. I had planned out the next few weeks and wanted to be out west over Christmas. I wanted to be anywhere but the east coast, really. Colorado was the promised land, they said. The climbing mecca. Go there.
Finally making it to Nebraska, I had a wild realization: What would I even do if I lived in a climbing town? Then I’d have to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life.
The drive felt like I was looking through a pair of glasses that aren’t mine
When I got to Colorado, Allie Levy took me to Eldorado Canyon. The wind was pretty bad, so we only did the first pitch of the classic Bastille Crack (5.7). We then climbed Tagger (5.10b/c) on the Wind Tower before calling it a day. It was truly the most scared I’ve ever been on a 5.9 pitch in my entire climbing life, by the way. Getting used to Eldo climbing might take a while, and I decided I would have to come back in the spring. We ended the day by taking a drive through the rest of the Canyon. The formations basked in the warm golden light and it was mesmerizing. On the twenty-minute drive back to Allie’s, it suddenly dawned on me how accessible climbing in Colorado really was. But, what? What do you mean, you clock a full work day and THEN go get a few pitches in? That just doesn’t happen.
Except for that it happens. Everybody in a climbing town is a rock climber. And again, I started to have that nagging thought: If I lived in a climbing town, would I be like everybody else? Would I be special anymore? Being a climber from Brooklyn, NY was the kind of thing I wore like a badge of honor.
Crashing at Allie’s, I made myself useful by offering her roommate, Aleya Jean, a ride to the airport one morning. On the drive, she told me that she missed the east coast epic: “Driving eight and a half hours to West Virginia to climb for three days and go back home like it’s no big deal. Climbers on the east coast are driven in a very different way.” She informed me of the “Colorado casual”, where you can basically look out the window and decide to get brunch until the overcast skies clear up, then go out and get a full day.
Would I like that kind of lifestyle? Would I miss the balance between city life and nature? Would I really be just like everybody else? “Being a climber from the east coast is different from being one in climbing specific areas. You’re not as special. Everybody here climbs!” Aleya’s words hit it on the head for me.
I’ve been living in Brooklyn, NY since 2010, but you couldn’t call me a city dweller. I spend so much time outside of the city, I’ve been considering taking up residence in my car for the next few months. (Don’t tell my mom.)
When I hear the word “adventure”, I don’t necessarily think of big mountains and vast oceans. I think about bushwhacking for unnecessary hours, wrong turns and car breakdowns, driving down unknown highways at 4 a.m., and the ever familiar retreat back to your car/apartment/campsite in blinding, freezing cold rain with no shell. And the best adventures begin sleeping on airport floors—obviously.
A perfect autumn day at Tennessee Wall
This adventure went from cold car camping in Red River Gorge to the La Guardia airport floor. I made a floor buddy, drank some whiskey, and smuggled two large pizzas onto my flight and woke up to big, beautiful, clear Tennessee skies.
We hiked a ways to find Fists of Fury (5.12c) at Paradise Falls. It’s a seriously badass roof crack. We warmed up on climbs to the right during the day. It was starting to get late, but I tied into the rope and armed myself with a headlamp (you just never know.) I started up the first fifteen feet of Fists and burled my way through the moves, taking on a lot of my gear. It felt like it took hours to just successfully make my way through the first little roof, and we had completely lost the sunlight. Admitting defeat, I had to down aid all of my pieces. Though I was worked, I’m glad to have tried the beginning section. I will be back, without a doubt. My fists are ready…and furious.
All in the business now. Photograph by Mark Pugeda
Heading back to the airport, I thought about how quickly November was passing by already. I didn’t make it to the Valley. I haven’t made it out west yet. There’s a lot that I haven’t done. I can tell you what I DID have, though: a buttload of fun. And November is nowhere near over.
Home is kind of a funny thing. This past year especially, I’ve become really good at nesting and feeling at home wherever I go. I think it’s a good life skill to have. Maybe home isn’t so much a place, but instead, a feeling. Whatever my latitude and longitude is, I know that the true joy of life comes from being content where I am, at whatever moment.
It’s not the kind of gift you can wrap in pretty paper. It doesn’t come with bells and whistles. It doesn’t have any monetary value. But my birthday gift to myself this year is a reminder that life is too short to do anything other than what you love. In a world where you can do and be anything, possibilities are infinite if you follow your joys.
I will always believe in celebrating birthdays. I think it’s really important to blow out candles, make wishes, and eat way too much cake. So here is to the next year. Keep traveling as much as you can and as often as you can. Make friends along the way. Care for those friendships and keep those connections. Stay tough (with a touch of vulnerability and honesty). Even if you don’t know what you want…knowing what you don’t want will put you in the direction of knowing what you do want. When I think about how I want to live my life these days, it’s FREE.
Yosemite birthday, dreaming and scheming of future things to come. Photograph by Tony Puyol
My mother introduced me to Peter Pan when I was six-years-old. I fell in love with the 1960 production of Peter Pan starring Mary Martin. She would dig up the VHS and put it on for me and I’d watch it over and over until I was sure that the VCR would break from excessive rewinding. I remember staying home from school, hours spent on the couch with flat ginger ale and chicken soup from a Campbell’s can. These are some of my happiest memories.
Not only was I enthralled with the magic of a never-world far away, full of swashbuckling pirates and mermaids, but also with a mischievous boy who was charming and adventure ensued wherever he went. The fact that Peter was played by Mary Martin made me love him even more, proving to me, right then and there on that couch, that anything the boys could do, the girls could do, too. Plus, he could fly.
Peter Pan is timeless, to me. If Peter was a real boy, I always felt like we would be best friends. As a child, I was always running barefoot in the grass in our backyard. It was quite small, but I always felt like there were acres of it. I was Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was Caddie Woodlawn. Sometimes I was even Xena, Warrior Princess.
My mom and me, circa 1990
When I’m climbing, I like to sometimes be Xena. I’m Meg Murry, who was stubborn and self-conscious, but a badass time-traveling mathematician. I’m Starbuck from Galactica, the cocky, anti-authoritarian, whiskey swigging fighter pilot. I’m a little bit of each of these fictional characters, and I’m a little bit of me.
This past week marked the four year anniversary of our high school best friend’s suicide. Four years is a long time, I mused. I almost hadn’t realized the date, being so wrapped up in my travels and climbing. Some times, I wish I could try and forget the date. I try and forget getting the worst phone call of my life. It took me so long to find my heart again because I never gave myself time to grieve. I made some excuse, like being too busy trying to be brave for everybody else. I would tell myself that I couldn’t go through life allowing my pain to dictate how I behaved. Since then, I’ve learned that mourning is this cyclical thing, and you can’t do it alone. You have good days and you have bad ones. Moments like that will always pass and figure themselves out if you let them. And I did…and they did.
Forever in our hearts. Photograph by Enrico Domingo
Fast forward four years later, and life did go on, not with great joy, but with somewhat surprising contentment that I never imagined I’d really know. Once, I used to be afraid of losing the people I loved, constantly thinking to myself, “It may happen. One day, someone I love will disappear and I won’t be able to go with them.” The impression that it leaves only makes you grip a little tighter and kiss a little harder every time you do.
Simply being a part of Mikey’s life made me realize how unique my own is. What happens next is that you continue to love the world they leave with you. Every pitch I climbed, every mountain I moved up somehow brought me a little bit closer to him, in a strange way. When he died, I silently promised to try and live a little bit extra for him, in little ways and in big ways. I found myself doing things with more purpose, every day.
Although his departure was premature, it’s the memory of Mike that remains timeless. For me, he will always be a skinny fourteen-year-old punk kid, skating down the block to meet me at my house in the early morning hours when the rest of the world was sleeping. I’ll always be kissing him with strawberry Lip Smackers chapstick in my back pocket. We’ll always be stupid kids watching that stupid sunset and then waiting for that sunrise, together. He’ll be Peter Pan, and I’ll be Xena, Warrior Princess.
When I first met Christina Natal, I had just moved to Brooklyn. My life was in a constant state of panic. I was only halfway through college, had broken up with my boyfriend and taken all of my worldly possessions to NYC and moved into a shoebox. A beginner climber, I took a job at a gear shop in Manhattan when she walked in one day. She was finishing nursing school and looking for part-time work. She walked her Univega (the very same bicycle I now ride every day to work) out of the store and my boss turned to me and said, “That woman is a badass climber.”
So obviously, she intimidated the fuck out of me and I never in a million years thought we could be friends. Her experience put her completely out of my league. So when the gear shop hired her to work in the climbing department, I took it upon myself to avoid her like the plague. Any time she tried to speak with me, I’d answer with short responses and find any excuse to leave the conversation.
One evening, I forced myself to stop being such a bitch and walked up to her in the break room. My shift had just ended, and hers was probably just beginning. I’d like to think I articulated it well, but I probably blurted out a sad apology for being such a shitty, terrible person, and the fact of the matter was that she intimidated the hell out of me—and maybe she’d be willing to climb with me someday?
Nothing compares to some of the friendships I’ve made through climbing. My friendship with Christina was probably one of the most special ones I’ve found yet. She’s just one of these people who leaves a lasting impression on you when you meet them. It’s just part of her personality. Forget the fact that she is an extraordinary rock and ice climber; she’s a woman who lives her entire life with such intention and love, and you are a better person for knowing her.
We went climbing in the Gunks for the first time and she put me on Baby (5.6), my third lead climb in the Gunks, and I forever dubbed her a sandbagger. We didn’t tie in again for several years, both constantly traveling to climb and not able to line our schedules up. But even though we were both embarking on our own personal journeys, despite passing time, we kept coming back to each other with bigger and better stories to share. And her stories have inspired me for decades to come.
Christina’s twenty-eighth birthday (it was a whiskey and olive oil carrot cake!)
I’ve always thought that the best friendships in life are the ones where you aren’t up each other’s asses all of the time. You exchange ideas and help each other, you don’t talk shit about each other and constantly compare. You just live your life and share your experiences with others, and they live and share theirs. Our climbing and friendship actually had very little overlap, but over the years I have known Christina, I have been moved by her many accomplishments. Moments of success, she taught me, aren’t always sends and onsights. It’s about perspective.
She told me that she’d read an issue of Alpinist when she had started climbing about the Diamond, and this summer she realized that dream: “You know those articles that just wow you with the history of the place, the adventure that leaves you dreaming of that thousand-yard stare? It was something that stuck with me. So far out of reach in my days following 5.8 in the Gunks.
And then this year the Diamond wasn’t a faraway epic idea, but something tangible. Sure, I fell on the crux pitch but whatever. That’s not the point. We bivyed three nights waiting for weather. Hiked the approach twice, crossing snowfields that scared the crap out of me. Twenty-two hours of motion. Sure, it gets a rep as being a freakin’ climbing gym for locals these days, but it was an epic adventure for us. We put in a lot of time up there and earned that mountain. I stood at that summit and thought about the other climbs I dream of. Cerro Torre…one day that will be possible too.“
Rollies at the Bivy. Photograph courtesy of Jordan Erenrich
I asked Christina about some of her biggest achievements in climbing:
“Most of these aren’t achievements per se. It’s more of that personal journey of following your dreams and believing you are capable of anything you want. Everything seems big and impossible from far away, but take one move, one step, one pitch, one mile at a time, the journey unfolds and there you are! Finding that out. Believing that and continuing to travel and try new things that have always seemed impossible to me—I think that’s my greatest achievement over the past eight years in climbing. Who cares what I’ve actually sent but wow, look at all the stuff I’ve tried!”
Look, indeed.
When Christina came into my life, I guess it just felt like I was changed forever. I struggled a lot this winter with identity, and so she was patient with me and we spent a lot of time sitting and talking in parking lots, as you do. There was a moment when shit just felt hard, and I really needed someone who understood me. Christina came through, and I’m not sure she’ll ever understand how much that meant. As much as we try to tell people what they mean to us, they’ll never really know. Christina reminded me that it’s about climbing a route that you love, leaving out the expectations of what you can and cannot do, and learning from the rock. You can learn if you’re willing to be taught.
When she told me that she is moving out of Brooklyn at the end of the month, I tried to keep the emotional range of a teaspoon. It wasn’t long before I was a weepy mess. As sad as I am to be losing her, I couldn’t be more excited about what comes next.
It’s all about the onsight. We have no idea what’s going to happen next—will there be a safe stance to plug gear? Are we going to bail at the crux or push forward with great pride, strength or stubbornness? Maybe we’ll have to build a bivy for a little while and wait out the weather. Sometimes a guidebook is handy, and it’s good to know what’s coming next. But this isn’t a rock climb. This is life. Sometimes you fall, but sometimes you send.
Life is just one of those things that, because it is so full of change, it is full of wonder as well. Here’s to the next chapter, and everything else in between. Natal, the next pitch is all yours.
for the love of climbing 