When I started climbing 58 years ago, in the Atlantis of my youth, I lived in southwestern British Columbia. In those parts, if you were going for summits, then you were pretty much an alpine mountaineer whether you wanted to be or not. Unless, that is, you wanted to spend your career staying low and being a professional bushwhacker. Treeline was pretty low, so it was easy to stay above it in what was called alpine country.
There are lots of types of climbers: rock climbers; peakbaggers; ice climbers; alpine mountaineers; boulderers, to name some of the categories. These are all valid pursuits, and they all have in common a love of mountains. It’s interesting how different the adherents of each of these categories can be from one another, and certainly in their attitudes. I’ve heard peakbaggers and rock climbers speak disparagingly of each other, as passionately as if they were having a political or religious argument. Yet, at the end of the day, they are all part of a brotherhood (and sisterhood) that goes to the mountains to ply their craft – they are all looking for that next line, route or summit.
The great thing about mountaineering is that you can do it anywhere. It’s hard to imagine a part of the world where there isn’t a boulder, a cliff, a peak of some sort that can be climbed. The processes of geomorphology don’t care about the economy, ethnicity or politics of an area. From the frozen polar regions to the steaming tropics and every place in between, there’s something to climb.
I spent my first 20 years climbing in a mostly alpine environment and loved every minute of it. Except for a few years in the flatlands of the American Midwest, I’ve been lucky enough to have always lived among mountains. The last three-plus decades have been spent in the desert southwest of the United States, so I guess I’m a confirmed desert rat. Sometimes I wonder how I was able to transition from ice and snow to desert heat, but I’m not alone – I know other climbers who’ve made such a change. Personally, I think that if mountains have become part of your DNA, you’ll seek them out and enjoy them wherever you live.
The desert never ceases to surprise, amaze and delight me, even though I’ve now lived here for more than 35 years. The utter solitude, the sense of alone-ness. Some think that the desert is a barren place, but not my desert. The Sonoran Desert is the world’s most-vegetated. Life is abundant here, and there can be so much vegetation that in places your parked vehicle can be invisible a hundred yards away.
The desert is in my blood, and I know now that I could never live anywhere else. Here, I am not beset by tornado, earthquake, hurricane, bug, flood or forest fire. Where else could I live and plan a climb for a specific date months in the future, knowing full well that it will happen on schedule, without fail.
It’s such a quiet place. You can walk all day and not hear the sound of an aircraft, automobile or human voice, only the crunch of your boots on the ground underfoot; perhaps your labored breathing or a bird’s song, but that’s about it.
During this past year, I’ve thought a lot more about climbing accidents. During a hard day’s climbing, it’s possible to walk 50,000 steps. Assuming you’re paying attention to where you’re planting your feet, you should be just fine. Fortunately, accidents for each of us are far and few between – if one happened every time we headed into the hills, our climbing careers would be short-lived indeed. There is a chance, though, that during any one of those steps something untoward could happen. A rock rolls beneath your boot as you weight it; your foot doesn’t land exactly where you had intended to plant it; you lose your balance, or any number of other little things could cause you to take a fall. It could be minor, and hopefully you catch yourself before you go down – a sharp intake of breath, a muttered curse, hopefully nothing more than that. You realize that you were lucky, it could’ve been much worse. Sometimes you lose your battle with gravity and hit the ground – if you’re lucky, a bruised ego is the only price you pay; less lucky, you could suffer bruises, scrapes or cuts; you could sprain something and have to limp miles back to safety. Perhaps you break a bone while in a remote area, far from help. Hopefully you don’t fall on your face and break your nose, some teeth or your jaw, or knock yourself out or suffer a concussion, or worse.
Whether you’re a rock climber or a mountaineer, accidents are surprisingly common. Every year, people are badly hurt or die in the pursuit of these activities. I’ve heard it said that avalanches kill more climbers worldwide each year than any other cause, and I believe it. Every year headlines mention those whose lives have been cut short, buried under tons of snow. Anyone who has been climbing for a long time has lost friends in mountaineering accidents – I’m no exception, having lost plenty over the years.
Climbers are often criticized as risk-takers – it’s true, there might be no more dangerous sport in the world, but anyone who loves a climber has cast their lot with them and knows the risks. There are those who are so skeptical of climbing that they consider it a one-way ticket to the Promised Land. The truth is, though, that climbers climb because they love it and aren’t trying to impress others. Climbers are well-aware of the risks we take. Sometimes we wonder what might happen if we push our luck on a difficult climb, but when we’re gripped in a tight spot we don’t think about dying. Dying happens to someone else, until it doesn’t. I guess that as we build up more experience as climbers, we take on more risk and aren’t even aware of it. We become more confident, but we’re not doing it because we get some perverse thrill from the risk. Climbers know that every climb is a two-way trip, and can’t be called successful until we’re safely back home.
Tennyson said: “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use.”
Bob Dylan said: “He not busy being born is busy dying”
I think both of those expressions ring true with climbers, that’s why we’re so passionate about our craft.