Sixty Meters to Anywhere

by Brendan Leonard

  At the end of the gully, we bushwhacked sideways across the slope through more thorns, losing the advantage of gravity. Then we crossed the saddle, moving over almost untouched shattered-red-sandstone gravel toward the tower. We headed around to the south face, where we were invisible to anyone who might be at the Point Imperial viewpoint. The only sign of other humans were the tour helicopters that flew past to the southeast, hovering above the Colorado River.

  I reviewed belay techniques with Mick, who had climbed with me a few times before. I cursed myself for not taking him out for a couple less committed climbing days before this trip. I wanted to climb Mount Hayden without worrying if his belay would catch me if I fell. Too late for that.

  Two pitches went by quickly, challenging climbing but not scary, at least for me. Mick followed with the backpack, carefully but naturally moving up the sandstone. I worked my way to the base of a chimney at the start of the third pitch and looked up into it. And that was when I got nervous.

  I couldn’t see many holds on either side, and I could tell I’d have to use opposing pressure to get up it—one foot on one side, one foot on the other, or feet pushing on one side, back pushing against the other. I couldn’t talk myself into going up it or convince myself that Mick could follow me up it with a backpack on his back, so I climbed to the left, creating a tremendous amount of tension as the rope zigzagged between carabiners clipped to the cams lining the cracks below me.

  I knew I was off route, climbing across bushes, breaking off pieces of rock in my hands, hoping footholds wouldn’t explode under my feet. I stopped to anchor myself in and bring Mick up, pulling the rope through my horrendously wandering route. The friction between all the carabiners made it feel like my rope was tied to the bumper of a car that I was trying to haul up the face. Finally, I ran out of rope, and Mick began to climb.

  Next pitch, I continued off-route, after pulling my way up a difficult hand crack. I wandered all over the south face of the tower, trying to find a route to the summit that I could both confidently climb and Mick could follow. What an amateur I am.

  I took deep breaths, trying to calm myself down. We didn’t have much daylight, and my poor navigation was costing us precious minutes. And I kept thinking of things that could go wrong: What if I broke a hold and it fell and hit Mick, knocking him out? We were close to the rim of the canyon, but we were on the south face of the rock, the side pointing toward the Colorado River and the South Rim. You’d need a telescope to see us from the South Rim. No one knew where we were, besides Mick’s wife, back in Colorado, who might not know who to call if we didn’t call her from the Winnebago tonight and tell her we had made it out okay.

  I should have stayed home. What the hell am I doing out here? Looking for “adventure?” Maybe not the best place to bring your inexperienced friend. If things start to go wrong right now, this could turn into the real deal. The canyon below us is going to turn into a big cold hole, and if we don’t want to spend the night in it, we have to get onto the rim before dark.

  Fortunately, I found a way, and got us back onto the real route. After too many hours of climbing, I sat in the autumn sun on the tabletop summit of Mount Hayden. Popping my climbing shoes off, I pulled in rope as Mick followed me up. It felt like we were on top of a clock tower in the middle of a city of red and brown ridges and buttes. I was blown away by where I stood, though in the back of my mind I was thinking, We still have to rappel off this thing and battle back up that horrible slope of thorns.

  We had three rappels, and each one consumed way too much time, because the ropes got tangled, stuck in bushes and cracks. I had to slide myself down the rope, carefully slowing just before a giant knot, then pull up rope to untangle it. Too much time, too much time.

  The sun was creeping down to the west, and the canyon below us grew darker and darker. Every rappel, I threw the ropes and watched them twist themselves into a mess as they fell halfway down. My heart sank.

  We hit solid ground at the bottom of the last rappel with a little more than an hour to make it back up to the rim before sunset. It had taken us two hours to get down the same distance.

  We hacked our way across the slope of New Mexico locust, my mind jogging back to the gauntlet drill in my high school football practices, where six teammates would form two lines and I would run between them with the ball as they all swatted at me, trying to knock the ball loose. Instead of twelve arms, I now rushed through dozens of tree branches that felt like they were armed with nails. I was too tired to be careful, and the thorns tore at my shirt, pants, hands. I kept my sunglasses on through the dying light to protect my eyes. I swatted at trees, I lunged. Once I lunged too hard and fell forward into another mess of thorny branches, frustrated, ready to kick and scream and throw a fit like a spoiled child.

  We tripped up the slope, keeping our eyes on a tall ponderosa pine we knew was next to the viewpoint. It was dark by this point. I left my headlamp off, wanting to be able to see the distant rim instead of what was directly in front of my feet. I trudged upward on autopilot. Mick was ahead of me, moving silently.

  At last, I grabbed the handrail at Point Imperial and pulled myself over. I dropped my pack on the sidewalk and sat down on the steps.

  I don’t know what keeps you going in those situations in the wilderness, when all you want is to sit down and stop, give up on getting home, let it get dark, and fall asleep on the side of a trail or against a rock. But you don’t—you keep pushing, putting one foot in front of the other, numb to the heavy pack full of ropes and gear on your back. Sometimes it’s adrenaline, maybe that last handful of M&M’s, or some other brain process that connects the desire to get home to your friends and family again to the muscles that move your legs.

  At the end, when you get to the car, or the tent, or just the bottom of the climb, your brain finally understands, I am not going to die today. There is no more doubt, no more fear, and you are warmed with a feeling of satisfaction, just enough that you start thinking, Hey, maybe I’d do that again. Not anytime soon, but what a day.

  Coming down from those days, you enjoy a comparatively easy life. Instead of fretting about stuck rappel ropes, or handholds breaking, or twenty-foot whippers into the side of the rock, you stand happily in the grocery store trying to decide between black beans or refried for the burritos you’re going to cook at the campground that night. And that’s fun. You smile. It’s enjoyable, to come back to the safer, grounded world that you dreamed about escaping, and realizing that even if you burn your burritos, it’s a tiny worry compared to wondering if you’re going to get yourself and your buddy killed on some stupid rock in a canyon in Arizona.

  The next night, Mick and I sat at the dining table of his twenty-year-old Winnebago Warrior at the Watchman Campground in Zion National Park. We didn’t have a chance to stop at a store on our way there, and Mick was out of beer. I didn’t think much of it at the time, since he only had four or five microbrews each night. But after dinner, we hardly spoke a word. I tried to engage him and got short answers, or one-word replies. Our usually limitless flow of conversation—on women, on life, on midlife crises, on climbing, on travel, on political issues and religious differences—had dried up. He’d been reading the newspaper for two hours, and there couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes of material.

  I glanced around the camper, trying to make conversation every few minutes, wondering if it was the lack of beer that made Mick so quiet. Did I used to feel the same way he did, when I didn’t have a couple of drinks in me? My fun friend, the engaging conversationalist, the guy who never ran out of stories, he was gone for the night. His engine sputtered and died after it ran out of fuel. Was he just tired? It seemed like too much of a coincidence that the one night he was sullen the whole trip was the night there was no beer in the fridge.

  Over the next three years, Mick and I would talk on and off about his drinking. To me, it hadn’t seemed like much, but I often remembered that night in the camper, how it seemed like somethi
ng was missing. I told him maybe it would be a good idea to quit completely. He disagreed, saying he thought he could do it in moderation. It was a conversation I’d heard in my own head at age twenty-three, and one that I continued to have: I can control it. No, you can’t. Yes, I can. No, you can’t. At one point, Mick and I even argued. We let it get between us, and didn’t get together as often as we should have. Eventually, we both apologized, and things returned to normal.

  He quit drinking six weeks before he died. Things were going really well, his wife told me. Then one day, his heart just stopped. He was fifty-four. At the funeral, Mick’s son, Dan, mentioned our Mount Hayden climb in his eulogy. Not a week went by without his voice popping into my head.

  As the radius of my travels around the West extended farther from my roots, Iowa became less of a familiar place. Wedding invitations tapered off, and my parents moved two hours away from my hometown. When I went to visit them, I wouldn’t run into any high school classmates at the grocery store. The month after Mick died, I went back for Christmas, to spend time with Mom and Dad, Chad and Meg—and Grandma, who was gradually slowing down.

  “Is this another goddamn fruitcake?” she asked me on Christmas morning, holding the gift-wrapped box. When you’re an eighty-two-year-old lady, using profanity is endearing. She was sitting in her bathrobe at the end of the couch next to a cup of coffee with a teaspoon of sugar stirred into it. It was clear I was going to have to get creative about wrapping to fool her next year.

  Two Christmases prior, I had found out how much Grandma hated fruitcake, so I’d grabbed one at the grocery store before my flight from Denver and wrapped it up, giving it to her on Christmas morning after she’d opened her other gifts from me, which always included two pounds of good coffee beans.

  “No, no, it’s not,” I said now. “Just open it.” Grandma and I had become very good buddies over hundreds of cups of coffee and cookies. When she visited, I slept in the basement so she could have a decent bed, and I always helped her in and out of the car. Out of her seven children, she visited us the most, at least partly because Mom, her oldest child, would never let her sit alone in her big empty house in Emmetsburg for very long. When Grandma stopped being able to drive the two and a half hours to Mom and Dad’s house, Mom drove to pick her up. Like I said, in my family, love is attendance-based.

  “It is a fruitcake, you jerk.” Grandma laughed, and I laughed, and I took a photo of her holding it. Just like the year before, we sat it on the kitchen table for an hour or so before throwing it in the trash. Every year for five years, I bought her a fruitcake and we did the exact same thing.

  Mom started to remind me before every visit back to Iowa, “Don’t forget your climbing harness and shoes.” She had kept going to the climbing gym, and when I arrived, the second or third thing she’d ask me would be, “What day do you want to go climbing?”

  I watched Mom put on her climbing harness at one of the picnic tables at Climb Iowa, the thirty-foot-high walls behind her speckled with a rainbow of plastic holds, strung with ropes and autobelays every five feet. I noticed one of the leg loops was upside down, something I’ve caught myself doing half a dozen times. I reached over and flipped it over for her.

  After she climbed a route, I tied into the end of the rope, inspected Mom’s belay device to make sure the rope ran through it correctly to arrest a fall, chalked up my hands, and climbed up the first twelve feet. I looked down at my waist and noticed a couple feet of slack in the rope. Mom wasn’t keeping up. Hanging from two good handholds, I turned around and looked down at her. She was working hard to try to keep taking in slack and keep the belay locked off at the same time, but she wasn’t fast enough. If I climbed up thirty feet and took a fall, she might have ten feet of slack in the rope. When it caught me, it would snap taut and hurt, maybe injure me.

  “You okay, Mom?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she said, furiously pulling short bits of rope through the belay device, struggling.

  “I’m going to climb down and see if I can help you do that a little more efficiently.” I started back down.

  “Okay, Mom,” I said, on the floor, watching her. “You want to pull on the rope that’s coming out of your belay device and going up to the anchor up there, pull on that toward you as you pull rope out of the belay device with your other hand. Try to get more rope in each pull so you’re not doing it a hundred times in a minute. Let’s practice that a few times, and then I’ll get back on the route and climb slowly.”

  I took my time, looking down every other move to see Mom keeping up better. She would need a little more practice before I could start climbing full-speed without worrying. We were both slow learners, I think, especially with physical skills. Which is probably why I only know how to tie five knots—the minimum I needed to do the climbs I did.

  An hour later, I started up an overhanging toprope route on the far right side of the gym, already a little tired. Two-thirds of the way up the wall, my forearms were pumped. I looked down to see Mom doing great, almost underneath me, because the wall overhung by eight or ten feet. My heart pounded, and my arms burned. Two more moves until the wall goes back vertical. I can do it. I can’t do it. I can do it. I lurched for one more hold, hoping I could freeze my fingers in a claw and hang on. Nailed it.

  Nope.

  I’m fucked. No way I can hold on. My hands started to open, and a sixty-year-old 110-pound woman who had been climbing maybe five times in her life hung on to the end of the rope as I whipped off the wall twenty feet above her head. I fell through the open space under the fluorescent lights, swung out from the wall, and stopped midair. She caught me.

  Nice job, Mom. I was glad it was a toprope, distributing the force of my fall through the anchor at the ceiling so she wouldn’t have to catch the full force of a lead fall, which would have yanked her off her feet and into the air.

  “I think I’m done,” I yelled down.

  “You sure?” Mom yelled back up.

  “Yeah, I think that’s good for today. Let’s go get milk shakes.”

  She lowered me down to the carpet. We popped off our climbing shoes and harnesses and packed up. Mom went into the bathroom, and I milled around the lobby waiting for her. One of the guys on the staff came over.

  “Was that your mom climbing with you?” he asked.

  “Yep,” I said. “We come in here every time I visit. I’m trying to get her up some 5.7s now.”

  “That’s so cool that she knows how to belay and everything,” he said.

  “We have a lot of fun. She loved the class she took here with her friend.” I looked out through the glass into the gym, calm on a weekday afternoon. A man was belaying a woman leading a route. The only other climbers were young kids, whose mothers sat on the benches as their seven- and eight-year-olds scampered up the walls, clipped into the autobelay ropes. When they came down, the moms would get up and unclip them, then clip them into another rope and sit back down. Mom was definitely the only climbing grandmother there. She was unique. I smiled.

  Mom liked climbing—the challenge, the exercise, and relating to me. We worked together. I taught her things I had learned in my hundreds of pitches of climbing: keep your weight on your feet, drop your knee, look at the route as a series of moves between rests. I think it gave her a better idea of what I did back in Colorado.

  As life became a little more serious and busy, with more responsibility at my job, I climbed not out of the beginner’s fervor, but to center myself. I appreciated the relaxation that came with concentrating on nothing but moving through a route without falling, pushing all my other concerns into the background.

  I’d left the newspaper for a nonprofit job, running a fund-raiser for Big City Mountaineers, an organization that took at-risk urban youth on wilderness trips. I kept writing and trying to get published, sending out article pitches after work and getting a few stories published in the Mountain Gazette, on The Dirtbag Diaries podcast, and in a few other small publications. But latel
y, the office had taken over my sanity: We’d had three executive directors in less than a year, and my boss was about to leave for a different job, giving me full responsibility of a program that used to be run by three employees.

  Meridian Hill was Lee’s idea. “Meridian Hill, Meridian Hill,” he’d been saying to me for two years. “Unclimbed. No one there. First ascents for the taking. If this rock was in Boulder Canyon, people would be all over it,” Lee said.

  Unfortunately for us, it wasn’t in Boulder Canyon, where the longest approach hike to any rock climb is about forty-five minutes, and most are fifteen to twenty minutes. Meridian Hill is in the Mount Evans Wilderness, an hour’s drive from Denver, and a two-hour cross-country hike from a dirt road. I took a day off work for it, telling myself it was for mental health.

  We parked the truck at 8 a.m. and hiked in. Lee led a fun first pitch up good rock, stopping at a ledge to belay. My lead. I padded up some easy moves to the base of a crack I thought would be good, but it turned out to be less than an inch deep. I tried to stuff my fingers in, hoping for some kind of invisible feature in the seam that could function as a handhold. From forty feet below, it had looked like a good line to climb up. On it, I found that it had about as many handholds as someone’s living room wall. Shit. I stepped right, hoping the next seam over was better. If I lost my balance, I’d skid down about twenty feet and probably swing over underneath Lee, belaying me from a ledge a hundred feet off the ground.