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Looking Up

By Michael Wolcott

Found in: | Outside | Climbing | Rock Climbing |

A bright blue sky yawns above this skinny gash in the slickrock. Cliffs of Entrada sandstone rise two hundred feet, glowing like ripe peaches and tangerines. My friend and I walk downstream, step over a muddy thread of water, and stare thirty feet overhead at a dead juniper tree wedged between the implausibly narrow walls by a flashflood. A canyon wren tosses down its one perfect song.

My hands trail over pewter-colored stone worn smooth by spotty but violent flows of silty water. Ten thousand storms have carved this corridor of stillness, etched folds and pockets into the soft rock, and polished the fluted cliff faces. This is a familiar place - one of the Southwest's most famous slot canyons. I've walked it in other years, with different friends.

Since my last visit I've become a climber, and learned to rope-dance in vertical space - to see clefts and cracks, chimneys and flakes as slow-motion choreography cast in stone. The raven perch has become a handhold, the layered history of sediment a delicate staircase to the sun.

This entry into the world of climbing has been a turnabout. I spent 20 years outdoors before finally roping up. For two decades I judged technical climbing to be a diversion not worth my time.

Most climbers, I had decided summarily, were people with sprocket heads and lycra hearts, who didn't love wild places enough to leave their egos at home - even when they were walking into holy land.

This view was based on little evidence, but there were at least some indicators - like what I had read in climbing magazines. It seemed there was really just one climbing story, which went something like this: "I tried a really hard climb. It was s-o-o-o gnarly. And I did it. Isn't that cool?"

Then there was Devil's Tower. The black stone monolith in Wyoming is managed by the federal government as a national monument, and is a sacred site for Plains Indians. It's also a climbing Mecca. After the tribes complained about climbers disrupting important ceremonies that have occurred there for centuries, the Park Service instituted a voluntary, one-month annual closure - which hundreds of climbers ignore every year. How dare they take away our right to play!

With press like this, climbing just smelled bad to me.

But then I tried it. I learned indoors and got hooked. Sport-climbing on walls in a gym, learning the ways of gravity, friction and delicate balance, I found new territory in my body and mind. Climbing became a passion, a love affair that took me to the edge of possibility.

I took the dance outside, on real rock, in real places, where red-tails and junipers cling to the hard edges of life, where datura blossoms into power under the swollen moon. I tasted new beauty, new magic. I found a different wildness.

But the climbing scene made me cringe. It still does. I don't like crowds gathering at every choice crag and cliff, turning mountains and canyons into outdoor climbing gyms. Wild places are sacred.

And though I want to believe my hands touch rock with love, not greed, I do not trust my own hunger for climbing. I don't want what I'm doing to blind me to where I am. Getting up there should never replace being out there.

I tell this to my friend as she investigates an alcove at a bend in the canyon. The hollowed-out stone is a good-sized room - big enough to camp in, deep enough to dream under. We turn away and move on, scanning the cliffs, spotting routes that draw us to them like the whispers of a lover.

We stand under a pour-off and imagine ourselves flowing up - up - planting our feet and hands, wedging our bodies into tracks of water in stone, reaching for the blue clarity of sky. My eyes cling to the rock. I step forward, climbing the route in my mind.

Suddenly my friend yells, "Stop!"

I turn toward her, puzzled. She points to the ground beneath me. "Your feet!"

Twelve inches from my bare ankles, the coiled rattler basks, a brown knot of muscle, reflex and venom. It doesn't move. And neither do I.

Michael Wolcott writes, climbs occasionally, and tries to maintain situational awareness in Flagstaff. Email him at angelpass12455@hotmail.com.