TWELVE YEARS AGO, I was knee-deep in a dumpster digging for groceries. Inspired by legends like Yvon Chouinard, who famously lived on cat food for a summer, my friends and I considered bruised apples and stale bread to be a blessing that allowed us to extend our climbing trips from weeks into months.
“Oh, shit! I have really fucked up. This is bad, and I know it. Kevin, take a photo.” My hands were rope burned almost to the bone. Far worse, my right foot blazed with pure agony. I knew that I’d seriously injured myself in the fall, and that I might never climb hard again. If this is it, I thought, I might as well document the ensuing epic.
To say that the mountains are a canvas on which we practice our art is one of the great cliches–and conceits–of climbing. Can comparing the act of climbing with that of creating art somehow elevate this pointless activity and give it social merit? We climb to be in the moment, savoring brief impressions as aesthetic in themselves: the varied textures of stone and ice; the way the light shifts across an ever changing landscape. We draw on our imagination to visualize a line, formulate a strategy or solve a sequence. But no matter how creative, significant and intense our experience of an ascent may be, at the end of the day, we are left with nothing tangible.
COLD CALLING has its place. In 1996 I saw a picture of Kitty Calhoun climbing a dazzling ice wall in an exceptionally fetching one-piece suit, and I decided she and I should climb together. Never mind that I was twenty and had never summited anything harder than Pyramid Peak in the Sierra and that Kitty was thirty-six and had just made a serious attempt on the sheer, ice-glazed north face of Thalay Sagar.
