Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick
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The valley workers slumped over in their seats with headphones on their ears, eyes closed or heads buried in books. The climbers pressed against the windows, jabbing and pointing at the increasing majesty of the views beyond, jumping from one side of the bus to the other as it wound up the valley, like kids on a school trip.
An old hand at the trip, I played it cool. This was my fifth visit to the valley, but in reality I felt just as excited as the first time. This and every other trip was a pilgrimage, and like all pilgrims I had been nervous the first time that El Cap wouldn’t live up to the hype. I’d read and been told so many things about the Captain—that it was a mecca of climbing, an expanse of rock so huge and overpowering it almost had its own gravitational pull, well at least on climbers, and that I wouldn’t ever see anything as aweinspiring—that I had been afraid it would not live up to its reputation. Now I was afraid that it might let me down, that El Cap would be diminished somehow by the nine ascents I’d already made.
It never had. It never would.
Out of the trees appeared the mightiest, most beautiful wall on the planet.
The first thought, on seeing El Cap springing up from a meadow and leaping into the sky, is one of disbelief. The scale of it is hard to set against anything else you’ve seen before. It is taller by hundreds of metres than the highest building on earth, three times taller than the Eiffel Tower. A ripple of excitement and gasps went through the climbers, those who had seen it before turning with smiles to their friends who had not, with a look of ‘I told you so’ splashed across their faces.
Its hugeness was as hard to comprehend as the first time, a vast expanse so large it was impossible to fit it within the viewfinder of a camera, or to hold its scale within memory. I loved this piece of rock.
When we reached the bus stop, we found the usual gaggle of tourists milling around. I stepped down from the bus and collected my bags, then began moving them in relays to Camp 4, the world-famous climbers’ camp site situated a couple of hundred metres away.
Life on a wall is simple, there is no place for ‘why’, only for ‘do’. A climb can take many days, even weeks, distilling your complicated life back to Stone-Age simplicity: eat, crap and stay alive. This most of all was what I had come to find.
I dragged my last bag across the dusty car park to the camp site, throwing my luggage into a heap in the closest space I could find that was free. I looked around at the picnic tables, and lines of washing strung up on old ropes crisscrossing from tree to tree, and listened to the faint chatter of resting climbers talking about ‘what next’, and the occasional power shout as a climber slapped the top of one of the world-famous boulders that lay on the edge of the camp site.
For the first time in ages I felt almost relaxed.
I began opening my bags and laying out my gear. Experience had told me that there were many reasons for failure—bad weather, ill partners, a lack of will—but the biggest of all was fucking around, not getting down to the task at hand.
Most climbers would arrive and spend a few days getting used to the place, maybe doing some short climbs, and probably another wall before jumping on the ‘big one’. It is often nice to build up your psyche before embarking on a tough climb, especially if it’s going to be the hardest one of your life.
You don’t have time.
I do.
You have to start tomorrow.
I have all the time in the world.
The longer you wait the greater the chance you’re going to bottle it.
That would be worse than dying trying.
The longer you stay down here, the greater the chance you’ll tell someone and they’ll talk you out of it.
I don’t want to be talked out of it.
I laid out my old tatty plastic tarp and began setting out all my gear, checking that nothing had been forgotten.
First I put my camming devices in a row: thirty alloy tools, designed to expand into cracks, ranging in dimension from the size of my fingertip to the size of my head. Each one would be invaluable on the climb. Even the smallest were good enough to hold a falling climber, although I hoped that wouldn’t be put to the test. I also knew that this route had minimal placements for bomber gear like this: if I had the chance of finding such a placement I would have to have the correct size to fit. My life could depend on it.
Next I laid out my wired nuts: thirty loops of incredibly strong and robust steel cable, fitted with a small curved rectangle of aluminum or brass, designed to be slotted into the rock. These were split into sets, each set clipped to a large karabiner, and racked so that if one set was dropped I would have two in reserve. I checked over the nuts, some marked as mine with green electrical tape, others with foreign markings and probably found on other climbs, or gone astray from the racks of past climbing partners. I picked up a number seven Chouinard nut and felt it in my fingers. It was the size of a small box of matches, and was oily and sticky with age, its size and manufacturer, stamped into the alloy, almost invisible under the scratches of a lifetime’s worth of placements. It had been given to me by my dad ten years before as part of my first rack, second-hand, loved and cherished. Back then everything I owned for climbing would fit on a single karabiner; now it wouldn’t fit in a single dustbin.
I set the nut down amongst the others and hoped I’d get to use it just once.
Would he ever have imagined I’d bring you here?
You think too much. It’s just an old nut.
I pulled out my karabiners, over a hundred, clipped together in neat bunches ready to be racked onto my harness, and began sorting them. The route comprised twenty-one long pitches, many close to seventy metres in length, and these karabiners would be vital to clip every piece of protection to the rope. They were the glue that held everything together.
As I was pulling out the last of the karabiners, a small wooden train tumbled out with them and fell into the pine needles that covered the ground. I picked it up. It was Ella’s, no doubt thrown in with the rest of my gear while packing. I thought of us setting up her wooden train track in the living room, her telling me what had to go where. I wished I’d taken more time to play with her. I stuck the toy in the pocket of my fleece.
I continued to lay out the karabiners, then noticed two climbers were watching me from a nearby picnic table, arms folded, checking out my gear, no doubt wondering what I had planned.
Everyone wants to climb El Cap, but, although many try, the majority fail. I used to joke that there are two types of climbers in Yosemite: those who want to climb El Cap and those who have failed. I wondered what group the climbers that watched me were in. Had they just failed and were now looking for some beta from a fellow big-wall climber, or had they just climbed it, and wanted to bask in the glory of telling someone else? Climbing El Cap by any route is an achievement, so any glory is well earned.
They walked over.
‘What you planning?’ asked the taller climber, his grubby shorts and dirty sandalled feet showing he’d been here a while.
Don’t tell them!
‘Not sure,’ I said, lying.
Ignore them.
‘We’ve just got down off the Shield,’ said the other climber, a scab on the bridge of his nose a sign that he’d smashed a piece of gear into his face on the climb: probably a peg while he was testing it.
‘Well done.’
The Shield was one of the harder classic routes on El Cap, a line that shot up one of the steepest parts of the wall. It had been my first big wall, but keeping this a secret and not bursting