Stone Walls, Stout Hearts

Climbers disagree over just what this high feels like, and what it means—and what it's worth. It can almost become an addiction. "You don't feel the high every time," says one veteran. "You don't expect it, you don't even look for it, but you know it's there, and you know what you have to do to get it."

One neophyte climber describes the first time he ever felt the high: "It was after about my seventh or eighth climb. I was with a guy much better than me, and he thought it would be a good idea if I tackled something over my head, just so I wouldn't get cocky, because I had been progressing really fast. He felt I needed the experience of falling, to sort of bring me back to reality. So he put me on this expert route. It wasn't a long climb, maybe only 75 feet, but it was straight up, with only a few tiny nubs for holds. He looped the rope over a rock at the top and belayed me from the ground. It took me three attempts to get over the crux, the most difficult move, but I made it all the way to the top. The guy couldn't believe it.

"At the top I just kind of went, 'Whew, that was pretty good.' I knew I had made a move or two far more difficult than anything I had ever done before. Reaching the top wasn't exactly an anticlimax, but I didn't feel especially high—until late that evening as I lay in bed. It was a delayed reaction. The next morning when I woke up, I felt so terrific I whooped when I got out of bed. Nothing special happened that day—I can't even remember what I did—but I do know it somehow was the best day I had all year, no exaggeration. The high lasted for a few more days; every time I thought about climbing that rock I broke into a big grin."

Veteran climbers find it increasingly difficult to experience such moods; the more they climb, the more it takes to turn them on. Loid Price, who is the head of the Yosemite Mountaineering School, says, "Most climbers stay gung-ho for only about three years. I call a three-year period a generation because they come and go so fast. Three years is the average period of rapid improvement, which is not that much different from a lot of other sports, but with climbing there is so much more emphasis on the challenge. When a climber doesn't improve so fast, the challenge is lost."

A quarterback feels terrific when he throws a perfect 50-yard pass, and he will probably feel just as good if he throws another perfect 50-yard pass in the next game. The climber would need a 51-yard pass in the next game to feel so good again. Although this is far from a perfect analogy, it helps explain why first ascents are so cherished. Nothing contributes more to the high than for a climber to be able to say, "I did something no one on the face of this earth has ever done before."

Climbing is a non-competitive sport. There is no such thing as a climbing contest, and if one were suggested, climbers would surely consider such a thing preposterous—a prostitution of their sport—and scoff. But climbers are not noncompetitive people; it's just that their competitive juices must be kept in check by the harsh verities of their pursuit. Two men on the same climb cannot compete against each other for very long without disastrous results. But when a climber's competitiveness is unleashed, remarkable things happen. In Yosemite, for example, first ascents are often attacked by climbers with the same sort of lust some hunters have for big game. A few climbers even try to set speed records on the big walls, an insane approach that undermines most of the objectives of climbing.

One of the paradoxes of climbing is that because there is no direct competition, the goals become more abstract and climbers often push themselves even further than they might if they were facing a rival. A climber has to define his own goals, and he continually doubts whether he has made them challenging enough. He may look at climbing like target shooting—if he hits 10 of 10, then maybe the target was too close. At the top of a cliff, the climber will often ask himself, "Did I really earn the right to feel this good?"

Roger Breedlove recently quit serious climbing because it lost meaning for him; he couldn't feel high no matter how well he climbed. Breedlove is 27 and had an intense affair with climbing for 11 years. He knew it was time to quit when he found himself on the face of El Capitan—a wall that had been tempting him from the very first moment he laid eyes on it years before—feeling indifferent about whether or not he made it to the top. He still isn't sure why he suddenly became so dispirited. Even more bewildering to him is why the sudden loss of heart occurred when it did, in the middle of the most exciting climb of his life.

"For four years I had wanted very badly to climb the west face of El Cap by myself," he recalls. "It is a very difficult route; a fellow had gotten killed there the year before. I climbed the first half of the route in about a day and a half. I was climbing very well, very quickly, climbing better than I ever had in my life. I was extremely confident. But it had no meaning for me at all. I was living out this fantasy that had been so important to me for four years, and I found myself thinking about things I'd rather be doing. It was very hard to be by myself up there; I couldn't take being by myself in those circumstances. I thought. I'll get to the top and it will be a cheap thrill, a truly cheap thrill, and I'll get nothing out of it. I'm already climbing well enough that getting to the top is not going to prove I'm climbing any better. All I'll get when I reach the top is a headline, a pat on the back from a lot of people and an introduction tag at parties: This is Roger Breedlove; he solved the west face of El Cap!' That image pretty much cinched it for me. So I turned around and rappelled back down. Even though it was hard for me, that was a good time to quit. Just quit cold."

Breedlove does not argue with those who suggest he copped out. He concedes that it is not entirely honest to say to yourself, "I know I can do it, so why bother?" when, in fact, you don't know you can do anything until you actually do it. It is very easy, sometimes even smug, for one to predict how he might feel after doing something before he does it.