fear (f?r) : n. A feeling of agitation and anxiety caused by the presence or imminence of danger; v. To be afraid of.
Sometimes dictionary definitions are useless.
I could hear the wind before I felt it. It was like a locomotive approaching at 70 mph. I leaned hard against the rock, trying to protect myself from the blasts. It slammed into the cliff. The ropes whipped back and forth. Ice chunks flew past horizontally, never losing altitude.
The Whitney-Gilman Ridge is a rock climb on Cannon Cliff, one of the largest cliffs in the Northeast. It is a narrow spine of rock that juts off the cliff, providing one of the few big easy climbs in the Northeast.
Easy is a relative term, however. While its technical difficulty is low, it ascends over six hundred vertical feet. It is directly adjacent to the Black Dike, a famous ice climb that acts as the cliff’s funnel, with stones the size of basketballs routinely cascading down. Anyone who climbs the Whitney-G gets to listen to the disheartening sound of rocks exploding. Cannon faces east, which means that it obscures weather systems coming from the west. And climbing rock in winter adds several grades of difficulty.
December rock climbing involves gloves and big boots, down jackets and big backpacks. I groped at tiny holds, calculating how much slack was in the rope and how far I would fall before the rope came tight. Every ledge looked like it would break my ankles; every flake looked like it would slice the rope.
I made tentative movements upward when the wind abated. I was on a shelf the size of a dinner plate, which to me was prime real estate. I pulled on gear left by previous parties and inched my way towards the large ledge above.
I crawled onto a ledge the size of a loveseat and heard the train coming. I threw myself onto the ground, grabbing for whatever was close by. My pack acted like a sail. The wind screamed at me and tried to toss me over the edge. After the initial blast, I was able to stagger to a corner and build an anchor. One quarter of the way up the route and I was completely drained.
I pulled the ropes tight and put my partner Ryan on belay. There was no way he was going to hear me, a hundred and fifty feet below with the wind blasting. I just pulled the ropes tight and hoped he got the message that it was his turn to climb. The rope went limp and I took in the slack as he moved upward.
I pulled off my pack, clipped it to the anchor and pulled out my down jacket and some food. Again, I heard the train approaching. The wind picked up the pack and threw it towards the Black Dike. The leash jerked taut and the pack hovered in the air, a windsock for any of the passing motorists far below.
Ryan reached me with a huge smile on his face. “Holy shit,” was the only thing I heard before another blast hit us. We re-racked gear as fast as possible and he started out on the next pitch. I watched him move slowly left, then right, taking the line of least resistance. My hands began to lose feeling and I prayed he would move faster.
He got to the top of his pitch and built an anchor. He leaned out from the rock to where I could see him and waved me up. I quickly broke down the anchor and put on my pack. Now, with the rope over my head, I saw why he had been smiling at the last belay. The climbing was great. The holds were large enough for mountain boots and gloved hands. The loose rock was mostly frozen in place and the old gear had been well placed, so if handholds weren’t obvious I could just pull through using the gear.
When I got to Ryan’s anchor, I had the smile and he had the disturbed look on his face. I grabbed the rest of the climbing rack and started up. The next pitch was the crux. It moved around the corner of the ridge to an overhanging wall that had great views of the Black Dike, two hundred feet below. I swung out around this corner and inhaled deeply. The wind was completely blocked, but the footholds were gone. I liked being in the wind better.
I clipped into pitons-large nails pounded into the cracks-that were obviously older than I am. And then I pulled on them. Instead of climbing the rock, I climbed from piton to piton. Some people would call this cheating; I call it surviving.
I built the next anchor amid swirling snow. I put Ryan on belay and pulled on my down jacket again. Ice chunks flew past. Ryan reached my stance several minutes later. “Which pieces of gear did you pull on?” I asked.
“All of them,” he responded.
He sprinted up the final pitch as more and more snow began to fall. The rope came tight. I moved up, wiping snow off of the handholds as I went. I hit the final steep section: about 15 feet with no obvious holds. But there were lots of pitons. I decided to keep the trend going; I pulled and stepped on every piece I could.
I met Ryan at the top and I was greeted by a big smile, a handshake and a hug. We laughed as we re-racked gear and packed up. We talked about how great a climb it was and how we ought to do it every month of the year.
“Little scary for a minute there though,” Ryan said.
“Are you kidding? I was god damn scared to death down there,” I said.
“Yeah, but that’s what makes it so much fun,” he said, with a perverse smile on his face.
The snow turned to rain and we trudged back down to the car.