hree pairs of skis. Somewhere in the mess there are two pairs of crampons. I have a rack of rock climbing gear and another of ice climbing gear, plus extra gear for special climbing situations. I have all sorts of footwear, from constricting rock shoes to heavy plastic mountaineering boots. All this gear is spread around my room along with multiple backpacks, sleeping bags, layers of clothing, and other miscellaneous climbing paraphernalia.
From time to time people call me a gearhead. Obviously they don’t get it. I’m not at gearhead; I’m an aspiring hardman. I want to be one of those guys in the climbing magazines. One of the people North Face pays to climb.
One house I used to live in just outside of North Conway contained my ideal gear closet. The house was small and plain, with a screened in back porch, a second story loft that was open to the kitchen and living room, and a little indoor climbing wall in the basement. The place was disgusting; there was two-month old milk in the fridge, climbing chalk on all the furniture, and cobwebs inside the lampshades. It housed three climbers, who each paid $189 a month to live there. The loft was my room. It was the size of the other two bedrooms combined but it lacked privacy. My bed was a mattress on the floor in a corner. There was an alarm clock next to it, and a naked lamp sat opposite the stairway. Spread about the rest of the room was gear. Guests were forced to tiptoe over harnesses and ropes and helmets to reach the stairs. Gear from one adventure would often be hanging all around the room drying as I left for another.
My girlfriend often wonders what is more important to me: her or my ice tools.
Black Diamond makes really nice ice tools.
The thing about gear is that it’s always changing. Equipment is always getting reengineered, manipulated and tweaked. New rock shoes come out every year. So do new backpacks. And new raincoats. The next generation is almost invariably better than the generation before, and anything that makes me a better climber is a celebrated addition to my collection.
I climb hard 5.11, but only because new gear has made hard 5.11 safer and easier. Climbing hard 5.11 is like skiing the steepest trail right under the lift: lots of people try it, but most get humiliated. Advances in equipment have allowed mortals to rise from the status of scared novice to the coveted position of hardman. Previously, this designation was saved for those individuals with less brains and more bravado than the rest of the climbing community. They hung it out when they established climbs, and subsequent climbers knew it when they attempted the routes.
But today new rock and ice protection devices have made climbing safer, new fabrics make it more comfortable, and stickier rubber makes climbing easier. Now it takes months to climb grade five ice instead of decades. The hardman routes of ten years ago are now trade routes. The scary climbs are well protected with modern gear. More and more climbers are claiming hardman standing.
Of course I know better than to think so lightly of the past.
Paul is one of my ice climbing partners, and he is forty-four. Paul was climbing ice when I was learning to ride a bicycle. When I was starting high school, he was alpine climbing in Russia. When I bought my first set of ice tools, he was guiding in North Conway. Even with twenty years between our ages, we enjoy climbing together, and we do it fairly often.
Anytime I start to bitch about some section of ice being hard, Paul pipes in: “I remember when ice tools had straight shafts,” or some other bit of antiquarian trivia that proves he is old. High above the ground scared shitless, other comments could be more helpful, but this is usually what I get. The fact is Paul probably climbed it twelve years earlier, without the aid of modern technology.
This winter my friend Jay and I climbed Standard Route on Cathedral Ledge in North Conway. It’s a summer rock climb that develops a little bit of ice on it in winter. Most of the time on route is spent scraping metal crampon points and ice tool picks on rock, searching for pockets of ice, and wrestling for elevation. It’s called mixed climbing, and it’s a wildly grueling experience.
The crux, or hardest part, of the route is about 300 feet up, on an almost blank wall with little runnels of ice on it. It is only about thirty feet high, at the beginning of the third pitch. It’s rated as a rock climb because so little ice usually forms, and it goes at a modest 5.6.
Jay and I work together at IME, the local gear shop in North Conway. We have both climb more days a year than most schools are in session, and we are both reasonably strong on mixed terrain. And being that we are shop employees, we both own the best gear money can buy.
As luck would have it, the crux pitch emerged to be my lead, and it took nearly an hour. Near the top of the blank wall I faltered. I lunged for a faded piece of nylon webbing that had been tied around a chockstone by some party years before. Clinging to the tattered nylon and pawing at footholds, I cursed the climbers who put up the route. A few moves later the crux was over.
Back at the shop, our boss asked how the route had gone. We were full of praise, noting the awkward chimneys and the thin ice that made it such a formidable challenge.
“What did you think of the cave wall?” he asked.
I laughed and told him it sucked. “One of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” I said.
He tossed me An Ice Climber’s Guide to Northern New England, the local guidebook.
“Standard Route- First Winter Ascent: Hugo Stadtmuller & Henry W. Kendall, January 19, 1964.”
Those were hardmen.