Wings of Steel

There is nothing remotely normal about these guys...

Richard, I think that your book and climb are both great. ... Hang in a little while longer. Ammon's article will be out soon enough, and I expect you guys to be finally vindicated.

Jaybro, I really appreciate such a perceptive question, and I'm happy to take a stab at answering. I'll also try to keep it (fairly) short. lol

Mostly the route was grim. It wasn't fun. Ammon has talked before about the "tedious" nature of the hooking. It's hard to describe how the juxtaposition of the "sameness" and the terror works. We were scared all the time. I, personally, don't think I ever fully got my ankle out of my mind. It hurt all the time, the whole route, and it wasn't properly flexible. So just moving in the aiders was a constant reminder of the potential of yet more pain to come. And each fall seemed worse to me because my mind was screaming: "Watch the ankle!" Fortunately, aside from scrapes and bruises, the other falls didn't exact a steeper price.

That said, however, the sheer beauty of that slab is impossible to fully describe! It SHINES! It GLOWS! It catches all different sorts of light and takes on those colors. We were back and forth on the main water streak, and it flowed until mid-afternoon that year. And it caught the light and really glowed. And the wall is RIPPLED in a way you don't see from the meadow or the ground. It's like you are slowly moving up these shining waves of perfectly-polished rock, glassy smooth in many areas.

It teams with life. The swallows (I enjoyed, Mark hated) are like little jet fighters, and the peregrine falcons are beyond amazing as they stoop down the wall taking those guys out! Several times they flew by almost arm's reach away! There are spiders and little red mites everywhere. It's like you're immersed in this ecosystem, and being that long in it you come to feel a part of it. We belonged. We LIVED there. This wasn't "getting up" a wall. This was living there... being there.

Another thing that's hard to describe is that even belaying on that route is intense. So, there's no mental rest whether you're leading or belaying. The falls launch you, and you get launched quite a bit! You get banged up just getting launched into the anchor so much. And you empathize with what the leader is going through. So, the thing slowly drains you of the will to continue. It's relentless, whether you're leading or belaying. As I said, it mostly felt grim.

But I actually found the hooking itself profoundly interesting. The flakes are SO tiny that you FEEL the subtle differences in them more than see the differences. You start to get a FEEL for what's got a better chance of holding. It's like caressing the rock gently to detect its minute secrets. I can imagine how others would find this unappealing or just tedious. Like: try this... fall; try that... fall; try the other... move on. But we found that if we slowed down and really FELT the rock, we did better.

Another thing that you wouldn't initially think about is the drilling itself. When you are top-looping a hook flake the size of a dime, imagine the outward pull, the not-good sort of pressure on the flake. Once you've gotten yourself positioned, your heels together and your toes wide to make a triangulated stance, you don't MOVE! I mean you don't move a muscle from the waist down. So, imagine drilling now. You arch your back away from the wall, barely balanced, reach as high overhead as you can (make the effort count). You want to POUND on that drill holder, because every flake you're on is a ticking time-bomb, and you want OFF of it! But you can't! POUNDING on the drill holder like normal causes far too much lower-body movement. And your lower body has to be STILL. So, you're hitting that drill holder with, like, 1/4 force. So every bolt or rivet takes so much longer than it should. Your feet go to sleep. Then your lower legs. Then your calves and thighs start cramping. Your lower back is hurting from the arch in it. The pain, honestly, gets intense! So, when you finally get the drilled placement in (IF you do without falling yet again), you have to hang there for at least fifteen minutes just getting functional again. That tiny piece of metal IN the wall is Heaven in the sea of hooking. And it's a mental TRAUMA to move off of it onto that next micro-flake. Terror, rest, terror. Rinse and repeat.

We didn't drill unless we couldn't find something to hook. We weren't just slapping in holes when we got scared. The only thing about our drilling that the rock didn't dictate was whether or not we put in a bolt or rivet. So, we were intentionally trying to, as the Bird said, "Keep the commitment level high." And, because we KNEW that we didn't know quite where the bar of "commitment level" OUGHT to be, our goal was to keep ourselves as utterly terrified as possible. So, we intended the route to feel grim to us. We weren't seeking to have fun. We were seeking to know what we were made of. I don't mean that to sound grandiose. I'm just saying that we didn't do that route for the typical reasons people do routes.

And I think that's one of the reasons why the particular nature of the defamation has been so painful over the years. It's not just that we didn't do ANY of what we've been accused of. It's that our accusers have seemed to project THEIR motivations for climbing such a route onto us. And we just didn't have some of the typical motivations. We went up there intending to terrorize ourselves, and "success" for us each day was rapping back to the bivy each night completely drained.

During the three-day storm at the top of the slab, we started having the same nightmares. In our dreams we would climb and climb and climb. For days. Yet the summit keep receding. So we would rappel and rappel. But the ground would recede away. So, we would give up and try to climb and climb again. But the summit would recede away. On and on. Night after night. A month into it, we were mentally maxed out in a way I have never experienced. And after that three-day storm, we almost bailed. It was mighty close. But we just kept thinking of the price we had paid thus far, and we just couldn't bring ourselves to start down. We kept thinking that if we could get into the Overseer cracks, we could make it to Aquarian.

We had always planned to end up in Aquarian wall, because our scoping efforts had revealed that there was only overhanging blankness from the top of the Overseer cracks to Truck Stop or any other features straight up. And when we got up there, we saw that our scoping was confirmed. By then we were actually a bit worried that we might find some tiny crack systems leading up, because by then we were really ready to get into Aquarian. Fortunately, nothing presented at the top of the Overseer cracks. We were DONE. The slab had just kicked the crap out of us.

When we reached the top, it was totally anti-climactic. No real sense of triumph. No sense of "we kicked ass" or anything like that. And we hadn't walked in more than a month, so even hiking out was a struggle.

And I really remember something strange from the hike out!

As we were hiking the Falls trail, we encountered a few girls. The looked STRANGE, man! I mean, women are built SO differently from men, and we had only see each other for 39 days. We got so mentally accustomed to seeing only the male form (no homo!) that that was "normal." And I was actually STARING at those girls, not in lust, but in AWE... just thinking, "Wow! That is something DIFFERENT!" Ever since then I've had a whole new appreciation for just how women are built. I don't mean that to sound seedy. I mean that they are just wonderful, and I'm so glad that we aren't all built like men. lol

After the ascent, the "persecution" set in for real. It was everywhere we went. We couldn't go to a climbing area in SoCal (except the Quarry) where people didn't recognize us and either catcall or yell obscenities at us. Sometimes groups would gather around to "have their say." All the while, we were thinking, "Wow, it sure seemed hard to US. It really isn't like they are saying it is. But perhaps we really ARE just complete losers."

And that self-doubt is what motivated us to try things like the Sea and Intifada. Now our critics say that we were all about self-promotion, but that wasn't it at all. We needed to KNOW if we were really as lame as we were being told. And as we saw that we weren't, we became DEFIANT! The objectives facts of what we did up there can be DERIVED from the drilled placements. But there is a deep subtlety about the performance we were seeking from ourselves that cannot be objectively quantified that way, and it was that subtlety that we needed to KNOW about ourselves.

The game we played was simple: run it out on natural hooking (sans this or that offending crystal on an edge) until no hook flake presented. Then drill a bolt or rivet (depending upon what had gone before). DEAL with what the rock presented and take EVERY opportunity to use the TINIEST of features to get up without drilling. Only in that way could we ensure that the self-test was real. And for us, the self-test was all that mattered.

Well, you know me... a bit longer than might be hoped. What can I say?

How about a bit more? lol

I've emphasized the grimness, because that is what we were seeking, and we found more than plenty of it. But that route did define me in terms of my self-image, and I think in entirely positive ways. Ever since that climb, I've KNOWN who and what I am in a way that few people on Earth ever will. I think that's the great thing about climbing: the opportunity it presents you to KNOW YOURSELF to OWN YOURSELF. I got that from WoS and subsequent climbs. So, I look back now with great fondness on the route. We are inexorably linked. Whatever is there now is not "the route" to me. I don't care what has happened to it or what will happen to it. "The route" was what I experienced on it and how that experience changed me. And I think that everything else I've accomplished in life can be traced back to those 39 self-defining days. For better or worse, I am the person I am today because of "the route."

I have to agree with Pete, like I said genius, they're well known.

You mean they don't want to stand up and be counted?

DMT

How could anyone ever look up the Super Slab (the start of WOS) and believe there was an authentic route there - authentic being a highly subjective word, granted....

I had to put my time in before I became an "insider"

Don't be so quick to toss out your unknowns... you may miss them when they're gone.

DMT