Over Thanksgiving 2014, John and I decided to tag along on a trip to Vegas to climb at Red Rocks. When we heard that a group of our friends were going, we immediately jumped at the prospect of a fun climbing trip and booked tickets. It wasn’t until I started looking into it more closely that I began to worry that I might have made a bad decision.
My fear of heights makes multi-pitch climbing a constant mental struggle for me, even when every pitch is well-bolted. My experiences with short, single pitch climbing on trad gear (nuts and cams that you put into cracks in the wall to catch you when falling), are less than stellar (see post from Wisconsin). Combine these two and you have the classic climbs of Red Rocks; giant multi-pitch big wall climbs that rely entirely on you placing your own gear. What was I thinking?
In addition, I started hearing stories that did not help. With multi-pitch trad climbing, you don’t have a friendly line of bolts to follow, so it’s easy to get off route. As a result, even some of the best climbers in our group had stories about times they got completely off-route on easy climbs (such as Tunnel Vision, where the hardest pitch is a 5.7) and ended up in bad situations.
John headed to Red Rocks two days before I did and got to enjoy some climbing with Andrew (and without me to hold him back). They immediately hopped on Epinephrine – a twelve pitch climb that is one of the most famous at Red Rocks. Around 1:30pm, he sent me a text saying that they were on the 9th pitch of the climb. “Flying through it”, I thought. I followed up with him at 9:30 pm to see how his day went, and he replied with a terse “Still on climb. Talk later”. Naturally, I started freaking out at this point, because there was no way they should still be climbing unless something went seriously wrong. I later learned that they had gotten completely lost on the last pitch and ended up taking five hours to figure out a way up. John mentioned that they had to do some “scary shit” in the process and leave some gear in the wall, which I chose not to get detailed information about. In the end, they didn’t make it back down to the ground until around 3am at which point they were too exhausted to even get food and fell asleep in the car.
Another pair in our group also spent their first day with a traumatic experience. While their only issues involved getting behind schedule, they ended up helping out a pair of climbers next to them that had gotten way off route. A girl was following a long traverse to try to get on route when she took a giant swinging fall, hitting her head on the wall numerous times (and foolishly not wearing a helmet). She somehow managed to keep it together until they rappelled to the ground, where she immediately collapsed and couldn’t stand up. Our friends ended up having to book it back to the parking lot (most of the approaches were 1+ hour hikes) and call 911, who sent a helicopter to get her out.
Simply put I quickly realized that it is completely possible to get injured doing big wall climbing, and I couldn’t convince myself that my fears were irrational. Add that to all the other elements, and things were not looking promising for me.
In an effort to actually enjoy the trip, I had decided to set some limits on what kind of routes I would do. Since Red Rocks does have good single-pitch sport routes, I figured I would spend most of my time there, and then venture out onto shorter, bolted, multi-pitch routes. As long as the anchors were bolted, I could convince myself that it was the same as sport multi-pitch, and hopefully avoid the inevitable break-down which would come from piling all my fears into one climb.
Needless to say, I threw all my rules out the moment I got there, because on day one, I hopped on Frogland, a six-pitch climb without bolted anchors. And shockingly, I was completely calm the entire time! Even when John left me a belay stations by myself for 30+ minutes because we kept catching up to the people in front of us. When I made it through the entire climb, I realized it was the first time I ever did a multi-pitch climb and actually enjoyed it. Most of the time, I am just gritting my teeth and trying not to have a freak-out. Then when I am done, I look back and remember the climb fondly because I am proud of myself for overcoming my fear. But usually, I am miserable and terrified during the actual process of the climb (yes… I realize that the fact that I climb is still weird).
By the end of our trip, I had hopped on three 6 pitch climbs – none of which had my requisite bolted anchors – and kept my cool the entire time. On my last day there, I even conquered Purblind Pillar – a climb that wasn’t particularly difficult, but had all the elements that freak me out in it – without letting the fear take over. For instance, we started the first pitch by free-climbing about 30 feet to a ledge in order to reduce rope drag. On the second pitch, there was an incredibly exposed traverse on slopers that I did not feel even remotely comfortable on. The third pitch required me to start by traversing about 20 feet to my right before even starting the climb, which left me with a huge pendulum opportunity after taking apart my anchor. And the fourth pitch left me so far away from my climbing partner that we couldn’t hear each other at all; I ended up taking a long time starting that pitch so I could be sure that he would have me on belay by then. Yet, even with all these elements stacked up, I kept my cool. Maybe someday, I’ll actually be able to handle leading trad (ha!).
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