The young buck who offers to take us up Time Wave Zero instead drinks twenty-eight Tecates and keeps the hot tub party going until 2am;
The silent and slight European who walks slumped and duck-footed seamlessly climbs 12a and slouches away, unexpectedly the most badass climber in Virgin Canyon;
The excitable new guy brings a Nike backpack, a strawberry lemonade vape, and half a twin rope;
Note: this piece is published in Volume 25 of The Climbing Zine, now available
Banner photo by Jsberli
Calloused knobs protrude from both big toes of the resident dirtbag. In a cool Francophile accent, he says his ex was a 5.14 semipro, and now he doesn’t care about grades, only flow;
The aspiring dirtbag takes many rest days, mostly spent disarticulating his 1997 Tacoma, and talks with anyone about breaking past 12s;
Excited screams from the pack of middle-aged men with barrel guts echo over the Conundrums, still leading 11s;
A Colorado climber screams, “ROCK,” and a moment later, “CACTUS.”
A pale Squamish climber cuts up aloe and applies it to her partner’s bright-red shoulders as he lies face down in the grass moaning;
Another sunburnt couple coming off Snott Girlz in full sun swear animatedly at the slow party in front of them, each other, and God, and drop their rope squarely into the face of another climber;
A shirtless stoner climber crags at the Upper Sense of Religion for the name alone;
Everyone lives off tacos and off-brand Nutella;
A climber brings a friend who sings softly to herself on the 5.7 pitch of Five Pitch Harmony: “This is terrifying…I am terrifiedddddd…aaaaallll the time…”
After dark, the headlamps of climbers still going illuminate the big walls like stars;
A sticker on a Nalgene at the base of a climb, wedged between mesquite branches: a fist holding a quickdraw, resembling a uterus, under the words CRUSH THE PATRIARCHY.
The jack mormon from Utah stick-clips an entire 12a; he and his belayer—his cheerful wife, who confides she knows “it’s real when he sounds like a muppet” (and truly, his operatic bray has us shaking in laughter)—fly home with not one but two snaggle-toothed Mexican street dogs;
A pair of beautiful, dark-haired climbers from Juneau whose relationship has expired, but the belationship stands solid, speak gratuitously politely, always handing each other the best bites; she leads The Raven the cloudy morning after he tells her he’s seeing someone, absorbed by the limestone pressing into her fingertips. The contact between callousing skin and crimpy edges eradicates thought;
At Leo’s, the man himself gives a polite climber two shots of medicinal Mezcal for the dog bite on his ankle, one topical, one oral;
The yoga teacher bails on her class at Posada to go surfing, then climbs 11c topless;
An anxious, chatty math teacher narrates every thought through Pitch Black, an impressively prolonged stream of consciousness, to the captive audience of everyone else on the wall, but later orders everyone a round of cervezas in fluent Spanish;
The Christian missionary climbers at El Buho somehow seem clean-cut, even with shoulder-length hair and beards, maybe because of their gentle voices;
A car backfires, and a military veteran walking to the crag resists the adrenal surge to tackle their climbing partner to the ground, though still kicks the pavement like a twitchy flamenco dancer;
A college girl breaking into 12s decides to change her major from chemistry to geology, to spend more time on rocks;
A cheerful dog with a Sharpie’d collar naming him Tufa Ted follows climbers up the arroyo, tail waving; he graciously accepts half a boiled egg and sleeps under the rope at the base of Supernova;
The Bay Area tech folks aren’t sure about drinking the water;
A full-send Australian with dreads parties hard, falls in love, builds a tribe, then disappears to El Salto;
Over a latte, a painfully shy climber pours over El Buho’s copy of The Climbing Zine and dog ears a story about rope soloing;
A poet photographs a semi-deflated star balloon lying among the thistles, then spends four brave, stubborn hours on the first pitch of Will the Wolf Survive;
And one quiet climber writes notes on the lovely, infinitely varied, somehow related sort of people inhabiting the vertical.
Bailey Williams is a seminomadic climber, storyteller, and yoga teacher. When she’s not in the mountains with her very large dog, she can be found in her dry cabin in southeast Alaska. She is the author of Hollow: A Memoir of My Body In the Marines (Abrams, November 2024).
This piece is published in Volume 25 of The Climbing Zine, now available.
