Boy Meets Girl

The start of so many great stories and the start to so many great tragedies.

Despite spending 20-30 days a year climbing, I’m not a climber. I’m a skier who just so happens to regularly find himself wearing a harness, half way up a mountain, with a steady flow of terror-pee running down my leg.

Not being a dedicated climber, I never actually work at my climbing, so despite climbing for over a decade, I don’t exactly crank big grades. Traditionally, 5.7 has been my happy place with 5.8s doable and 5.9 being something that come with no guarantee of success.

But then I, the skier who climbs, started dating Christine - a climber who skis.

The first couple of months of our relationship where fantastic in that we got to cater entirely to my strengths – skiing. When ski touring, Christine and I are similar in speed on the way up, and I’m stronger on the way down.

But then it stopped being winter.

An Incentive to Climb More

All of a sudden I was acutely aware that I was a skier who climbed 5.7 on top rope, dating a climber who leads 11s.

Luckily, before we ever got a chance to actually climb together, Christine took off on an 8 month climbing trip, so I didn’t have to show her what a terrible climber I was – she knew I was a skier, but she hadn’t had to confront the true depths of my horrible-ness. I knew someday it would come up, but we were in the early days of our relationship so it was easily brushed aside as a ‘tomorrow problem’.

But then, in a moment of idiocy while trying to convince Christine to spend a couple of weeks of her climbing sabbatical with me, I suggested I take a couple of weeks off work later in the summer and we go climbing together. Possibly stupid.

After considering options literally all over the world since I was looking to burn some frequent flyer points, we settled on a region in Northern Spain called the Picos de Europa. We picked it because it’s predominantly big, long, multi-pitch routes up big, slabby, limestone peaks. I do my least-worst work on slabby limestone, so this would play to my very limited strengths.

The problem was, I was still a terrible, terrible climber. Luckily, I had a couple of months to train in.

What followed was the most intense flurry of climbing of my entire life. No scrambling, no trail runs, no hikes, no mountain biking. Every single possible minute was spent climbing. I was seriously into this girl.

Katherine Valentine has been dragging me up routes since the day she moved to Canada about five years ago. She gets that I struggle on lead and, despite being a climber on a similar level to Christine, Katherine really enjoys climbing long, easy routes that make me happy in a ‘Phil only weeps with terror a little bit’ sort of way.

Nursing a slowly healing ankle she broke the previous summer in a lead fall, Katherine couldn’t handle long approaches – so the next two months turned into a mission to climb every single easy, short access, preferably long, multipitch route we could find.

We started with the (not very) long Rundle Horn. Then in a one-month burst, we climbed Ha Ling, Water World in Revi, Gooseberry and Aftonroe. When we weren’t on long routes, we were cragging at Sunshine or cranking routes at the gym. Nearly imperceptibly I was getting better. For the first time in my life, all of a sudden I was seconding 10a routes cleanly so, Katherine, Mike and I climbed Beautiful Century. And then things kept progressing and all of a sudden I found myself climbing Sea of Dreams (10c/d) with Mike, Katherine and Matt with only minimal hauling on draws and only the tiniest bit of terror-pee.

I recruited others to the cause along the way. Rebecca shepherded me up Mother’s Day Buttress and Paul dragged me up Twilight Zone. I still couldn’t lead worth a damn, but thanks to great friends willing to drag me up stuff, I’d gotten to a point where I felt like I could make at least a halfway decent showing of myself in front of my shiny new climber girlfriend.

What Could Go Wrong?

It was only when I was on the plane about half way across the Atlantic, that it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, a two week climbing trip, on another continent, with a girl I’d been dating for only a few months, most of which she’d been away for and with whom I had never actually climbed with – might not have been my most brilliant idea ever. I spent the rest of the flight figuring the odds of us killing each other or her leaving me for dead half way up a route. Shit.

Christine had flown over a couple of weeks before me to climb Gorges de Verdon in France so I flew into Paris to meet her. We grabbed a rental car and we then did a two day, marathon drive down to Spain. The drive was punctuated by intense excitement at getting to finally climb with Christine and abject terror of having to keep up to her climbing.

I know that it doesn’t bother me to ski with people who maybe don’t have as much experience on skis as I do – but that didn’t do much to quiet that little voice in the back of my head that this amazing girl was going to dump my ass the first time I froze up on a 5.2.

Feeling the Destination Out, Feeling Each Other Out