The Fear Chronicles 2

November 2014

Climb

I started climbing in 1991 when I was taken out toproping at Carderock by a friend I met at the University of Maryland. In the first few months of climbing, I had no idea there was any other way to climb. Remember, we didn’t have climbing gyms and the internet at that time. A year later, I was on a student exchange at Colorado State in Fort Collins, and I was riding my bike to Horsetooth Reservoir and going on trips with friends to Devils Tower, Sinks Canyon and Vedauwoo, so I was starting to see there was a lot more to climbing. I did my first lead with gear at Joshua Tree on spring break. I could toprope 5.11s pretty regularly, and this was a good choice for a first lead because it was 5.7. I got to the top and belayed my friend to me, and asked him how my gear was, feeling proud of myself. “Well,” he said, “every piece fell out. Other than that you did great.”

A year later after that I was back at CSU in a master’s program and immersed in climbing. Climbing by myself at Horsetooth on the boulders was really interesting to me–there was one boulder problem that was about 25 feet high, on a short cliff band. The harder moves were near the ground, but the climbing continued to the top of the rim, and I just couldn’t get myself to commit to the end of the harder moves and get into what I knew was easier climbing to the top. I was always by myself and crash pads weren’t really a thing yet, so I would climb up through the hard moves and then downclimb again. It drove me nuts that I couldn’t climb past that point–mentally, not physically–but I was too afraid of getting high up and falling onto the hard dirt, though I went back day after day and tried to convince myself to just keep going.

Finally I took a piece of rope out there one day with a bunch of overhand knots tied in it and tied it off to a tree at the top of the bluff. From the bottom of the wall I climbed up, clipped a carabiner through my belay loop into one of the bights and then climbed up farther and clipped into the next one when I got to it–kind of like making a giant daisy chain of rope as I climbed up. It wasn’t very high tech, and I would have taken a little whipper if I’d fallen, but I knew now I wouldn’t hit the ground, and finally it allowed me to climb past the bottom of the wall and all the way to the top. At the top, with a bunch of knots hanging off my belay loop, I felt like I’d never felt before: quietly filled with joy, satisfied–and also proud of myself for figuring out how to break past my mental barrier in a way that worked for me, slowly and gradually.

After that, I could always boulder up that wall with no problem–the spell had been broken. But how annoying it was too! Physically the climbing was really not that hard for me–it wasn’t dead easy, but it was also not at or beyond my limit–yet I had been completely prevented from being able to do for weeks it by my fear of falling to the ground. It was annoying to the point that I finally simply had to figure out a way to work it out if only to get past it in my mind, and the experience caused me to put a lot of thought into an idea I became very attached to for about ten years after: the idea of what I called real fear versus fake fear. In this theory, real fear is when there’s actual danger, and fake fear is when you’re just anxious about something that you shouldn’t actually be afraid of. It seemed obvious to me that fear could really hold me back from life experiences that could make me grow and become better.

In this time, about 20 years ago, I imagined that I could totally apply myself to figuring out how to get over fake fear, how to recognize real fear, and that at some point in my future I would be absolutely free and happy and never afraid again! So that was a pretty exciting time 😉 The key word there is “imagined.”

And this is how and why I started to free solo, on small and easy walls. To learn.

Is there value in exploring fear, in doing things that have risk? Is it better to seek ways to be insulated and absolutely physically safe? Where do you draw the line?