It’s Friday, April 26th. Hunter and I get a late start. We roll out of the driveway in his pickup around noon. The drive to the summit of the Sandias is a sweeping forty-five minute haul around the southern and then the backside of the range.
We arrive at the top and two things are instantly clear – it’s cold and it’s high. At ten-thousand-six-hundred feet above sea level this is the highest I’ve ever been. The wind in the parking lot bites at me angrily.
Our objective for the day is to climb a one-hundred-thirty foot crack on The Sentinel, a stone spire which begins just a few hundred feet below the summit. We leave the parking lot and begin our approach hike down. The ecosystem stuns me. The upper regions of the Sandias are a forest. Not really what I expected in New Mexico. The sweet, earthy smell and large trees remind me of home in Upstate New York. How is it possible that I was in the desert an hour ago?
A few minutes of hiking brings us to a thirty or forty foot tall limestone cliff band. Hunter sets up a rappel off of a tree and we descend the drop. Rappelling brings me a touch of childhood joy every time. It’s like a combination of the peace of floating on my back in the water and the excitement of jumping on a trampoline for the first time as a kid. It’s all consuming, but it’s simple. My feet kick against the rock sending me flying into the open-space-of-nothing as I gradually feed rope through my ATC lowering myself.
Reaching the bottom, we repack our rope and continue our downclimb. After post-holing in the snow for about ten minutes we reach another steep face which requires some creative downward scrambling and two more short rappels. The views of the desert below are spectacular. “This is why I moved here,” I say to Hunter. Honestly, I’m speaking more to myself.
We traverse a boulder field for about twenty minutes until we reach the base of our target climb. All in all, our unorthodox approach hike took close to two hours despite being only three-hundred yards as the crow flies. Deep snow, boulders, cliff bands, and thin air – these mountains are rugged. I love the fact that we won’t see a single other person the entire adventure.
Hunter opens up a bag of banana chips while I eat peanut butter straight from the jar. It takes us a few minutes before we collaborate and engineer a genius idea to combine our respective snacks. Food tastes better outside, and it tastes five-star after burning calories for a few hours in the mountains.
The elevation has me a bit light headed, but the view is magnificent. Five-thousand feet down the mountain to a completely flat expanse of desert that extends miles and miles to the horizon. Add in the fact that I’m wearing red-tinted sunglasses and I truly feel like I’m on Mars. Thankfully, the wind is calmer here and the sun is shining. It’s comfortable climbing conditions.
We gear up. I feed rope through my grigri as Hunter leads the first pitch. He climbs confidently, taking several breaks to look down to me and yell, “Yeah man this is sick, absolutely splitter crack.” It doesn’t take him long to build an anchor about eighty feet above me. “Alright Schloss, you’re on belay. Climb on”, he yells down to me.
The first fifteen feet are an easy scramble. I reach the start of the true climbing, remove the cam Hunter has placed, and begin working my way up the finger-width crack. The climb is slightly slabby, meaning it is less than vertical. The movements are well within my physical limitations, but before long I’m filled with terror as the exposure swallows me. My legs start to shake uncontrollably. Each breath is exceedingly difficult. My eyes are looking at my hands on the rock, but my peripheral vision dominates my sight. Over each shoulder lays an abyss that wants to whisk me off into the nothingness. So this is what being afraid of heights is like?
I’m on the verge of a full blown panic attack. I’ve truly never felt this level of unease climbing before. I’ve never climbed anything so open and exposed. “Hey buddy, you’re going to have to pull it together. The only way out is up,” I think to myself in a lovingly commanding tone. I reach up with my right arm, turn my hand sideways, stick my fingers into the crack, and flex every muscle in my hand and forearm to lock my grip in. Pull up, find a foothold. Pull up, find a foothold. Repeat. Repeat. The action of doing slowly dissipates a small portion of the mental anguish I’m feeling. Breathe, Ryan, breathe.
Finally, I reach Hunter at the anchor eighty feet above where I started. “I’m never doing this again,” I think to myself as I work my way onto the two-foot wide rock ledge he’s standing on.
“Isn’t this awesome?” he asks me, as I tie myself safely to the wall with a clove hitch.
“Yeah man, good climb, really cool,” I lie as my heart beats through my shirt. “I honestly got a little nervous though, this exposure is different man. It’s not like this back East.”
Hunter gives me a nod and a bit of a sympathetic smile. The concept of fear seems to confuse him more than anything.
My hands shake as I set up my gear to prepare to belay. I take extra time to focus on not dropping anything off the wall. Even though my soul is begging me to return to flat ground as soon as possible, I can’t help but to pause for an awe-filled moment of appreciation for where I currently am in the world – standing on a narrow ledge, eighty feet above the ground, five-thousand feet above the New Mexico desert. I’m certain I’ll appreciate this in the future. For now, I’d just like to not die please.
Logically, I know climbing with a rope is “safe.” I could, theoretically, jump off the cliff face at any time and be secured safely by the rope. Emotions have a funny way of dominating logic and theory.
Hunter and I fistbump and he takes off to lead the second pitch. This climb is lightwork for him. He quickly reaches the top of the rock spire. I can’t hear or see him, but I know it is my turn to climb when he pulls the rope up to the point that it’s taut on my harness.
My left foot finds an imperfection in the rock that is significant enough to give me some purchase to stand on. I reach my arm up and jam my fingers in the crack and pull hard. Fear still has a strong grip on me.
It dawns on me how asinine climbing really is when viewed logically. How we drove a truck to the top of a mountain just to hike downhill to a cliff face to climb up to the top of just to rappel back down and hike back up to the truck. Conquerors of the meaningless. Pursuers of pointless adventure.
I lift my right foot, turn it ninety degrees sideways, push my toes into the crack, and crank my leg back upright until it creates enough torque that I’m able to stand up without my foot slipping. Then my fingers jam in and pull. The process repeats until I reach Hunter and the top.
A rush of accomplishment washes over me. I still feel uneasy and know it will not dissipate until I’m back “safe” on flat ground. However, I know myself well enough that I have to smile at a thought that would have enraged me minutes ago. It won’t take me long back in civilization before I’m longing to return to the mountains.