Donnie and I climbed for five years before we even saw another climber. This was the mid 1970s and you probably wouldn’t recognize the sport if you could get an operational time machine and transport yourself to 1975. 

Besides the low number of climbers, attitudes were different, too. Free soloing wasn’t an oddball activity practiced by a few, rather most of the climbers I knew—that is once the gang grew to a whopping six of us—soloed. Soloing was simply something you did, added to the sport’s tradecraft that included bouldering and nailing. 

I hadn’t met Henry Barber back then, but he was an inspiration, and climbing’s marquee name for his pure style, which included soloing. One Saturday Barber was on the American Sportsman to free solo The Strand, an exposed 5.10 on a sea cliff in Wales. The viewing was so critical to our development Donnie and I stayed home, an otherwise impossibility, to watch.

After that I bought a beret similar to the one Henry wore, and climbed more and more without a rope. When we graduated from high school and Donnie got married and moved away, I only soloed and made it a mission to solo every route we’d climbed with a rope. Looking back I’m fortunate that our rudimentary gear and tennis shoes limited us to about 5.7. 

Two years later, in college, I had a new partner, Mark “Herndie” Herndon, who would go on to become an early BASE jumper and a wildcatter, but back then climbing was all we cared about.

We didn’t think of soloing as much more than practice for run-out trad routes, and where we mostly climbed, in the Wichita and Quartz mountains of southwestern Oklahoma, being strung out dozens of feet above gear was normal. Some routes were so runout they were practically solos anyway. 

Normalization to danger is a common phenomenon. Driving a car is dangerous and you likely realized that when you got your license, but now that elephant is no longer on your chest and driving is so casual you might even do it with you knee. If you solo much, it gets like that. 

We soloed and didn’t think too much of it as long as the rock was solid, which the pink quartzite of the area was, and you climbed a few notches below your onsite grade, which we always did. In fact, after 50 years of climbing I’ve only known one person who climbed at his onsight and that was the great Walt “Mortimer” Shipley. When he was leading 5.11 he was onsight soloing 5.11. 

“That’s crazy,” everyone would say, but he did it anyway, adding to his list of craziness that could fill a book with the last chapter written in Dinky Creek in 1999.

***

The South America wall is a plaque of bullet-hard pink granite on Old Baldy or “Quartz Mountain,” a south-facing dome that rises some 300 feet from Ted Johnson’s wheat field just south of the prison in Granite, Oklahoma. The “SA” wall is shaped exactly like the continent itself—naming it wasn’t a moment of inspiration, although farmer Ted, during the many years he plowed the fields at the base, saw something different in that wall, a woman. “See it,” he says, and work his hands in the shape of an hourglass.

The center of that wall appears blank from a distance, but like most “blank” routes up close it has holds. Amazon Woman takes the righteous line basically straight up the middle. The route’s name was a play off of the southern continent and Ted’s vision, and was a nod to the mythological female Greek warriors who were dead eye shots with the bow.

Amazon Woman has four bolts in 130 feet and begins with a row of steep crimps. At about 40 feet the holds get larger and get you to a nearly impossible looking section of polish where the wall kicks up to about vertical, but still has just enough hidden holds to go at about 5.9. Twenty feet later the wall lays back, but it is here, at about 110 feet above sharp granite talus, you’ll find the crux, a small roof that you high-step over using polished scoops for handholds. That move goes at about 5.10, but on a hot day those scoops get smarmy and no longer feel like holds, bumping up the grade at least psychologically. 

I’d climbed the route a dozen times and had never fallen, and during a weekend of cragging with Herndie and soloing, I decided that Amazon Woman could use a solo. Back then 5.11 was about the top of the climbing scale and 5.10 was a sort of dumping ground: when a route was harder than 5.9 but you were reluctant to give it the heady grade of 5.11, it became a 5.10. Most routes at Quartz were 5.10, and that is the grade we led most of the time. Solos were 5.7 to 5.9 on most days.

Paradoxically, ground up climbing on less than vertical rock didn’t require physical strength as much as it did mental strength. Training the mind didn’t seem possible, so we trained the body with endless pullups, sometimes as many as 1,000 a day, on a “fingerboard” made from wood scraps. Having power gave us confidence—we were pretty certain we could downclimb from any situation, or keep going knowing there was always juice left for another move. Alex Huber would, when he freed the Salathe over a decade later, call this having “power to waste.”

The late morning was crisp when I started up Amazon Woman and the lower section of crimps and knobs was soon history, and I arrived at the crux overlap just as the sun peeked over the ridge and bore down on that set of polished scoops. Earlier that morning I’d visualized the crux, reaching to the scoops, bearing down on them, hiking a foot waist high, rocking over and down pressing. Routine.

But, now that I was actually at the roof I considered various ways to get over it and avoid the total commitment of the rock over. What about laddering the hands higher on upper holds and working my feet higher? 

I pulled onto the roof and reached for those higher holds. Except there weren’t any. Shit! 

Reversing course, I lower back under the roof and planted my feet on a solid edge, to camp there and re-evaluate. 

OK, that didn’t work, go back up and do the move just like you’ve always done. Don’t think about it. 

I moved back into the roof, pressed into the scoops, hiked a foot high to just above the roof’s lip, but it didn’t feel right. It felt slippery. Probably, the foothold wasn’t any more slippery than it ever was, but at that moment it felt like my foot could blow off and there’d be no way to catch myself on the scoops.

Back on the camper edge below the roof, and with the sun now warming the face, I ran through the options.

1. Downclimb over 100 feet. Possible, but there are a few spots that would be tricky to reverse—odds would be better pressing over the roof.
2. Traverse left 30 feet and jump onto the parallel route South Pacific, a 5.7 with large holds. But, that would involve working out unknown moves on the traverse, then risking all on a jump—odds would be better pressing over the roof.

Back on the ground, Herndie was watching from the boulder field and noted my predicament. “I thought about running around, going up the backside and dropping you a rope,” he’d later say. That conceit, however, just wasn’t cool and, along with toproping, previewing, rap bolting or even studying a route too closely, it wasn’t allowed in 1981.

A few words about those scoop handholds. Imagine pressing your fingers into a pair of spoons, spoons that had been worked over with emery cloth and silver polish. The scoops on Amazon are smoother and the foothold you commit to is no better. In that moment when you weight your shoe you trust all to the coefficient of friction—your shoe sticks and you make it, or it doesn’t.

I had hesitated so long on Amazon that perhaps an hour had passed with me stuck under the roof and the holds getting warmer and warmer. 

At that point in my life I hadn’t worked out time-machine thinking, that is mentally projecting yourself forward to a better moment, imagining yourself really there, and skipping over what is actually happing to you right now. It is a useful trick for getting beyond tight spots and works provided that in the future when the moment you imagined happening really happens, you note it. If, for example, you projected that in the future you won the lottery, then when you actually win the lottery you have to think, This is that time, that other thing never happened.

This isn’t like becoming unstuck in time like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five because unlike Billy you can’t actually go backwards.

That’s the downside: You can find yourself at a distant point when you are decades older and wish then that you could go back and be young again, so you should use projecting sparingly if at all. Usually it’s better to stay where you are even when that moment seems intolerable. You will find then that suffering slows time and when the moment is especially uncomfortable it is possible to achieve near immortality. Which could be the Christian version of hell.

But on Amazon Woman me figuring out the nuances of time travel were still four years away and I had to live in the awfulness of Now.

I pulled into the scoops again and again, hiked the foot over again and again, and couldn’t commit. The air under me when I had started up didn’t seem consequential, but now it was all I could think about, the foot slipping, hands skipping off the polished rock, a long fall to the base.

After another round of mental gymnastics going over the alternatives, I ruled them out again, tried to steady my mind, and pulled back onto the scoops.

They were smooth but I knew that. The foothold was slick, too, but I knew that. This time I didn’t hesitate, weighted the foot, rocked over and pressed out the roof. It felt easy, the hard part had part had been deciding to do it. Twenty feet of easy climbing and I was on top, sitting in tall grass bent by the wind. For the first time I noticed that my feet hurt and unlaced my EBs. On the hike down I stepped over a big diamondback rattlesnake hidden on the trail. Next time, go down a different way.

Forty-two years later I’m writing this column, thinking back to what should have been a learning moment, but instead was just an insignificant point in time, pecking at letters on a keyboard, projecting to a fine day on Looking Glass, underclinging smooth eyebrows and listening to the chirps of the Carolina Wren. That is all that really exists, the present can be easy to skip over.

See how it works?

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