Climbing Hard Isn't Everything

Updated July 16, 2024 10:48AM

This story, originally titled “Messages From the Skull Cave,” appeared in our 2024 print edition of Ascent. You can buy a copy of the magazine here.

I. A prodigal son

On a bleak, gray evening in March 2007, during a poorly planned off-season pilgrimage to Rifle, Colorado, my friend Scottie and I, driving aimlessly through the darkening canyon, noticed a lone Tacoma parked at the Skull Cave. It was raining, but there was still snow on the ground, and the dirt road was a mess of ruts and puddles. Scottie and I had driven 2,000 miles to escape New Hampshire’s no-more-dismal late winter, and in the week we’d been in Rifle, we hadn’t seen another person, let alone another climber. The sight of a strange truck on this grimmest of days was shocking enough to make me stop my Honda Element in the middle of the road and peer up toward the cave’s leering mouth, where a solitary headlamp was fencing with the semi-darkness.

I parked beside the Tacoma, and, after agreeing to bring the guidebook so we’d have an excuse for snooping, we hiked up the short, muddy approach trail to say hi.

Back then, Scottie and I were the sort of desperate teenagers who, undistracted by drugs, jobs, romantic partners, or real-life ambitions, spent our rare rest days poring diligently through the Rifle guidebook, hoping to identify 5.14s that might be in our style and imagining how our lives would change if we ever got strong enough to send them. The only people we respected more than climbers who were already strong were climbers who embraced hard work and discomfort as core elements of the sport. So we were deeply impressed when, in the cave, we found a lone man hanging from the third bolt of a bouldery 5.13c called, lamentably, Skull Fuck. He was rope soloing with a grigri, something I had never seen before, and when he heard our footsteps echoing in from the cave’s mouth behind him, he pulled on the wall, flailed toward the next hold, and took a short, jarring fall.

“Hey, dude,” Scottie called timidly. “I’ve got a harness in the car. You want a belay?”

The man turned and took us in. He had slicked-back dark hair and a pimply three-day beard. A six-pack of Coors Light was sitting in the dust beside his backpack, several cans already crushed and empty.

He lowered himself to the ground, lit a cigarette, and introduced himself. Hugh (not his real name) was probably no older than 35, but he had the wrecked face of a man who’d crammed a lot of hard living into a short number of years. Despite the fact that it was pouring rain and barely 40°, he was shirtless and sweating from his effort on the wall, and I couldn’t help but think that he didn’t look much like my vision of a climber. Narrow shoulders. Flabby stomach. Thin pale arms that lacked those shapely climber veins. But Hugh quickly made it known that he was a former Rifle regular, one of those punk-era renegades who’d spent the all-or-nothing ’90s chasing grades through the canyon. He’d done early ascents of several popular 5.13s here, he said, including the fifth or sixth ascent of Slice of Life, a Kurt Smith route that was Rifle’s first 5.14a “until some fucking sissies kneebarred it down to 5.13d.”

“So where’d you go after that?” Scottie said, which was his politely appalled way of asking the same question I wanted to ask: If you were blessed enough to be one of the first 50 or so Americans to climb the mythical 5.14 grade, how could you devalue climbing enough to prioritize beer and cigarettes and whatever else it is that has made you look like you do?

“I guess life happened,” he said, explaining how he’d spent the last few years living in the oil fields of North Dakota, an experience that involved “pretty good money, if you know what I mean.”

Scottie and I, privileged little neo-communists that we were, did not. Instead, we grimaced at the idea that this man, who could have been one of our heroes, had put money and “life” before climbing—and oil money, no less.

Hugh then told us how, after years of paying his dues, he’d finally managed to get the same sort of gig in the town of Rifle, so he was “back in the game.” As he said this, he toasted Skull Fuck with his cigarette and grinned at us. And though his grin revealed several cracked and filthy teeth, it also brought a ghostly youth back into his face, the fervent smile and trickster gleam of a psyched young kid who once—and not very long ago—wasn’t so different from Scottie or me.

Hugh didn’t do very well on the route. His fingers were latently strong, so he could use the holds and hold the positions, but his body didn’t seem to move as his mind expected it to move. He kept blowing off in weird directions. Feet skittering. Shaky fingers unable to latch Skull Fuck’s crimps and pockets at speed. With us as his audience, he grew frustrated and embarrassed, shaking his head and chuckling to himself in a way that seemed to ward off tears. Eventually, he looked down at Scottie and said, “I’m a fucking mess, bro. I’m sorry.”

“We’re just resting today,” said Scottie, who, because I was his main climbing partner, was no stranger to marathon belays and emotional meltdowns. “Give it another go.”

When Hugh finally came down after about half an hour, he’d still not stuck most of the crux moves and hadn’t made it past the fourth or fifth bolt. If he’d been me, he would have kicked his chalk bag and then—loudly—begun outlining an ignoble future of poor performance and death. But Hugh was grinning again.

He opened a beer and drank it quickly. He offered us beers that, since we were on strict diets and since we’d recently learned that Coors’s chairman was a vocal Republican, we declined. Instead we asked Hugh about the Rifle he’d come of age in. He regaled us with stories about the pre-kneepad days and early trips to Hueco and Wild Iris, making sure we knew he’d been on back-slapping terms with Kurt Smith, Todd Skinner, and John Sherman, while also trying to impress us with the sort of dirty, sexist, racist jokes that would have gotten him shunned by the quiet woodland locals at our home crag in New Hampshire. Case in point: He’d picked Skull Fuck as a get-back-in-shape project because he thought the name was “epic.”

Finally, as darkness finished falling and the rain began slackening outside the cave, Hugh asked if we wanted to climb again on Sunday, his next day off.

By this point, I wasn’t sure I did. I respected his work ethic and his willingness to try hard alone in the rain, but his jokes made me uncomfortable, and his cigarette smoke made me nauseous. The vast gulf between who he’d been and who he’d become threatened my own desperate faith in steady linear growth and the glorious destinies afforded to those who worked hard and climbed harder.

He laughed to make it clear that this was a joke, and he seemed about to go on—perhaps to say that he just wanted to climb on something, it didn’t matter how easy it was—but then Scottie, a better person than me, simply said, “We’d love to, man!” and promised that we’d meet Hugh at the Ruckman Cave at 8:30 a.m.

And Scottie, who has a photographic memory, said, “Of course he does. Look at the guidebook. Here.”

Scottie leafed through the book and stopped at a black-and-white shot of a lanky kid giving a try-hard grimace on one of the canyon’s older 5.13d’s. At first I wasn’t sure Scottie was right. The kid in the photo bore only the faintest resemblance to the man we’d met. But the names were the same, and after some close scrutiny, I thought I recognized that quick gleam of youth I’d seen in Hugh’s face.

“Once you’ve got it, you’ve got it,” Scottie said. “He’ll be crushing again in no time.”

Sunday was one of the first truly warm days of spring, and the canyon rang with clanking quickdraws and the laughter of friends reuniting after a long, dark winter. Scottie and I waited about half an hour in the Ruckman parking lot, doing jumping jacks in the sun. Then we did a few nearby warmups. When 10 a.m. rolled around, Hugh still wasn’t there.

Sensing something about Hugh that I wouldn’t recognize for another 15 years, Scottie wanted to wait a bit longer, so he recommended that I try Street Knowledge, a 5.12b in Ruckman that he’d already done and I’d previously expressed interest in projecting. But I knew that, even in his lapsed state, Hugh was far stronger than me, and I didn’t want him to see me climb, sure that he’d find some way to show me how poorly I compared to his own impressive youth. So I insisted on taking this chance to escape, heading instead toward my project at the Anti-Phil Wall.

Twenty minutes later, hanging on Easy Skankin’s upper crux for the billionth time, I looked out over the canyon and saw Hugh, a cigarette clenched between his lips, gnashing his Tacoma toward Ruckman. Scottie, belaying below the tree line, couldn’t see him, so I said nothing. A few minutes later, still hanging at the same crux, I watched Hugh’s truck return, heading down canyon. When I lowered, I didn’t say anything to Scottie.

We kept an eye out for Hugh for the rest of the trip, Scottie truly hoping to see him again, me dreading it. We also kept an eye out when we returned to Rifle that summer. And we kept an eye out when we returned the following year to live and climb in the canyon for seven straight weeks.

II. Who’s the ghost now?

But Hugh wasn’t done with me. Or I wasn’t done with him. His youthful photo, ugly grin, crude jokes, and die-hard presence at the crag that day—all of these sparring details informed various imaginary versions of Hugh that I used over the years as foils for my evolving relationship with the climbing life.

In those early days, the latter half of the 2000s, back when climbing served a quasi-religious function for me, I thought—or wanted to think—that Hugh was some sort of apostate. Back then, I not only believed that there was an inherent causal link between dedication and destiny, I believed that destiny, like the heaven of the faithful, was a real and tangible thing. I also believed that if I tried hard enough, yearned maniacally enough, and sacrificed enough ancillary comforts and interests, I’d earn the right to enter some sort of mythical promised land open only to the strong and the talented—and that my presence there, in that land, would forever dissolve all the confusion and uncertainty that ran so rampant through my teenage life. Given this metaphysical framework, it was easy to understand Hugh as a warning of sorts, a Dantean shade who’d been summoned to the Skull Cave on that miserable March day for the sole purpose of showing me what happened when you strayed from the straight and narrow path.

But I wasn’t totally out of touch with reality. So, at the same time, Hugh’s real and human existence also threatened my propensity for easy fantastical narratives. I could see that Hugh, once a promising young crusher, now lived a life that in no way resembled the lives lived in my imaginary promised land—and this fact threatened the mythology of a final destination, threatened to teach me that sending 5.14, though sometimes fun and self-validating, is not any sort of endpoint and does not stop life from happening. In that sense, Hugh was less a warning than a threat—someone whose very existence ridiculed the brittle philosophy with which I’d made the world tolerable. And during those tenuous early years, when I put so much pressure on climbing that all the fun oozed out of it, these two Hughs seemed to live on my shoulders, laughing their slightly different laughs in each of my ears.

Later, when I was in college, Hugh took on a different form. Surrounded by climbers who, like Hugh’s former self, were infinitely more talented than I’d ever be, I reluctantly accepted that it wasn’t reasonable to build a system of self-worth based on how strong I was. This prompted me to relegate climbing to a fun hobby, something that allowed me to relax and socialize when I wasn’t diving headlong into school or work or alcohol or literature or whatever other pursuit-of-the-moment I thought capable of holding all my life’s meaning. Unsurprisingly, when I stripped climbing of the obligation to mean so much to me, it became far more fun, and I maintained my strength and fitness not because I felt like I had to but because I climbed whenever I possibly could, which allowed me to continue to do things that were hard enough to feel rewarding. Now, when I thought of that brief hour I spent with Hugh in the Skull Cave, I saw in his uncoordinated arms and flabby stomach a simple warning of what might happen to my body if I let other pursuits take me too far from the sport. He was a reminder that for climbing to stay fun, I needed to keep doing it.

III. Everyone has their own North Dakota

Rather than involving heavy drills and fracking fluid and lonely trailer homes quaking on the plains, the life that happened to me was privileged and lucky, revolving around a non-climbing wife, a dog, a fixer-upper house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a full-time desk job. Sure, Hugh’s grin occasionally flickered back at me across the years, particularly when I started describing my annual climbing goals with phrases like “get back in shape” and “maybe do V10 again,” but the truth is that I thought of him less and less often. Climbing was still fun—a thing I did to connect with my body and my friends—but it felt like a relatively small facet of a life far richer than I’d have been able to imagine at age 19 in the Skull Cave.

I never really considered the idea that an injury could end it for me—largely because a plethora of minor ones over the years stripped the term of its more somber tones. I’ve dealt with elbow tendonitis and sprained ankles; I’ve torn a lumbrical and more pulleys than I can count; I’ve strained collateral ligaments and torn my labrum; I’ve dislocated both shoulders; and I once fell so hard on my ass I ended up with internal organ damage. But at no point between October 2004, when I first met Scottie and dove hard into his regimen of calorie restriction, pull-ups, and weather-be-damned psych, and Tuesday, October 11, 2022, when my left elbow stopped working, did an injury ever force me to take more than a few weeks fully off. And even when I wasn’t psyched, when I was pursuing other interests with all-in zeal, I never understood my breaks as in any way constituting a long-term departure from the sport. Climbing was always there, something I could return to the second I healed up, or was psyched again, or both.

In the year leading up to October 2022, I’d taken a half-step back from the sport, climbing just once or twice a week, putting my energy into buying a house and getting married, and taming the wilderness of invasive weeds in my yard. But I had spent most of September 2022 training again. And while warming up in the gym on October 11, I barely noticed that my left elbow felt a little odd, a little tingly, focusing instead on the delightful fact that I felt stronger than I had in more than a year. Trading burns with several friends, I sent a V9 that had absolutely shut me down two weeks earlier and then, feeling confident, began projecting a harder problem, the crux of which revolved around a shouldery left-hand gaston. That’s when my elbow started feeling even stranger. There was still no pain yet, but it did feel like some great accident was bubbling to life just beneath the surface of my skin, so I told myself to be smart, leave my friends, and switch to low-intensity endurance on the auto belays.

I harnessed up, set my stopwatch to 20 minutes, and pulled onto the route of my undoing: a measly, dead-vertical 5.11a.

I almost cried out and let go. The auto belay lowered me 10 inches to the gym floor. I regarded my arm, then grabbed another jug.

So I put my feet on the wall and pulled on the hold. Zing! The pain was quick and hot and personal. I stepped back down to the ground, massaging my arm. None of the muscles or tendons hurt to touch, but I could feel the shivery afterglow of pain somewhere deep inside the joint.

It was clear that my session was over, so I pulled some slack into the rope system and tried to open the auto-locking carabiner. Zing!

Half embarrassed, half infuriated, I packed up, accidentally probing my new limitations in the process. Trying to use my left hand to remove my climbing shoes, I provoked it again. Trying to pull my sneakers on. Zing! If I hadn’t been in a gym, surrounded by people I knew or wanted to know, I would have grimaced or even cried out, but instead I just gnawed my lips and left without saying goodbye. In the car, trying to buckle my seatbelt. Zing! Trying to turn the steering wheel with my left hand. Zing!

My initial self-diagnosis was some bastard apparition of acute medial elbow tendinopathy, but that evening, after barraging myself with various tests, it became clear that something weirder was going on. I could bend my elbow without pain but couldn’t apply any pressure to the arm or hand if the elbow was bent. I could hold a full Nalgene straight out in front of me but couldn’t bring it to my lips without prompting pain. I could hang straight-armed from the Beastmaker 2000’s 10mm crimps, but I couldn’t slide my left hand into my jeans pocket, couldn’t pull up my pants with my left hand, couldn’t towel myself off after a shower. Pull-ups or push-ups? Forget about it. And yet, in between the bursts of pain, I felt almost nothing. No muscular tightness or discomfort. Nothing I could poke and say, “That’s it, right there.” Just a faint tingling sensation deep inside my outer elbow—a reminder that the hurt had been there and could come back.

That night, after provoking a zing! while pulling my sheets up over myself, I turned to my wife, Emma, and—because I was perplexed and afraid, because I was melodramatic and self-pitying, because I half hoped that voicing the worst-case scenario might somehow jinx it away—I said, “This sort of feels like it’s going to end my climbing forever.”

A month passed. Then three months. I saw surgeons and physical therapists, some of them dismissive, others fascinated. The elbow stayed more or less the same. Even my yard work was on hold because I couldn’t wield a shovel or lift a rock without pain. And gradually, rather than representing a foil or a warning or a vision of my future against which to strive, Hugh reemerged in my mind as someone with whom I could directly identify: a man with body pain and a drinking problem who wakes up in his post-prime middle age and realizes that he’s lost something special. Fitness, sure, and zeal, sure, but also more than that. Something he can’t quite name. Something that makes you want to quit your job and load up your truck and flee as fast as you can to the distant scene of your youth so you can rope solo in the rain on a climb that’s impossibly outside your new limits.

Except, I could drive up to Rifle whenever I wanted. I just wouldn’t be able to climb.

IV. It’s just so fun

That winter was a lonely time. Every Monday I left fire emojis on Instagram clips of my friends sending their weekend projects in Roy, in Hueco, on boulders just a few miles from my house. Yet I no longer had an excuse to see these friends in person. I rose in the dark, wrote for a couple of hours, worked, ran on my lunch break, worked, walked the dog until it got dark, ate dinner, did some PT, stretched, foam rolled, and went to bed. It was a machinelike existence, surprisingly fun because it felt efficient. On days when I would have previously been climbing or working on the house, I wrote a lot and read a lot and took four-hour dog walks in the desert with Emma, chatting about books, daydreaming about house renovations we couldn’t yet afford. But I remember that period as heavy and flat, leveled by a depression that I only truly noticed when I came out of it.

Then, in February 2023, four months after the injury and four months before my 35th birthday, Scottie (who has sewn nuance into the communist impulses of his youth and now does pandemic-prevention science at Los Alamos National Lab) called me up and asked if I wanted to get out somewhere.

“I don’t think so, man,” I said, ignoring the sudden puddle of warmth in my chest. “I can’t even run with my arm bent.”

“Dude,” Scottie replied, “you’ve been climbing for 20 years. You can toprope a 5.9 with one hand. And if you can’t, you can belay me.”

The next day, I went to the gym to see how the elbow would feel. I bought a day pass because I’d canceled my membership, and I went during my lunch break because I didn’t want to be seen. Back on the wall, I discovered two important things: (1) My elbow had quietly improved during my previous months of rest, and I could now bend my arm under a light amount of weight so long as my shoulder was engaged. (2) Scottie had been right: Even after four months off, I could contort my way up slabs as hard as V4 while keeping my left arm mostly straight.

Three days later, with scarves of snow billowing from the summits of the Sangre de Cristo Range, Scottie and I drove two hours south for a day of sunny slab climbing on the stubby rhyolite cliffs outside Socorro, New Mexico. We started on some balancey 5.8s, where, forgetting that I had to climb around my injury, I managed to provoke a few minor zings! But I adapted. And eventually, to my surprise, I clipped the chains above a desperately thin 5.11b slab.

“Come to the gym tomorrow, bro. I’ll belay you on my warm-ups. And if the elbow gives out, we can grab dinner and a beer.”

V. What I missed

That was a year ago, and it was my reintroduction to the sport. Since then I’ve been driven less by my old desire to set goals and try hard than by the knowledge that, for me, climbing is now basically an excuse to maintain a community of friends. The elbow is quite a bit better than it was. I still can’t do push-ups or pull-ups, and I still can’t campus, and I still can’t generate max power with my left arm, but I can sport climb near my new limit in certain styles. Emma and I recently celebrated a friend’s birthday at a beautiful basalt crag overlooking the Rio Grande Gorge. My buddies and I ate triple-chocolate cake between laps up thoughtful moderates. My Jack Russell napped in my backpack. While we climbed, Emma and one of our friends went for a walk and ran into a small herd of bighorn sheep. The young rams sparred with each other, clacking horns, butting heads. I had hoped to climb the next day, but my elbow was shot, so Emma and I took one of our deeply cherished dog walks instead. We didn’t see any sheep. We watched a beautiful sunset.

Lately, I’ve wondered whether I missed a fundamental thing about Hugh all those years ago—something that Scottie, a wiser person than me, found too obvious even to mention. What if Hugh’s desire to move back to Rifle and venture up to the Skull Cave on such a cold and rainy day wasn’t simply about returning to the halcyon strength of his youth? What if it was a confused and human attempt to return to a community that, even though it isn’t perfect, and even though it can misplace emphasis on strength and bravery and grades, also brings important social comfort to its participants? What if Hugh went to the Skull Cave subliminally hoping to befriend a pair of unreasonably psyched teens like Scottie and me?

VI. And Hugh?

Soon after that first trip to Socorro, when it became clear that my climbing life was not, in fact, over, I started outlining this essay, writing brief lists of recollections and sending them to Scottie to see if his memories corresponded with mine. I also did some internet snooping, and what I found made me very happy.

Beginning in 2009, two years after we saw him, Hugh—unaffected, apparently, by the grim future my kid self had imagined for him—started logging climbs on Mountain Project. He sent a 5.13b in the Front Range in 2011 and then went around repeating some of the climbs he’d first done as a young teen. He’s kept at it since. His most recently logged climb was a 5.13a. The date: April 2023.

I texted Hugh’s profile to Scottie, who was at that moment recovering from wrist surgery.

I Thought Climbing "Hard" Was Everything. I’m Glad I Was Wrong.