Back in the early 1990s at the start of every rest day at Rifle Mountain Park, Colorado, my friend Charley would turn to me with a straight face and say, “I’ll give you a dollar to hit me in the back of the head with a 2-by-4—I want to be unconscious until bedtime.” Though I never took him up on the offer, fearing I might kill him given my overdeveloped shoulders courtesy of my terrible footwork and Rifle’s steep compression climbing, I could feel the vibe. 

Rest days back then were endless and boring and horrible—we all dreaded them, even when we were dog-ass tired from climbing. There were no Sprinter vans with deluxe, sunlit interiors, perfect for listening to Eat Pray Love on audio and taking thirst-trap thong-underwear selfies—if you were lucky, you had a Vanagon that broke down every five miles or a hot, windowless Toyota cargo van with a lumpy futon in the back. There were no smartphones, no internet, and no Wi-Fi hotspots. There were no tablets to download movies onto or Air Buds to listen to them with. There were no decent laptops to play games or work on (and besides, with no email, who would you send the work to anyway?). There was no local climbing gym with a bouldering area to stretch in and spray everyone’s ears off about how your project was going down “next try.” And there was no Google Maps to lead you to the nearest Whole Foods, which would have been in Palo Alto, California, 1,110 miles away.

No, instead what we had was a picnic table to fester at, if we were rich enough to afford a pay campsite that week; crappy old paperbacks we circulated among ourselves; a sun shower—maybe; the matinee in Glenwood Springs, 30 miles away (I once saw Cliffhanger here, alone, since no one else wanted to go); the hot springs, also in Glenwood, but since we were poor we’d sit instead in the tepid, sulfurous outflow pool for the resort, down below the highway overpass, where trash floated in water that had to have been half urine; the KOA in Newcastle or a trailer park in Rifle for $2 coin-op showers in stalls so dirty they’d make a prisoner blush; the City Market (“Shitty Markup”) grocery store in Rifle, with its sad white-bread offerings only notionally reminiscent of food; and the local climbing shop, where we’d leaf through climbing magazines and talk beta with one of the salespeople until it was clear we’d overstayed our welcome—especially if we hadn’t showered yet and were scaring off the tourists who’d come in to buy $300 parkas.

****

And yet, a person can’t climb all the time unless they’re one of those suspiciously ripped Euro dudes who “somehow” onsight 8c their fifteenth day on, and so we’d face our non-climbing purgatory with courage, which made the climbing days all the sweeter because at least it wasn’t another goddamned rest day. 

Before or after the inevitable foray into town, some of us bolted and cleaned routes (not very restful, I now realize), some went trail running (also not restful), some went for hikes (semi-restful), some swam in one of the local reservoirs (restful), and some walked up and down Rifle Canyon with portable Crazy Creek chairs, plunking down below the Project Wall or Wicked Cave or Arsenal to watch the “sports action”—other climbers trying and falling (very restful—they’re doing all the trying). Essentially, we were homeless people trying to kill time.

One endless rest day at Rifle in high summer, we ended up at the Wasteland crag in the afternoon, sitting on the logs below the climbs like the local yokels outside Ma and Paw’s General Store. The blue-gray limestone was baking in the sun, with no one there, when one of us got the very dumb idea to pick up a rock and fling it at a hollow flake on the climb Ruckus, a short scruffy 5.12b, to see what sound it made. Soon the lot of us were flinging rocks, the rocks getting bigger and bigger and bigger until chunks of the flake started falling off, thunking down in the hard-packed mud: thud-thunk, thud-thunk, thud-thunk, thud-thunk, thud-thunk!

“Hey, shit, stop!” one of us finally said. “We’re fucking up the climb.”

“Whatever,” someone else said. “No one does that thing anyway”—or if they did, it usually resulted in a meltdown, since Ruckus packs its 5.12b into two or three desperate, ungainly moves.

“Some people do,” I said. “At least sometimes….”

We hooligans stopped to look at our handiwork. The flake now had a jagged edge, with cracked stone teeth along its lip, some as big as toasters, ticking time bombs waiting for the next climber to come along.

“We can’t leave it like that,” I said. “We need to fix it.”

Five minutes later I was up on the wall, fifi’ed into the second bolt, hammering on the flake to clean up our mess, when two climbers—who happened to be well-known pros—arrived just as evening shade began to creep up the cliff. They pulled out their guidebook and started looking at the crag, scanning back and forth, trying to figure out which climbs were which. Then they paused and gave me a quizzical look. 

“Isn’t that an established climb?” I heard one of them say to the other, sotto voice.

“I think it is,” said the other. “What’s that guy doing?!”

And with that I clipped my hammer to my harness, down-batmanned the draws, and—full of shame—bolted for the parking lot, where my miscreant friends stood laughing beside the van, flinging open the sliding door so I could tumble in, the lot of us driving off up-canyon, back to our campsire, amidst a riot of juvenile laughter. Rest-day success!

****

The other big rest-day activity was “getting wedged”: finding an all-you-can-eat buffet and inhaling obscene amounts of food. Because—again—we were broke, we’d save up our appetites all week, then on one special rest day go into town and find a buffet, often the Golden Corral. The operating theory was that you would cram down so much food on this one day that, like a camel at an oasis sucking down water before crossing the Sahara, you could store calories for the remainder of the week. Unfortunately, humans are not camels—we don’t have food-storage humps. What this meant instead was that we ate until we felt sick (we’d paid for an all-you-can-eat buffet after all!), then we’d head back to our campsite amidst a gastric crisis that unfurled for days, compromising our climbing, our guts stretched out, gurgling, and angry.

One day in Las Vegas, a small crew of us descended on a salad place on Rainbow Boulevard on a  refeeding rest day. My buddy Jerry, a blond surfer type who said he had the “inside beta,” brought us there after we’d all watched some terrible matinee (probably Ghost Dad) to get out of the gale-force Red Rock wind that blew a constant stream of fine red sand into our eyes, ears, noses, and mouths. Jerry’s “inside beta” comprised two tips: you could stuff your face extra full by going back for multiple helpings of frozen yogurt and layering on the crunchy, sugary toppings, and the buffet kept out a massive basket of rolls, which were easy to stuff inside your jacket and bring back to camp for later.

As our “wedge sesh” wore on, each of us eating heroic amounts of rolls (and pocketing others), vast Matterhorns of salad, and obscene volumes of fro-yo, we slowly ran out of room in our stomachs—but damnit, we weren’t leaving until we couldn’t eat another bite. However, physics dictated that the contents of our guts had to go somewhere, and soon Jerry was farting up a storm, cutting horrible, stinking, greasy ones that had other customers furrowing their brows as they walked past our table to load up their plates at the buffet.

“Jerry, man—gross,” I said. “Can you cut it out?”

“Dude, not really,” he said. “I kind of have to. I’m so full right now.”

“Gnarly…everyone’s looking at us”—and they were, more and more customers giving the side eye to our group of grubby dudes who seemed unable to stop eating.

“Well, screw them. Hey, why don’t you go grab us more rolls for later?” 

I’ve always been a bit of a rule follower, at least in cases where people can see me, and pilfering rolls wasn’t really my thing. But I also knew the bread would keep for days, making for “free” crag snacks, so I slunk past Jerry’s fart-cloud to the buffet table, where I surreptitiously began wrapping rolls in napkins to cram into my pockets like some pathetic Dickensian street urchin.

Then: “Sir, you can’t do that,” a voice behind my left ear said, as a hand clasped my elbow. “Those rolls are meant to be eaten on the premises.” It was the restaurant manager, and now he was asking us to leave with an, “I think you guys have eaten enough—more than enough, actually.”

It was only 5 p.m. when we found ourselves evicted into the parking lot, burping and farting and with another three hours left of stupid daylight and the wind still howling out of the west, the sky a late-spring desert yellow blurred by fusillades of cruel sand. We had nowhere to be and nothing to do and hours until bedtime. This was terrible, and yet we’d brought it on ourselves by being such unrepentant gluttons.

And with that, I turned to the group and posed my question: “Does anyone have a 2-by-4? I’ll give you a dollar to hit me in the back of the head.” 

Matt Samet is a freelance writer/editor and longtime climber based in Boulder, Colorado.

Also Read

• Oh Those Dog Days, Yosemite Valley, 1983
• Janja Garnbret Crowned Queen Once Again in Jaw-Dropping Double-Gold Performance at Innsbruck World Cup
• An Open Letter to My Tendons and Ligaments, Which I Have Wronged