First Time
Molly Higgins
It was the first warm morning after a week of rain, and I should have been racking my gear at the base of a climb. Instead, I chucked stones into a pot-hole in the parking lot and watched Jim load his gear into a pick-up. Barb was still busy visiting her multitude of friends - first the Camp 4 ranger, now some new arrivals from Oregon. I wished one of them would finish so I could get on with my day. Finally Jim hauled his last trunk of gear on to the bed of the truck and approached me, obviously to say goodbye.
I looked up at him, loving him so much that my heart felt raw, yet still cursing him for leaving me.
He looked down at me with his warm brown eyes and said: "Do your best, Mol."
"If you would stay with me I'd do better," I replied bitterly.
His patient silence was enough of an answer. Furious, I turned and ran, grabbing Barb away from her friends, and running off with her into the woods.
"He's such a creep," I said. "How could he leave me to go home? How could he sacrifice our ultimate climbing relationship?"
"I know you love him, Molly. It's certainly a shame, but he has his bad points too," Barb said.
He had the build of a gymnast and fists so huge he could jam a four-inch crack. His physique, combined with the fact that he was nice to me and had faith in my future as a climber, made it difficult for me to see his faults.
"Besides, now we'll have more time to climb with one another," Barb added after a pause. I agreed that it would be nice to spend more time together because routes were such an adventure with her. Since we had about the same ability, there was no one else to lean on except ourselves, and that made it a much more challenging endeavor. But I was worried about whether Barb would be as aggressive as me because I longed to climb as well as I possibly could, and some days she wasn't in the mood to push herself.
"What do you want to climb this afternoon?" Barb asked.
"Something hard," I answered.
That evening I slipped away from Camp 4 because I was in no mood to listen to the weekend crowd's sing-songs around the camp-fire. Barb was visiting a friend for dinner, and Jim was probably bar-hopping in San Francisco. My hands stung so badly that I could barely think. I felt like a lonely kid in the city of Camp 4, so I attempted to find some solace in the quiet woods of the valley floor.
I stopped at Eagle Creek to soak my hands; the skin on the back was scratched and raw in a few spots from being wedged so tightly in the crack. The climb had been desperate, so vertical and intimidating that I hadn't even glanced up at it once Barb and I arrived ad the base. The crack had gone on for ever (maybe 120 ft.) and, at the end, when I was the most tired, it had widened by half an inch, just enough to make it bigger than the wide part of my fist. What a struggle! The last three feet of the crack took ten minutes. I tried to wedge my whole arm, a hand on one side of the crack, an elbow on the other, desperate for a place to rest. Finally I squirmed six inches higher and, reaching deep into the crack, I found an edge to lean against and was then able to pull up on to a small ledge. Jim's fist or any other man's fist would have wedged easily, but not mine. Barb had an equally bad time, and her hands looked worse! But maybe her friends had some hot water in which she could soak her hands.
It was a restless night and I awoke feeling uneasy and even more alone. I rolled on to my back and stared up at the stark trunk of a sugar-pine tree. It was 200 ft. tall and shot straight as a plumb-line from the ground to the sky in one clean vertical line. "It's just like the rock walls here," I thought. It made me squeamish. Everything in Yosemite seemed bleakly vertical - the boulders, the walls, and even the tall barren pines! It was all so uncompromising, almost over bearing. Every climb that I examined had me craning my neck to see the top of a crack disappearing into a blank grey wall. In fact I seldom looked up from the bases of my climbs because it frightened me too much. I had a similar fear when I first began climbing, a desperate uneasiness that something might go wrong. But this late fear had surfaced when I began to dream about long and multi-day routes, like Washington Column, the Steck-Salathe, and ultimately the Nose of El Capitan. "By the time you do those routes you'll be competent," Jim had said. But I still imagined myself tiny and overtaxed on those huge walls, and I clutched to the thought of forgetting to tie into my jumars or rappelling off the end of the rope.
"There are supposed to be some decent ledges here where we can lie down," I said, leaning out on the rope and peering out from the depths of a chimney-sized crack.
"It's dark and I'm not moving," Barb stated. "Here, have some gorp."
I didn't really feel like moving either, for to move meant untying particular knots and unfastening certain karabiners, and I didn't want to undo the wrong ones. It was our first wall climb and our first time on a multi-day route climbing a 1000 ft. face. We were well aware of the repercussions of a mistake, and with fatigue, an unusual routine, and now darkness, we had both got a little nervous and terribly conservative. We sat at the bottom of the V-shaped chimney and leaning against each other, recounted the day's joys, horrors, and lessons.
"I don't swear anymore, it takes too much energy. I don't even sing. When I'm belaying I just sit with my head against the rock and doze."
"You nap when you're belaying me?"
After dinner I scooted ten feet farther up the chimney and knotted my climbing rope to the eight anchors I'd put deep in the crack. Perhaps eight anchors were extravagant, but since I'd placed them in the dark, my vivid imagination required at least that many. Then I crawled out on to a ledge about the size of a toilet seat to spend the night.
It has always been one of my cardinal rules to avoid misery whenever possible, and this tiny ledge seemed like a ridiculous place to spend any time at all. It jutted out of a featureless vertical wall, and I could look straight down between my feet to Yosemite Village 700 ft. below. I was prepared for the worst night of my life, but strangely I was more intrigued then disgruntled. "Jim has spent the night under more miserable circumstances," I thought. Besides, Barb and I were over half-way up Washington Column, and the fact that we'd get little sleep didn't seem to matter much.
We finished the climb the next day, delighted with ourselves for actually climbing a wall. With our ungainly packs we staggered happily down the trail to civilization, Kalua, and hot fudge sundaes. We spent two sleepy days identifying flowers along the Merced River before I again felt the rumbling need to do more difficult routes.
"El Cap next year!" I announced to Barb.
She hesitated, then said: "El Cap is three times bigger than the Column. We'd need seven days of water, and our sack would weigh 80 lbs. I think it would be too hard."
"We'll have to free climb the Stoveleg cracks," I said. "That'll knock off two extra days."
Barb answered me softly and slowly: "Molly, you're climbing 5.9 and I'm climbing 5.8. The Stovelegs are 5.10, and with wall gear they'd feel even harder."
"Well, we'll just have to train! We'll do all the 5.9's at Arch Rock and the Cookie this spring, and then we'll be solid on the 5.10 by fall." I felt impatient, it seemed that Barb was stalling. We were both progressing so rapidly that it seemed ridiculous to waste time on less prestigious routes than The Captain itself. I loved to climb with her, but I loved the challenging routes more and knew that I could be leading 5.10 by the end of that spring.
Barb sensed my uneasiness and finally said, "You can do El Cap, Molly, I doubt that I ever will."
I felt wretched but I couldn't help but answer, "Well, maybe we should free climb with other people for the rest of the month then."
"Would you pass me the bag, I think I'm going to be sick," I said.
Barb reached across the ledge and retrieved some paper bags from the haul sack. "Are you going to be okay?" she asked.
"I'm so tired," I answered. "I've been living to climb El Cap for two years and I'm sure glad I didn't get here any sooner. I couldn't possibly have done this last year!"
Barb awoke early in the morning with the swallows, and as they darted and dived about us she passed out our allotment of granola bars, Tang, and one apple. She was in a typically cheerful mood. Barb was always like a little kid in the morning and especially optimistic on walls, as if that type of endurance and commitment most suited her strong body and will.
"Thanks to you, we made El Cap Tower in one day," I said. "You did a great lead in the dark."
"And we climbed the Stovelegs almost entirely free!" Barb exclaimed. Those beloved Stoveleg cracks! For the last two years every crack I'd climbed had been a gesture of training for those cracks, and I was sad that they were over.
"Now all we have to do is climb the upper 2000 ft. of the route," I said. It seemed like a long way to go.
The first pitch that day was mine and it was nasty. A great vacuous chimney opened up like a yawning mouth for 40 ft. and for the first time I was scared. There was no protection: if you fell at the top of the mouth you'd go slamming down on to the ledge. It was an awful image, and I whimpered and yelled down to Barb to come take the lead because she was better in chimneys. But no, that would take too much time. She sent up my better climbing shoes instead. Braver, I went up the chimney and finally hauled myself on to the top of the flake that formed its outside. This was Texas Flake but, as I straddled its top, I could have easily been a flea perched on a protruding mica chip on a huge boulder.
The whole day was tedious, for we often had to traverse sideways or pendulum into a different crack system. That night we were so exhausted that we slept like babes on a ledge so cramped that my rear end hung out over the valley below.
Jim once told me that if climbing were a religion, the great dihedrals on the upper 1000 ft. of El Cap would make a good cathedral. He was right. I felt fortunate, almost blessed to climb those great arching lines and roofs. Recessed in the back of each sweeping corner was an exquisite crack that one could write essays about. I envied the Stonemasters who had the time and talent to free climb those cracks, for they were all vertical or overhanging, and classically beautiful. I did my best, leaving behind my cursed stirrups, getting both hands and feet into the crack, and taking off for as long as I could free climb, resting on a nut, and then going again. I felt the way that I love to feel - elegant, strong, sure as a cat, and fast. I was so incredible that I kept reminding myself of how happy I was and, especially, how lucky.
And then there was the sack. A great red pig that had to be hauled up every pitch like a fat client who refused to jumar. The sack was so big and took so much energy to haul that it was as if our whole purpose on the climb was to haul the sack to the top; the climbing was for fun but the 70 lb. Grail was what really mattered.
By noon on the fourth and last day of our climb, I found myself reluctant to top-out. I looked over at Barb, who had a yellow bandanna holding back her long brown hair and accentuating her kind features. Her hands were well taped from her wrists to her cracked and bloody finger-tips. She was my very best friend, and I wasn't sure how much I'd see her in the next two years because I'd enrolled in school, and my biannual trips to the Valley were about to cease. How could we relate if we couldn't climb together, or plan and train together? If our goals were not the same, could we remain such incredibly good pals? I had a feeling that the answer was yes, although it would never be quite the same again.
"Make sure you tie into your jumars," I needlessly advised. She gave me a sour look. I knew my comment sounded condescending, but I felt a surge of loneliness as I left her at the last belay and escaped to the summit. Everything had gone so well, but we both knew the story about the guy whose rope broke when he fell on the last pitch of El Cap.
But no, Barb and I were too thorough for such misfortune. We topped out safely and with enough food and water for our hungry friends who met us on the top. The friends emptied and carried the entire contents of the red pig, leaving us to descend the wooded paths together, down to my tent in Camp 4 where I found a note pinned to the door:
"Congratulations: first team of women up the Nose!"
I looked up at him, loving him so much that my heart felt raw, yet still cursing him for leaving me.
He looked down at me with his warm brown eyes and said: "Do your best, Mol."
"If you would stay with me I'd do better," I replied bitterly.
His patient silence was enough of an answer. Furious, I turned and ran, grabbing Barb away from her friends, and running off with her into the woods.
"He's such a creep," I said. "How could he leave me to go home? How could he sacrifice our ultimate climbing relationship?"
"I know you love him, Molly. It's certainly a shame, but he has his bad points too," Barb said.
He had the build of a gymnast and fists so huge he could jam a four-inch crack. His physique, combined with the fact that he was nice to me and had faith in my future as a climber, made it difficult for me to see his faults.
"Besides, now we'll have more time to climb with one another," Barb added after a pause. I agreed that it would be nice to spend more time together because routes were such an adventure with her. Since we had about the same ability, there was no one else to lean on except ourselves, and that made it a much more challenging endeavor. But I was worried about whether Barb would be as aggressive as me because I longed to climb as well as I possibly could, and some days she wasn't in the mood to push herself.
"What do you want to climb this afternoon?" Barb asked.
"Something hard," I answered.
That evening I slipped away from Camp 4 because I was in no mood to listen to the weekend crowd's sing-songs around the camp-fire. Barb was visiting a friend for dinner, and Jim was probably bar-hopping in San Francisco. My hands stung so badly that I could barely think. I felt like a lonely kid in the city of Camp 4, so I attempted to find some solace in the quiet woods of the valley floor.
I stopped at Eagle Creek to soak my hands; the skin on the back was scratched and raw in a few spots from being wedged so tightly in the crack. The climb had been desperate, so vertical and intimidating that I hadn't even glanced up at it once Barb and I arrived ad the base. The crack had gone on for ever (maybe 120 ft.) and, at the end, when I was the most tired, it had widened by half an inch, just enough to make it bigger than the wide part of my fist. What a struggle! The last three feet of the crack took ten minutes. I tried to wedge my whole arm, a hand on one side of the crack, an elbow on the other, desperate for a place to rest. Finally I squirmed six inches higher and, reaching deep into the crack, I found an edge to lean against and was then able to pull up on to a small ledge. Jim's fist or any other man's fist would have wedged easily, but not mine. Barb had an equally bad time, and her hands looked worse! But maybe her friends had some hot water in which she could soak her hands.
It was a restless night and I awoke feeling uneasy and even more alone. I rolled on to my back and stared up at the stark trunk of a sugar-pine tree. It was 200 ft. tall and shot straight as a plumb-line from the ground to the sky in one clean vertical line. "It's just like the rock walls here," I thought. It made me squeamish. Everything in Yosemite seemed bleakly vertical - the boulders, the walls, and even the tall barren pines! It was all so uncompromising, almost over bearing. Every climb that I examined had me craning my neck to see the top of a crack disappearing into a blank grey wall. In fact I seldom looked up from the bases of my climbs because it frightened me too much. I had a similar fear when I first began climbing, a desperate uneasiness that something might go wrong. But this late fear had surfaced when I began to dream about long and multi-day routes, like Washington Column, the Steck-Salathe, and ultimately the Nose of El Capitan. "By the time you do those routes you'll be competent," Jim had said. But I still imagined myself tiny and overtaxed on those huge walls, and I clutched to the thought of forgetting to tie into my jumars or rappelling off the end of the rope.
"There are supposed to be some decent ledges here where we can lie down," I said, leaning out on the rope and peering out from the depths of a chimney-sized crack.
"It's dark and I'm not moving," Barb stated. "Here, have some gorp."
I didn't really feel like moving either, for to move meant untying particular knots and unfastening certain karabiners, and I didn't want to undo the wrong ones. It was our first wall climb and our first time on a multi-day route climbing a 1000 ft. face. We were well aware of the repercussions of a mistake, and with fatigue, an unusual routine, and now darkness, we had both got a little nervous and terribly conservative. We sat at the bottom of the V-shaped chimney and leaning against each other, recounted the day's joys, horrors, and lessons.
"I don't swear anymore, it takes too much energy. I don't even sing. When I'm belaying I just sit with my head against the rock and doze."
"You nap when you're belaying me?"
After dinner I scooted ten feet farther up the chimney and knotted my climbing rope to the eight anchors I'd put deep in the crack. Perhaps eight anchors were extravagant, but since I'd placed them in the dark, my vivid imagination required at least that many. Then I crawled out on to a ledge about the size of a toilet seat to spend the night.
It has always been one of my cardinal rules to avoid misery whenever possible, and this tiny ledge seemed like a ridiculous place to spend any time at all. It jutted out of a featureless vertical wall, and I could look straight down between my feet to Yosemite Village 700 ft. below. I was prepared for the worst night of my life, but strangely I was more intrigued then disgruntled. "Jim has spent the night under more miserable circumstances," I thought. Besides, Barb and I were over half-way up Washington Column, and the fact that we'd get little sleep didn't seem to matter much.
We finished the climb the next day, delighted with ourselves for actually climbing a wall. With our ungainly packs we staggered happily down the trail to civilization, Kalua, and hot fudge sundaes. We spent two sleepy days identifying flowers along the Merced River before I again felt the rumbling need to do more difficult routes.
"El Cap next year!" I announced to Barb.
She hesitated, then said: "El Cap is three times bigger than the Column. We'd need seven days of water, and our sack would weigh 80 lbs. I think it would be too hard."
"We'll have to free climb the Stoveleg cracks," I said. "That'll knock off two extra days."
Barb answered me softly and slowly: "Molly, you're climbing 5.9 and I'm climbing 5.8. The Stovelegs are 5.10, and with wall gear they'd feel even harder."
"Well, we'll just have to train! We'll do all the 5.9's at Arch Rock and the Cookie this spring, and then we'll be solid on the 5.10 by fall." I felt impatient, it seemed that Barb was stalling. We were both progressing so rapidly that it seemed ridiculous to waste time on less prestigious routes than The Captain itself. I loved to climb with her, but I loved the challenging routes more and knew that I could be leading 5.10 by the end of that spring.
Barb sensed my uneasiness and finally said, "You can do El Cap, Molly, I doubt that I ever will."
I felt wretched but I couldn't help but answer, "Well, maybe we should free climb with other people for the rest of the month then."
"Would you pass me the bag, I think I'm going to be sick," I said.
Barb reached across the ledge and retrieved some paper bags from the haul sack. "Are you going to be okay?" she asked.
"I'm so tired," I answered. "I've been living to climb El Cap for two years and I'm sure glad I didn't get here any sooner. I couldn't possibly have done this last year!"
Barb awoke early in the morning with the swallows, and as they darted and dived about us she passed out our allotment of granola bars, Tang, and one apple. She was in a typically cheerful mood. Barb was always like a little kid in the morning and especially optimistic on walls, as if that type of endurance and commitment most suited her strong body and will.
"Thanks to you, we made El Cap Tower in one day," I said. "You did a great lead in the dark."
"And we climbed the Stovelegs almost entirely free!" Barb exclaimed. Those beloved Stoveleg cracks! For the last two years every crack I'd climbed had been a gesture of training for those cracks, and I was sad that they were over.
"Now all we have to do is climb the upper 2000 ft. of the route," I said. It seemed like a long way to go.
The first pitch that day was mine and it was nasty. A great vacuous chimney opened up like a yawning mouth for 40 ft. and for the first time I was scared. There was no protection: if you fell at the top of the mouth you'd go slamming down on to the ledge. It was an awful image, and I whimpered and yelled down to Barb to come take the lead because she was better in chimneys. But no, that would take too much time. She sent up my better climbing shoes instead. Braver, I went up the chimney and finally hauled myself on to the top of the flake that formed its outside. This was Texas Flake but, as I straddled its top, I could have easily been a flea perched on a protruding mica chip on a huge boulder.
The whole day was tedious, for we often had to traverse sideways or pendulum into a different crack system. That night we were so exhausted that we slept like babes on a ledge so cramped that my rear end hung out over the valley below.
Jim once told me that if climbing were a religion, the great dihedrals on the upper 1000 ft. of El Cap would make a good cathedral. He was right. I felt fortunate, almost blessed to climb those great arching lines and roofs. Recessed in the back of each sweeping corner was an exquisite crack that one could write essays about. I envied the Stonemasters who had the time and talent to free climb those cracks, for they were all vertical or overhanging, and classically beautiful. I did my best, leaving behind my cursed stirrups, getting both hands and feet into the crack, and taking off for as long as I could free climb, resting on a nut, and then going again. I felt the way that I love to feel - elegant, strong, sure as a cat, and fast. I was so incredible that I kept reminding myself of how happy I was and, especially, how lucky.
And then there was the sack. A great red pig that had to be hauled up every pitch like a fat client who refused to jumar. The sack was so big and took so much energy to haul that it was as if our whole purpose on the climb was to haul the sack to the top; the climbing was for fun but the 70 lb. Grail was what really mattered.
By noon on the fourth and last day of our climb, I found myself reluctant to top-out. I looked over at Barb, who had a yellow bandanna holding back her long brown hair and accentuating her kind features. Her hands were well taped from her wrists to her cracked and bloody finger-tips. She was my very best friend, and I wasn't sure how much I'd see her in the next two years because I'd enrolled in school, and my biannual trips to the Valley were about to cease. How could we relate if we couldn't climb together, or plan and train together? If our goals were not the same, could we remain such incredibly good pals? I had a feeling that the answer was yes, although it would never be quite the same again.
"Make sure you tie into your jumars," I needlessly advised. She gave me a sour look. I knew my comment sounded condescending, but I felt a surge of loneliness as I left her at the last belay and escaped to the summit. Everything had gone so well, but we both knew the story about the guy whose rope broke when he fell on the last pitch of El Cap.
But no, Barb and I were too thorough for such misfortune. We topped out safely and with enough food and water for our hungry friends who met us on the top. The friends emptied and carried the entire contents of the red pig, leaving us to descend the wooded paths together, down to my tent in Camp 4 where I found a note pinned to the door:
"Congratulations: first team of women up the Nose!"