Location: School Rock, Donner Summit

I feel sick with dread as we chug up the winding mountain road west of Truckee. I am about to do something hard, something I’ve never done before, something that fills me with fear.

The fear feels incongruous with everything else in my life. It is a gorgeous day, the best kind of California day, with brilliant sunshine and fresh mountain air and temps hovering in the 70s. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. Before our trip I was worried about California’s notorious wildfires and the consequent smoke, but I can see to the horizon in every direction: Donner Lake gleaming blue far beneath us, great cracked walls of granite rising out of the evergreen trees all around.

It feels good to be in an adventurer’s paradise. During our morning in the Dark Horse coffee shop, where I did my day’s writing, we watched them file through one after another: puffy down jackets, hiking boots, unkempt hair. They drank their coffee and scrutinized guidebooks before embarking on their adventures of choice.

On our long, winding drive towards the summit we pass hard-working cyclists. We wave. Climbers work their way up cracks. Everyone is happy, wind-blown, bathed in sunlight and mountain air. The vehicle turnarounds are full of Jeeps, trucks, and vans with off-road tires, adorned with solar cells and jerry cans. It’s Mad Max in photographic negative, a mechanized utopia.

But my sense of foreboding grows as we approach the summit. I’m about to lead my first multi-pitch trad climb, a major milestone in my climbing journey.

The only way to get better at hard things is to do hard things. It’s a truth I hate to admit. If we want to expand our limits, we have to continually step over the line of everything we’ve done before. I think of Sam Gamgee’s famous words to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring: “If I take one more step, it will be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.” Expanding our limits always means a step into the unknown, where anything might happen.

 

—

This day has been a long time coming. I’ve had the raw climbing ability to do multi-pitches for years. In theory, I also have the skills. Two years ago I took a multi-pitch climbing class in North Carolina, which taught me everything I needed to get started. A year later, I hired a guide to take me up two routes on Looking Glass Rock. The next step was to “tie into the sharp end”, as climbers say, and lead a climb of my own.

The problem is that I live in central Alabama. The nearest climbing gym is 90 minutes away, the nearest crag twice that. The hills of northern Alabama hold some wonderful climbing, but the walls are all single-pitch, meaning no taller than a single rope length. To find multi-pitch climbs, I must travel even further, to North Carolina. The climbing there is different and unfamiliar; my skills aren’t quite matched. I live too far away to practice. The end result is a plateau of my climbing skills as flat and featureless as Alabama itself.

One of my goals for this trip is to break through that barrier. We chose Donner Pass as our first destination for a specific reason: the aptly-named School Rock. I couldn’t ask for a better first multi-pitch. The impressive-looking slab contains a row of relatively easy two-pitch routes. It’s only two minutes from the highway, and after each climb, climbers can simply walk off the back and down a gully. Even better, perched as it is near Donner Summit, the views are extraordinary. For a beginner route, it feels like an epic mountain adventure.

My fear seems silly. This is as easy as it gets. The bold, frightening route I’ve picked out for myself is called Kindergarten Slab. My guidebook rates it as 5.3; if that’s right, then it’s theoretically the easiest vertical route I’ve ever climbed. Further to the right is Kindergarten Crack, and a little ways after that is Junior High. Meaning: I’m at the bottom of the bottom of the multi-pitch learning curve. At least we’re skipping Nursery School Slab, which is full of kids on top rope.

Despite the low grade, climbing is climbing, and a mistake can kill you. Fears circle like bats. Climbers talk about differentiating between rational fears and irrational fears, but it’s often hard to know in the beginning which are which. I fret over all the things that can go wrong. This is a “trad” route, which means there are no bolts in the rock to clip the rope into as I climb. Instead, I’ll be placing cams and nuts in cracks. Falling on a bad placement could pop a piece, extending a fall. If I use up my pieces too early, I’ll find it hard to protect the upper reaches of a pitch. I also have Hannah to think about, a much less experienced climber. My life is in her hands, and hers in mine.

If something goes wrong partway up, getting down again won’t be trivial; there are no rappel stations to facilitate a rapid descent. Once I leave the ground, the safest and easiest way to get off the rock is to reach the top.

—

All of this raises the question: why climb? Meditating on this question is part of my ritual encounter with fear. First comes the anxiety, then the reflection, then the thought that perhaps it’s time that I quit. Maybe climbing has already given me everything I need. But each time this happens I eventually overcome my fears and start the climb, and rediscover the sport’s rewards all over again.

Many of us are familiar with the concept of flow, of being so immersed in something that we lose our sense of time and our awareness of the world around us. Unfortunately, the concept has often been reduced to a productivity hack, a tool for getting more done. It is indeed critical for productivity, and I have largely tried to structure my working life around the achievement of flow states. But when I read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s marvelous book Flow, which introduced the concept, I was surprised to discover that he wasn’t writing about productivity at all; he was writing about happiness.

“It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly,” Csikszentmihalyi writes. Flow is a state of immersion and participation in life itself. Challenge and expansion are essential to these moments of optimal experience. “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Climbing, at its best, is a pure expression of optimal experience—the crystallized essence of the conditions that create flow. And the continual process of encountering and transcending limits brings a feeling of vitality that carries over into other domains of my life.

 

There is a yin-yang quality to the two major aspects of this trip: climbing and writing. My fears as I drive up to School Rock mirror my fears about my writing. Writing daily reflections, and sharing them online, awakens the same primal sense of danger. I don’t know why. But doing hard things requires doing hard things. Writing requires writing. Climbing requires climbing.

—

When we arrive at the turnoff near Donner Summit, other climbers are gearing up nearby. I verify we are in the right place. Then I pull out my guidebook. The guidebook’s pictures are good, and I immediately identify the wall. That alone is enough to dissipate some of my fear. Knowledge is power. It is the uncertainty I fear above all else.

We hike to the base. The climb feels intimidating but it also looks very doable. Alongside my anxiety rises a new feeling: confidence. This climb is asking me trust that confidence: my years of climbing, the skills I’ve acquired and that Hannah and I practiced relentlessly in the weeks prior to this trip. It’s the same thing that my three-week writing project is asking of me: to trust myself.

We gear up and double-check each other. Then I start the climb.

The climbing isn’t hard. I could do this whole route in ten minutes on top-rope. But leading is a different animal, especially trad leading. I feel compelled to protect every move where a slip would be consequential. I climb slowly, placing abundant gear.

Pushing our limits can be messy. Most of my forays into the unknown are highly embarrassing, at least at first. It’s a necessary stage in building competence. One model depicts four stages of competence: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and then unconscious competence. I’m somewhere between stage 2 and 3, sewing up the route with too much gear, knowing that developing competence will take practice and time.

I build a belay anchor earlier than planned, then belay Hannah up to me. When she arrives, we are both beaming. Something miraculous has happened during that first pitch: my fears have mostly dissipated. I feel vibrant and alive. I’m realizing that an imperfect performance is still good enough, that we can still climb safely, that I have the skills and flexibility to adapt. We feel intoxicated by the sunshine, the wind, the exposure. We’re really doing this!

Our hours practicing in the garage and at Sand Rock pay off at the belay station. We are slow but safe, meticulous, and orderly. When we’re ready, I start up the next pitch, and we do it all again.

—

It feels exhilarating, topping out. Our performance was laughable. It took us almost four hours to complete the easiest climb on this face and it somehow took us four pitches to compete a two-pitch route—an extra safety precaution so we could always see and hear each other, given our novice skills. But we did it.

At the top I make a list of lessons learned, things we need to do better, skills we need to practice. It’s a lifelong habit, rooted in my training as an Air Force pilot: the flight isn’t over until the debrief is complete. It’s how we get better.

We hike down the gully back to our van, clean up, and sit in camp chairs overlooking Donner Lake below. We have taken one more step. Our world is larger.