Gripped Notes from the Top

Notes from the Top

Living My Dream

Story Nicolas Favresse

Bip, Bip, Bip’ It’s one a.m. I wake up in the middle of one of those dreams that make absolutely no sense. It feels like I just closed my eyes, but there it is, the alarm, it’s already time to go. I feel so cozy in my sleeping bag. The idea of getting out of it reminds me of cold, hard mornings trying to wake up for school after a late climbing session with my friend Sean Villanueva. We were so motivated that we were finishing our daily gym training at home with pull-ups and hangs. In order to simulate the real situation, we would weigh ourselves down with climbing packs filled with food, water and bivy gear and drain our very last bit of strength. This absolute masochism often carried us well beyond midnight. Getting up the next morning was always quite a crux and thinking clearly at school was even harder. Even then, climbing was already a consuming passion.

But right now, I am on an expedition in Pakistan in a remote area on the Indian border. 360 degrees of big walls encapsulate me. It takes me a few minutes to clear my head, then I realize how big the upcoming day will be. I close my eyes one last time and think of this huge virgin granite spire: its beauty, the enjoyment it will offer me, the place where I am. That’s it! I feel ready. All the anxiety related to the risk of such an attempt dissolves, leaving me with a positive vibe that lets me enjoy the pleasure of each moment. Unlike ...

The rest of Nicolas Favresse's article can be found in the April - May 2008 issue of Gripped.

SAFE IS RISKY

Story Dave MacLeod

Originally in Feb - March issue of Gripped

Here I am, sitting at the foot of a 100 m wall of mountain granite, gingerly pulling on my rock slippers. Above me, my project looms. It’s about 8a+ (5.13d), and I mentally rehearse the crux moves once again in my mind, judging whether I am ready to perform these moves in the next 10 minutes without mistakes. If I was to make an error on the slopers 30 m above, I will land on the ledge I am sitting on right now. Out of the corner of my eye, my wife Claire looks quiet but relaxed holding the rope. We have a plan that if I fall, she will jump off a ledge in the gully bed, and if she can get 12 ft of rope in, the sole protection piece worth talking about might stop me just before my 30 m fall ends on the ground. On the gully walls, two friends are pointing film cameras at me, but they are distant and have been silent for the last 20 minutes, having internal battles with themselves about whether they really want to be filming what I’m about to do. I stand up, chalk my fingers and make the final decision to begin climbing. Can you imagine a scarier place to be?

Well yes, actually. Here is a place I fear even more:
Here I am, sitting in a bar near my house, talking to some acquaintances about our histories and telling our stories. Looking back on the 80 years of my life, I tell the others about how I loved rock climbing and had potential to be a really good athlete. They ask “What stuff did you climb?” When I think back to my climbs, I don’t feel much energy in my memories of them – they were all, sort of, easy. Easy? Well maybe that’s a bit harsh. But I knew I could do them. The one I really wanted to do was that arête up on Ben Nevis. Could I have done it? I’m not sure. I certainly had the potential. I wish I could have found out – it would have been quite something to climb that thing.

The latter scenario, which I desperately hope will never be more than an imagined one, is to me the scariest place to be in life. I never, ever want to be looking back on opportunities past and feel I had the potential but never realized it. What a waste. Where climbing involves taking risks, we are constantly weighing up the value of the risky endeavour we are going for, versus the chances of it costing us the rest of our lives if we make a bad judgment. But there is an equally great risk that should loom heavily on our minds: the risk of stepping back from doing something really great because of the fear you feel in the moment of taking the risk.

It’s absolutely critical to understand the difference between risk and fear. Risk is a judgment, fear is a raw emotion. The greatest risk we face is not something going wrong while in the process of doing what we love doing and what is important to us. Rather it is to miss out on realizing potential to do amazing things and find out what we are capable of. Every time we give in to the immediacy of fear, we take a massive risk. We are risking becoming trapped inside our comfort zone for good, convincing ourselves that what we were trying was beyond our reach anyway. Can you afford to risk getting to the end of your life without having really stretched yourself and found out if you could have done it (whatever the ‘it’ may be)? What is more painful: the pain of boredom, lost motivation and unexplored possibilities, or the pain of failure or injury? The pain of failure or injury is easier to imagine so we tend to react to its anticipation. The ache of boredom or wasted potential is harder to imagine, so it engenders less fear, even though it’s the much more serious consequence of a bad decision on taking a risk.

What am I saying here? Take more risk? Well yes, but that’s only part of the picture. Every action we take has risks attached to it. Risks are necessary to accomplish anything worthwhile. These risks might not always be so obvious – like emotional risks. Lots of folks step back from something they want to try to accomplish because they are afraid they won’t be up to the job. Sure, it’s scary to feel that you might invest effort and time and put your self-esteem on the line to try something that you might well fail on (and be seen by others to fail on). But if you decide you are not up for taking on this risk that does not mean you have taken no risk! Instead you have just risked wasting potential you had and opted for failure without even trying.

In my climbing, I found that once I looked at the things I was doing in this light, my climbing activities didn’t seem nearly so risky. When I imagined the scenario I described above of reaching late life with no valiant failures, no huge efforts, no surprising successes and no strong memories to hold, life seemed just as scary. But the things that scared me completely changed. Giving in terrified me. Settling for comfortable terrified me. Failing personally or publicly when I tried something hard hardly seemed scary at all by comparison, especially when I saw that those failures were really lessons in disguise for my next attempts. The ultimate climbing fear, of falling on a poorly protected route, didn’t scare me so much either, but I understood this risk differently.

Because I understood that risks are everywhere, and that some are more obvious than others, I could see that the challenge we face isn’t avoiding risk. It’s avoiding taking the wrong risks (and taking the right ones with confidence). So the real worry to occupy our minds is: what is the right risk to take? Are you motivated enough for the route you are climbing for it to be worth the associated risks? Navigating that mind map is worth another article.

For me, hard climbs are truly motivating. I’m lucky that I know a good climb when I see one and I want to climb it, no matter how hard it is. I find so much pleasure in making them happen. Passing them up because of something like fear of failure or falling is too big a risk for me to take. In fact, I’d say the thought of never sitting at the foot of a hard trad route preparing for another scary lead is the scariest thing I can imagine.

Dave is one of the boldest trad leaders today. He has made the first ascents of Rhapsody E11 7a and the winter route The Hurting XI, both among the hardest traditional climbs of their kind in the world.

Conversations with Fear

Story Arno Ilgner

Originally in Dec 2007 - Jan 2008 issue of Gripped

“I can’t hang on anymore. I’m too pumped. No, stay with it. Don’t let go.” I’m halfway up a redpoint effort and my thoughts are fighting each other. One part of me wants to be comfortable and get away from the stress, while the other wants to stay and see if I can rise to the challenge.
This dialogue is a strenuous mental activity and our ability to stay committed depends on how much mental stamina we’ve developed. When we’re in the middle of stress it is too late to develop mental stamina. We need to prepare ahead of time. Much of this preparation involves learning to deal with various kinds of fear. The type of fear that comes up will vary with the type climb – a competition, no-fall situations, yes-fall situations. Some fears are universal to all types of climbing situations.
Let’s look at three main fears and what to do about them.
A very common fear is fear of failure. We tend to equate success with getting to the top of a climb or performing at a certain grade, and we’re not sure we will be able to reach that goal. We’re not in control of the outcome and that can generate fear. Fear of failure can be especially strong when we are competing with others during climbing competitions or in more subtle competitive scenarios.
Another common fear is fear of falling. This fear can be hard to unravel. There is so much variety in climbing – bouldering, sport climbing, ice, mountains, runout trad – that assessing the fall can seem complicated and the consequences uncertain. Uncertainty and vagueness in your idea of the risks you’re facing leads to fears that may (or may not) be unfounded.
A third fear, which you likely have not considered, is fear of exerting intense effort. This fear is deeply engrained in us. We love our comfort zones, and while moderate effort is comfortable and pleasant, intense effort is uncomfortable. Climbing something that really challenges you will require intense effort; it will be uncomfortable and stressful. We fear this stress, and when we’re in the middle of it we want to let go or downclimb to escape.
Any of these fears will distract our attention and keep us from being effective in dealing with the challenging climbing. Let’s now look at some simple things we can do to deal with each of these fears.
First, if you are equating success with sending the route or beating someone else in a comp, you’ll be distracted. You are focusing on the future instead of dealing with the challenge of each move. For more effective climbing, see success as giving your best effort. On challenging climbs and in competitions, you cannot control whether or not you’ll send or beat someone else. You can only control the quality of your own effort, what you do with your body and mind. When you focus on what you can control, you gain power and maximize your chances of sending the route or winning the comp.
Second, develop the ability to evaluate climbing’s many and varied falling scenarios. The variety of climbs may make this seem complicated, but all you really need to do is identify whether you are in a no-fall or yes-fall situation. Most bouldering, sport, and well-protected trad climbing involve yes-fall situations. Ice, mountaineering, and soloing are typically no-fall situations. The line between yes-fall and no-fall can become blurred, however, on high-ball boulder problems or sport climbs that are bolted poorly. In this case, simply identify those parts of a climb that are no-fall and those that are yes-fall.
In no-fall situations, you don’t want to push too far. Constantly weigh your pump against the strength and stamina that will be required to arrive at your next rest or pro. Climbing all the way to the next pro or rest may involve too many unknowns. In this case, find ways to engage the challenge a little at a time. Identify a decision
point a few feet into the runout where a fall would be safe to take, and engage just that section. Then, reassess to see if you should continue. You may decide to retreat, or you may find that the runout is not as daunting as you thought, as easier climbing or unexpected pro appears.
Even yes-fall situations can cause fear. We tend to be afraid of unknowns, and this can effect us even if we’re facing a short sport-climbing fall. If you haven’t fallen much, the feeling of falling is unknown to you and you’ll be distracted by fear of it. To diminish this fear, gain experience taking falls. Get this experience in small increments by taking some toprope falls, then working your way gradually into lead falls.
Third, acknowledge that climbing will require exerting effort and that effort will be uncomfortable. Discomfort is natural during a challenging climb. Anticipate discomfort and stress, and assign value to the effort itself, not just your end goal.
To deal effectively with the stress of intense effort you need to be as comfortable within it as possible. Accomplish this by doing things not with your mind but with your body. Breathe, relax, loosen your grip, lower your heels, refine your balance and find creative rests. Also, make sure you know the difference between resting and climbing. To rest, shake out, breathe, scan ahead and assess. To climb, keep breathing, and keep moving. When you rest, rest. When you climb, climb.
I’m pumped and my dialogue is going strong while on my sport redpoint, but I know what to do. I’m resting, so I rest by breathing, loosening my grip, shaking out, and keeping my hips in and balanced over my feet. I let go of thoughts and simply focus on what my body needs to do to rest. I also identify where the next rest is, about five feet higher. When I begin climbing, I climb. I stay focused by breathing and moving continuously until I’m at my next stance. I make it there and then cycle back into resting mode. By knowing where I am – resting or climbing – I know how to prepare and act out the climbing challenge without fear.

Arno Ilgner is the author of The Rock Warrior’s Way: Mental Training for Climbers and teaches mental fitness clinics at crags and climbing gyms throughout the U.S. He’s looking for Canadian climbing gyms that are willing to host his clinics. For more info go to: www.warriorsway.com.

Taking Responsibility

Story Lynn Hill

Originally in Oct - Nov 2007 issue of Gripped

As active participants in a sport with obvious inherent dangers, all climbers must deal with certain responsibilities. As a young climber, things like a house, kids and a family are not issues. Your body recovers faster from strenuous exercise as you push yourself, perhaps not climbing as carefully, or as intelligently as you can. It isn’t until you start getting older that life starts to seep into your climbing and you have to acknowledge that you won’t always be 18 years old and free to climb all day, every day. You need to climb safer with less dynamic moves, more warm-ups, more stretching. You need to acknowledge that other people are relying on you. These are issues that everyone has to deal with eventually. They do not mean that your life is becoming joyless, but that you might be developing a well-rounded existence.

You are directly responsible for your actions and decisions on the rock. You can’t sue someone if you take a fall, you can’t blame anyone other than yourself, and you’re responsible for any financial burdens that follow. Taking part in a risky activity means there is a chance that shit will happen. Bearing this burden of self-reliance and direct responsibility for one’s self is what our culture needs. Not being able to blame others for one’s downfalls or failures teaches us to take responsibility for our actions even when the consequences are unpleasant. When you make mistakes climbing, you’re the one who made a mistake, there’s nobody else up there to blame. When you succeed, on the other hand, it’s all that much sweeter.

At some point in your climbing, you’re not going to bounce back from injuries in a day, and you’ll realize that you have to start paying more attention to what your body is trying to tell you. If it hurts, stop. Overuse injuries are prevalent these days, especially in ambitious newcomers to climbing, and those who simply have a hard time listening to their bodies. Even those who are aware of the basic principles of preventative medicine still tend to disregard them at crucial times. Making the choice to develop muscular balance is one of the keys to maintaining perfect form in movement. Developing a strong core will help you maintain this. Also, make sure you balance what types of climbing you’re doing. Too much repetition of the same moves or types of moves can cause overuse injuries. If you’re climbing slabs with tiny ledges all the time, you’re risking finger and forearm injuries. Alternate by climbing some overhanging terrain to exercise your shoulders and core strength. Alternating your climbing will help develop well-balanced strength; however, getting on routes way out of your current skill level is also a way to be injured. If you’re choosing climbs which are too difficult, you’re going to fall into patterns of self-sabotage Instead of climbing with confidence and fluidity, you’re going to struggle up the rock. Be sure to plan your movements before actually moving. Scan the rock and decide where you’re going to make each point of contact, trying to maintain three points at all times. When pushed beyond our limits of strength, form is likely to break down, resulting in poor technique, which will lead to injury.

Outside of being responsible for your own health and safety, you will be responsible for that of others. Unless you’re strictly free soloing, learning how to safely belay and place protection while leading are essential skills. Taking the time to learn technique to keep you and your partner safe is a responsibility that every climber needs to address. Pay attention while belaying, and pay out just enough slack so that your partner isn’t fighting against you to get the slack they need. When a fall happens, you’re going to pull in as much slack as you can and jump as the rope catches your partner. Unless you weigh less that your partner, jumping will soften the fall on their end by providing a dynamic belay. Keep yourself safe while belaying. Watch your stance, and where you’re going to get pulled to when a fall happens. Belaying is a serious responsibility, and if done incorrectly, someone could get hurt, and it is often the belayer.

In the end, no matter whether we choose to take part in so-called risky activities or not, life is full of unexpected accidents and no amount of money or denial of one’s own personal or moral responsibilities can stop them from happening. The sad irony is that what our culture needs now, more than ever, is to engage in activities like climbing that require us to take direct responsibility for ourselves. Accepting and learning from our mistakes is a key part of our self-education.

Lynn Hill is one of the world’s most well-known and successful rock climbers. She lives in Boulder.

Mountain Unicycling
Ain’t no Circus

Story John Long

Originally in Aug - Sep 2007 issue of Gripped

The first time I tasted legitimate Muni (mountain unicycling) was in Santa Barbara, California, a 90-minute drive up the coast from my hometown in Los Angeles. The city, famous for stunning panoramas and zillion-dollar haciendas, is strewn along a half-moon scallop of Pacific Ocean; a few miles inland the Santa Ynez Mountains shoulder up to a knife-edge summit off which pour dozens of steep single tracks, favourites amongst hard-core, downhill mountain bikers.

I met six members of the Santa Barbara Muni Club (SBMC) at an old Spanish Mission in the middle of town and we all jammed into a van and chugged 45 minutes to the top of the mountain and immediately dropped in on San Ysidro Trail, amongst the more technical and rocky of the notorious Santa Barbara runs. A few minutes later I feared for my life.

The SBMC is one of the more active Muni groups in the U.S., and the riders are practiced and skilled. Prior to that first trip, my Muni experience consisted of a few months grinding up and down local fire roads, smooth and wide. San Ysidro swooped right off the summit ridge onto a two-foot wide single track cut into a mountainside steep as the back side of Half Dome. The off-camber, hairpin turns were plentiful and you could die – or fall a terrible distance – if you flew off the trail all wrong. I walked at least half of the first three miles, including all the turns. At a stream crossing the crew held up and Eyal Aharoni, one of American’s outstanding Muni riders, warned that the “hard part” was just below.

The trail shot down a gauntlet of ledge drops, shorn up with wooden railroad ties, then snaked into a steep, rocky arroyo. I watched amazed as the locals tractored, rolled and dropped over all obstacles, basically the same as a mountain bike might do, except slower and with far greater effort. There’s no coasting on a Muni, and every bump and drop and oblique torque is absorbed by your legs and core muscles, the rider’s business arm yanking up on the seat handle, the free arm waving extravagantly a la bull riding. Like difficult bouldering, Muni requires fast-twitch muscle bursts, poise and relaxation, and the constant flexing and relaxing is exhausting. After twenty or thirty minutes, even your gloves are soaked through.

To witness a world-class Muni rider flash a grim stretch of technical single track is to do to death all of our normal associations to unicycling – clowns and parades and silly hats, et al. Hard Muni puts the H in hardcore, and you know it the moment you see it. Even in Santa Barbara, where hikers and mountain bikers are accustomed to seeing Muni up close, crowds form to watch a group tackle a difficult bit, especially the high flying stuff, which can involve gaps and drops approaching ten feet. It’s no wonder that as the sport grows (and in So Cal it’s growing like mad), the better riders have mostly come from other aggressive balance sports like big wave surfing, climbing and downhill skiing.

I didn’t ride more than twenty per cent of that initial run down San Ysidro and my legs were mush for days. But I’d found another adventure sport that put me in the wilderness, pumped my brains out, had a satisfactory danger quotient, and knit me into a group drawn in large part from the climbing world. Much like my early climbing days, I had a blast from day one; but it took many months of constant riding to start getting dialled on technical terrain, and it kept getting better from there.

It’s impossible to describe the sensation of rolling one wheel (the basic model is a 24-inch wheel cum three-inch wide tire mounted on an aluminum frame) into a steep, rocky chute full of big drops. It feels a bit like free soloing, and a crux well done is immensely satisfying, and terribly addictive, for reasons only a participant would understand. At first it all seems impossible – it takes roughly ten hours to learn to ride a unicycle, and the first few weeks are sketchy. But after a few months on the trail your body learns to accommodate the rapidly changing planes and suddenly you’re riding stuff that scared the crap out of you only a month before. Since the sport was invented only a decade ago, the frontiers are whatever you can imagine. World champion, Canadian Kris Holm (also a 5.12 climber), has ridden down some impressive terrain, including the 17,925 ft high Mexican volcano, Popocatapetl. If ever a sport was made for climbers, it’s Muni, a fact I expect to see played out in the years to come. To be sure, Muni is growing fast as any adventure sport out there.

Interested parties can get more information at Krisholm.com or Unicyclist.com.

John Long is one of the most well-known climbing writers in the world. He lives in Los Angeles, California

Cerro Torre
Tools + History

Story Kevin Thaw

Originally in June - July 2007 issue of Gripped

Tool use is a clear indicator of our society’s rise to planetary control. The mastery and development of tools essentially separates us from beasts. Tool use distinguishes civilization from the primitive world and offers a perfect example of how far we’ve come with opposable thumbs.
Tools are the basis of Earth’s hierarchy and led to more than living beyond caves. They have given us engines, computers and spacecraft. You would think that this was evolution, progress.
But why do we climbers strive to return to caves where we argue the ethics of tool use?
Questions surrounding tool use recently stepped into a whole new arena. This season’s fracas over Cerro Torre’s Compressor route has divided climbers in Argentine Patagonia. Good friends sit in both camps and offer strong cases for completely removing the bolts and leaving them untouched.
I feel the most important notion in the argument isn’t really the Torre nor the questionable bolted route, but the validation of history. Surely, if we backtrack through time and evaluate everything leading to the current state of play, all will be in question. Do we have the right to remove history? Should we eradicate all that does not fit into an idealistic mould or should we simply leave examples of poor style to punctuate a point?
Cerro Torre poses an excellent example. Maestri was proving the Compressor for a company that had paid his way down to Argentina with the hope of winning a contract on the Alaska pipeline. Maestri was their marketing vehicle to demonstrate the technology. Sure, the Compressor could have been done in finer style with loads fewer anchors. But it was certainly a breakthrough in an era without camming devices, sticky rubber and lightweight gear.
How different would the route have been if left to more modern pioneers?
The role of bolts varies in different regions. They are always the source of valid questions. Consider a French trend. Are Chamonix guides improving the mountains by retrobolting traditional lines, thus steering traffic onto one line, minimizing impact and offering safety from speedy quickdraw-only ascents? Or do they simply force the environment to conform to their need to conveniently repeat the same routes with different punters?
So what’s the deal with the actual Compressor route; not the politics, but the route, the climbing?
I believe it’s an absolute classic, one of the best alpine routes around! Cerro Torre is undeniably one of the planet’s finer summits and certainly more accessible via Maestri’s forced line.
Fine caves at Norwegian (Norwegos) Camp provide pre-climb accommodation, four hours from town and a further hour grovelling up the loose slope above the main dry glacier. This bivy/camp sits just below the tongue of cracked ice guarding the thousand metre-plus East faces of Cerro Torre, Torre Egger and Cerro Standhardt.
Above this upper glacier, seven 200 ft pitches of 5.9 fall under the guise of approach to the shoulder and true technical beginning of the South East Ridge, Compressor.
Introductory pitches offer variations up to 5.10, or bolts to avoid cracks choked with ice in rude conditions. For myself and Mark Synnott in February of 1998, these pitches were ice-free and downright fun. The first ten were dispensed in a long block. Staying in my rock shoes for the few unavoidable icy sections proved quicker than switching to full mixed mode. It was sustained at the lower end of 5.10, with occasional bouldery sections but nought harder than 10+.
Mark took over for a couple of mixed pitches and the monumental bolt traverse. Incidentally, the first attempt on the line (pre-Maestri) made it thus far and beyond to the terrace atop the bolt traverse but chose an alternate, more threatened, ice mushroom-riddled direct line.
The bolt traverse stays on slabs between the threatened gully on one side and mushroomed ridge to the left. Fixed hardware is constant enough to occasionally bypass and it isn’t rawls or split bolts, but Lost Arrow pins coming straight out of the wall (the West face of El Cap also has a few of these). These fixtures end by forcing a pitch up a mixed funnel of a gully/couloir. A large icy chunk rode from above and smashed through this gully as Mark and I were simultaneously clipping – unclipping – clipping our way through the precipitous iron road. Kinetic energy can indicate cleansed passage and diminished threat. At least this hypothesizing makes upward progress seem viable and rational, right?
Half a pitch in the flushable gully, then we exited right to bolts connecting terraces via overhanging short blank walls. Deposited onto hanging ice fields we found more simul-climbing over ice pitches to the left (south) side beneath the Ice Towers. A steep boulder problem to steeper bolt ladders landed us at the ice towers and front and centre on the spike of a headwall. A strangely run-out 5.10 boulder problem begins the proud headwall, a brief filter before clip, clip, clip can recommence.
The final 45 m rope length is a strange slice of history. The belayer stands on the frame of the famed Compressor while the leader uses rivets placed by Jim Bridwell.
Maestri chopped his own fixed gear on this final rope length, although the anchor bolts are certainly the same as the rest on the climb. Perhaps he felt compelled to do this, following his controversial run-in with the climbing community over his claim of the first ascent of the Torre’s North Face with Toni Egger. After adding one of the more savage alpine lines to-date, he justified chopping the pitch because it forced work from others – but that’s a whole other story.
As climbers, we understand Maestri’s actions, even if we don’t agree with him. Do authorities understand what a bolt is? Arguing for legitimate land use won’t be treated seriously if we appear too segregated over issues that appear farcical outside of our community.
North American authorities seem to view climbers as the lowest form of land users (as opposed to the high regard they enjoy in the rest of the world) and have made up their mind without too much debate. We now hold the opportunity to prevent this sentiment from rippling into fresh arenas, where the land managers have a cleaner slate. Shouldn’t we really try to use all knowledge to this point and take a less emotional, politically driven stance and think about a bigger picture before the scrap ensues?
If we indeed backtrack, evaluate and eradicate history. then should a first ascent permit scheme be introduced in which qualifications are presented before you’re allowed to establish a new route?
The nature of climbing and massively varying reasons for involvement can create the community’s biggest danger: We the people. But it’s not just about you or me. I’d hate to find myself one day saying, “This was one of the best areas on the planet, back when we were allowed to climb.”

Kevin is one of the most experienced climbers on the planet and has climbed at the highest levels in all disciplines, around the globe.

The Circle of Lines

Story Andreas Bindhammer

Originally in Apr - May 2007 issue of Gripped

In the life of every climber there comes a time when trees are not high, steep and challenging enough. When even via ferratas can’t bring you satisfaction, there’s nothing you can do but start climbing. But why do reasonable people want to take all the effort to walk up the hard way?
In my case it was and still is a question of lines.
On my family’s frequent trips to the Northern Alps and the Dolomites I saw fascinating sharp ridges and mirror-like faces. At first I wasn’t impressed by these miracles of nature. I couldn’t even imagine making a move from the ground without artificial help.
I remember very well the first time I received the yearbook of the German Alpine Club as a gift. I read both articles about free climbing. One was about Heinz Mariacher on new routes on big walls in the Dolomites and one was about sport climbing in Germany. I read about Wolfgang Güllich and saw pictures of his creation Kanal im Rücken, the hardest route at this time, with holds and footholds so small that they were invisible in the pictures. It was the most impressive sport I had ever seen. And it took place about an hour’s drive from my home.
Then I bought Metallica’s Master Of Puppets CD. I read the two articles again and again. I lifted weights, the only kind of training I knew, to make me feel like it did to climb the lines I saw on these pictures.
I searched for books about special training for climbing. Güllich co-authored one of them, but, except for some interesting statements about mental fitness for soloing and exercises like little-finger one-arm pull-ups, I didn’t find anything useful to an ambitious beginner. I searched for free climbing courses and found a booklet by the Austrian Alpine Club describing how to build and use a wooden training board. Nearly all the exercises described in this book could be done on this board. This was how I started working on myself to try to become a free climber.
At 16 I was finally allowed to take a one week free climbing course in Arco, Italy. Most of the technical things I remembered from multi-pitch alpine climbs I had done with my father. Compared to the other participants I had a lot of finger power, but my technique, especially on overhanging routes, was terrible. I drove home with ambivalent feelings, but resolved to climb more to improve my skills.
This decision was easier taken than realized – there were no bouldering rooms, no climbing gyms and the closest cliffs were an hour away. So I kept training on my board and climbing on holidays and weekends when the weather was good. By autumn, I could lead some of the classic multi-pitch routes in the Alps (at A0 instead of A2) and this fulfilled some of my dreams.
Then the German winter came.
I knew that without practicing movement I would start from zero in spring. The only solution was a low room in the cellar of my parents’ house I used for weight lifting and hanging on my board. With a two and a half metre ceiling, it was far from perfect. To improve the situation my father and I circled the room with a 60 degree wooden overhang and bought some of the first artificial climbing holds on the German market. My brother Andreas, who had just quit football due to injuries, joined me in our own overhanging private climbing gym.
Spring started promisingly with my first route 6c+ (5.11b/c) and even a 7a+ (5.12a). They were short but impressive lines I couldn’t imagine climbing a year ago. Now climbing definitely had caught me. I was no longer the alpinist who also enjoyed standing on the top of a 4,000 m-plus-mountain and ski touring. I was caught by the lines.
The following autumn I took part in the first German youth competition series which was held during the nationals. I wanted to meet the famous people I read about in the magazines more than I wanted to compete. My success was varied, but more importantly, I felt like part of the scene, shaking hands with 8b+ climbers. In my eyes they were a kind of lower-level gods.
For the first time in my life I bought no Metallica CDs. Rage Against the Machine, the crossover-sound preferred by hard climbers from the Frankenjura, made me train harder during winter. The overhang was only a part of the training now – most of it took place on a small 60 degree wall and a little campus board. The ‘Bomb Track’ made me ignore the pain the little holds caused and even bleeding cuts couldn’t stop me. No pain, no gain! – ‘Bullet in your Head!’ That winter, the first 8a came during a trip to France. A couple of months later I could climb Sortilèges, 8b at Cimai. I achieved all this with a simple small bouldering wall in our cellar.
Spending most of the year on the cliffs in Frankenjura I began to dream of the really famous top-level lines. Trying the test pieces of that time I soon recognized that the next step would be hard. If the simple wall in our cellar caused such an improvement of skills, surely a bouldering wall would be even better. In the autumn we built a new training area in our grandfather’s barn. It was cold and uncomfortable, especially in winter, but now we could do longer problems with dynamic and more technical moves.
Especially for competitions, the new wall was a big step forward. I could regularly qualify for the finals in our nationals and was allowed to take part in my first World Cup. New and motivating impressions poured in. I focused on competitions and training. The sound of Prodigy helped me be aggressive enough to push through more than five intense hours of training five days a week. This wasn’t bad for my winter training, but the next outdoor season it was burned in my mind that I was training for competitions, even when I climbed rock. Winning my first title as German champion in autumn and being one of two climbers (including overall-world-cup-winner François Lombard) to top out in the semifinal in the World Cup event in Birmingham reinforced my decision.
But where were the lines I always wanted to discover? Two years of climbing competitions and training on competition-specific routes later, with some participation in international finals, but without real progress, I had the chance to climb on rock for three months. I found something I missed the last two years, something which made me remember why I started to climb. The pictures of the legendary Wolfgang Güllich slowly came back to me and I rediscovered the spirit of free climbing a line using your body power.
For weeks I freed my mind from competitions and focused on the lines I was trying. Near Nice, my brother and I found some open projects near 9a, which was state-of-the-art at that time. Trying hard and completely focusing on these routes, we made first ascents of 8c+/9a routes Alien Carnage and Vitamania.
At the first world cup event of the season, we were both still thinking about the rock and planning our next trip. We were relaxed on the qualifiers, knowing that many routes awaited us, but focused on the route at hand. After the semifinal we realized that it was our first time in a World Cup final together. I won the competition and my brother was second. I recognized that I found the right way again.
Looking back I understand that nothing is as important as going back to our roots from time to time, to free our mind of the priorities society is likely to dictate. To focus on the simple lines and give them the chance to be the most important thing in the world – at least for a while. Nowadays I often hear Metallica again, and it reminds me to watch out for all the lines still waiting to be discovered.

Christian lives in Frankenjura and is one of the top sport climbers in Europe

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