The Hierarchy of Climbing According to...

Peak Sending

My friends like to joke that they have tons of time till peak sending age, 33. I don’t know where they got this number from, but it got me thinking: When will I peak? And perhaps more concerning: At what grade?

Climbing is one of those sports that seems to have endless possibilities. Depending on the crag, you could be projecting a 5.10 two climbs away from a guy on a 5.13c, and you’ll likely even get to chat with him after he’s sent. It’s not like soccer where pros are far removed from the rec league team.

Climbing is also a relatively new sport and a small one. There are fewer people separating me with Alex Honnold in ability level than are between me and David Beckham or Tom Brady. As climbers, we also like to watch videos and read interviews of their favorite climbers. We call them by their last names, feeling like we somehow know them, and hope they’d find us cool enough to climb with on one of their rest days—unless you like Dean Potter, and then you know he probably won't talk to you. This makes us feel like climbing near their grade might be possible. No, I probably won’t ever project a route with Sasha DiGiulian, but if she is three inches shorter than me and climbs 5.14, then why can’t I send my project? It can’t be because I’m too short.

And then there are these crazy stories of people crushing into their 70s. If Hermann Gollner can send Pump-O-Rama (5.13a) when he’s 71, who says I’ll peak in my 30s? Also I hope to one day have biceps half as strong as Gollner’s.

Photo by Dariusz Krol and courtesy of Rock and Ice Magazine.

Many professional climbers discovered the sport in college, so I can’t blame not having started climbing as a 65-pound 10-year-old for not sending now. Cedar Wright didn’t start climbing until he was 21, and now look where he is: crushing in the Rock and Rave 2015 pro highball bouldering comp.

Photo courtesy of Dead Point Magazine.

However, what if I’m not like Wright or Gollner? What if I only ever send up to 5.12a sport or V5 boulder problems? For one thing, all hopes of getting Dunkin Donuts to sponsor my coffee and chocolate glazed donut addictions are off, but will my climbing life be any less awesome? At first this thought made me a little sad: what’s the point of climbing if I’m not striving to send harder routes? But then I thought about all of the 5.10s alone that I haven’t sent at Rumney. There are dozens of V0-V4 problems that I’ve yet to send in Pawtuckaway. And that’s just two climbing areas. What about all the trad routes on Cathedral, Whitehorse and Sundown? I have years worth of projects in New Hampshire alone. So even if I do peak next year, or next week, I’ll never run out of routes to work and projects to send. There is no way I could visit, let alone send, every 5.12 and V5 and below in the world. So no matter when and where I peak, I’ll be happy just climbing, no matter what the grade.

But for now, I’m going with the Sasha principle: If a 5’2” girl can crush, why can’t I?

The Art of Car Camping

According to the calendar, spring is less than a week away, which means the season of car camping is quickly approaching—or, if you don’t mind overnight temperatures in the teens, it is already here.

There are many benefits to car camping. First of all, there is little setup required. There are no tent poles to assemble, stakes to pound into the dirt or flies to line up over the tent doors. Most cars are waterproof; all of your gear and clothing should stay dry inside. Better yet, you don’t have to stuff your vehicle, soaking wet, into a little bag after a rainy night like you would your tent. Car camping is the lazy version of overnighting in the wilderness or parking lot of your favorite crag; however, achieving the ideal sleeping configuration does require a bit of gear shuffling.

For those of you lucky enough to have a van, you probably have a mattress or bomber crash pad sleeping arrangement. I am envious and offer you no advice, as I have never had the luxury of camping in such spacious accommodations.

If you have a truck, I have little advice for you either, except that I recommend you invest in one of these courtesy of casual turtle campers:

Or better yet, just buy your first home instead:

Small to medium-sized vehicles I have more experience with:

1. Throw all of your gear except for sleeping bags and crash pads in the front seats. Make sure you put your snacks and toothbrush on top of the pile, so you don’t have to yard sale your gear in the parking lot at 9 p.m. when you need to satisfy your Cool Ranch Doritos craving or locate your Colgate.
2. Stash any extra supplies, especially things you might want later in the evening or when you wake up in the morning, in the backseat floorboard.
3. Fold down the back seats. If you have a hatchback, count yourself lucky for the car equivalent of cathedral ceilings. If you have a trunk, still fold down the back seats and get psyched that the storage space by the rear window is now conveniently a nightstand.
4. Unfold your comfiest crash pad (if you have one) so it fills as much of the backseat and trunk/hatchback region of the car as possible. Unroll your sleeping bag, toss down your pillow if you brought one and enjoy.

Additional tip for bouldering trips: Extra crash pads can be placed above or below the vehicle depending on the likelihood of precipitation and their getting stolen while you snooze.

Sometimes you just don't climb.

This past Sunday I visited Pawtuckaway State Park. It had been a week since my last excursion there, but it felt much longer. My friends intended to go bouldering, braving the inch of ice and foot of snow covering every rock in the park. Normally I’d be psyched, but the idea of not being able to top anything out coupled with knowing my hands and feet would soon be numb wasn’t sounding quite as awesome as usual. I like being able to finish things, but more than that I like being able to feel the rock under my hands while I’m climbing. Just grabbing the starting holds when it’s twenty-three degrees turns my fingers white, and I have to rely on sight and the fact that I’m not on the ground to know that I’m successfully holding onto the rock. There is also the matter of taking off one’s warm boots and smart wool socks to change into twenty-three degree climbing shoes, which will likely become wet from the snow in the process. This is not the happiest thought, especially when I know I won’t be able to even get to the top of the rock I’m trying to climb. But I still go to “p-way” every weekend.

The previous weekend I didn’t climb. Brandon reached p-way before Tommy and I and decided to meet us on the pond, where he had been working on a project. It was about thirty degrees and had been cold for over the past month, but due to the currents caused by the stream running though the pond not all of the ice was solid. He fell in up to his navel. When Tommy and I arrived, he was just walking up to the parking lot, pants partially frozen.

Naturally ten minutes later Brandon had changed and was walking the downhill mile to the pond with Tommy and me. Something about p-way draws you in, whether or not you intend to climb its rocks.

When we arrived at the pond I followed the boys, not about to fall into the muddy water. Tommy took his chances and took a short dip into the cold, smelly liquid, but only a little over his knees. The boys stayed on the pond, having found an alternate, solid passage to their beloved rock. I decided to hike around alone while they took car brushes, toothbrushes, and a shovel to clear off the ice and snow encasing the rock.

P-way is beautiful. I followed a side path around one side of the lake that eventually leads to South Mountain. It had snowed that weekend, so there were several inches of powder covering the snowshoe-packed path beneath. I sunk in, only wearing my L. L. Bean hiking boots, but I didn’t mind getting my ankles a little wet. After all, it was warmer than putting on my climbing shoes. The only animals I saw were a few humans riding snowmobiles before I turned onto the path. It must have been quiet, as I don’t remember hearing any distinct sounds besides the occasional roar of a snowmobile.

As I often do when I’m wandering the woods alone, I quickly switched from admiring the nature around me to imagining life in the summer. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the winter months, but I like to look ahead in life, planning out possible scenarios and getting excited for what is to come. On this stroll the topic was the climbing I would be doing this summer when I live in Carbondale, Colorado. I imagined bouldering with my colleagues after work, letting the sun’s rays tan my pasty skin. I thought about getting into trail running and interviewing climbers I idolize as part of my internship at Rock and Ice Magazine. The internship is real; I learned I had been chosen as the magazine’s summer intern at the end of winter break, but the rest are just best-case scenarios. Every time I think about this summer I imagine something a little different, a twist on what will soon become a story to tell Tommy and my parents over the phone. It is the many possibilities that excite me, not a particular one.

The woods are my place to think. I forget that I have to write a twenty-five-page research paper for what I fondly call my “cabin class,” something that, as a sophomore, I have never done before. I forget that I live in one of the noisiest of the University of New Hampshire’s campus living options: the Gables. It’s party central from seven p.m. to one in the morning every night of every weekend, and I want the party to be over by nine p.m. so I can curl up under my three fuzzy blankets and sleep. I forget that I have work at eight in the morning the next day. I’m just Liz and my ideas for the future, excited about what life in the nature beyond Thompson Hall lawn and college woods holds.

When I returned to Tommy and Brandon they were finishing up on the pond. They hadn’t climbed either, and unlike me, they were cold from falling into the pond and hadn’t warmed up hiking partway up South Mountain. We decided to hike out and hope more snow wouldn’t re-cover the rock that week.

I didn’t reach the top of anything that day, not a mountain or a rock, but my mental state had risen. That’s why I returned this past Sunday, one week later. I hiked my climbing shoes, chalk bag, and crash pad into p-way, but I didn’t climb. I let the boys use my crash pad to work on the first two moves of a hard problem that they couldn’t finish due to snow and ice obscuring the top out, and I hiked up to the top of North mountain, again imagining life away from Durham, UNH, and school work obligations.

For me, going into the woods is getting out of the human world that my parents, professors, and prospective employers find greatly important and entering the real world of flora and occasional fauna that live around me. For them, life continues whether or not I get all A’s, finish my German homework, or eat with next years housemates at Hoco. I can be just Liz, not Liz the journalist, Liz the bee taxonomist, Liz the stressed-out overachiever, or Liz the skinny girl obsessed with climbing. I am excited about life and all the paths it could lead me down instead of overwhelmed by the lengthy, color-coded list in my assignment book. I’m never tired or stressed when I’m hiking around p-way. Hungry sometimes, but that’s what the dried blueberries in my daypack are for. And I’m happy always, even when on occasion I do manage to fall into a hidden body of water in February. That happened on my first trip to p-way last winter, and I still keep going back.

What you should know about girls and camping

First of all, yes, girls do camp. Not all females are innately afraid of nature and believe that a Marriott in the woods is camping. Some of us actually enjoy sleeping in tents, even for a week at a time. However, before you embark on a camping trip with a girl there are a few things you should know:

1. Like you, she will not be showering, wearing makeup, or even washing her face. Do not expect her to look as clean on day five as when you left. You will look dirtier too.
2. She is not trying to look cute or outdoorsy by wearing a bandana. It’s there to hide her greasy roots. If it’s cold, the same principal applies for her favorite hat.
3. Her feet will smell. After several days of wearing sweaty hiking boots, running sneakers, or worst of all climbing shoes, her feet will smell just as bad as yours, maybe even worse.
4. Her ponytail will turn into a single, large dreadlock.
5. She will not be wearing a clean base layer every day. She will probably not be wearing a new one every-other day either. It will get sweaty and stop smelling like tide after the first approach.
6. Her eyes will likely be puffy when she wakes up in the morning.
7. She will fart at least once on the trip. She will also have to poop. 

But don’t be scared away just because she will become just as smelly and dirty as you. She will also:

1. Help you set up the tent.
2. Be just as psyched as you for hiking and climbing.
3. Carry an equally heavy pack.
4. Bring more than just Pop Tarts and beef jerky for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
5. Be down to swim at the end of a long day.
6. Not care that either of you is gross and sweaty.
7. Help you swat the crafty mosquitoes that find their way into your tent.
8. Enjoy just being outside.