Sedona

Rooted somewhere in the mind of nearly every American climber is an image of Sedona.

It blossoms from distant rumors of whole climbs falling down, of crystals and pink jeeps, brutal, old-school off-widths, and squeeze chimneys through towers. A place of hours’ long approaches for a handful of pitches. Of agaves through the chest. Resorts and sweatlodges for Californians and UFO tours for 70 bucks a night. Where bags of sand pour from decades’ old climbs. A place where face holds exfoliate in front of your eyes, hand-jams explode, and twenty-foot runouts above half-driven drilled pins can be mandatory.

This is all true, and why most climbers don’t visit and fewer still stay.

This says something salient about the continued sanity and prudence of most American climbers. But for the better part of 50 years, hard climbers and desert rats have been going quietly crazy in Sedona:

Bob Kamps, TM Herbert, and Dave Rearick realizing the Mace in ’57 while Yvon went to Mass. Geoff Parker in the early 70’s, slaying spires and naming them dragons. The Syndicato Granitica and the Banditos, blowing up the 80’s. Baxter, Mish, Rink, Coats and Coats. Hardwick, Davidson, Grossman, and Zaiser, making .11X almost common. Hovering near your own apparition trying to repeat their climbs. Toula, Mattson, and Middendorf laughing quietly as you try to free old aid lines, as you scream “Rock,” to your partner, a block on your chest. The new breed, laughing alongside you.

Because each climb here excites all the fear and euphoria, the feelings of exploration and risk – and the pleasure rising from the able negotiation of that risk – common to climbs in the bigger mountains. It is a place where boldness is necessary and adventure, the rule; where a good partner is still more than someone who climbs hard.

This is a place where the blood rises in strange tempos inside your knee in the offwidth. Where your heart fills your fingertips as the patina breaks and the breath falls from your body. Faster, even, than the sand from the formations, or the wind, which picks up those grains like a paintbrush leaves a canvas.

It is a place that always exceeds the imagination and one’s comprehension. Where you stop, mid-pitch, to consider the shadow beneath the falling block and think, for a moment, that you get it. And then you move again, slowly upward, and again, know nothing. Blue sky, red stone, fear, movement.

Rapping off each time, you spy improbable new lines on remote, slender towers or 600 foot walls. You know it’s ludicrous, but they’re made suddenly imaginable by your recent success and the relenting angle of the sun toward evening. Your partner, on the ground, laughs off the rockfall and the offwidths, relives the splitter fingers to the squeeze chimney to the hand crack, the Cooper’s Hawk that came by on the thermal, the miraculous overhanging jugs, the thrutch through the sugary rock and agaves near the top…. He takes a big swig of water and beats the sand from his hair.

The wind comes up, and you stop moving the rope through your device. Spinning out from the wall, you see a landscape native to your dreams: canyons of unclimbed lines, beautiful spires against the dying blue sky. Miles of red rock. Hectares of choss.