The Edge of Myself

My last day, my first “easy day”, ended long and hard and painful as I scraped and scrambled, tired and tangled, Silent Partner locking and rope running out, onto the rim of El Cap.

I had been alone on the wall for fourteen days, four of them on half rations of water and the scraps of my food bags. I staggered, stood, staggered again, pulling hard in the still heat of darting lizards and baking dwarf trees with charcoal bark, away from the edge, away until I was sure I was beyond gravity’s high watermark, safe from the Sea.

I stood there for several minutes unsure what to do, how to feel, whether to stand or sit, laugh or cry, my legs equally unsure how to address the flat world again. But it’s always like this. I know the feeling well.

This was my fourth El Cap solo, my thirty-fourth route up the Captain. I knew how it feels at the end: the relief, the sadness, so desperate for it to be over for so long, yet wanting to hang on.

The Sea of Dreams is a route that still maintains a mystique, a route that retains a grade of A4+ (“if you fall you die”) despite having been put up in 1978. Time has mellowed it a little. Well-known features like the “surfboard” have fallen off, bolts and rivets have been added. Nevertheless it still deserves Bridwell’s grade of PDH—pretty damn hard—in most people’s books.

Although an undoubted classic, the Sea is rarely climbed, perhaps one ascent every couple of years. There are many stories of teams bailing, of loose and dangerous rock, runouts, scary obligatory free climbing and bad belays. SOD is one of the few routes still dominated by old bolts. Horror stories abound.

Robert Steiner, the German translator of Psychovertical, lost a finger on the route when a loose flake broke and chopped it off. No one I’ve ever met who has climbed the route has had anything but respect for the first ascensionists, who set out to create the longest, hardest, most sustained big wall in the world.

When I arrived in the Valley I already had my headset on doing a proper solo route, something full-value, not speed shenanigans this time. My first choice was Tempest (A4), a modern route with lots of thin climbing near Mescalito.

One reason for choosing a long solo was that I’m working on a film with Jen Randell—who made Project Mina—called Journey Through the Brain, a profile of my relationship with climbing. The solo was a way to gather material for the Kickstarter. I needed something hard, but not so hard I couldn’t film.

I began by climbing Zodiac for the seventh time with my mate Charles, who wanted to lead a big wall. He led all but three pitches. While climbing, my eye kept drifting over to the North America Wall and the Sea.

This part of El Cap is like looking across at Mousetrap Zawn on Gogarth: black, loose diorite, mega steep, obviously death on a stick. Tempest scared me a bit, but it followed golden granite. The Sea scared me more.

Stories of the Hook or Book, Peregrine Pillar, the Blue Room, expanding belays—cams placed in expanding cracks—had lived in my head for years. Peregrine Pillar scared me the most, Nate Beckwith’s words burned into my mind since the late ’90s.

After our third bivy on the wall, I took the Peregrine Pillar pitch. Starting with a long stretch of no-pro 5.8, I reached two loose pillars. Watching my cams expand and contract in the diorite, I half free-climbed, half aided upward. I started pounding an angle. The rock moaned and would not stop. Everything was hollow. I tied it off and continued. Finally, better pins, then the belay. Not a moment too soon.

There was no route on El Cap that scared me more. But why not do it for that very reason? Why let stories put me off? Death falls, skyhook puzzles, car-sized blocks that rattled when nailed, pillars stacked like Jenga that had to be free climbed before committing to A4 above.

I had come to sort my head out. To reboot. Nothing does that like a hard wall. Why not take the full dose?

I’d already climbed Bridwell’s other classics here—Pacific Ocean Wall and Zenyatta Mondatta—and thought the Sea would be similar: hard but manageable, the shine worn off. I’d get the tick, come down a hero, stories deflated.

I was wrong.

I hauled a huge rack, ten days of food and water—thirty-three litres—experience enough to guard me. I was ready for a battle. Not a war.

The lower pitches passed faster than expected. Careful, deliberate, then the Continental Shelf and the Hook or Book.

This pitch earns its reputation. A vertical hook traverse, lower off a rivet hammered into a shallow hole, swing blind, catch an edge with a skyhook. Then chess with the rock. Hook, step, search. Further right. Higher. Eventually the fall line drops away into a hundred-foot void.

Midway, the copperhead nest. All but one had fallen out. I tried to replace them. They were as shallow as matchsticks pressed into clay. I backed them up with a solid flake and a bomber skyhook weighted by my Fish bag, which at the time seemed perfectly reasonable.

Then on. Never weighting the heads. Never going the wrong way. And suddenly the belay.

The route was relentless. Mentally exhausting, amplified by being alone. I was out of condition. My hands swelled so badly I couldn’t pull gloves on. I just hoped they would heal faster than they hurt.

Again and again I reached dead ends. Once I rappelled and returned the next day. Each time the answer came from my big wall rule: If in doubt, get high.

Then Peregrine Pillar.

An unprotected traverse on creaking flakes. A fall would have broken my legs swinging into the North America Wall. Then the pillars: stacked blocks that looked ready to topple. Half aiding with nuts, half free climbing—“fraid climbing”—I moved upward, unsure whether it was C1 5.8 or C4 XS.

I mantled onto the top of the pillar. Above: A4, with the pillar waiting below if I failed.

The days were hot and still. Three litres a day was pushing it. There were no easy pitches. I climbed from dawn into darkness. I could not stop. I had to top out before the water ran out.

The Blue Room was worse. Cardboard-thin flakes flexed under my feet. Pins felt like triggers. My ropes snagged constantly on downward-pointing teeth. Nothing was safe. Least of all me.

I improvised constantly. A hook tied to my hammer for a blind move. A cam hook behind bone-china flakes. Opposed beaks in horizontals choked with broken RURP tips. I laughed out loud at what I was being forced to do.

My food ran out. Water was low. It was my forty-fourth birthday. Dinner was a packet of M&Ms and my final brew before the gas died. It felt like a feast.

I thinned and hardened. Then broke down. I slept with my arms above my head to stop my hands from bursting.

Then, almost there. Three pitches of the North America Wall. An easy day, I thought.

But alone, nothing is easy.

And so I stood there, fourteen days on, at the rim again. A year older. Not the man who had started. Broken down by the wall, skin and bone and thought rendered by the work of it all.

I looked out, feeling that familiar feeling at the end of such things, at the rim of the wall, at the edge of myself.