Normally Descended

I was perhaps fifty feet up the crumbling metamorphic cliff and looking down. The glacier below, which had been a scary sheet of ice when I had been atop it, now beckoned like a down pillow. I looked up at the moves ahead. I had tried them twice and concluded the moment of no return would be the third hand hold, where my butt would be hanging in the air and I would be committed to grabbing at something I could not see. It was not a difficult sequence, but the rock was not very friendly. 

I was by myself, and that made it easier to accept that it had been a mistake to leave the glacier. Though I felt enough fear to hesitate, sequence the moves, and understand that I was over my head, I did not feel any dis-ownership of the predicament. When I am in the mountains with others, a part of my brain grasps such situations in terms of how I got there. Did someone else make the suggestion and I just went along with it? Did I not want to do this for reasons that had fulminated earlier, earlier grievances now coming out in whether to buy into the route or not? Was this my lame idea and now I needed to pretend otherwise? 

But in all likelihood, a partner would have increased the chance I would have been part of a more rational route choice and never found myself hesitating in this particular place. I had scrambled along all morning, taking the harder rock problems just to take them and declining to get my butt wet glissading onto the easier snow. Then turned up the staircase of a cliff until it had become a wall. The image of a horn player improvising notes until the song underneath is lost came to mind. 

I pulled out a loose piece of the dark Minaret rock and watched it fall to the snow below. Unlike the cohesive, dependable granite in much of the Sierra, the Minarets don’t let you know where you stand until you stand there, telling yourself if I clean just a little gravel away or toss a handful of loose stuff, something more agreeable is just beneath. Shattered, tricky rock. 

I kicked at the cliff. This is kinda dumb was the only useful abstraction I could muster about the situation. I tightened my shoes, drank some water, and pulled through the moves. As I passed the last hold, I immediately told myself the problem had been elementary, even felt embarrassed to have been intimidated by it. 

I hopped up the easier slope above on lighter feet, regaining the fluid, smug lift of the earlier morning. Near the top of the cliff, I was brought to a stop by a surprising site, a pair of nylon slings and a rappel ring. Other people had come this way, this unlikely line from a to b. But they had been heading down; the route was normally descended. 

The anchor suggested something about the cliff I had come up. I flexed my arm and tried on a conquering guide pose. But that wasn’t it and so I headed off to climb the rest of the mountain.