A Brush with Death

Back when I was just getting into trad climbing, I didn’t know anyone who was experienced, so I looked for partners on Mountain Project. After a few weekends at the Leap, I met Mike who was a more seasoned climber. He took me to Yosemite for the first time, a long held dream. We climbed the Nutcracker and a bunch of single pitch stuff at the Sunnyside bench.

Mike was going to climb the Incredible Hulk the weekend after but his partner bailed. So he was like, “Tommy, you’re really strong, let’s go for it!” Now, climbing single pitch classics in the valley is one thing, a massive multipitch route in the backcountry is a whole other level. And then another level above that. I obviously had no hesitations and off we went.

I really had no idea what I was getting into but I trusted Mike to take care of the logistics and I was ready to pull the hard moves. The Incredible Hulk is a huge vertical face in the Hoover Wilderness on the eastern side of the Sierra Sawtooth Ridge. At 11k feet, you have to worry about altitude, especially coming from the Bay like we were. It’s a good day’s hiking distance into the backcountry, with no easy rescue options. The face itself is about 1500 feet and about 12 pitches (rope lengths).

The trip started smoothly; the long drive and the hike in were enjoyable and we were excited to make camp at the foot of the cliff and hit it the next morning. It was October and the temperatures dropped low enough to deplete both our cellphone batteries, so our alarm didn’t go off. We both ended up sleeping in. That was a bit of a concern because we needed all the daylight we could get for climbing and the descent, but like all good adventures go we decided to go after it anyway.

The route we climbed was called Yggdrasil (the Tree of Life) aka the Red Dihedral. It goes at 5.10, which is arguably steep for an entry to the multipitch trad in the backcountry. We moved a bit slow given the altitude but the climbing was super fun. We made it through the keyhole just before sunset and happily watched it from the top celebrating a good day’s worth of work.

Now this is where the story goes sideways. We could not find the proper way down and soon the darkness descended and we didn’t. After wondering around the top for a long while, we decided to make a call on the direction and just improvise our descent, which meant basically building anchors for the rope and leaving gear as we lowered each other down pitch after pitch over an unknown side of the mountain.

We were terribly unprepared for this. We had no food, we ran out of water, we had a single headlamp between the two of us and my light jacket was warm enough in the sun but not at all when the temperature dropped below freezing. Since Mike was more experienced, I kept lowering him down until he found another place for an anchor and then he would lower me down. We chose not to rap because the terrain was loose and untravelled and it was dark.

At one point, Mike stood on something that looked like a ledge to build the next anchor when the whole thing collapsed under him. The huge chunk of rocks went tumbling down below. In the quiet of the night, the echo was deafening like thunder, it felt like the whole mountain shook and the wall we were on vibrated. It went perfectly along with the fact that by then I was becoming hypothermic and shaking violently myself. Fortunately, I still had Mike on belay and he stayed hanging above the rockfall.

It’s hard not to say a word or two about the morale at this point. It was low. Now looking back at it with a decade and a half of climbing experience, I’m sure I would be terrified but whatever: it’s something I know how to deal with. But back then I was a gym climber, my fingers only knew plastic, which among other things didn’t cause rock falls. I literally thought I was going to die.

It took us longer to descend this way than it had taken us to go up and there wasn’t a minute of it that I had any hope. Surprisingly, I was okay with it. It became very clear to me then that I really didn’t mind dying at all. It was kind of a calm but chilling realization. I remember having plenty of time to wrestle with it as Mike was fiddling with the anchors. There was no panic in me, I operated flawlessly pitch after pitch but to be honest, it wasn’t a small part of me that wanted it to end there.

The suffering was familiar to me, just as the suicidal urge. I didn’t know it then, but that urge was protecting me from something deeper and more horrifying and it took me many more years to get closer to it. But those are stories for another day for those with sufficient capacity. For now, it’s enough to say that it was a memorable night for me. One of those experiences that really brought me closer to myself than my regular distracting life afforded. There was something clarifying and purifying about being this close to the edge that I found attractive.

It was a bit comical to come back to work after that weekend. I remember watching my colleagues’ anxiety over meetings and emails through a bemused daze. Like what the hell people, you have nothing to worry about... I felt like a different person. And I wish I could say that that the experience changed me and I was never the same again. But that wasn’t the case.

Soon I went back to my regular life of chasing dopamine and escape like everyone else. But somewhere in the back of my mind there remained a knowing that something very real lies beneath. And I was back to climbing multipitch trad again and again over the years. It was putting me closer to the edge so one day I could finally build enough capacity to take a peek at what was beyond. Climbing became the ritual of coming back to myself before I knew what grief was, until one day I built up enough capacity to realize that it wasn't death that I was afraid of: it was aliveness.