Skin
A Love Letter to Rock Climbing
By: Emery Carlson
Rock climbers obsess over their skin, though not with scented lotions or exfoliants. After every failed attempt, a climber will sit on the mat or in their harness and look down at their fingertips. They are assessing how many tries they have left on a climb by examining the tiny craters that obliterate fingerprints and expose the dermal stratum, searching for the first hint of blood, flaps of torn skin, or to see how many layers remain. An outsider might ask whether they’re okay, suspecting a cut, but for a climber, this is a compulsive gesture, already looking ahead towards the next go even while feeling the recoil from the last fall.
Over winter break, I went on a climbing trip to Red Rock Canyon in Nevada, just west of Las Vegas. We were a large group, all staying in an AirBnb in residential Vegas, which felt incongruous considering that I’d never imagined Vegas as a place where people actually lived. Outside our windows every night, we could hear occasional flurries of engines, suggesting street racing, and see the glowing neon beacons of the casinos, drawing people toward them like moths. Vegas is all skin, no flesh. Now, looking back, I see the prevalence of skin everywhere in the trip, not just in the climbing.
The first thing my carmates and I did upon completing the thirty hour drive from Minneapolis to Red Rock, sleep-deprived and dehydrated, having subsisted on Red Bull, gas station snacks and fast food for the last thirteen hundred miles of open road, was to find the boulders (a not-so-difficult task, considering the number of fellow climbers we saw lugging bulky crash pads from the Kraft Mountain parking lot). What the rock quality, its skin, would be like had been an object of some speculation in the car: would it be jagged or smooth, polished or high-friction, crumbly (chossy) or solid, and what kind of holds would there be? Smooth, bulbous slopers, sharp-edged crimps, or both? Climbers have favorite rock types like favorite kinds of ice cream, except that rather than taste buds being the judge of favorites, here it is the skin.
The boulder we came upon was a rather famous (a “classic” in the climbing vernacular) and rather tall one called The Cube. The name is appropriate for The Cube greets one from the trail as a reddish monolith with angular edges and stark, sheer faces rising about thirty feet off the sandy desert. In my fatigued and stiff state, I was drawn to the imposing vertical face of the oft photographed boulder. I like climbs where, from a distance, the way up is obscure, if visible at all, and where it is only on closer inspection that small edges, fissures, or pockets can be seen to hold onto. But it was tall, a “highball,” and though we had pads, we all knew that after a certain height, a fall would almost certainly mean serious injury. It was getting cooler as the sun began to set, so the friction was good, and I made my way up the face on its sandstone crevasses, existing not through my mind, which might’ve been scared, but through my skin and my joints, which felt the solidity of the rock and my own strength keeping me on it. From the top of Kraft Mountain, I imagine I looked like a bug suctioned to a particular lump from the scree that had once sloughed off the mountain, as easily as dust from the cover of an old book. I clamored over the lip of the boulder ungracefully, with hands and knees akimbo, and stood atop it, neither the first nor the last to do so, breathing heavily and with heart pounding both in excitement and residual fear and, having no further business with that space except to look out over the desert as if it weren’t just as beautiful from the ground, climbed back down the same way I had come up.
A part of me feels that it is taboo to write about the act of climbing, as if it were somehow salacious or deeply personal, and I can’t say why I have this instinct. But it is personal. Everyone has their own beta or method for a given climb—no climb feels the same to everyone. I climb because I enjoy it but also because, for however short a duration, I am able to do, be, and not think. Except maybe when I’m lead climbing, and I’m trying to clip and fumbling, six feet above the last bolt, facing at least a fifteen foot fall if I can’t manage. But in the moments when I do manage, despite sweaty hands and muscles fatigued to the point of being unable to make a fist, grabbing hold after hold despite thinking that each would be the one that I’d fall off, then I feel that I am more than a consciousness in a vat and an haphazard assortment of memories.
Vegas may be all skin, but only a few miles outside it, where we drove every day, the Earth’s bones and muscles are exposed in the form of bulges of rock jutting out tan and red (I fancifully imagine that the rocks were turned hues of red by all the uninhibited desert sunsets washing over them like layered dyes), weathered or pristine as if newborn out of a volcanic womb. Climbing was born out of a rebellious spirit, a sixties counterculture offshoot, and there’s always been a raging debate as to the ethics and unwritten rules of the activity (even calling it a sport is contentious): who gets to decide them, what constitutes “pure” climbing, and under what conditions is one justified in saying one sent a route? Some say that the only way to climb is to bring everything with you and leave no trace on the rock (as opposed to bolting routes), that leaving bolts or other permanent protection defaces these sinews of Mother Earth and means coping out, leaving somebody else to lay the groundwork to make it easy on yourself. On the trip, I had a discussion of this sort with one of my fellows.
It is true that climbing leaves traces, trails of white chalk in blotches where holds are on rock faces, but it doesn’t have to mean that something is lost or that a climb becomes somehow impure, the achievement nullified. I see the process of a route or boulder becoming chalked as akin to thieves coating a keypad in baby powder to find out how to access a safe. The chalk is perhaps a key to the ascent, but it is also a record of where other people have been, an evolving image of different people’s interactions with the same rock, even a communal work of art, not only revealing something that has always been there, but adding an artificial skin, a version of “was here” plastered on sometimes grand, sometimes unremarkable rocks near and far from civilization, and not so different in ethos from the handprints left in caves by our ancestors.
Red Rock, as a world-renowned climbing area, has become a veritable gallery of chalk lines, records, and stories, each one both a personal struggle and a part of the history witnessed and choreographed by the rock. I left my own record there, nothing newsworthy in the community, but significant to me, and I left both literal and metaphorical skin there.
The AirBnb was packed, and every bedroom had at least four or five people in it. The kitchen was often crowded, so that there would be a line for the stove, and another outside each bathroom. But it was cheap. Different contingencies would leave around eight every morning for various climbing areas, and most everybody would be back in the house by six in the evening for dinner, cards, or video games. We would also talk about where we had been, what we had got on, sent or not sent, and show each other our skin and often take a secret pride in how worn it was, how deep the fingertip craters were as a testament to the quality of our day. We would swap stories, all in good humor, about interactions with non-climbers:
“Do you live here?” (While we were standing around the mouth of a cave at a boulder.)
“How far up have you made it?” (Pointing to the peak behind them.)
“Climber! What spire are you ascending?” (A hiker calling up from the ground to a climber on a route.)
Once we tired ourselves out, we would retire to beds, couches, air mattresses, and sleeping bags on the floor or in front of doors, in walkways and next to the living room couches. It was always warm on account of all the bodies and sometimes I didn’t need my sleeping bag. As a person who enjoys my time alone, it was sometimes galling to wake up in the middle of the night to someone stepping over me on their way to the bathroom. By the end of the trip, while the skin on my fingertips still had a few good climbs left in it, my social skin was wearing thin. There was nowhere to go in the house that wasn’t already occupied, and taking a walk meant circling a neighborhood of nearly identical one-story houses arranged in a spiraling labyrinth around empty parking lots and boulevard palm trees.
On the last day of the trip, I tried a boulder called Vino Rojo that I had picked out for myself as a worthy opponent a few days before. I tried it first thing that last morning and was starting to figure it out when my skin broke at the base of my thumb, the blood telling me to stop. I went away feeling frustrated because I thought I had been close, but Vino Rojo is as much a mental boulder as a physical one, with a tenuous last section over a lip on bad holds ten feet off the ground. I followed the group over to another boulder a few were trying, and we stayed there for a couple hours. Sometimes one of them would get agonizingly close and on the next go barely make it halfway. It was touch and go and getting colder as the heat was quickly sucked from the rocks by a gentle but chilling breeze. They were down to their last tries, and there was still hope, but they were tired. I was watching, anxious for them to succeed but itching to revisit Vino Rojo. For added dramatic effect, rain appeared in the forecast for forty minutes out. The end to the session was anticlimactic with no heartbreaking failure, just a resignation to fatigue.
I was armed with new beta on Vino Rojo, and I started getting closer right away. The people who had been climbing the other boulder were now spotting my falls off the lip, which were perilous and not always straight down. My skin was raw and the cut on my thumb prevented its full range of movement. It was dark enough at this point to warrant a headlamp, and I made my last attempt wearing it. I was running on pure adrenaline and muscle memory, and I got to the point at which I usually fell, didn’t, made the next move, vaguely heard encouragement from below, tried to pull and slipped off, landing on the pads guided by the other’s hands.
“I thought you had it!”
“So did I.”
“Ah well, now we’re all in the same boat—we all have something to come back to and train for.”
“You know, I’m actually glad I fell. This way it’ll feel even better when I come back for it.”
The feeling of completing a boulder is euphoric and becomes more so the more struggle was involved. But like anything that is intensely euphoric, as soon as it’s over, the next thought is of more, the next boulder, the next challenge that feels impossible at first, and this can be motivating, but it can also be an addictive cycle, where nothing matters except the next moment of bliss, always one step ahead. My skin was broken (the adrenaline was wearing off and it was beginning to hurt), there was no sunlight anymore, and the headlamp wouldn't have made much difference. I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had gone until I absolutely couldn’t.
“Thanks for the spot, guys. I really appreciate you sticking with me.”
“Of course. You stuck with us too.”
As we were walking back to the parking lot, I saw the moonlight over the desert for the first time. It coated the sand and rocks in a mystical cream-colored veneer and left a streak in the sky where the sun had set. The lights of Vegas in the distance mingled with the stars, and the city was no longer skin-deep but a mysterious constellation. All it took was a little failure, some broken skin, to see it.