No Disappointment

I hated that I ranted to her about all of the miserable reasons I’ve never summited the Grand Teton and all of the people and conditions in my life I blame for it (myself, mostly, on all counts). 

I’m sorry I ruined the trip.

Fuck my soul. I never wanted her to feel that way. We sat on a rock in the middle of the Hoback River. We’d left Jackson Hole and the fucking Tetons. We couldn’t even find a decent place to swim, and it was so hot. The Snake River was running high. So we decided to move on and leave the Tetons behind. We decided not to climb Disappointment Peak. She said she didn’t want me to be disappointed, and I said absolutely I wasn’t, that it had been a great trip, and I was happy and having a good time, it was just being back in Jackson Hole brought back all of those old feelings and thoughts.

If you’ve followed me at all, you’ll know I have this teeny, weeny, tiny, whiny obsession with the Tetons and specifically summiting the Grand Teton. Going on thirty years now…

This trip I hoped—gritting my teeth kind of hope—we could summit an easier peak. Thought maybe the Middle Teton with an overnight in Garnet Canyon or Disappointment. At the last minute I decided not to take the backpacking gear to save space. I’d hoped we could camp or sleep in the car most of the trip. Partly to save money and partly for the experience. But that knocked out the possibility of trying the Middle Teton.

Jackson Hole was packed with tourists. Tourists. Clogging up the roads and trailhead parking, falling all over each other at Mormon Row, occupying all of the camping spots, etc, ad nauseam. The next day they’d be on the trails, in front of the views, drowning out any semblance of peace with their Bluetooth speakers. 

I’d been in hard driving mode for most of the trip, and I let it open wide up as we pushed our way through traffic out of Jackson toward Pinedale. I was of a dark mind. More why questions. More rolling around my regrets in my craw. And it was hot. The whole trip had been hot. Our hike to Little Devils Tower in the Black Hills had been blistering. Stretches of road felt Mad Maxian. 

Winding alongside the Hoback River I was determined to find a spot to swim. Eventually we saw a pull off and eased in. We both figured the water would be cold, but the temps were in the 90s so it hardly mattered. So we sat in the shallow whitewater and cried a little, and I chewed my lower lip determining I wouldn’t let the past ruin this trip. 

I had hope for the Snowies, and once we got back in the car I started sharing what I knew about them. I’d first learned about them in a blurb in a climbing magazine with a mini-guide to some multipitch trad climbing there. The photos looked amazing, and I quickly discovered the range is near Vedauwoo. Despite knowing about the Snowies for the same thirty years I was obsessed with the Tetons I’d never managed to get there. Vedauwoo was a better acclimatizing overnight spot on the way to bigger things.

The Cloud Peak trip made me realize lesser goals could be so rewarding. And I realized I had missed so many great opportunities because of my eclipsing obsession with the Grand. I remembered that, and it started to make me feel better about leaving Disappointment behind. 

We approached West Lake Marie Trailhead from the west. I knew the eastern aspect of the mountain ridge was more dramatic than the forested slopes we could see. Then we rounded a bend, and there it was. A couple minutes later we turned into the parking lot. 

Wildflowers blanketed the slopes around the asphalt rectangle. Stunning scenery filled our vision as we slathered sunscreen and stowed everything in a day pack. In short order we set soles to the Medicine Bow Peak loop; a seven mile hike gaining sixteen hundred-ish feet to the 12,018’ rocky summit dome. 

We struck out for the summit three miles away at 9:30am. What I didn’t realize was the the summit wasn’t really recognizable from the parking lot. The dramatic crags that were visible were much lower and easily attained. The high point in the range was much farther away than it looked. 

There wasn’t a bad view along the entire hike. Whomever laid out the trail should get a Nobel Prize for it. It climbed easy and meandered across the border between talus and meadow. Even the final steep crux ended up being well constructed and manageable. 

View of the summit of Medicine Bow Peak 12,018' from the south

Then we were on top, and hardly feeling the altitude and miles. But we still had miles to go and all downhill. I broke out the trekking poles for our old knees. We could see almost the whole route back. Storm clouds overhung the lower half, back near the car. Thunder rolled out there over the lakes. We could see curtains of rain that might be evaporating before they reached the ground. And then a dark indigo shadow was creeping over the lip of the ridge above us. I’d stowed my camera and got a trash bag out to stuff our phones in if those clouds decided to unload. And down we went. 

The rain never materialized over us. We dodged the worst. Down around gorgeous alpine lakes we went. So many beautiful lakes, and millions of wildflowers: asters, columbine of varying colors, paintbrush, penstemon and so much more. Views for days. 

The world seemed to just be the circle of the horizon around us. My dark thoughts had been left behind. For seven hours the outside world left me alone. My head was clear. My heart was clean. It was the best day of my life. 

The hike and the summit were five star experiences. The scenery was like something out of a magazine. The cold, clear lake water enveloping me was like silver and ice in my veins. I dunked my head under Lookout Lake. I swam out a few yards and found a rock to stand on. Tonya laughed and took a photo. 

What made the whole experience more than great was Tonya. I lost her a long time ago. I didn’t think I’d ever find her again. We’ve been together again almost two years. We have two lifetimes between us, but without going into it I think we have something now that defies description. That’s what made the whole hike and climb the best experience of my life. Her. Us. 

After the impromptu swim we continued down the trail. Down and down. The last view we had before the parking lot was the outflow falls of Lake Marie. Good to the last drop.

Changing our plan to hike in the Snowy Range instead of Disappointment Peak was a better decision. We didn’t do the thing everyone does (hiking to Surprise, Amphitheater, and Delta Lakes) and we had a better experience. Far less people, trailhead parking half full, better trail, honestly better scenery and views, and something I’ve wanted to do for decades since I first learned about the place much like Cloud Peak which also ended up being one of my favorite hikes/climbs ever. Cloud Peak, Katadhin, Medicine Bow Peak. Not sure which is the right order, but it doesn’t matter. 

There was so much more we did and saw. There were so many profound things I thought along the way that I didn’t manage to write down. I hope they slowly come back to me. They’re somewhere in the twists and turns of my mind. 

I might not remember the finest details, but I’ll never forget our day in the Snowy Range. 

Nailbiter’s Lament

The tip of the middle finger of my right hand is sore. It feels like I’ve bitten it down to the quick, but I haven’t. Or maybe the feeling is more like having a sliver of wood or chunk of dirt jammed under the nail into the tender flesh underneath—a feeling of achy pressure with the promise of festering goodness in a day or so. 

I push it with my thumb to increase the intensity of the pain—to try and pinpoint its source. I pull down the hard, dry skin bounding the nail, but nothing is revealed. No splinter. No crack exposing subcutaneous vulnerabilities below. Is it simply a hangnail?

As a chronic nail biter, hangnails are an everyday thing for me. They usually don’t hurt. Or their pain is my baseline. But this pain is downstream of the hangnail. It’s under the tip of the nail, right at the edge. 

The urge to chew on it grows. But the pain is hard and tight and threatens against any aggression from my teeth. It will hurt more if I try to pry and dig at it. 

I muck out the dry bits to find that eases the ache. Was it simply too much dry, dead skin creating pressure under the tip of my nail? My own body creating a foreign intrusion? Maybe. Now it seems the source has shifted to the center of the leading edge of the nail. This feeling is more like exposed quick. The intensity rises with use of the digit; increasing the pressure of pinching an object drives tender underlayers into the edge of the nail. Nerves tingle like sparklers. 

The mystery is that the appearance of the fingertip does not match what I’m feeling. It should be puffy and red. It should be obvious what causes this sensation. Usually there is no mystery. If I had smashed the finger with a rock yesterday it would make more sense. Or if I had unexpectedly jammed it. But I didn’t do any of those things. I only climbed some rocks. I hardly bore down on those crimps at the crux—when my feet were smeared on whispers of edges—as I fought the sweltering air, dipping and redipping into my chalk bag for courage. Did I have most of my body weight bearing down on that fingertip for a minor eternity as I searched for something better for my left hand? It seems like it. Did I grind that borderland between hard nail and soft skin into the sand accumulated in a piss-ripple in the rock? Absolutely. 

I didn’t feel the pain under my nail after that. Not as I made the final easier moves of the climb to the anchors. Not as I flaked the rope back into the rope bag. Not as my friend and I made the long but pleasant hike back out of the valley to the car. I didn’t feel pain on the drive back to town or as we circled around in the grocery store picking up a few things for supper and breakfast. I didn’t feel it when I kneaded the dough for pizza or cut up the bell pepper or spread out the basil leaves and crumbled up Italian sausage before layering the grated mozzarella over everything. 

I didn’t feel it in the shower before bed or as my hands roamed over her body in the soft darkness. I didn’t feel it as sleep took me into dreams I don’t remember this morning. I didn’t feel it as I heated water for coffee or poured it over the filter into the waiting steel pot. 

It was as I sat sipping the hot concoction of joe and half and half, looking bleary-eyed out the big front window into the foggy world beyond that the fingertip first spoke. Soft, but persistent. Until I couldn’t ignore it, until I had to investigate. In the quiet moment the smallest voice becomes heard. 

Heart of Gold

I saw an IG post this week (@megoneill10) with this line:

“I'm an energetic, magical person. And when something uncomfortable lands in my life I don't just survive it - I alchemize it.”

“Alchemize it”

The Alchemist 

“To change by alchemy : transmute”

That’s the definition of “alchemize.” 

“Alchemy” is defined as such: “a medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy aiming to achieve the transmutation of the base metals into gold, the discovery of a universal cure for disease, and the discovery of a means of indefinitely prolonging life.” 

And also: “a power or process that changes or transforms something in a mysterious or impressive way.”

These past couple of years have involved me trying to impressively change my life. The impressively part isn’t the important bit. That’s not the goal. But I feel like if I make the changes I want to make then it will be noteworthy. 

Anyway, the whole process of improving my situation has led me back to bouldering and bouldering development. I’ve rearranged my life in such a way that it’s possible and desirable again. In that sense I am the alchemist. 

My life is really good right now. The changes have allowed me the mental and emotional space to approach bouldering as a discipline again. Specifically bouldering development. 

All those ages ago when I was prolifically developing pebble wrasslin’ around home I had begun to see it as an almost religious rite. I went to the stones to commune with the infinite. To celebrate being alive and awake to the world around me. I still had hope for the future laced through with a shrinking naïveté that I was normal and the built world was a good place with a few problems. 

I’ve taken some hard ground falls since then. I discovered I am neurodivergent. At 32 years old I made the discovery that I have ADHD. My academics struggles were almost finished at that point. It seemed too little, too late. And not early enough for me to factor it in to my career planning. Or life planning. So I became a Planner. What irony.

I failed in my first effort at a professional career. Ran tuck-tail home when the edges started to crumble. 

Then there was the marriage and the aftermath. It could have been worse, but it was not good. I managed to keep my house. I managed to keep my kids. I lost dignity. I lost years. I lost confidence. I lost my good health. I lost my energy and my passion. I stopped planning and keeping life lists. I lost my way. 

So I turned to the kind of alchemy I knew well: introspection. I went deep into the darkness of my own soul to find the answers. What I found didn’t shock me. 

I’m relearning my old patterns—the ones that served me well. I’m finding my space in the world again. I’m rediscovering old emotions and thought streams. I finally feel like the person I was before all the darkness; the person I thought had died. 

It turns out—it seems—as if he was just dormant, hiding within himself and protecting what was most important. So I have alchemized myself to turn a leaden heart back to gold. 

This blunt arete I’ve been working the last week is an apt candidate for the problem name of “The Alchemist.” I’ve borrowed it from the Paolo Coelho novel obviously, and it hit hard when I read it, but really it’s been the process I’ve been going through since July of 2024. 

That’s when I started making real changes in my life. I solo backpacked Rough Trail, and then went on to the Pine Mountain Trail. I changed relationships. I changed jobs. I went to Wyoming and solo climbed Cloud Peak and then bagged a slew of state highpoints on the way home. Then I went to New England and had the best road trip of my life. And I’m now with the person I should have always been with. That’s a whole story unto itself. 

All of those changes alone would constitute a successful transmutation from trash into gold. For me, the physical expression of all of this is to go out, visualize a line up the rock, and then make my body flow and conform with the canvas nature has provided. To commune with stone. To justify myself in the world. 

I have not sent this line yet. I know I can. I know I will. 

First photo showed original beta
In this one I was trying a more
straight-on approach

Time Is Just Weakness Lingering In Your Body

 Wolverine…

…Not the character played by Hugh Jackman. It’s a line. On a boulder. Not my line. I did not do the first ascent. I’m pretty sure I did the second ascent right after the first. Or soon after. 

This is how I think it went—I’m reconstructing some memories of this event—but the important bits are sourced directly from memory.

My younger cousin—Dustin—and I had started intentionally bouldering during the last half of 1998. We’d climbed a few things at Emerald City with no crash pad. I’m sure we didn’t clean or only minimally cleaned anything. 

I’d been telling my new climbing friend Tony about Emerald City as well as our other bouldering exploits at Torrent Falls, Tower Rock, and The Heights. I was particularly proud of The Heights. There’s a five start V2 roof problem I called Sugar High there. 

Tony was finally in town with his crash pads (I believe he had already loaned me a pad we’d been using but had not used when we did the first stuff at Emerald), and he was willing to let us show him what we’d found and climbed. I was giddy to have gotten him to go with us to Emerald just to boulder. 

We started out near Yellow Brick Road. We’d already put up problems on the Black Magic Boulder, Solitaire, Skittles, and the Yellow Brick Toad. While I was showing them to Tony, Dustin wandered over the hill into the rhododendron and disappeared. 

The rest of us kept climbing near the cliff, but eventually Dustin came slogging back up the hill excited and demanded we come see what he’d found. 

Dustin was a mute. I mean, he could talk; he just chose not to most of the time. And he always had a deep voice, even when you weren’t sure where he could have kept such thick vocal cords in such a scrawny frame. So when he did talk it was hard to ignore. Somehow we did.

I can’t remember for sure, but he may have absconded with a crash pad, and when we started looking for it realized it was down in the rhododendron thicket with Dustin. So we went to investigate. 

He’d found a king line. Everyone agreed, even Tony. The downhill side of the boulder overhung a nice long bench which would yield even more nice boulders after we explored around. But that day we dropped everything under that prow and gawked. 

As soon as the rest of us arrived, Dustin jumped on the rock and showed us the moves he’d figured out. We started chucking shoes around like Mr. Rogers and took turns trying it all-the-while Dustin kept reminding us he’d found it, and it was his line. I believe the exact phrase he used was “Get off, you homo, it’s mine!” 

Everyone respected his find and he sent it. That day or the next session I can’t remember, but he got after that thing with a vengeance. For someone whose spirit animal is probably a sloth, that was a big deal. 

As being relatively new to formal bouldering, we cajoled Tony to give the problem a grade. It felt hard. We wanted to know how hard we’d just bouldered. I mean, that thing has some moves on it would blow your mind seventy feet up and a body length out from your last bolt. 

You step up onto the slab with two small, but good holds—left on the bottom of the prow and right on a good vertical incut—with decent feet.  Then you reach across with your right hand and palm the underside of the offset prow and rock into that to lock yourself into the space. Then it’s a high reach up to a severely small crimp with a thumb catch, bump feet, and grab a small but positive hold higher up on the prow with your right. Then it’s move feet again, another reach up to a nice handlebar with a positive lip for the left hand, and then move feet again and get a nice hold for the right and top out. 

When pinned down (I had two inches and thirty pounds on him) Tony said it was V1. 

Dustin and I hadn’t bouldered anywhere else beside the Gorge. We didn’t know what bouldering grades meant. And in fact, we had only been climbing a couple years when we shifted to a bouldering focus (much to the chagrin of every other climber in the Red in the Nineties) so we couldn’t even really make educated guesses about grades. Tony set the bar for us. After Wolverine we at least had a reference for V1. That influenced every line we put up over the next three years. 

Why Wolverine? I can’t remember now. I wasn’t an X-Men fan back then. Dustin named it—as was his right—and I’m sure it was either commonly understood or maybe he explicitly stated it was named after the X-Man. But after twenty seven years I’m not even sure of that anymore. The name is distinctly singular, not plural, therefore I’m certain it wasn’t a Red Dawn reference. 

I missed the twenty seventh anniversary of the first ascent by two days. Tonya (not Tony) and I went up last night. I wanted to get in a few problems, but most stuff needs some cleaning. And I need some conditioning. But I ended up standing at the base of it, chalking my hands, and putting sticky rubber to sandstone. After one false start, muscle memory kicked in. This one makes a little more sense…I have climbed Wolverine a lot in my lifetime. It’s an old standard for sure. I didn’t send, but I would have if I hadn’t been moaning like an old man. Like the old man that I am.

I haven’t talked to Dustin in years despite his mom and my dad being siblings. There’s no animosity. We drifted apart after he graduated high school, and I got married. 

He was seventeen when he found and climbed that line. Sure, it’s a lowly V1. But Dustin’s discovery of what would become this iconic line, and his insistence that I come and check it out, led to the further exploration of the rhodo-covered bench which inspired the ensuing intensive development of Emerald City that occurred and is still ongoing. Last night I spied another couple of unclimbed lines I want to get on. And I still think there’s a variation of Wolverine that could be significantly harder. From the severe crimp, just imagine going left and up onto the blank headwall. I’ve always thought a strong enough climber could do it. I have yet to be that climber.

Reaching for the severe, small crimp

Pulling up on the small, but positive
hold on the prow before the handlebar.

Blu-eyed Boulder Gai

I sent Blue Eye Samurai. I got home from work last night but hadn’t planned to boulder. But conditions were perfect, so I asked Jay to go. We took two pads and our shoes and chalk bags. 

She tried Better Call Saul, and I should have gotten on it again, but instead I threw the pads down under that prow. No day but today. 

Two pads gave me confidence, and it got a boost when Jay moved the pads for me as I moved out the prow. I sent it first try. I didn’t cut feet. 

It’s funny; the crux of the route was the 5.3 exit slab move above a twelve foot 5.9 overhanging prow. It’s not hard; it’s just high.

It was the perfect mix of steep and slab, hands and feet, comfort and tension. Yeah. Perfect. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about that line. I looked at that five or six years ago and saw the possibility. I didn’t really think I’d ever do it. And here I am. Author of a classic. 

It’s the perfect bouldering story: Long lost problem. Rediscovered. Delayed return. Pondered. Doubt. Then I cleaned it. Then I cleaned it some more. Put hands on it. I might just do it. Threw a pad down. Swung such cool moves. Enough to know it would go. Squatter in my blotter. Not in dread but in drive. All came together. Spotter Jay. Temps were fine. My energy was high. Stoke followed. 

Hands to stone, feet placed, and I flowed upward. Controlled reaches. Confident pulls. Gunksian position. Finally onto the shelf. I did it!

I am the wizard of slab. Upward I dance. Pause at the 5.3 crux twenty feet off the ground. Grab the ridge and heave over. Blue Eye Samurai.

I dabbled in creating images in Copilot until I realized
how detrimental creating AI imagery is. These are relics...