Ascentionist: 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.