Familiar Faces

I'm not going to sugar coat it for all the people who were still in Boulder these last few days.  Rifle was perfect yesterday.  The breeze blew most of the remaining leaves from skeletal trees, drying fingers and cooling holds to a perfect crisp.  Sun was abundant, leaving the air warm enough to keep climbers in the shade, albeit in a puffy coat.  All of the hot, muggy days of summer lead up to the best time of the year, and we're enjoying its fleeting presence.  Pretty soon, the canyon will be cocooned in snow, this season finished.  That urgency, along with the sense that I'm just starting to return to the rhythmic groove of consistently climbing in one location, has me hoping to return for at least a few more days.

Dan belays (properly out of the road) at the Project Wall

I haven't been in the canyon this summer with the same consistency of the past.  Maybe I was more focused on other big road trips, but over these past few days, I could feel my disconnect with Rifle manifest in discomfort.  Instead of feeling totally locked in, even on the warm-ups that I've done hundreds of times, I was shaky and unsure of exactly where to go.  It wasn't a pleasant feeling.  With my hands and feet slightly out of sequence and on the wrong holds, my mind tended to wander to the absurd.  "Perhaps," I thought, "I've forgotten how to climb.  Maybe turning 30 means I've lost the required strength to climb hard routes here.  It's over."

Instead of the melodramatic delusions centered on my own demise, I have to remember that Rifle is just that way.  The cryptic beta required for upward progress is especially pronounced out there.  You've got to build a steady relationship with the stone.  All areas are like that.  The more time you climb at any one place, the better it feels.  While I was inefficiently quaking my way towards the anchors of each Rifle climb, I forgot that key lesson.  Even though I have been climbing consistently, I wasn't repeating my days at one specific location.

Projecting, the type of climbing best suited to Rifle, is, at least for me, the transformation of a route from impossible to effortless.  I miss that feeling of flowing through moves that were once terribly uncomfortable and difficult.  I love to climb with precise efficiency on a route that is just at the edge of possible.  Walking that fine line where a break in concentration means hanging from the rope requires so much time spent in methodical, dedicated practice.  I'm hoping that these past few days in Rifle will come together to allow me to find that flowstate on one more project before the season ends.    

Of course, the snow has to hold off, and I have to get back in order to test the theory.  If I can't return to Rifle, I'll hopefully take that same ritual to Zion before Thanksgiving.  Maybe I'll just have to content myself by commuting with Wally between other destinations in the American West.  If that's the case, I won't have immense repetition to fall back on, and will instead just have to rely on experience and balance as I battle the self doubt that will inevitably creep in.  No matter the situation, climbing is always a challenge.  That's why it's so incredibly rewarding.    

Team PatagoNeon