I got a call from a friend the other day. He was sad because his girlfriend of eight years had dumped him like a wet sandwich. His ex was a former beauty queen, blonde and curvy, and, of course, she had a new boyfriend before her old SO had dried his tears.

“I thought we were tight,” he told me, sniveling a little into his iPhone. “What about the kids we were going to have? The babies!”

“Brother,” I said, “You live with your mom. You don’t have a job and you are a second-tier climber. When it comes to beautiful women, you can either be unemployed and be Chris Sharma, or make a lot of money and be a sub-par climber. What you can’t be is a total loser. I don’t know how you got a girlfriend to begin with anyhow.

"You're like the kid at school with head lice that no one wants to play with," I said, quoting my favorite line from the Pecker in Tropic Thunder. "You've got to shave your head and get back on the monkeybars."

My advice seemed to calm him a little and he asked me if we had any job openings at Rock and Ice.

“We do,” I said, “But I only hung out with you because you had a hot girlfriend. Now get out of my face!”

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Rock and Ice intern "Mississippi" Chris Parker, 27, comes from the Delta and made a deal with the devil. He stands about as tall as a pony keg stacked on an oil drum and rips the blues, singing and picking. He has a black beard and a sharp white canine tooth. It’s the tooth that gives away the hidden temperament—the disposition required to send an absurd, conditions-dependent problem like Super Slopenstein (V8) when it was lofted with wet snow.

In many ways he’s the best intern I’ve worked with. He has a nerdy encyclopedic knowledge of climbing—“Oh yeah, Evgeny, Ouray, 2008, when he hung from his front points at the top of the diving board?”— writes well, churns out good online news and listens attentively to Alison explain hyphenation. He’s respectfully muted in the presence of Andrew’s early-winter low-pressure system with the forecast for snow and blowing snow. He endured my pre-Thanksgiving feast while kids thundered through the room in troupes. Chris arrived late in the season, but caught on quickly to the jive local granite area. He was a great partner, strong and bold.

It seemed like he’d be down for some early-season dry-fooling, a game where you dangle from axes and front points and scratch out a 40-degree, 70-foot conglomerate ceiling called the Man Camp. In winter the Man Camp gets ice at the midpoint and you exit onto long ice daggers, but it’s possible to dry tool anytime. It’s a great place to shake out the winter gear, familiarize yourself with the sharp points and possibly hit yourself in the face with a hammer. I called Mississippi Chris and invited him.

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"911, what is your emergency?"

"I ... uh, I'm not sure but I think.... my friend's house might be on fire."

It all started when I texted Amanda on Friday night. Jamie Lynn had found Amanda - Jamie does that, finds people and brings them into her orbit, wherein I, too, rotate. I didn't know Amanda well, but we'd climbed at the same places a few times, and I'd sent my nice intern Chris over when she had a room for rent.

"Hey Amanda, want to climb this wkend?" I wrote. "Indoor if Saturday bec cold or Main Elk if Sunday?"

A return text asked, "Er ... who is this?"

"Sorry,” I replied. “Alison. Must've gotten your # fr Chris."

"What Alison?"

That was a little surprising: Amanda and I had worked a boulder problem together just the other day,

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My partner and I queued up for tufa pulling and jug hauling in the Las Ventanas sector of Rodellar, Spain. After spending a few days cragging in the Spanish limestone wonderland, I was feeling pretty good about life. But as I waited for another popular climb, I noticed what I thought was pure lunacy.

“Lily," I said, "can you believe these people?”

I gawked at the couple in front of us. The girl appeared to be starting up the route that we were all waiting for, while the climber from the party ahead of them still battled near the top. I was talking loudly, but I had heard the couple speaking French and figured they couldn’t understand anyway.

“What the hell are they thinking?” I marveled. I was now witnessing the French woman unclip the first few draws of the still-climbing leader above, and clip her own rope through. She slowly slithered higher and higher up the pitch.

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2011 has been an absolutely legendary year for rock climbing. We’ve seen a crazy number of 5.14c onsights (by Adam Ondra and Ramon Julian Puigblanque), the first American woman to climb 9a/5.14d (Sasha DiGuilian), two 5.15s sent in a day (Chris Sharma), numerous cutting-edge sport climbs, continuing development of V14-plus boulders here (Dave Graham) and abroad, Alex Honnold’s mind-bending streak of really hard single-pitch free solos in Yosemite, the world’s hardest offwidth (Century Crack), and the ongoing efforts of what may shake out to be the hardest route in the world (the free Dawn Wall by Tommy Caldwell). And 2011 isn’t even over.

But it’s not just the top tier that is stepping it up. It’s everyone. At my home crag of Rifle—if this is any reliable indication (and I think it is)—I noticed just this year that people, in general, are climbing harder than ever. The average level at which the average Rifle climber is operating is unquestionably higher than it was seven years ago when I first started going there. More weekend warriors are climbing 5.14. More women are climbing 5.14. People are getting better.

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Andrew Bisharat, the senior editor here and author of the honest if scathing TNB magazine column is back from China where he toured the world’s best climbing area and collected a story that, fittingly, you’ll read about soon in the world’s best climbing magazine.

As I sat drinking coffee with “AB” this morning, he regaled me with tales of an unbelievable 1,000-foot limestone arch drilled up with a five-pitch route, and of a local dude who used to solo a lower, lesser but still spectacular wall to harvest bird spit, but who now solos for the tourists who increasingly throng to the karstic wonderland and toss coins at him as if he were a wishing well.

“It’s an amazing place,” AB said, “but our hotel room was filthy and we ate the same thing every day. Noodles for breakfast and rice for dinner."

We briefly discussed the annoyances of being anyplace where they use different money, then dispersed for work.

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It was daybreak, late May 1993 and I was climbing the Nose of El Capitan with two strong and lovely ladies, Jeannie and René. We’d just poached a jumar up some lines hanging from Sickle Ledge and we were crouching on the narrow, crescent-shaped feature—the last flat spot before Dolt Tower—sorting our haul bag one more time before blasting off on a four-day ascent. Voices sounded behind me and two men appeared, tethered together with a short bight of rope between them. They were carrying coils in their hands. The one in the lead—a skinny, long-faced, wild-haired man—said, “Excuse me, pardon me, pardon me, excuse me,” in a rapid-fire Manchester accent. He slipped past as neat as a skink sliding into a waterhole and the second man approached. He was big as a bear with a kind face and short, dark, mussed hair. He lifted the left side of his mouth, a signature lopsided smile, and we recognized each other at the same time. It was Craig Luebben.

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By Christopher Parker

Last week I wrote a story for rockandice.com about a strong American climber who just sent her first 5.14a. Having never tried a climb that hard before in her life, Chelsea Rude clipped the chains on just her third try. When I asked for a photo, she sent me a picture of herself holding a lizard, close to the camera, so the viewer could see what it looked like. The image sparked a memory full of meaning for me.


I had just lowered from the first desert-crack lead, on the first road trip, of my life when the beat-up white Buick slid into the parking area. Thirty Seconds Over Potash, a beautiful sandstone corner and the recent victim of my shiny new Camalots, hung above as I waited for the Buick’s doors to open, excited to catch a glimpse of some real “hard” climbers. The car was stuffed to the brim with gear. Dust caked its exterior, mingling with a fresh sheen of road-grime. I just knew there had to be some gnarly climbers inside.

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Chris stared down at the edge, silent, unable to bring himself to rappel.

As his climbing instructor, I said, “It’s OK, everyone feels that way at first.”

“It’s not—” Chris Allport began. “It’s just fear,” he said, sensibly.

I waited, backup toprope in hand, perfectly content: It was Joshua Tree and warm.

Suddenly, Chris, a movie actor with a theater background, raised his face upward and bellowed, “To be or not to be!”

He grabbed a great hank of the rope, and fed it through his Figure 8.

“That is the question!” he yelled, leaned back, and plopped over the dread edge.

“Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer”—he descended down the wall. “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," drifted up.  He reached the ground still shouting: “What dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must ... give... us ... pause."

In teaching climbing, as I did for years, you meet all kinds of people. They,

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There is an interesting phenomenon in climbing that involves what I am going to dub “contingent ascents.” That is, ascents that often are not cutting edge but garner a lot of attention or interest because the ascent hinges on some kind of contingency. This category of ascents contains a degree of gradation, from the “first female ascent” (which may or may not be significant due to many factors) to something as contrived as the First Deaf Colombian ascent of Mount Everest (not that being deaf or Colombian is contrived—but these days climbing Mount Everest is). Other contingent ascents might be: Climbing a famous route and downgrading it. Climbing a route without a chipped hold. Mixed climbing without heel spurs. Mixed climbing without leashes. Climbing a Grit headpoint without crash pads. Everest without oxygen. Everest without porters. Everest without fixed ropes. Not using kneepads. Climbing a sport route on trad gear.

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