A Step Along The Ladder

In Episode 67 of The Sharp End podcast, while relating a scrambling accident that happened on Ellingwood Ridge on La Plata in Colorado, Tori, the protagonist or, depending on how you look at it, the victim, describes how she is "comfortable being uncomfortable." Apparently this is because Tori climbs in an indoor gym all the time. I see your eyes rolling and that is probably fair. There is little correlation between indoor rock climbing and scrambling a long, exposed and shockingly loose 4th to 5th class ridge on a 14,000 foot peak in Colorado and anyone who thinks they have become "comfortable being uncomfortable" is actually, as we all were at that age, simply blissfully unaware that we are - to quote Accidents in North American Mountaineering - "exceeding abilities."

Now that I am almost 60, I have to push myself hard to get into a situation where I might be "exceeding abilities." I know my abilities fairly well, although admittedly, I surprise myself sometimes by succeeding where I expected to fail. But knowing my abilities well, I seemingly can have all the will in the world to go out and do something challenging and yet achieve whatever the "thing" was without too much drama. Sure, I might be tired and uncomfortable and happy to have the "thing" (whatever it is) over, but generally I no longer reach out and touch the edge the way Tori did on Ellingwood Ridge.

In my youth, I fell over the edge - literally - many, many times. I fell down cliffs and knocked myself senseless, I staggered back from trips in the early hours of the morning by the faint light of a fading headlamp somehow expected to show up for work in two hours, I lost food on ski traverses and skied for days with nothing to eat, I endured mountaineering trips with all my gear including my sleeping bag soaked for half a week, on ski mountaineering trips my feet swelled to twice their size and had to be painfully stuffed into frozen ski boots every morning, I got hit by falling rocks, and caught in avalanches, I spilled out of whitewater boats in rapids and lost all my gear, almost drowned and had to bushwack out to the road carrying a whitewater boat with no paddle, I limped off rock climbs with sprained ankles, sustained countless scratches, cuts and bruises, dodged falling rocks on alpine climbs, shivered at belays, and disturbingly watched my gear rattle out of cracks leaving long unprotected sections of climbing. Twice, my climbing rope got caught in cracks and I had to untie and finish the route and once I was so scared leading a rock route (!) I almost blacked out.

Many, but not all of these mishaps occurred during the glory days of my youth when my adventure eyes were way larger than my adventure belly and I had the blithe over-confidence and hubris of youth that comes not from an honest estimation of difficulty and ability but just blind ignorance. If you survive that stage, eventually you learn to match your ability fairly closely to your challenge and you start having real fun, the kind of fun that challenges you just enough to push your boundaries out a little without scaring you spitless or shitless.

But, back to Tori and "getting comfortable being uncomfortable." Obviously, this is nonsense, one cannot be both comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time; a situation analogous to being both dead and alive at once. Even the Queen who easily could believe "six impossible things before breakfast" would not swallow that one.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about getting uncomfortable. Outdoor sports like ocean kayaking, rock and alpine climbing, ski mountaineering, whitewater paddling, backcountry skiing - the so called "adrenaline" sports - have drawn me since I was in my early twenties. The appeal is complex and involves a desire to explore both myself and the natural world as well as the need to get tired, scared, challenged, worked, and yes, uncomfortable.

I have wondered, however, if we are ever really are as uncomfortable as we think we are. Perhaps we have some kind of built in central governor mechanism that limits our choices so that when we head out to do something that scares or challenges us we unconsciously narrow down our adventure to match our ability. When young, we easily push out well beyond the boundaries of our expertise not because we are better at getting uncomfortable but simply through ignorance. As we gain experience, our ability to accurately gauge the balance between challenge and expertise improves and we settle onto a line that is close enough to, but not quite over the edge beyond which we would fail.

Sometime early in 2021, I don't remember the date but I do remember the place, Doug said that I was getting "fearful" as I got older. We had paddled out to North Head in an off-shore wind and had landed just inside North Head to consider our options. The wind was so strong that when we got out of our boats, the wind picked our boats up and it was only by quickly grabbing them that the boats were not tumbled and smashed on the rocks. I wanted to head back, Doug wanted to keep going. The problem with an off-shore wind is, of course, that it blows you off-shore, next stop New Zealand. We ended up paddling back. It was work, but not desperate, and I made the return journey with much less trouble than I had anticipated and I got to thinking that maybe Doug was right, I was getting fearful as I aged.

I like to think that since then I have regrown the ability to push against the boundaries again because I do not want to be a fearful person. Moving towards and beyond the edge of failure can be giddily intoxicating. Being scared to try and fail, yet trying and failing anyway, is perhaps one of the greatest gifts that adventure can impart. We learn that failure, rather than being a hard endpoint is actually a step along a ladder.