Steph Davis - High Infatuation: A Climbers Guide to Love and Gravity

HIGH INFATUATION

THE MOUNTAINEERS BOOKS
is the nonprofit publishing arm of The Mountaineers Club, an organization founded in 1906 and dedicated to the exploration, preservation, and enjoyment of outdoor and wilderness areas.

1001 SW Klickitat Way, Suite 201, Seattle, WA 98134

2007 by Steph Davis

All rights reserved

First edition: first printing 2007, second printing 2008

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Copy Editor: Julie Van Pelt
Cover Design: Karen Schober
Book Design and Layout: Mayumi Thompson

Cover photograph: Steph and Fletch at home in their truck at Indian Creek, Utah (photo by Eric Perlman)
Back cover photograph: Freeing El Cap in a day (photo by Heinz Zak)
Frontispiece: Steph Davis freeing the Salathe Wall, El Cap (photo by Jimmy Chin)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davis, Steph, 1972

High infatuation : a climbers guide to love and gravity / by Steph Davis.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-59485-065-8 (paperbound)

1. MountaineeringGuidebooks. 2. MountaineersUnited StatesBiography.

3. Women mountaineersUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

GV200.D38 2007

796.52'2dc22

2006036711

Printed on recycled paper

ISBN 10: 1-59485-065-8
ISBN 13: 978-1-59485-065-3

TO DEAN AND FLETCH

Lovers dont finally meet somewhere.
Theyre in each other all along.
Rumi

Gamble everything for love,
if youre a true human being.
Rumi

I STARTED CLIMBING ON GROUNDHOG DAY 1991, at a tiny little cliff near the Potomac River in Maryland. Of course, I wasnt out there for some kind of holiday celebration, but many years later I had a sudden vivid memory of sitting in dappled sun, exclaiming I cant believe its Groundhog Day and its warm enough to be in a tee shirt!

At every moment, single decisions affect lifes direction, but it is rare when they are so easily identifiable as the day I decided to skip my freshman calculus class at the University of Maryland and try this mysterious thing called rock climbing.

I had been a nonathlete all my life. Id been put in front of a piano since the age of three, and I spent my time practicing piano or flute, reading, and doing homework. Yes, nerdy. As a kid I did like poking around in the woods, but certainly not in any specific or sports-oriented way. But oddly, in my last year of high school, I suddenly became interested in mountain biking and started enthusiastically tearing through the woods and then around the University of Maryland campus on my bike. I loved it to pieces, literally, and spent many happy hours taking my bike apart and putting it back together again. This was before the advent of shock suspension, and before helmets became common, and I managed to crash and knock myself out many times, most embarrassingly while cutting across a hilly lawn between classes.

The Salathe Headwall, El Cap (photo by Jimmy Chin)

This newfound passion was what turned me into a rock climber. I was sitting outside the cafeteria one sunny day, eating lunch with my bike propped beside me. The university was not a particularly outdoorsy place. Most people walked around in dress shoes and were usually found indoors. Although my scruffy clothes and hand-painted bike would not have caused a second glance in Boulder, in College Park I stuck out like a sore thumb. I think I must have been the least worldly eighteen-year-old around. Despite filling my brain with thousands of books over the years, I was not very clued in to the complex rings of social hierarchies that circled my own life. In a pattern that would take me years to notice, a fit, attractive guy from Wyoming stopped his own bike next to me and engaged me in a conversation, eventually suggesting that we go rock climbing together. Although I had no idea what rock climbing might be, I got the feeling that it could have some things in common with mountain biking, and without questioning why anyone would want to do it with someone who had never even heard of it, I immediately agreed to go.

You might wonder how a person who did almost nothing but read books had managed to never hear of climbing, not even mountaineering. I have no idea. All I can say is that I grew up in the suburbs, outdoor sports had not yet boomed into the mainstream, and I read mostly classics. Through my entire childhood, my favorite book was Brave New World, which was lying around the house, a relic from one of my moms college courses. On any boring day, I ended up rereading it, to the point of knowing most of it by heart. By the time I realized it was more than a sci-fi story, I had irreversibly absorbed all the social criticism. This may have dramatically influenced my outlook on life and turned me into a subversive at a very young age. Something did, so I may as well blame it on Huxley. At any rate, then, as now, I lived in my own little world, and climbing had never appeared on the radar.

On that very first day of climbing, slipping and flailing my way up a thirty-foot rock slab, I was infatuated. I immediately restructured my entire life to direct everything toward climbing. Little did I know that I was experiencing the safest, least dramatic type of climbing imaginable, with a toprope above me on the tiny cliff that kept me from falling more than six inches. To me, it was like a door had been opened to another world.

Over the subsequent fifteen years, my infatuation with climbing has not dimmed, although it has matured into an enduring love. I have learned the joys and limitations of the many disciplines that make up climbing, from the intensity of short boulder problems, to the complexity of aid climbing on ropes and gear while living on big walls, to moving fast, alpine style, over snow and ice in the mountains, to pushing the edge of my limits on free climbing projects, and perhaps the purest of all, the flawless movement of free solo climbing without ropes or protection, when the mind truly empties, stripped to nothing but the rock.

My pursuit of climbing was initiated by impulse. In reality it was never a choice, but rather a surrender to the inevitable. Even now, supposedly older and wiser, I make my most fundamental life decisions impetuously, based on what feels right inside, and I never look back. Its the only thing I can do.

Although I reshuffled my life to accommodate my newfound passion for climbing, I did finish college, and even got a masters degree. I took advantage of U of Ms student exchange program and spent my sophomore year at Colorado State University. I later returned to CSU for grad school and of course used mountaineering literature for my required thesis. At the time, the literature department did not consider this a valid field of study, but thanks to my open-minded and supportive thesis committee, I was allowed to do it. Im sure these wise professors realized that anything else I might have chosen would be a lifeless, superficial disaster and would have bored us all to tears. And in fact, I was so enthusiastic that I finished my thesis a year ahead of schedule, which is a little embarrassing even for a graduate student.