News from Jules | 07.17.2023 | One with Nature
We were on our way up as the sun was on its way down for the day. Last Wednesday night was my first multi-pitch climb—up a 250-foot sport climbing route called “Voyage of the Cow Dog” with a climbing partner from the Bend Climbing Club.
We put on all of our gear at the car, then hiked the mile down, around, and up to the start of the route tucked deep into a gulley filled with giant boulders in Smith Rock State Park.
With 15 years of experience, my climbing partner swiftly ascended the sloping basalt wall, wiggled through a stone chimney, and was soon out of sight. Unlike having someone holding the rope from below who can give pointers and encouragement, once he was up there, I was all alone on the wall.
On this first section, or pitch, of the climb, I was solely focused on finding hand and foot holds until I joined him above the chimney. Once safely on top of the first 100-foot pitch, I was finally confident that I—thus we—could make it up the whole 5.8+ route.
I relaxed and broadened my tunnel vision to actually see what we were doing.
The laser focus that keeps me safe and fearless while I’m in the zone also creates tunnel vision, the tendency to focus exclusively on a single or limited goal or point of view. All I see, smell, feel is the rock in front of me.
It is easy to forget to take it all in.
My eyes widened with awe as I scanned the distant horizon full of clouds, mountains, cliffs, fields, and the setting sun in an Impressionist landscape painter’s palette of calming pastels.
I remembered the same deep sense of divine connection when I completed, or sent, my first outdoor climbing routes in the Shawangunk Mountains—known as the ‘Gunks—just a year ago on July 19, 2022.
I had only climbed outside twice before that. I immediately understood why it was called “real rock.” It was nothing like the lifeless plastic holds and fluorescent lighting at the rock gyms where I had been climbing every week last year.
The hard, silica-cemented sedimentary conglomerate of white quartz pebbles and sandstone in the ‘Gunks felt like it gripped my fingertips and rubber soles, holding me as much as I was holding it. Clutching holds as wide as my wingspan, my face was often just an inch from the wall.
Way up there it felt like it was just me and the rock. We were in it together.
As I recall, once I made it to the top of the 100-foot route and shouted, Take! so I could “take a break” before descending, I heard one of my climbing partners say something.
“What?” I yelled back.
“Turn around.”
Oh. Right. Once I looked behind me over the vast landscape it took my breath away. High in the sky, I was in a different world.
See photos from my climbing adventures at Smith Rock and the ‘Gunks on Instagram.
The gentle sloping rock of the second pitch, rated a 5.2 (on a scale of 5.0 to 5.15), felt more like scrambling than climbing. My climbing partner and I followed the safety protocols that we’d practiced to smoothly transition from me climbing up to meet him on the ledge to me belaying him from below while he continued climbing and securing our rope to bolts higher up the wall.
As soon as I easily mounted the bulge above me and passed the first bolt, I could see my climbing partner a little ways ahead.
Short and sweet.
Soon my feet were firmly planted on either side of the pile of green rope and my harness was secured to the heavy chains anchored to the rock wall at the base of the third pitch. I was safely perched some 600 feet above the river and trail while I waited for my climbing partner to secure the belay, then pull up the rest of the rope so that I could start climbing again.
A strange noise caught my curiosity and drew my attention from the wall.
I looked around from my hawk’s eye view.
A great stroke of golden light reflected off the sheer walls on the other side of the canyon was sliced in half by the dark shadow of the massive rock I was on. The jagged shadow underlined the zig-zagging path from the parking lot on the plateau down to the bridge over the dark blue Crooked River.
A smile spread across my face as I saw a tiny human gleefully running with arms spread wide down the cement ramp to the path. The rubber soles slapped the cement in a pitter-patter that echoed through the canyon. The wind picked up the hint of a giggle in a chorus of unnatural and natural noises.
One of the few other human beings basking in this glorious moment.
Just like I’d heard professional climbers talk about on Reel Rock, my favorite climbing documentary series: The more I believed in myself, the more confident I felt, the more I relaxed, the better I climbed.
And the more I communed with nature.
A frequent phenomenon throughout the past two years.
Two years ago yesterday, July 16, 2021, was my last day of full-time work. The Friday afternoon before Memorial Day, my then-boss let me know my role at the startup was being eliminated. It was deja vu—the third time in 10+ years that I’d faced this exact same fork in the trail.
I spent that long weekend camping in the woods with my friends. While they took long mountain bike rides, I laid in my hammock letting reality sink in then hiked by myself along the massive basalt walls of the Columbia River Gorge contemplating the millennia of change and transformation around me.
Every fifty years or so between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago, a thousand-foot wall of water flooded down from Montana with the force of a tsunami scraping its way along the Columbia River as a drainage basin to the Pacific Ocean. Boulders the size of a house were mere pebbles in the torrent of water that cleared everything in its path.
Just like how lava flows moved the Crooked River and carved the debris-filled slopes and angular basalt cliffs of Smith Rock millions of years before that. And how thick sediment deposits piled up for millennia and created the hard bedrock of the ‘Gunks that used to be deep in an ocean basin.
Every fifty years.
The water receded, seedlings grew into trees, and wildlife returned. Life adapted.
After that weekend, I knew three things: Nature will persist (who knows about humanity), I needed to work less and create more, and I wanted to spend as much time as possible outdoors.
Several weeks later I spent the weekend before my last day of work in Bend, Ore. I vividly remember sitting on a boulder in the Crooked River and sharing a beer at sunset. In response to the question about what would I do next?, I heard myself say out loud for the first time, “I just want to live in nature.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I’ve spent the past two years trying to figure it out.
Bonding deeply and finding inspiration in the solidity, beauty, and adaptability inherent in the natural world.
A sharp tug pulled me out of my glorious moment enjoying the slapping shoe soles, the swallows swooping overhead, the contrasting light across the skyline, and I yelled up to my climbing partner, “That’s me!”
The third pitch was the hardest, but also the most fun. We were in the zone.
I quickly glided through some sequences of holds while I struggled with others, including falling once. Without missing a beat, I took a deep breath, shook out my hands and forearms, and told myself, You got this, girl.
The rock was still there. I just needed to hold on.
Be one with nature.
I kept moving up. After a long reach and a high step, I made it over the edge to join my climbing partner on the top with a huge smile and a big high five.
May you be one with nature this week.
Love,
Jules