Mar 14 2006
The Wedge of Faith
In 1981 I was stationed at Lowry AFB which was located just East of Denver, Colorado. Now, I’d been involved in backpacking for the past 6 years and had done a little rock climbing at Carderock in Potomac, MD so the Rockies standing there on the horizon beckoned to me constantly. Luckily for me I met a guy a year younger than me who had been involved in the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group as a high school project and who was more than willing to show me some of the climbing routes in the mountains just West of Boulder. The one thing I have to say at this point for you to understand is that I am deathly afraid of heights. I don’t mean a little afraid but seriously, perversly afraid. I dream up what ifs to the point that my legs jittered, and my hands sweat so much that I’m sure to loose my grip on anything, even a ladder rung. I mean rock cliffs have been known to sheer off from time to time… I’ve never been an adrenaline junkie so that’s not the reason I liked to climb, it was more of the internal challenge of beating my personal fears. Or maybe like a moth drawn to the light of a bug zapper I just can’t help myself.
So off we’d go on the weekends, throwing all our gear into the back of the ol 9 passenger Dodge war wagon and blasting our way up to Boulder. John started me off on some simple climbs like the Flat Irons, but eventually we worked our way up to some more technical climbs. One of the climbs that John wanted us to do required the use of some rather small (ridiculously small in my opinion) hardware called micro wedges. The micro wedge that we needed to place was about the width of the finger nail on my pinky and about 3/8 of an inch thick. This was going to be the initial point of protection on a 20 foot horizontal traverse. What this meant is that while I was 60 feet up, I had to pull out the bolt that was in front of me and then try to make that 20 feet before I’d get to that wedge. If I fell, I’d be swinging in a pendulous arc across the rock face. If that wedge happened to pull out, not only would I be swinging like Tarzan but I’d take another 10 foot plunge at the same time, which means that I’d wind up crashing into another rock wall that was sticking out at a right angle from the face that I was on. To say that my fears were starting to take hold at this point would be an understatement. So how did I finally conquer my fear and make my across that traverse?
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