After a winter of bouldering and training in the gym, finger-boarding at home and the slow increase in the amount of outside rock time I was able to fit in, I finally had a little golden ray of sunshine today, which reminded me what exactly this is all about.
After careful and tenuous scheduling with my partner, I had a full day to throw myself at the rock, any rock really. Anyone with kids knows how difficult it is to keep a tiny piece of time for yourself during a week, so the time I had Saturday was precious. Over the two previous days I had thrust myself through two quick, ultra-efficient bouldering sessions that had punished and brutalized my body and mind. My shoulders all the way down to my anklebones were sore, tired, stiff, cut and grated. Those anklebones are the worst, sticking out awkwardly, just waiting to be ripped and scraped down the sharp edge of a boulder.
The chance to climb all of Saturday came to me as if by magic, like an archaeologist taking the bejewelled statue from its final resting place with shaking hands and sweaty brow. Could I withstand another boulder’s onslaught?
Would my body hold out? My skin would be in tatters. My ray of sunshine began with a call from an old friend who had just returned home after a winter working in his ski touring lodge. “You able to climb today?” was one of the first items mentioned and like that, the die was cast. What better way to spend a full day out than catching up with a great friend on our home cliffs?
“So, what should we climb?” It became obvious. We needed to get high off the ground and climb something world-class; we needed to climb The Grand Wall. My ray of sunshine began cresting the horizon.
For anyone unaware, The Grand Wall is possibly the Chief’s most sought-after route by climbers far and wide, young and old. It is moderate, far from the most difficult, and marks the point where Squamish climbing changes from lower-angle slab climbing to more physical crack climbing. It climbs an aesthetic group of features up the wall, The Grand Wall, which faces the highway in 10 pitches, and is featured in the documentary, In the Shadow of the Chief.
We left the ground on Apron Strings, the set of pitches which starts the Grand. We laybacked and jammed the slabby upper reaches until we arrived at the Flake Escape Ledge and the start of Merci Me. A ladder of fingertip edges stretched upwards toward the roof of Humpty Dumpty. A traverse across the wall put us below the Split Pillar, the crucible of quality granite corner jamming. We ran into friends there and shared a few long-lost “hellos” and “how’ve you beens.”
From there, three long pitches of vertical crack climbing and laybacking vaulted us up and onto the lower angle slabs of The Flats and finally to The Sail Flake, the final pitch before Bellygood Ledge, the end of the route. Every pitch on The Grand has an element of the heroic to it, where the climbers live out their own Odysseys pitch by pitch, hanging from the edge of the world as they climb higher and higher.
My friend and I, we laughed, hooted, hollered, gawked and stared across the expanse of Squamish far below, happy that instead of climbing up the steep side of a boulder of which we could have walked up the back, we were linking features up a face on a granite mountain, the Stawamus Chief. Once on top, we finished French salted peanuts and back-warmed water, then exited along the precipitous Belly Good Ledge with the rope still on, a catwalk 500 metres above the ground.
A winding trail and some rounded granite domes lead into the forest and then spit us out onto the ever-popular Stawamus Chief hiking trail. From there we leapt, balanced, ran and tip-toed our way down through crowds of people, gear and rope clinking and flapping our thighs. As the poet Robert Frost once wrote, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.”
This was my ray of sunshine, the beginning of summer, my May long weekend 2015.
