Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick

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      First I put my camming devices in a row: thirty alloy tools, designed to expand into cracks, ranging in dimension from the size of my fingertip to the size of my head. Each one would be invaluable on the climb. Even the smallest were good enough to hold a falling climber, although I hoped that wouldn’t be put to the test. I also knew that this route had minimal placements for bomber gear like this: if I had the chance of finding such a placement I would have to have the correct size to fit. My life could depend on it.

      Next I laid out my wired nuts: thirty loops of incredibly strong and robust steel cable, fitted with a small curved rectangle of aluminum or brass, designed to be slotted into the rock. These were split into sets, each set clipped to a large karabiner, and racked so that if one set was dropped I would have two in reserve. I checked over the nuts, some marked as mine with green electrical tape, others with foreign markings and probably found on other climbs, or gone astray from the racks of past climbing partners. I picked up a number seven Chouinard nut and felt it in my fingers. It was the size of a small box of matches, and was oily and sticky with age, its size and manufacturer, stamped into the alloy, almost invisible under the scratches of a lifetime’s worth of placements. It had been given to me by my dad ten years before as part of my first rack, second-hand, loved and cherished. Back then everything I owned for climbing would fit on a single karabiner; now it wouldn’t fit in a single dustbin.

      I set the nut down amongst the others and hoped I’d get to use it just once.

       Would he ever have imagined I’d bring you here?

      You think too much. It’s just an old nut.

      I pulled out my karabiners, over a hundred, clipped together in neat bunches ready to be racked onto my harness, and began sorting them. The route comprised twenty-one long pitches, many close to seventy metres in length, and these karabiners would be vital to clip every piece of protection to the rope. They were the glue that held everything together.

      As I was pulling out the last of the karabiners, a small wooden train tumbled out with them and fell into the pine needles that covered the ground. I picked it up. It was Ella’s, no doubt thrown in with the rest of my gear while packing. I thought of us setting up her wooden train track in the living room, her telling me what had to go where. I wished I’d taken more time to play with her. I stuck the toy in the pocket of my fleece.

      I continued to lay out the karabiners, then noticed two climbers were watching me from a nearby picnic table, arms folded, checking out my gear, no doubt wondering what I had planned.

      Everyone wants to climb El Cap, but, although many try, the majority fail. I used to joke that there are two types of climbers in Yosemite: those who want to climb El Cap and those who have failed. I wondered what group the climbers that watched me were in. Had they just failed and were now looking for some beta from a fellow big-wall climber, or had they just climbed it, and wanted to bask in the glory of telling someone else? Climbing El Cap by any route is an achievement, so any glory is well earned.

      They walked over.

      ‘What you planning?’ asked the taller climber, his grubby shorts and dirty sandalled feet showing he’d been here a while.

       Don’t tell them!

      ‘Not sure,’ I said, lying.

      Ignore them.

      ‘We’ve just got down off the Shield,’ said the other climber, a scab on the bridge of his nose a sign that he’d smashed a piece of gear into his face on the climb: probably a peg while he was testing it.

      ‘Well done.’

      The Shield was one of the harder classic routes on El Cap, a line that shot up one of the steepest parts of the wall. It had been my first big wall, but keeping this a secret and not bursting their bubble was more rewarding than telling them that.

      ‘Yeah, it was cool,’ the climber carried on, ‘but I sure could have done with a rack like yours though. You must be planning on something hard . . . Aurora, Pacific Ocean Wall, maybe Lost in America?’ He reeled off some of the harder routes.

      Don’t tell them.

      ‘Not sure,’ I said, not adding that I’d ticked those routes over the last five years.

      ‘Wyoming Sheep Ranch?’ asked the other, crouching down to sift through my rack of skyhooks, tiny hooks of steel designed to latch onto holds as small as a matchstick. The Ranch was one of the hardest and most sought after routes on El Cap, its crazy myth-busting name giving away nothing of the danger involved.

      ‘No, sounds a bit too loose,’ I said, as I started laying out my knife-blade pegs, sorting them in size from the smallest scalpel-thin pegs, up to those of butter-knife thickness, each invaluable for hairline cracks.

      ‘Come on, tell us what you’ve got planned,’ said the tall climber, now looking at my birdbeaks, tiny tomahawk-shaped hooked pegs, their blades as small as a fingernail, to be used when knifeblades were too fat to fit. ‘You must be planning something hard with this lot. We won’t tell.’

      I set down a couple of Lost Arrow pegs, thick chunky steel pegs for cracks too large for knife-blades, and felt their weight as they passed from my fingers to the tarp, imagining the sound of them driving home in the rock.

      A ranger passed by on a mountain bike and smiled at us, no doubt making a mental note to come back later and check we’d all paid our camping fees.

      ‘We know who you are,’ said the climber with the scabbed nose. ‘You’re Andy. You’re hardcore.’

      If only he knew.

      I laughed, but it felt nice for someone to think I was good at something for a change. For most of the last few years I’d just felt more and more useless—the harder the route, the greater my apparent inadequacies. I didn’t see myself as a climber, yet climbing consumed me. Perhaps my problem was being married to someone who saw climbing only as a negative; there was no room for hero worship or ego with Mandy. She saw through the bullshit. The greater the climb the greater the pain for her. She saw it as an end-game. Her mother had died when she was six. Her father had kept them apart so as to make it easier. She didn’t remember her, only the loss. Now she thought I would die and leave her too. No climb, no matter how hard, would impress her, only my return.