Lies and delusions in the mountains
By Majka Burhardt

I’m a mountain guide — which might mean I’m a control-obsess thinly veiled machoist or that I’m a climber who likes teaching people how to stay safe in the mountains. It definitely means taking risks for a living. I’ve guided thousands of pitches from 5.0 to 5.11, ice, big mountains, and long hikes — but I am not a full-time guide. I was, 10 years ago, when I started, but now I guide intermittently, though I’ve worked, loved, and lost in the guiding world for a dozen years now.

At age 19, when I first decided to guide, I saw it as the ultimate job — it meant status, pay, and purpose as a climber. Back then, I was also in love with another mountain guide — being guides together meant we’d have a shot at the perfect life. Guiding as a career choice and life direction seemed logical.

As a young guide, I refused to admit fear or apprehension. Part of this was being a 21-year-old female guiding 50-year-old men around the glaciated peaks of the North Cascades. But guiding didn’t give itself easily to me. Injuries, academia, and life always intervened so that I was constantly forced to question my choice. I would guide in fits and spurts. Each time I returned, the choice became a bit harder. Being an over-analytical person, I decided to tackle my apprehension from a logical angle: I would write an article on female guides. And so I interviewed nine top female guides and alpinists about how they’d started guiding or why they chose to stop, how they felt about being women in the industry, how they felt about babies, peeing in front of clients, being hit on, and taking risks.

In the end I wrote a neat, tidy article that no one wanted to publish. Now it’s four years later and four of those nine women I so meticulously interviewed are dead. Sue Knott, Karen McNeill, Laura Kellog, and Christine Boskoff all died in the mountains in 2006. None were guiding when this happened. You can say they were all pushing big routes, that all were taking chances, but when is climbing not taking a chance?

These women are not statistics. I have pages of notes from each. Quotes like, “Guiding? Me and guiding? Every time I think about it I realize I have a hard enough time taking care of myself,” (Karen McNeill). And, “My philosophy about climbing and guiding? You need to carry your weight, be a good psychiatrist, and learn how to let things go,” (Christine Boskoff). But those are words on a page and I’m not sure what to do with them anymore.

Close your eyes for a moment, take a breath, and think about death. Think about dying while climbing. Think about a hold breaking, your body pitching against the rock and slamming into the face. Think about pieces popping, factor 2s, that edge of granite that was once a foothold now a knife rushing up to meet you.

When I think of dying while climbing, my heart pounds, my palms sweat, and I can’t catch my breath. If I’m climbing when I enter this line of thought, I can barely hold onto the biggest jug and my foot shakes on the thickest ledge. Of course, you and I are not supposed to think about this when climbing. But what happens when we do? And what happens when my job is to altogether remove death from the equation?

It’s early September 2002 at Lumpy Ridge. After a long summer guiding, I’m out with my friend Jeff. We warm up on a 5.8, Sorcerer. On the second pitch, the crack disappears and a sticky face takes its place. Out on the sharp end, I cannot move — I cannot picture going up but only falling down and cheese-gratering on this low-angle 5.8 slab. I make a move, I come down; I make it again, I come down again. I regularly climb several grades harder than this. I regularly guide several grades harder than this with clients I don’t count on to catch me if I fall. Today, I cannot make it. I lower off and hand Jeff the rack.

“Too much guiding?” he asks

“How’d you guess?” I reply.

Jeff once was a guide himself and has climbed with enough other guides to know the glazed look when you finally let down and let it in. Maybe there is a limit to how many pitches you can do on which you’re putting yourself out there. Maybe there is a limit to how many people you can share a rope with. I’d had more than 40 clients that summer and I wasn’t even guiding full time. Each client, at some point, would ask me about soloing. “I don’t do it” I would say, “What kind of message is that sending to your family — that you need to climb so badly you’re willing to die for it?” I would say this to a person who just learned how to belay one day before, a person who understands gravity in theory but still lets go of the rope to scratch her ear.

It’s July 2007 in Eldorado Canyon. I’ve been traveling for two weeks and am back on the sharp end, guiding the perfect client. “5.10 all day,” he said on the phone. When he told me he regularly led 5.9, I asked if he wanted to swing leads up the easier pitches. “I’m on vacation,” he said. “No responsibility.”

What he is not saying but we both know is true is that I am the one who is being paid to be responsible. That is my job. I am supposed to take and manage the risks. I’m supposed to do this even though three weeks before, for the first time in my life, my foot slipped and I took a 25-foot fall on the Diamond, when slimy, green moss attached to my shoe sent me on a sideways swing. The same weekend another friend fell head first on the same wall, shattering a quarter of his teeth. The same weekend another friend helped carry a buddy with a shattered femur from a crag in Aspen. But none of this matters to my client. He signed a waiver. I am the guide. I am supposed to climb; he is supposed to follow. Nothing bad is supposed to happen.

This works… for two pitches. But soon I’m shaking on 5.10a. I’m placing a piece every three feet, climbing past it, reaching below to clean it and place it again, sweating off edges as big as truck stops. I know Jeff sees this. I wait for him at the next belay, and when he arrives I ask if he minds taking a break. I tell him about my fall, Pete’s fall, Jonny’s rescue. I admit to being scared. My client pats my shoulder and tells me it will be all right. And then, miraculously, it is… for that day.

Admitting we are scared in the mountains is never easy. It’s bad juju to talk about dying when you’re on a climb where you could die. But what about finally letting in the dark realization that you can always die climbing? I think about Christine Boskoff and Charlie Fowler watching that gully slide toward them, I think about Laura Kellogg rapping off her rope. I wonder if they were scared, and if they talked about it before the worst happened. Most of us don’t — it opens up the door of possibility to danger and so we beat down that doubting, scared part with an iron fist. We talk about it after the fact. This fall, I talked about death and risk for the entire descent off Astroman with a 19-year-old who then went and did the Rostrum highline leashless. I went home to Colorado and cried on toprope, again.

Maybe I need medication. Maybe it’s hormonal. It’s not a bad theory. I’m 31: by someone’s clock, I’m supposed to be having babies. Maybe this is my body priming itself to stop taking risks and to gestate. At the same time in life when I am striding out into my climbing career, I have to decide if I want to chuck it all and become a mom. And yes, I know you can climb and have kids — you can take everyone to the crag, the kid can play with a toy dinosaur and wear a cute, little chest harness and then out-crank you. But you can’t take a kid to sandstone towers in Ethiopia or plunk her down in the snow for eight hours while you do a quick ascent of Polar Circus. You can’t watch your partner send a chunk of ice as big as a file cabinet your way and feel like a responsible parent. Or, rather, I can’t. Or won’t. For now.

Part of the reason for my fear is that this community — this circle — gets smaller with every month. Twelve years ago, I used to tell my mother climbing was no more dangerous than driving. That was before I’d been to 10 different climber funerals in the same picnic area in Eldorado Canyon. That was before I’d spent one of those ceremonies watching the pregnant belly of a new widow, waiting to see her baby kick, as if that sign of life might make that moment seem OK.

We fool ourselves that what we are doing makes sense. We go to funerals and tell each other that our friend died doing what she loved. We surround ourselves with climbers in our everyday life, call them our people, because they understand us. But in the process of writing this article, I’ve watched myself go from being a confident climber to crying on toprope. I’ve thought so much about death and responsibility and consequence that sometimes I cannot go more than eight feet above gear without hyperventilating.

I think daily about the climbers I know who’ve died. I see their smiles fading as they come to realize a snow-cave bivy might become a tomb. I feel their excitement at flying over their perfect alpine-ice objective moments before their plane smashes into the side of the mountain. I see them confidently kicking steps up divine, blue-white snow that, without their knowing, hangs moments from catastrophic slide. I see them plugging a cam into a crack that is actually a loose block, poised to slice the rope.

I see these things and I try my best not to see them. I see them and I make a choice. I see them and I decide to climb.