What Happens in Vegas Stays in the Atmosphere 

"Go against the tide and sell a product that no one else is selling"

If you compare climbing to other sports as Ernest Hemmingway famously did, one is forced to draw a few conclusions. Obviously climbing is a lot more eco-friendly than auto racing and bull fighting. We don’t go billowing around a track, needlessly spewing oil and fumes. We don’t stab hapless angry cows with sharp sticks. As we drive to the crag, we rest assured that climbing isn’t dependent on huge stadiums or fertilized wastelands of lawns. Instead, we seek the places of purity, unblemished by the contaminated postindustrial world, places that civilization has found too steep to contain. Places that our climbing forefathers like John Muir said gave us, “good tidings.”

If this sounds lofty, it is. Because there, we scratch up walls, place gear our frugal selves would never leave behind or clip bolts nearly impossible to see from the ground. We leave only a trace of smudged chalk, a shoe print on a use trail we’ve appropriated from a bighorn, a deer. That’s the ethos of our climbing culture, steeped as it is in a wilderness ethic that no other sport — aside from perhaps surfing — can claim.

Climbing is transformative. It’s made us better people in the process, attuned to this fragile planet’s harms and fragile existence. Yet most always we drive. A climbing trip, a trip to the crag, is synonymous with turning over the starter and putting a foot on the gas pedal. The great unspoken paradox of our otherwise good intentions, the conundrum of our collective eco-ness.

Last week my carbon culpabilities were well in mind when the missus and I flew (hate to know how many tons of atmosphere we murdered in that endeavor) to Las Vegas. The wife, who possesses the DNA of a family who lived through WWII in Germany, is even more frugal than most climbers I’ve tied in with. She booked the smallest, most economical rental car available. We arrived, bags heavy with climbing gear, tent, stove, and a ratty sleeping mat, and loaded it all into a plain, white car.

I put the key in the ignition and tried to turn it. Nothing. A light went on in the dashboard, but not a peep of engine sound greeted us. Ah, a button above the key that stated START. I pushed it. More lights lit up, and then the faint electrical hum of a motor. We found ourselves for the first time in a Toyota Prius.