Allegory of the Caves

An adventure in the highlands of Yunnan Province and the creation of onE of China’s longest rock climbing multipitches

by: Ryder Stroud

with contributions from: Dane Schellenberg

Foreword: Allegory of the Caves (5.11c, 17 pitches, Grade IV, ~540 meters) was a wild adventure to create and put out into the world. While the story you read below hopefully gives you a sense of what development duty and lead bolting is like, Dane and I want readers to know that we cleaned our route so that YOU can climb it and have a good time. But always keep in mind Baiyansi is an incredible, high-quality wall that has the potential for hundreds of amazing lines. Go climb it!

You can download the guidebook here or through the GUIDEBOOKS section of the website.

I. The Crack That’s Not a Crack

“Dane, you think you’re alright with this?” I held up the rack of the gear he was leaving behind for establishing the second half of the pitch above us. “You KNOW how much offsets are the secret weapons.” I had just lowered back to the anchor. I always found a place for those cams, and I tried to get Dane to do the same. I brushed some stone dust off of my jacket.

ACHOO. I sneezed as a cloud of dust came off my jacket and rose up to my face.

I lifted the three small offset cams out of the sling full of gear, dangling them in front of Dane’s face. He shot me a quick sidelong glance, shook his head, and went back to clipping bolts to some quickdraws. He scoffed and clipped the drill to his harness.

“Think about it.” He said. “How many climbers traveling in CHINA are going to have small offsets cams? If that becomes required gear, I think it’ll scare people off…” Dane waved away my cams as he reached for more draws that I had left hanging from the anchor.

“Well, I…” I stopped. I was too psychologically exhausted to try to convince him. These new pitches were steeper than almost everything on It’s Just a Ride, the route we put up the previous year. Splitting the pitch was the new norm to avoid total burnout.

We had hashed the cam conversation multiple times before. I quickly gave in.

“OK, man. Suit yourself!” I clipped the gear sling to the anchor, grabbed the rope, and slotted it into the open plate of the Grigri. I snapped it shut and reached into the backpack hanging off the anchor bolts. I slid the small speaker closer to the lid for better sound. I hit play on my phone.

Oooooo ooo ooo ooo ooo

The sounds of the iconic Halo theme came out of the bag from a speaker we had squirreled into the pack’s lid.

“Well, let this music make you feel like a Spartan and NOT fall, Dane…” I picked up the belay strand of the rope as we checked our systems. “You are… on belay, duzi.”

Dane looked up. “Welp… it only looks like it gets harder the higher we go!” He hiked his harness slightly higher on his waist. “God, this looks so much harder than what we did last time.” He grabbed holds off the anchor, and climbed above me, the drill bit swinging low near my face as he stepped off the anchor ledge.

He worked his way back to my highpoint on a rounded ledge and looked out right. The slightly less-than-vertical terrain of most of the pitch suddenly fell away into a steep, rising traverse. I could see Dane nervously scoping out the line that would break through to another small ledge a ways above him. He climbed a little ways before retreating back to a small stance

“I think I am going to ditch the drill and try the moves!” Dane yelled back down.

“You sure that is a good idea? Do you really want to be out in space without the drill?” I could feel myself getting increasingly nervous. Dane retreated to his previous bolt and clipped the development gear to it.

“Doing this on-sight with the drill on?! No way! I have to check the moves first.” He caught himself as he suddenly got off-balance on the rest ledge. He slowly balanced himself as he clipped his gear to a sling on the previous bolt he had drilled.

He slowly climbed out and back multiple times, testing small holds, cracking some of them off the wall.

WHHHHIZZZZZZZZ. Some of the small pebbles he let loose from the unclimbed rock zipped down the face and whipped past the belay, sounding like tiny racecar engines revving as the rocks sped by towards the ground.

Click. Click. Click.

Some of the debris carried across the face with the wind and pinged off of my helmet.

“Ho’ boy, this is gonna be tricky. I really hope that little crack above me takes gear!” Dane retreated to the last bolt a third time, precariously balancing on the small, sloping ledge as he clipped all of the development gear back on his harness. He reached behind to the rear gear loop, unclipped his nut tool, and clipped it to the front of the harness.

“I’ll probably have to do some digging out there! Alright, let’s give this the good ol’ college try! Watch me, Ryder!” Dane cautiously ventured back out off on the face. I pushed my sunglasses further up my nose to block the mid-day light. Dane clung to the steep face, furiously digging out the hard-packed soil that choked the crack feature in which he was hoping to find gear.

I did a quick scan of the cliff face and my belay hand tightened. Dane was three to four meters above his last bolt and maybe four or five meters off to the right on the traverse. The sloping ledge at the last bolt stuck out a little too prominently from the cliff face. If he fell here, he–or more specifically, his legs–would connect with a lot of granite before the rope could bring him to a full stop.

I suddenly whipped my head from side to side, trying to get the negative thoughts and images out of my head. He’s done scarier things than this in Squamish, I’m sure. I looked back up to see Dane hurriedly shaking out the arm holding the nut tool. He kept digging.

“Oh, this is NOT a good crack! Shit…” I watched as Dane blindly slapped at the back of his harness looking for cams. He desperately unclipped a .4 and shoved it in the crack.

“Oh, god! It looks like it takes an offset! This is… NOT a crack! HA!” I watched him wiggle the cam furiously over and over, looking for a little pod in the rock that would hopefully set the gear in place. He grabbed a small Totem cam and rammed it into the crack next to the .4. “Ha!” He feigned confidence for a split second before nervousness crept back into his voice. “NEITHER of these cams will hold a fall! OK! Ryder!... take… SLOWLY!”

“What! Why?” I hollered up. I looked at the .3/.4 offset cam dangling from the anchor and then back up at Dane.

“I want to try to take some weight off so I can stand higher to drill a bolt!”

I slowly drew in the rope until I felt the tension of it pulling on the cams and Dane. I leaned back slightly.

“WAIT, STOP!” Dane yelled in a panicked voice.

“WHAT? You OK?” I released tension on the rope.

“These cams are already coming out!” He sounded increasingly desperate. He fumbled with the hammer as he lifted it off his harness. “DAH, my arms are so pumped!” He was clinging to a tiny hold with his right hand as his left swung the hammer looking for a place to drill a bolt. He reached for the drill and lifted it over his head.

BRAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPP. The drill bit bounced erratically on the cliff face as Dane held it over his head with a fully outstretched arm as he tried to engage the drills hammer enough to drill the bolt hole. He stopped every five seconds or so to shake out. Suddenly, his left arm curled as his muscles spasmed and locked up from adrenaline and dehydration.

“DOWWW. Cramp!” He desperately pushed his wrist against the cliff in a bid to unlock his arm muscles. He reached up, screaming, and grabbed the drill trigger again. He kept pushing.

BRAAAAP. BRAAAAAAP.

“I think I got the hole deep enough!” He quickly withdrew the drill bit and blew the dust out of the hole. He fumbled around the side of the harness looking for a quickdraw and a bolt.

“C’mon, man. Get that bolt in!” I could see that Dane was getting close to his limit. He kept shaking out his arms every few seconds. I could hear sharp puffs of air as he exhaled to calm his nerves.

Dane swore continuously as he feverishly placed the end of the bolt in the hole. Fully pumped, he desperately swatted at the hammer dangling below him until grabbed the handle, jerkily raised it above his head, and swung at the bolt, missing it twice before finally connecting with its top end. It sunk maybe a few millimeters into the rock.

“Just clip it!” I yelled up to it.

“Just a little more!” He swung the hammer three times more with the bolt no more than a centimeter into the rock.

“OK! Ryder CLIPPING!” He reached down to grab where the rope was tied to his harness. He slowly lifted the rope towards the quickdraw gate.

PING… PING

The cams blew. I saw Dane begin to sway off-balance.

“Oh, SHIT.” Dane screamed.

I strangled the rope and my knuckles instantly turned white. I felt the rope begin to stretch and waited to get torn upwards by Dane’s weight hurtling through space.

II. The Second Part of Scrubbing Lichen

“You boys back to scrub choss again?” Reuben’s thick British accent piped up from his guesthouse’s common room from which he stuck his head out to greet us. He had a cheeky grin on his face.

Dane and I stepped into through courtyard entrance. The usually cold winter mornings in the Yunnan highlands always seemed suspended at Reuben and Ling’s place. Sun streamed down around the ridgeline that separated the Shigu valley from Daimaidi village, landing perfectly in the middle of their courtyard. There was a wafting smell of noodles and coffee coming from the kitchen across the yard.

“Nah, just came to tell you that Shigu sucks and that we’re going home to Liming.” I chuckled. “We drove over just to say that.”

The odd, comical rivalry between climbing developers from the two areas always manifested as wise-ass comments that a select few–maybe five people–would laugh at. Otherwise, the joke was completely unfunny.

I looked over at one of Reuben’s guests who seemed genuinely confused.

“Oh! Hi. Umm… that’s just a joke we locals have about…” I awkwardly tried to parlay my way out of the ‘joke.’

“Sure, it is.” The guest chuckled as we walked by. She went back to sipping her piping hot cup of coffee. We entered the common room. Reuben had not fired up the wood stove in the corner. He sat in his giant puffy, hood up and cinched tight around his face, staring at his laptop’s computer screen. We could all see our breath in the cold room.

“We’ll be out soon. Just finished months of work. We’ll probably hang out for a day… and maybe have a beer or two later.” I walked over to the beer fridge and looked longingly inside.

“Oh! And I got Dirtbag! We could watch it on the projector tonight if some of the guests are keen.” I stood up from the fridge and turned around to face Dane and Reuben.

I was hoping to find some inspiration in documentary for this expedition. After nonstop working for three and a half months, drumming up energy for a 3 week new-route mission was exhausting. I was hoping the world’s ultimate dirtbag, Fred Beckey, a man who never appeared to tire out of mountain missions until the day he died, could inspire me with that energy to endlessly develop.

“Just another excuse to raid the beer fridge, I’m guessing?” Reuben nodded towards the glass door of the fridge. “You’re not gonna raid the fridge started now??” He chuckled and looked down at his computer and squinted at the clock on the screen. “Get on, then! 9:30 in the morning is fairly appropriate, I’d think.” He took a long drink from his coffee cup and set it down next to his wife Ling’s cup, boldly emblazoned with the words “The Boss” across the front in a kind of Art Deco font.

“Coffee first.” I shivered and shuffled outside into the morning light. Some wisps of steam from a couple of guests’ noodle bowls spun out on a light breeze across the yard.

The morning warmed, and Dane and I returned to the car. Since we left Dali in such a hurry, most of our gear was piled in an enormous, haphazard mound on the bed in my van. Pulling one thing out threatened to send the whole pile sliding out the side door.

The gear lay scattered in the dirt around the van like a bomb had gone off inside: a dozen lengths of stainless steel chain, 40 maillons, trad gear, two drills, batteries, fresh food supplies, two blocks of butter, camping gear, whiskey... The list in my notebook grew as I kept turning pages to add more items to the list. I began doing the rough math in my head. 100… 200… kilograms? Maybe more. We loaded everything into our largest bags. Dane squatted down and grabbed his 75-liter pack and tried dead-lifting it up onto his knee.

“GUHHHH. Oh, man.” He hefted the bag onto his knee then around onto his back. He took a few big strides away from the van. “This walk up is gonna SUCK.”

I tried lifting my huge 95-liter haul bag onto my back. I could feel my lower back pinch strain under the load.

“Oooof.” I trutched the pack onto my back to test the weight. “I wonder if this is what it’s like to carry a… oh, shit!” I began precariously tipping onto one foot as I lost my balance. I quickly grabbed onto the car door.

CREAAAK. The un-oiled side door began lurching back towards the car frame. I caught myself and steadied the door and sharply exhaled. I laughed. “… what it is like to carry a dead mammal.” I completed my thought as I dumped the bag into the side of the van. I could see the ageing, well-abused suspension of my van sag a bit under the added load. I looked around. Three packs still sat on the ground. Dane threw his pack through the trunk door.

“Well, this is the cost of having whiskey and a kilo of butter in camp!” He flashed a bottle of Sortilege, a hard-to-find, maple syrup-infused whiskey from Quebec, before stuffing it into the top of one of the packs still on the ground.

“Yeah, we might need some of that BEFORE we leave.” I looked back inside the van. The living area was totally overwhelmed with gear.

“We need to make this shit last for a few weeks! Let’s save it. It’ll be a good reward once we set up base camp. Plus I want to save a good dose for when we top out.” Dane quickly pulled the drawstring closed on the top of the bag and hefted it into the side of the car. He slammed the door shut.

“Well, let’s at least hydrate with a beer?” I nodded towards the guesthouse. We closed the doors and meandered back to the courtyard. I quickly looked back over my shoulder at the van.

Do me a solid and make it up that logging road. I thought

That night everyone curled up in puffies and blankets in the common room. Reuben tended the fire, throwing some logs into the furnace. I pulled the projector screen down, and dimmed the lights. The light of the projector bathed the room in blue light as I ran over and opened the beer fridge.

Fred Beckey is… an enigma.

Images flashed across the screen of snow capped mountain in British Columbia and granite ridge lines in Washington.

I don’t know what gets someone to climb. I think it is a bit of the trust you have in other people. It’s the excitement of doing something new. I don’t know how to describe the feeling exactly.

The footage cut from an interview with an older Beckey back to his youth, smiling ear-to-ear while standing at the summit of Denali. The film then him climbing up some Cascades granite wearing tennis shoes and wool cap, a bowline tied around his waist before cutting to his infamous pink, 1950s Thunderbird, his notorious dirtbag adventure rig.

Fred just kept climbing like the whole universe was coming down around him. I think if he was afraid that if he stopped climbing he would simply cease to exist.

I looked down from the screen and took a long drink from my beer bottle. I turned my head and glanced over to the other guests watching the film. No one’s eyes moved from the screen.

“Like the whole universe is coming down?” I mumbled quietly to myself. “I wonder what that feels like…”

III. Trying to Live the Beckey Life often involves a lot of Dirty Rock

CREEEEAAAK. THUNK.

The frame of the van groaned as we crossed over a pile of rocks. The suspension shifted uneasily as we rounded a corner. I had replaced two of shocks and part of the suspension system in the van, welded the gas tank back onto the van frame, and even repaired a coolant leak in the engine block. I began to wonder how long until…

PING. CLACK. DING.

A rock shot out from beneath a tire and bounced off the bottom of the car, rattling around like a pinball.

“This van… is gonna die soon.” I quickly downshifted into first gear.

VEEERROOOOMMMMM. I came off the clutch too slowly and the tiny engine whirred beneath the seats before the clutch engaged, drowning out the Ween album Dane was blasting from the stereo.

“You say that AND you are trying to sell me this thing? AND after you rebored a cylinder?? You drive a REAL hard bargain, Ryder! REAL HARD BARGAIN.” Dane half scoffed, half laughed as I floored the gas. The engine revved, and the van shot up the final hill to our van’s usual parking spot about two kilometers from the cliff.

CLACK. Another rock shot off the road and hit the bottom of the van.

I laughed nervously. The van was sluggish under the load we had piled into the interior: two drill, batteries, solar charger, camping supplies, whiskey. The list–and consequently the weight of it all–grew to a number that I knew Dane and I would grow to hate with every step we hauled all this stuff uphill. I crept around the final corner, past the old spring where we used to fill water at the old van camp. I yanked up the emergency brake.

“Hey, there’s Meteor’s van!” Dane pointed through the windshield. “Dude’s fearless if he hauled ass up this road on his first try with his own van. Ballsy…” We came to a stop right behind the trunk of the other van.

“Ooookay! Here is where life is about to really suck!” I opened the door and stepped outside. I walked around the van and sized up the cabin. She was a mess.

After 6 months of sitting through rainy season, the Turd Bus looked more and more like its namesake effluence. The shine of the car paint was gone, replaced by a layer of crust and dust that accumulated from months of sitting in the driveway in Liming. The patch paint I had used to repair scratch marks stood out like a second-grade level finger painting project. Brown wisps of dry dirt from the abandoned logging road streaked the back of the van like racing stripes..

I walked up and opened the trunk and patted one of the quarter panels.

“55000 kilometers ain’t much, but 35000 of them are this garbage!” I pulled out a stick that had lodged itself in the wheel well.

“Ahhh, yes, just like the good ol’ days…” I laughed and pointed back down at the road we just drove up. Dane grunted as he rooted through one of his backpacks, hefting the massive 36-volt brick battery he brought for his drill.

The sound of dry leaves crinkled out of the hinges of the van as the back hatch opened as I stared through the trees up towards the wall.

“I think… oh, WAIT!” My head snapped back towards the car as Dane’s huge backpack lurched out of the back door. I dodged the sharp edge of the trunk door from taking a chunk of my forehead. It tumbled down and landed with a heavy, dull-thud just next to my foot. “Welp, there’s YOUR bag to start with.” I laughed and grunted as I righted Dane’s pack.

I walked around to the side of the van and pulled the haul bag from its resting place at the side of the bed. I struggled to control it as it tumbled down onto the grass. I reached inside the van, opening a drawer and grabbing more things before stuffing them into the collar of the bag. Dane came around the van, raising his eyebrows when he saw the monster the haul bag had become.

“You really want to bring that beast up on round one?” He laughed. “Don’t wreck yourself before we even start.”

“Well, we are fresh now. Suffer first, have it easy later?” I hefted the pack onto my back and slowly squatted down to get my trekking poles. Voices suddenly drifted through the trees.

“Yo, duzis!” I called out into the woods, half expecting to hear the sounds of some locals’ goats instead of a foreign voice.

“YO!” Woody rounded the corner, Meteor and Kit trailing not far behind. “Y’all made it!”

“We’ve got work to do up there. We don’t want to lose any more time!” Dane hefted his backpack onto his shoulders.

“Well, we are still loading into base camp. This is our second run.” Meteor opened his van’s trunk and Kit hoisted out a nearly overflowing duffel bag.

“This is gonna be brutal.” Kit lifted the duffel straps onto his back, stumbling backwards a bit under the weight.

We all looked at each other as if sizing each other up to see who would break first under the load of their base camp equipment. We slogged uphill for what felt like an eternity, through old, abandoned farm fields and logging roads that had been left to decay for the better part of a few decades. My back started burning from the fatigue of my unevenly weighted haulbag.

We rounded the corner of the final section of the logging road before reaching the faint goat trail that would take us up to the temple ruins, an ancient stone foundation built into the base of the main cliff of Baiyansi that looked like someone had pulled off the set of an Indiana Jones movie.

Everyone threw their packs to the ground. Kit sat down in the leaves, sweat pouring from beneath his hat down his face and beard. He looked like a proper dirtbag. We all looked up through the trees. The 500-plus meters of the main wall erupted above us, its alternating streaks of black and yellow rock rising up to meet the cloudless, dry season sky above.

“It always looks bigger than I remember,” I craned my neck up to look at the caves on the center-right of the formation. Woody lifted his trekking pole into the air, waving it around like a wand.

“So I’m thinking: we can start from pitch 3 of It’s Just a Ride and start heading for that dark streak up the pillar.” He motioned in the air to the freestanding column of rock on the right side of the formation.


Dane could barely contain his excitement. “DUDE. The pillar is FINALLY going to have a route! I’m so stoked you guys are the ones to do it. But you should totally make it an independent line.”

“Guess we’ll just have to see what it is like below that. I think steep slabs?” Woody took a long drink of water before hefting his backpack back onto his shoulders. We all reluctantly followed his lead.

We all stared in silence at the wall. It was such a blank canvas. There were literally acres of rock on this single feature.

A sound of chainsaws far across the valley from local loggers broke our gawking at the wall.

“Alright! Last leg, boys!” I squatted and lifted my pack back onto my shoulders.

“The shittiest leg…” Kit wiped more sweat off his face, and we continued off uphill into the woods.

I stumbled through the stone foundation entrance of the temple, tripping on an old roof tile and stumbling forward across the leaf litter.

“PFOUHF.” I gasped for air and whipped my trekking pole out in front of me to brace against the fall. I stood back up and adjusted my bag on my shoulders before chucking it to the ground. I plopped down in the leaves. Sweat dripped off of my nose and down into the dry leaves that covered the inside of the old temple foundation.

I looked around as the others trickled into camp: 10 bags, all 60 to 100 liters holding gear that probably reached collectively into the hundreds of kilograms and 8 containers of water we would have to fill. This is what it took to live luxuriously deep in the woods for weeks: camping gear, bivy gear for the wall, trad gear, bolts, lengths of stainless chain, drills and batteries, a solar panel.

Camp began to take shape into a habitable space. Tents popped up on the flat ground inside the temple. Kit slung a hammock between the old trees that had grown up from the temple floor. We arranged some stones to make a kitchen table, where we deposited stoves, pots, and an enormous pile of fresh food. I reached back into the bag and grabbed the coffee grinder.

CLINK. The tap of glass reminded me to reach bag in the bag. I extracted a bottle of whiskey.

“Well, anyone want some? I think we deserve it after all THIS shit.” I motioned around the campground at the piles of gear we had dumped indiscriminately on the ground.

“Hell yeah, we do.” Kit’s eyes widened as he half walked, half stumbled down the old, ruined stairs that separated the main tier of the temple from the upper deck where he and Woody set their tent. He slid as he crossed some of the pine needles at the base of the stairs.

“Don’t forget that we have… THESE.” Dane lifted both his hands above his head, one holding a bottle of maple syrup, the other with the bottle of Canadian whiskey he had shown me earlier.

“Maximum Canada.” I laughed as Dane walked over with some tin cups emblazoned with old Maoist propaganda on the sides. He poured a small dose into each glass.

“We can have some tonight, but I want to save a bunch for when we top out.” Dane carefully measured out each pour.

“Yeah, then we can celebrate by drinking all the whiskey and eating all of the butter at once.” I chuckled and raised my cup. We all struck our cups together. I turned around and looked out from wall of the temple. The long afternoon sunlight raked across the valley below, putting the valleys across from us under the nearby peak deep into shadow. Endless green mountains rose out into the distance to the horizon to our south, a few of them dotted with enormous, white wind turbines.

“Here’s to two new routes on the wall?” Dane held up his cup again.

“May we all survive the terrors of lead bolting.” I half laughed, knowing too well what the terrors felt like.

We all raised our cups before downing the rest of the whiskey.

IV. Up the Wall Again

“Dude, I think I’m done. I need a break!” Dane clung to small holds halfway up the first pitch.

“You sure! I can take over if you really want to!” I instantly regretted the words I had said.

“This wall is so much steeper than It’s Just a Ride! I want to get a break so I am not mentally destroyed by the end of the first pitch!” Dane downclimbed to his last bolt.

I lowered him, knowing I would instantly regret my misplaced confidence. But this was the new strategy: keep both of us from fully red lining and shutting down at the end of a pitch. With a wall this big, we could scant afford one partner getting shut down, especially if we wanted to cling to any chance of a new route.

I climbed up Dane’s section of the pitch, waiting for the inevitable moment my fear levels would spike when I hit the end of the known ground that he had just established. The wall angle reared back as I pawed at unclean, unclimbed rock above me. Bits of black lichen and small granite crystals trickled off the top of my helmet. My heart rate accelerated as I could feel the lactic acid creeping up in my forearms.

“Dahhh, DANE. This is so steep! I don’t know if I can do this!” I kept pawing at dry dirt and Jericho rose above my head. His voice came back up the wall unusually calm.

“Are you SURE? Have you looked around enough? Have you dug out the Jericho Rose around you?” He had a script to calm me down from the last time we went lead bolting together on It’s Just a Ride.

I inhaled sharply, smacking my dirt-encrusted, dry lips that had caked over from all of my panicked exhaling. I took a few deep breaths to slow my heart rate, and y vision began to emerge from its narrow, burrow-like hole it into which it had receded from the surge in adrenaline. I looked right and spotted a thin traverse leading into a small corner up to a ledge covered in Jericho Rose.

“Alright, I’m gonna try to cut right, Dane! I think I see a line!”

“OK! Just be careful of the pendulum.” He hollered back from the belay as I tentatively reached out across the face, tiptoeing across small edges and smears of dubious quality. I did a short split and reached the corner.

You’re so close to a stance. Just go for it! I thought.

My eyes widened with a combination of fear and excitement–but mostly fear–as I squirmed up the corner to within reach of the ledge.

“Any gear?” Dane’s voice sounded genuinely concerned.

I dug at the hard-packed soil choking the seams in the back of the crack. “Nope! None so far!”

“You should think about placing a bolt then!” He called back up.

“I think I can make it to this ledge first!” I could feel the adrenaline closing up my range of view again. The world stopped at the edge of the ledge just above my head.

“I… OK. Be smart about this, Ryder!”

I slapped at the rock on the near edge of the ledge, tearing away Jericho Rose in hopes of finding an easy escape to a stance higher up. Small crystal edges at the lip of the ledge kept snapping off beneath my fingers.

“UGH. SHIT. This ledge is SO MUCH HARDER than it looked from below!” I spat out some dirt.

“You REALLY should think about placing that bolt!”

“One more try!” I considered the consequences with what little clarity I had left in my head. I looked at my last piece of gear, a bolt way below me and to my left.

Well, this could get ugly. I looked down at my tiny footholds beneath my shoes and then back up at the ledge.

I slid my hand slowly up the steeper left wall, finding small, rounded edges as I unceremoniously thrutched my way higher up towards the ledge. I let out a fearful scream. My right foot blindly inched higher until it reached the rounded, downsloping front of the ledge. I slowly shimmied onto it, switching into a frenetic pace to get a bolt into the wall. I finally clipped the rope to the bolt and let out a long, ragged sigh. I looked back at the terrain I had just climbed.

“You OK?” Dane called up.

“Yeah, fine. Good god, I should have put a bolt in between those two.” I stared back down at the bolt below. A fall getting onto the ledge would have been nothing short of extremely ugly.

“Yeah, probably will be a good idea to add one down there at some point. Nice work, bud! Bold!” Dane fed out some more rope to me as I climbed across easy terrain to build a belay.

The second pitch continued in much the same way. I continued leading a block before Dane took over, leaving my high point towards what looked like a beautiful, rising traverse on a very exposed section of rock. He moved out towards the exposed face, his pace slowing as the climbing got harder.

“What does it look like out there?” I yelled up to him.

“I think I am going to ditch the drill and try the moves!”

“You sure that is a good idea? Do you really want to be out in space without the drill?” Dane retreated to his previous bolt and clipped the development gear to it.

He slowly climbed out and back multiple times, testing small holds, cracking some of them off the wall.

WHHHHIZZZZZZZZ. Some of the small pebbles he let loose from the unclimbed rock zipped down the face and whipped past the belay.

Click. Click. Click.

Some of the debris carried across the face with the wind and pinged off of my helmet.

Meters away from his previous protection, Dane desperately tried drilling a bolt. He sunk it no more than a centimeter.

“Just clip it!” I yelled up to it.

“OK! Ryder CLIPPING!” He reached down to grab where the rope was tied to his harness. He slowly lifted the rope towards the quickdraw gate.

PING… PING. The cams blew. I saw Dane begin to sway off-balance.

“Oh, SHIT.” Dane screamed as he started falling.

His weight began peeling away from the wall, and I prepared myself to get whipped upwards from the force of his huge fall. My entire core tightened. I waited a beat. Nothing happened. I looked back up at Dane. He had not moved from his stance high up on the traverse. He had managed to catch himself just enough to not fall. The cams hung down a ways on the rope, uselessly dangling below him.

“HOOOOOOO’ BOY.” Dane let out a scream as he righted himself. As he moved his body away from the cliff, I saw the bolt and the quickdraw with the rope running through it, the bolt’s wedge mechanism protruding tenuously far from the rock.

“I dropped the rope in RIGHT as my cams blew out.” He looked down at me with a wildman grin on his face. He knew he had barely escaped.

“How is that bolt still even in?” I still death gripped the rope for fear what little part of the bolt was in the rock would suddenly pop out without warning.

“I have NO idea, but I’m hammering that shit in immediately.” He shook out both arms furiously before repositioning himself on the cliff, taking his weight off the bolt before hammering it fully into the hole.

If this is only a couple of pitches up, how much more of this are we going to have? Maybe I should finally sort out my health insurance…

My thoughts were cut off by Dane as he moved out of the crux traverse onto the face above. A grapefruit sized rock suddenly came rattling down the wall, whipping past me out right of the belay.

“Oh, HEY!” Dane reached way above his head. “Finally a JUG.”

We slowly pushed the route higher and higher up the wall. Returning to base camp to find a way to shuttle bivy supplies to a high point somewhere high up in the caves that still towered above our high point. Much like an old 60s cartoon, the background never seemed to change; the caves never seemed to get any closer as we inched our way up the gigantic main face of Baiyansi. The lower pitches slowed us down. They were consistently steep and much harder than their peers over on It’s Just a Ride. Pitch 3 was a flawless .10d pitch with non-stop, dead vertical .10+ climbing for over 20 meters before ending with a boulder problem at the top. Pitch 4 thinned out even more, turning into small edges across a smooth face. Dane took the reigns and headed out into space, making his way towards what looked like a short crack system.

“This is gonna be a tough pitch, but I think this crack…” His voice strained as he reached from his stance to the edge of the crack system. “… will take better gear than the last one on pitch 2!”

“Was that even a crack?” I hollered over the wind that had picked up. “That’s kind of a low bar.”

Dane grunted as he made moves across the face into the crack system. He placed a pair of cams, slotting them into what looked like an actual crack. He put his weight onto them.

“Gear?” I looked up at Dane. Pitch 3, a beautiful, dead vertical face that looked devoid of protectable features, had its fair share of gear placements, and we were excited at the thought of having more gear opportunities to keep the route mixed.

“Yeah! The cams look good, but…” he adjusted his stance, grabbing the hammer from off his harness. He swung it at the big column of rock to the right of the gear where it protruded away from the main face.

THUP. THUP.

The rock returned a completely dead sound.

“Welp… this big chunk of rock…” Dane reached as high as he could with his hammer and gently swung again.

THUP. THUP.

The whole column was detached.

“… is NOT attached to this cliff!” Dane looked down at the two cams that were holding his weight. “Good thing I placed a bunch of cams in it!” He chuckled nervously as he looked for a way to climb off the feature.

He weaseled and squirmed his way up a corner feature before reaching a ledge to build a gear anchor.

“Take, Ryder! I am going to tear those blocks off!” He leaned out from his perch out and right of me. “Should be a clean fall. You’re clear of the drop zone?”

“Yeah, I… hope… so!” I was below Dane and five or six meters to his left. I still instinctually leaned further left, tucking myself further into the shallow scoop where the belay station was. After the craters I watched Dane make on our first project, I wanted to leave as little to chance as I could.

I tied off Dane’s rope and reached into my pocket for my phone. I turned on the camera “Ok. You’re good! Let ‘em rip!”

“ROOOOOCK. LUO-SHI.” Dane screamed as loud as he could. He let out a few loud grunts as he leveraged the loose rock away from the wall. But with just a few pulls of the hammer’s claw, a huge chunk suddenly soughed off, catching a protruding piece of the cliff and springing away from the bulk of the wall. We both watched as the rocks fell in complete silence for nearly 100 meters before crashing through the thick tree cover at the base of Baiyansi.

CRACK. Fine stone dust and soil rose up in a small cloud from the impact site. Dane looked down from where the column of rock parted from the wall. We could smell powderized rock.

“Well there is… no crack anymore!” He surveyed the rock scar where the rock once was. “Looks like my cams where sitting in the exact thing that made the rock rip out from the cliff! Sweet…” Dane looked back up before climbing further above the ledge.

He went slower and slower as the angle of the wall refused to relent. His pace slowed to a crawl. I wiggled my buff a little higher on my face as I felt the midday sun baking the back of my neck.

“I’ve got 4 cams! I don’t think any of them are good!” Dane yelled down.

“Are you… serious?” I yelled back. I began wondering if we were getting away with too many close calls.

“The crack runs out above!" I am going to try to climb up as high as I can before placing a bolt!”

“Don’t push it too far, dude!” I was getting worried about how many times we had the same conversation.

The rope slowly slunk through my belay device.

SNAP.

“Ryder! RYDER! FALLING!” Dane’s hand hold broke and he started hurtling downward through space.

POP. POP. POP.

I could feel the rope pull taught as Dane fell to his previous cam, each of them failing and exploding out of the shallow cracks and pods into which he placed them. I whiplashed forward and scraped off the rock as Dane came to a sudden stop. His last cam held. I could hear him breathing heavily from the adrenaline rush of the fall.

“Holy shit.” Dane righted himself, and I looked up. He came to rest no more than a meter above the ledge above the first crux. He stared in silence at the ledge before turning to me.

“Had that last cam not held, I’d be fucked…” Dane brushed some of the dirt off his shirt. “Lower me, dude. I’m done.” I lowered him back to the belay, swapping positions before reclimbing the pitch to his high point, climbing back through the same terrain that nearly broke Dane’s ankles. After painfully slow progress through the headwall, I finally pulled over the roof, tiptoeing across loose rock before finally arriving at a crack. I frantically slammed in three cams, collapsing in exhaustion on the belay ledge.

________________

Pitches slowly slipped by. We gained a huge bowl feature above pitch 5, the mountain mercifully giving us a break with some easy adventure climbing as a small reward. We tried bivying at the top of pitch 5, perched on a sloped grassy ledge in the back of the bowl. While the sunrises were worth it, the airport-quality sleep was not. My knees knotted up in my sleep as I slowly slid down the grassy slope.

We repacked the bags in hopes of bringing them to the caves high above, but the prospect of a 20+ kilogram followers pack left our arms cramping at the thought of even climbing one of the easy pitches. By the base of pitch 7, we could see our first massive cave. Almost perfectly round, it opened into a dark chasm.

I balanced my way up pitch 7, an odd slab pitch that turned through a steep bulge at the top. I clawed my way through a mat of jungle vines down to bare rock as I screamed out in fear at the all-too-familiar feeling of fall potential high above my last piece of gear. My eyes winced and shut as I tore some vines off the cliff. Sharp, jungly plant leaves crumbled into bits before catching some updrafts on the wall and blowing what felt like small razor blades into my eyes.

I slashed through the greenery, finding good granite holds beneath. I clawed my way over the bulge and up the ramp into the cave as my sight came back in smudged, watery views as my eyes attempted to flush all of the debris that had landed on them.

Dane made quick work of my pitch, even as the bolts and anchor chain swung around in his backpack like some ungainly mammal latched onto his shoulders.

“Hey, look! It’s a cave thing!” Dane swung the dry bag of bolts awkwardly around his waist and threw them on the ground at the entrance of the cave.

WUMPF. The bag landed with a dull thud, kicking some sand, dust, and dried bird poop that covered the cave entrance.

“We made it to the cave! The first big, monster cave!” I turned around to face the dark hole that led into the cliff. In the waning evening light, we could not really see how far the cave went into the mountain. The mouth of the cave was perfectly round, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could just make out the features inside. It was a fairly shallow cave, with the back being nearly as round as the mouth, as if some giant had come along with an ice cream scoop and bored a chunk right out of the mountain. I scrambled up into the cave. Small, loose plates off rock sloshed under my feet as I wandered into the back of the cave.

We must be the first people to ever be in here! I thought, as I turned around to face Dane.

The wind picked up as the sun disappeared over the horizon. Dane was flaking the rope and preparing to rappel. Behind him, another huge wall rose across the gully, its arete just slightly less than dead vertical. I could already see that it was covered in holds. Yet another beautiful line that someone could climb. Every face has something on it, and we were just two climbers. There were more climbable lines on this whole formation than I could count.

The sun disappeared, and we rappelled into darkness down to the ground.

The days ground on. We pushed up and around the entrance of the cave, finding a mellow, moderate pitch full of cracks and pockets for gear, ending at another cave. An imposing roof loomed above the belay station. Dane looked over into the new cave.

“This bivy… will suck.” He clipped the hammocks he had stashed in the pack to the anchor.

“Well, do we even have any idea that the caves above will be any better?”

SQUEEEEAK. The locking gate for the drill’s carabiner made a shrill noise as the gate ground over sand lodged inside the screw mechanism. I jiggled the carabiner and looked up from my harness.

“Look at the slope!” Dane motioned to the lip of the cave, sloping uncomfortably from the back out to the front, where the wall fell away for 200 or so meters down to the ground. “We’ll have to be harnessed in all night again. I definitely don’t want to be wandering around there at night without a harness on…”

I sighed and looked up at the roof above me.

“Well, then I guess we will have to just find a better one!” I hefted my harness higher on my hips and clambered up the slab above the belay.

I hemmed and hawed at the lip of the roof, tearing Jericho Rose away along a seam, climbing up and down repeatedly. No gear above the roof, not even a good handhold save for a couple of sharp crimps. I locked off as hard as I could and dug into the earth that choked the seam and the hole beyond it. I tore out some grassy root systems, the pump in my forearms was rewarded with a small, finger-sized hole just barely within my reach.

“Let’s hope there’s something after the roof, so I don’t hit the slab!” I faked confidence as I threw my foot up to the level of my head. My heel caught on the lip of the roof, my left foot dangling uselessly in midair, unable to reach any feature under the roof. I could feel my inflexibility each time I moved.

I sunk my finger into the dirty pocket I unearthed, the grass roots jammed between my skin and the rock, slowly grinding away and letting my fingers slip from the hold.

FUH! I pulled as hard as I could, drawing my foot under me as the drill clacked against the edge of the roof. I could feel my dehydrated core muscles begin to lock into a contracted position as I contorted into what must have looked like an odd combination of a cannonball and a crab walk.

I painfully stood up, and to my surprise, a shallow crack slashed left across the face right at my eye level. I plugged two cams.

“Perfect timing for gear!” I clipped the rope through a carabiner before turning to look at Dane down at the belay. I was smiled with a big shit-eating grin. It was an odd feeling finally feeling comfortable being on lead development duty, hauling a pile of crap off my waist up into the unknown.

“No bolts needed? Sweet!” Dane looked up from the belay. “You think you can reach the next cave in this pitch?” He craned his neck out to see the terrain above the roof.

My eyes traced the crack in front of me out across the face as it disappeared into the cliff. A Jericho Rose-choked crack rose up about 4 meters to my left as started tiptoeing across the top lip of the roof.

Digging continuously, I wiggled and weaseled by way up the crack as the wall to my left closed in and squeezed me into a slot. I jammed a 2 cam into the rock I had just dugout and looked up. A steep imposing headwall stood between me and the entrance to another cave. As I ventured out onto the face, holds appeared, and my confidence surged.

I’m going to make it without drama and without getting blinded by plant matter! I thought

Suddenly, the holds began to shrink, interrupting my early mental victory lap. I looked around and then down to my last piece of protection multiple meters below and to my right. A fall or a broken hold would send me into a v-slot choked with plants and pointy rocks.

BRAAAAAAP. I clung to the steep face on a rounded sloper, drilling into a flat portion of the headwall before hammering in a lone bolt. I climbed above it and lifted myself onto the entrance of the next cave.

Dane followed up a few minutes later, grunting and cursing under the enormous weight of our development and bivy supplies on his back. He reached the roof and let out a scream as he tried to hoist the combined weight of himself and the pack over the lip.

“GAHHH. FUCK THIS PACK.” He slapped at the holds above the roof. I could hear his gasps for air from 20 meters above. He sat on the rope, attempting to adjust the pack as he hung out in space. “I may need you to help me through the roof, Ryder! This pack is way too heavy!”

I quickly reached back on my harness of prussiks and rigged a 3-to-1 pulley and began pulling against Dane’s weight. Nothing moved.

“Pull, Ryder!” Dane had started trying to pull around the roof again. “PULL.”

I squatted and leg pressed again. Still, nothing moved. I dropped another strand into the system to make a 6-to-1 pulley.

“Ok, try again!” I yelled, as a strong gust came up the cliff and partially drowned out my voice.

I hauled, and the rope just barely inched through the belay device. I looked down at Dane before before doing a double-take. The rope was following the crack above the roof, which cut in a prominent zigzag across the face. Two sharp bends in the rope were rendering my pulley system almost entirely useless.

“Too much rope drag!” I yelled down to Dane.

“Well, I’m not sure I can get over this roof with all of this weight on my back! It has to be at least 20 kilos!” I could see he was angry from all the exertion.

“Alright, let’s try one more time!” I. Reached down and grabbed the pull strand of the pulley.

“FAHHHHHH.” Dane screamed as he tried again to pull past the roof. I squatted low and tried pulling rope through the pulley system using my legs. Inches of rope slid through the belay device as Dane just barely latched onto the holds above the roof. He swung precariously as the weight of the pack through him off balance. He swore and continued up the rest of the pitch. He flopped onto the belay ledge, panting as he stood up and clipped the pack to the anchor. The anchor cord sagged under the added load of the extra equipment.

“That…” Dane took a long drink out of his water bottle, drops of water dripping off his beard. “… was some of the bolder climbing I’ve seen you do.”

“I was aiming to avoid the ‘brown pants adventure.’ I laughed. Dane squinted into the darkness behind me.

“This cave looks steep! Put me on belay. I want to see if this connects somewhere else!” He scrambled off the belay platform and into the cave. Unlike the others, this cave resembled more of a large mine shaft, rising steeply up from its entrance and into darkness inside the mountain.

“Come ON! Why won’t any of these caves connect!” I could hear the loose plates of rock sliding down beneath Dane’s feet. His headlamp disappeared as he faced the interior of the cave. I watched the light dance across the walls.

“Not even a skylight or some sort of hole anywhere?” I hollered into the cave, the echoes reverberated and came back out to me at the belay station.

“Nope!” He turned back towards me, momentarily blinding me as the light from his headlamp went directly into my eyes. “One of these days, Ryder, we will find a cave that connects! But that day…” Dane paused and looked down, grabbing a plate of loose rock and throwing it from the cave entrance down the cliff. “… is NOT today!”

He returned to the belay.

“Now time to find out where this next pitch goes, I guess.” I looked up as Dane rigged the development gear to his harness. I extended my leash from the anchor, reached up, and grabbed what looked like section of the cliff full of large holds. I gently pulled and a rock the size of a microwave lurched out towards me, its fissure lines suddenly appearing where I thought there had been solid cliff.

“SHIT. Put that back!” I recoiled as the rock wobbled back into its perch on a small ledge. I looked up past the rock I had just touched. The whole area to the left of the cave was full of hanging blocks and stone that was, with varying levels of obviousness, not attached to the wall.

“Looks like we aren’t going THAT way.” Dane had been watching me the whole time. He turned around to face the opposite side of the cave, a steep lip that gave way to an airy section where the cliff fell away for a hundred meters before reaching a gully on the cliff below.

Hours passed as Dane inched up pitch 10, climbing through an awkward overhang before finding a huge crack system that could actually take gear. I shouldered our mammoth gear bag and attempted to follow up behind him. As the wall steepened, I exerted harder and harder to just make the moves. By the time I reached the overhang, I felt like vomiting as a blindly slapped at the rock, searching for holds that Dane said would make the pitch “easy 5.10.”

Darkness eventually overtook us as we tried to push higher up the wall. I tried saddling up to lead another pitch, but I had been shivering for nearly an hour. The winds picked up and the temperature dropped as the sun dipped behind the ridgeline across the valley. I sat at the belay and kept shaking.

“Are you SURE, you want to lead this pitch?” Dane gave me a concerned look.

“I…think I’ve… got this.” My hands started feeling wooden as I clipped cams to my fear loops.

“I… OK. Be smart about this, Ryder.” I ventured up off the belay, my hands shaking in the waning light as I tried to find gear in some grass-choked pods a few meters above Dane. My hands kept shaking as I fumbled with gear. Suddenly, one of my feet slipped on the slab. I righted myself before I could fully slide out of position.

“Ryder… I think you should come down.” Dane looked up at me, his headlamp shining around the rock where I was standing.

“I… OK…” I delicately climbed back down the slab. I was still shivering. I desperately dug through our supply bag until I found my puffy jacket and threw it over me, nearly losing it, as my numb hands lost control of one of the sleeves. I could feel my body heating up almost instantly.

“I think we should try to reach that cave.” Dane motioned around the corner. I craned my neck out in the darkness. Above us was a small cave entrance, but unlike the others, it looked like it had a grass terrace in the front.

Wonder if it could be a welcome mat? I thought longingly.

Dane quickly transferred all the gear to his harness.

“You sure you’ve got the beast pack?” He looked at me and then the bag dangling off the anchor.

“Yeah.” I cinched my hood up around my face. “The jacket helps…” I was still shivering, but less intensely.

Dane quickly climbed up the face above before stepping left. I looked at the anchor, realizing he had left half of our cams at the anchor.

“Are you sure you have enough gear?” I yelled after him. The rope suddenly began zipping through the belay device.

“It’s like 5…. 3! I… Oh, my god! HAAAAAAHAHAHA.” Dane began cackling in the darkness above me.

“You OK?” I yelled up after him.

“This is… THE CAVE, Ryder! WE FOUND THE CAVE! Holy shit, this is amazing!”

BRAAAAAAAP. Ding. Ding. Ding.

I could hear the sounds of Dane feverishly building a bolted anchor station.

“On belay, Ryder!”

I hefted the bag onto my shoulders and sloppily combed up the arete and into a small gully. Dane’s headlamp was a lot closer than I was expecting. I lifted myself onto the ledge at the mouth of the cave and tucked the bag deep into the entrance.

“Hoooo, baby. Look at our cave! It’s HUGE!” Dane turned his light into the back of the cave. The ground, which had been sloped in all of the other caves we had encountered, was totally flat and covered with sand. He could barely contain his excitement. “And look where we are! There’s the moon!” He spun around towards the entrance of the cave, holding his phone up to capture the scene on video. “Wonder if you can even see anything out there, but we’re, like, 400 meters up right now.”

We wandered into the cave. Almost immediately the temperature went up a few degrees from the entrance.

Dane started unpacking the bag, throwing our camping gear, 7 liters of water, and food onto a small stone platform above the sandy bottom of the cave.

“Wait, DANE!” I was staring at some dead wood laying on the cave floor before I my brain suddenly jumped to life and realized what I was looking at. “We are NOT the first ones in this cave!”

“Wait, what? How do you know that?” He wandered over to me as I still was stared at the ground. I pointed to a spot on the floor. All of the timber in the cave had been arrayed in a pile, all of the larger logs perfectly parallel to one another. But next to the timber was what clearly looked like charcoal and small fire pit.

“Mind-blowing. People have been in here before.” Dane shook his head. “They must have come down from that ledge system and chimney that we saw at the top of the mountain!” He lifted one of the pieces of timber from the pile. “They brought this whole chunk of wood from somewhere on those ledges into here?! Damn, the locals here are nuts.” Dane dropped the log and wandered back over to backpack. He pulled the lid off and reached inside.

“OH! Now this is worth it!” He lifted a bag out of the backpack. “An ENTIRE LOAF of Reuben’s banana bread! HA! Now all this pack weight is worth it.” He laughed.

WUMPF.

Something whistled by our heads in the darkness. I spun around.

“The FUCK was that?” Our lights danced around the roof of the cave.

WOOOOSH. Something zipped past our heads. A wing like thing brushed off Dane’s helmet. I could feel the wind of something rushing by.

“A bat?” I looked around frantically with my headlight.

WUMPF. The thing zipped by again and I instinctively crouched down. Dane shot back up from the floor, his headlamp’s beam shooting across the ceiling.

“Dude, there it is!” He pointed out to a small alcove in the cave ceiling.

“What? Has to be a bat.” I spun around to face his light.

“I… SHIT.” The thing flew towards our faces again. We ducked back down. I spun around to face the direction I thought it flew.

There, lurking in one of the small round holes in the ceiling, was a small, gray bird. A small band of red feathers peaked out from under the gray layer. Its head and long, curved beak were constantly twisting from one side to the other as it hopped around the steep rock faces, seemingly trying to find a better angle from which it could dive bomb us.

“This little thing is aggressive!” Dane kept turning around in attempts to track the bird as it flew past us. “It definitely wants us off its turf.”

WOOSH. The bird zipped by, and Dane flapped his arms in attempts to scare the bird.

“Ugh, how are we gonna deal with this thing?” Dane kept turning in place to track the bird. “I really don’t want us to have to kill it or something.”

“I mean, I don’t either. But we have to try and do something. We don’t really have much choice of other places to sleep up here…” I squatted down and picked up my foam sleeping pad, folding the panels into a squishy club. I looked down at it. I did not think it would do much to deter the bird, but I also did not want to kill it, either.

“Well, we have to do something if we want to sleep…” Dane’s eyes locked on the bird again as it lined up to make another dive.

“Maybe we can scare it enough to leave?” I waved the foam pad lamely in the air, suddenly laughing at myself for assuming a soft pad would have any effect.

“I dunno, man. I… heads up!” The bird dove at us again and Dane ducked.

I swung the pad blindly into the darkness my light twisted out of position tracking the bird as I ducked. The bird turned around and made another pass at us, and I swung again.

POF.

I felt the pad hit something solid.

EEEEEEEK.

The bird shrieked, and I turned around to face the space I had just swung the pad through. A bunch of small feathers floated gently in the air. I felt a burning sensation in my gut, thinking I had just killed the bird. I looked down and scanned the sand on the floor. No bird. I looked back up on the ceiling.

“Did you… hit it?” Dane’s light started scanning the ground and walls to find the bird.

“I think I did. There it is!” I pointed up.

The bird kept bouncing around the ceiling. I held up the pad, ready to swing it again. But the bird hopped aimlessly around the ceiling for a few minutes, as we watched it thinking it was going to collapse and fall to the ground. Finally, it reached a small round alcove at a low point in the cave roof. It hopped inside, turned its tail towards us, puffed out its feathers, and stopped moving.

“You think it’s… dead?” I held my light still on the alcove where the bird was perched. The bird suddenly quivered inside the hole.

“Doesn’t look like it. Maybe it got the message that we’re just spider monkeys, and we mean it no harm?” Dane shook his head. “Hopefully it won’t decide to dive bomb us in the middle of the night while we sleep!” Dane returned to our bivy spot, and lit the stove. He pulle dout four packs of instant noodles from the pack. “So! Banana bread and spicy noodles for dinner?”

V. Out of the Cave and to the (recently climbed) Top

WAUHHHHHH.

The sound of Dane’s snore woke me up, and I rolled over. My shoulder creaked from sleeping on the hard ground for too many hours as I struggled to sit up from the sand on the cave bottom. I looked up into the alcove where the bird had been the previous night. It was gone.

Faint morning light trickled in through the mouth of the cave. It was barely past dawn. I blinked and felt the grating sensation of the dirt and Jericho Rose from the previous days gumming up my tear ducts. I rubbed my eyes and looked out again. My eyes widened as I stumbled towards the cave entrance.

“Ohhhh, shit! Dane! Dane, look at this!” I turned around to face him, as he groggily rolled around in his sleeping bag.

“Dane! Get your ass out of bed!” I rushed back to my sleeping bag and pulled out my phone.

“I… what? Why? What time is it?” Dane sat up, squeezing his eyes shut and rubbing them. “Oh, man my eyes are full of dirt…” He shook his head and slowly opened his eyes. His eyes widened, too.
“Duuuuude. This is wild!” The two of us half zombie walked, half stumbled to the cave entrance.

The sun barely broke over the horizon, but the colors it cast over the valley looked other worldly. The shadowy mountains became bathed in purple, yellow, red, and orange light, illuminating our valley and the mountains out to the horizon, as the colors of light formed bands on the horizon to the east where we could just barely make out the distant white lines of a huge mountainside wind farm 30 miles away.

We both wandered back over to our bivy where we had cached food on a small inflated mat between our sleeping pads, covered in biscuits, dark chocolate, banana bread, and coffee. We sat down and began devouring the food.

“We have some of Reuben’s banana bread and some…” I pulled back the tin foil from the chocolate bar. “… some dark chocolate. A fine meal…”

“Hm, yes,” Dane cracked in an aristocratic British accent, lifting his pinky into the air as he bit off a chunk of a chocolate bar. “We are about to have some fine, imported Colombian coffee…”

By halfway through the dense loaf of banana bread, we were stuffed, and we lumbered over to our gear. Suited up, we headed back out to the entrance of the cave as sunlight lit up the entire face and began warming the air around us.

We climbed up moderate, but engaging terrain, encountering very little over 5.9. But our original estimate of two and a half pitches to the top was not even close. Pitches went by, and the mountain still rose above us, even as we tried pushing our pace to climb through steep and occasionally loose terrain. What felt to be a little too soon, the sun’s rays began getting long, raking across the ridge line the cut away from the main wall to our left.The main face of Baiyansi, which had always loomed over us since we first started coming to the mountain a year and a half earlier, was finally below us. Our wall kept going, slowly decreasing in angle as we approached the treed in ridge line at the top of the mountain.

Dane ventured off onto a slab on pitch 16.

“I dunno if we are going to make this, dude. It’s already getting late.” Dane took out his nut tool and scraped into the dirt, unearthing a small crack into which he placed a cam.

“We’re closer to the top than getting back down to the cave. We’ve kind of committed to going up, no?” The wind started picking up as the sun approached the tops of the mountains across the valley. The cold afternoon winds started rushing up the wall in bursts. I shivered and donned my windbreaker.

Dane climbed around a block and scrambled his way over the top.

“I’m just worried that this thing just keeps going!” I could hear the fatigue in Dane’s voice. We pushed four pitches in a single push, far more than we normally established in one day. The steep terrain combined with the Jericho Rose always seemed to conspire and prevent us from maximizing our upward progress.
“Just get to the next belay station, and we will talk about it there!” I shouted after Dane as he rounded a corner and went out of sight. I sat there alone in the wind, waiting for the rope to stop moving. Suddenly, the rope shot out faster and faster as I struggled to keep up with Dane’s progress. The middle mark of the rope shot by and then out of the belay device.

Well, now we HAVE to go all the way up! I thought.

The rope came to a quick stop.

“Off belay, Ryder!” Dane yelled. “SHIT’S ABOUT TO GET CRAZY!” His voice echoed back off the main wall below and to my left.

My stomach sank. Dane was rarely ever the one to be intimidated by what lay ahead of us on this project. It was the first time he sounded as if he was resigned to the fact that the mountain was going to make us suffer that night.

I packed up the anchor station and charged up the pitch as fast as I could. I followed the rope, watching the rock and for a short stretch and get replaced by a combination of boulders and dirt. The rock reappeared right as Dane came into view. I looked past him and realized what he meant by “crazy.” His belay was a small tree at the beginning of a large terrace. The terrace itself was covered in thick bushes and tress with another wall rising up on its far end.

Dane shook his head and pointed to the mass of greenery in front of him.

“Welp! This is YOURS, buddy.” Dane let out a long sigh as he turned around to look at the sun sinking lower to the horizon.

“Looks pretty easy, but you can keep me on belay.” I clambered up the slope beneath Dane and quickly passed him and the belay tree.

“Alright, I’ll definitely keep you on belay. We have no idea what’s on the other side of those bushes.” Dane fed a huge armful of slack through his belay device. “It’d suck to fall at the end, right?”

“Yeah,” I grunted as reached the bush line and began tearing at the small branches that started poking me in the face. “At least I have a lot of shit to grab onto if I slip!” I grabbed a small branch and snapped it, the bottom whiplashing back and hitting me in the shin. I disappeared into the bushes, which were thick enough to quickly obscure Dane from view.

“You got this, bud!” Dane yelled after me. “Fuck it up, Ryder! Fuck it up!”

I slashed through the undergrowth, eyeing the slab above me through the trees. I popped out in a small clearing formed by a big, dead tree trunk, tiptoeing across it back through the bushes. Huge logs and dead wood slid down the pine needles beneath my feet as pawed up a steep slope underneath the slab. I popped out in another small clearing under the slab, and I looked up. A small groove wound its way up the slab beneath a pile of boulders at the top. The summit ridge was tantalizingly close.

“Off belay, Dane!”

“You sure?” He yelled up through the trees.

“Yeah, there’s no real climbing in the bushes! You’re fine!”

I watched the bushes and trees quiver as Dane smashed his way through the undergrowth. He popped out in the clearing, sending one of chunks of old tree sliding down the bed of pine needles on the slope below. He looked up and then over his shoulder at the setting sun.

“Soooo… some casual soloing to end our day?” Dane passed me and made the first few moves up the groove off the ground. “Moves don’t seem too hard.”

“Errrrr, OK. I guess I can do it.” I scurried up behind him, as his Squamish soloing experience allowed him to jet off way faster than I could consider moving.

I gently moved up the groove, locking myself into the shallow feature as best I could. The forest above had shed pine needles down on some of the footholds below the crack, forcing the both of us to move gingerly over the terrain.

Bare rock suddenly gave way to forest, as Dane and I scrambled over downed trees and slopes of pine needles towards what we thought was going to be a lonely, unoccupied summit pinnacle. Instead, the two of us looked up to see Tibetan prayer flags strung between trees, flapping in the evening wind. Dane started laughing uncontrollably.

“Ohhhh, we climbed all the way up and… there’s a back way up and there are Tibetan prayer flags!” My voice cracked as I started stumbling uphill towards the summit.

“FUUUUUCK YESSS!” Dane screamed.

We alternately let out yells of combined joy and exhaustion as we lurched up the final slope to the summit. We broke through a small line of bushes on the summit and discovered a small clearing, complete with a stone shrine furnished with religious icons and a timber lean-to with a fire ring that looked like local pilgrims used to camp out at the top of the mountain.

We were both still panting. The walk up the final hill seemed to siphon what remaining energy we had left. I stood up and looked around, stumbling a bit as my fatigued muscles struggled to keep up with my sudden movement. The sun’s low rays lit up all of the mountains around us, lighting up the limestone cliffs above Shigu. Out in the distance, the bright white glaciers of Jade Dragon Mountain reflected pink with alpenglow.

“Dane! Dane! We fucking did it!” I held up my hand, as Dane lifted his hands off his knees where we was resting and turned to face me to high five.

“Fuck, man!” He began laughing again. “Soloed the last pitch!” We both knew that we had made a bit of a seat-of-the-pants decision to do that, and there was a bit of a feeling that, even though it was easy, we still got away with something.

I plopped down on the ground, watching Dane change into his approach shoes. I looked down at my climbing shoes, my heels sticking out of the back to relieve the pressure on my toes.

“Dude, you should…” Dane looked over towards me. “Oh, right. You didn’t bring your approach shoes… shitty…”

I stood up and jammed my toes into my shoes, wincing as they crunched down inside the toe box. I looked longingly over at the twin summit across the gap from us where we would more likely catch a glimpse of Jade Dragon in all of its alpenglow glory. I turned around, and Dane had already jogged off into the bushes.

”Oh, GOD. I am so happy there is a trail right now!” He disappeared down a steeper slope as I weaseled my way after him, following the narrow wide trail and not trying to slide down the slope in my climbing shoes. “Imagine if there was no trail! We’d be here all night. HAAA!” He let out an uncontrollable laugh of excitement as he slid down the steep dirt on the trail.

We dropped onto the north face of the formation, and quickly the light disappeared. We turned on our headlamps and wandered down through the steep gully. Ghostly silhouettes of old-growth trees, some of the few survivors of generations of logging in the area, towered over us like ents out of a scene from Lord of the Rings.

Our shoes crunched over fallen yellow aspen leaves as we broke through the undergrowth, perched on the side of rock faces leading steeply down to a gully a couple hundred meters below. We looked ahead to see old chunks of timer laid across the cliff edges to make crude bridges.

“I guess we have some locals to thank!” Dane slowly moved his way across the bridge, some of the timber sagging uncomfortably low towards the open space that separated us from the gully far below.

I skittered across the log bridges as my feet protested louder and louder with every step. We eventually crossed back into the undergrowth, our world shrinking in the darkness into an orb of light that only went as far as the bush branches would allow.

I wallowed most of the way down, Dane constantly getting out in front of me and waiting, while I stumbled along as my feet felt increasingly like clubs bathing in a weird sweaty slime that lined the inside of my shoes.

After what felt like hours–but turned out only to be 1.5 hours–a ghostly dome shape appeared in front of us. We wandered towards it to find a huge pile of pine needles a local had made, likely bedding material they were taking down the mountain for their livestock.

“Hooo, YES, we are back!” Dane yelled out. He quickly disappeared down the main trail. I let out a long sigh and continued down slowly behind him.

We crashed through the undergrowth and stumbled back into the temple base camp. I collapsed on the floor and peeled my shoes off of my feet.

SHLORRRP. The sweaty slime that had built up inside my shoe on the walk down was now like a suction cup keeping the shoes on my feet. I laid down in the dirt next to our tent, indiscriminately casting off gear into a pile.

“Where are the boys?” Dane looked around camp, his light dancing across all the tents.

We heard some hooting and hollering down the cliff from where Woody, Kit, and Xinwu had started their route.

“Guess they’re still on-route?” I squinted into the darkness.

“Should we go meet them?” Dane picked out a bottle of whiskey we had stored in a small rock hole formed by the temple ruins.

“You want to get up there… right now?” I groaned as I slipped on my normal shoes and stood up.

“Why not? Bring some whiskey over there. It’s fer-da!” Dane cast off the last of his gear, grabbed the whiskey and wandered off into the dark.

VI. A Bit of The Beckey Life

Two days later, we rappelled down the wall with our gardening tools, stripping piles of dirt and tapping out some loose rocks from slots and cracks on the route.

“ROOOOOOOCK! LUO-SHI!” I pulled a large, toaster-sized piece of loose rock from inside a giant hueco and cast it off down the wall. Silence ensued.

CRACK. I watched the rock shatter in the gully below, becoming a cloud of shrapnel as it sped off down towards the lower part of the route. A crackle came out of my radio. I kept staring out into the space where I had just thrown a rock. Something was off.

“… Come in! Come in!” The radio kept crackling.

“Duzi 2, this is Duzi 1. Come in!” Woody called into the radio. I tossed the hammer out of my hand, suddenly swinging to my right as the momentum of the falling hammer pulled down on my harness.

“UGH. PUOAUGH.” I spat out a mouthful of dirt as a cloud of soil hit me in the face from an updraft coming up the cliff. I snatched the radio as my eyes teared up and started dripping water onto the receiver. “Hey… Wo… UGH. BLAH.” I coughed as another gusty updraft picked up speed and pushed some of the soil back up the cliff and hit me again.

“Duzi 1 calling Duzi 2. Requesting permission to take a dump.”

I fumbled with the radio, nearly dropping it down the cliff.

“Wait, what?! What are you talking about?”

Woody’s voice crackled back over the radio. “You guys have been throwing rocks down all morning! Kit and I have been too scared of rock fall to leave base camp to go to the pit toilet we dug!” His voice was clearly irritated. I had disrupted the universal order of colon-based rituals.

“Oh… I…” I looked down at my watch. 10:45. “Shit, I’m sorry, dude. I didn’t realize it was so late! Duzi 2 granting Duzi 1 clearance to pass through the danger zone.” I laughed.

“Copy that, Duzi 2. Duzi 1 en route to pooping. Give us 15 minutes. Over and out.”

“Hey, Dane!” I yelled up the cliff. “The boys, are passing underneath us to the pit toilet. Don’t throw anything down the wall!”

“Oh… oh, right. HA, THEY HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO POOP!” Dane’s voice echoed down the huge gully to the right, his words quickly getting swallowed up by a strong updraft that shot out from the huge chimney at the back of the gully. Kit and Woody were still hundreds of meters below us.

For months–2 years now–Dane and I were blissfully unaware of the world below us. We cleaned debris off our routes and cast them down the cliff and screamed random, usually vulgar exclamations into the void never expecting a response. But we were not alone anymore. Part of new routing at Baiyansi now meant dealing with other people below us while we were high on the wall–an unusual feeling, but one that would make Baiyansi become a place to climb. I popped my headphones back in.

Hi, I’m Jad Abrumrad

And I’m Robert Krulwich, and this is Radiolab.

I looked up at Dane above on Pitch 9 as I plunked down next to the belay station on pitch 8. I stood up and adjusted the wedgie that had formed beneath my harness. We would be lucky to finish cleaning the route by dark…

I sat back on my foam pad against one of the big trees that grew inside the temple ruins. I shifted as bits of Jericho Rose and bits of granite pebbles poked me through my shirt and pants. I sat in silence, staring at the darkening sky while blindly picking some plant barbs off my pant cuffs. The sun had sunk behind the huge forested mountain across the valley from us a few kilometers away. Without a single cloud in the sky, the light turned into a Fauvist color palette of blues, pinks, purples, yellows, and even a bit or orange.

“You CLEARLY need some Sortilege!” Dane got up from in front of our small camp stove wandered over from near our camp kitchen with his hand out holding a small cup full of whiskey. A massive chunk of butter sat in the other, slightly discolored from all the crap we smashed into it with our camp-clean knives from many nights’ dinners.

“Are we gonna eat ALL of that tonight?” My eyes grew wide.

“Why not?? Bring it on down to flavor town!” Dane tossed the chunk of butter up and down in his hand. It had to be at least a couple of hundred grams. “Plus, we are going to pack out of camp tomorrow, now that the project is done. The more of this we eat, the less shit we need to carry back down! MORE BUTTER, RYDER. Put it in your body!” He made a slam-dunk motion with his hands.

He looked over at the stove. “Annnnd, I should probably mix this butter in before the stuff in the bottom starts to burn!” He scurried back over to the stove and sliced off two more large wedges of butter into the vegetable and egg concoction we were preparing with the last of the fresh food left in base camp. The pan hissed as the butter melted and bubbled.

The blues, pinks, and yellows in the sky faded into a deep purple as the sun disappeared below the horizon. Some of the stones of the old foundation blocked the last of the dusk light from my view on the ground.

There was nothing out here to bother us–nothing to get in our way. No rangers, no national forest, no scenic area, no nothing. It was just the five of us, sitting in the stone foundation of a centuries-old abandoned temple, covered in dirt from weeks of development work. I shifted in my seat and felt my back get irritated as more Jericho Rose dribbled down through the back of my jacket and onto my skin.

I wondered if this is what Fred had felt back in the 40s… or the 50s… or the 60s… or for his whole life, for that matter. There were just the mountains and the four of us at Baiyansi. That was our whole world, if only for three weeks. It felt simple. It felt freeing. We could climb these mountains like we had no responsibilities other than opening this route–like the universe was about to come down around us.

I took a long drink out of my whiskey glass and spat out the leaf bits that had settled at the bottom of my cup. I tasted maple syrup.

I wonder if this was a little bit of what Fred felt–a tiny slice of the dirtbag pie.

I lifted the cup to my mouth again and took a sip. I felt giddy. Even a small bit of that free feeling Fred described felt like a flood of positive energy. I wondered if I could maintain this type of thing longer, to try to find my own little piece of what appeared to define his entire life. But I still did prefer the space of the boxy lawn mower Turd Bus van over his pink Thunderbird.