Learning to Fly

by Steph Davis

  In the aftermath of the arch debacle, and the virtual drubbing that had come from the climbing chat boards, I’d asked myself why there wasn’t more positive energy in the online climbing world. It was the early days of the Internet, before people even used the term social media. Friends who were more up on trends had encouraged me for some time to start a website and a blog, and to join this new thing called Facebook, which I didn’t fully understand, though I was becoming addicted to the convenience of instant communication through e-mail. I did know plenty of climbers, and they all loved climbing and being part of the global family of climbers, being able to show up at any campground in the world and sit around a fire with people who would become new friends and climbing partners. It just didn’t match up with the snarky nastiness that seemed to appoint itself as the voice of the climbing community on the Internet, if only by default.

  I found it disturbing to see climbing devolve into negativity and malice, and having experienced the shock of having some of it directed at me and my life almost made me want to quit being a climber at all, much less a professional one. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to coexist in a world like that. For me, climbing had always been something pure and aspirational, a path to become better in every way. Why share my deepest love and passion with people who wanted to hurl meanness at it? But the negative energy and pettiness that infected the climbing chat boards just didn’t add up. These weren’t the climbers I knew. Something was not right, and though that loud, malicious voice proclaimed itself to be the voice of the climbing community, to the point that sponsors reacted by trying to disassociate themselves from anything it chose to tear apart, I didn’t think it was.

  The arch debacle was like a crash course on the power of the Internet. Though the experience was deeply negative, it left me strangely compelled to find the positive side that had to be out there, the hundreds and thousands of people I’d personally met who were enthusiastic, positive, and caring—climbers who just loved climbing.

  I started a blog, without even knowing what it was or how to do it, writing the way I wrote in my own journal, and asking people to write me back. I discovered the liberating joy of having my own forum for storytelling, photos, and connection. Suddenly I didn’t need someone else’s magazine or catalog to reach out to the climbing community. I could create my own world. It was life changing. I discovered that I could help people, and they helped me immeasurably.

  I started to receive beautiful, heartfelt letters from climbers and outdoorspeople, telling me I’d inspired or helped them in some way through my book or my stories. Several people told me they were grateful to have found a place on the Internet where they could find other people who shared the simple love of climbing. Many people wrote to me from the depths of turmoil, looking for some guidance or help in trying to reconcile their passion for climbing with the pressures of a more mainstream society, thinking I might have some insight on the struggle because of the things I’d written. Many people wrote to me simply to say hello, often from other continents, and to tell me they liked knowing I was out there, living the climbing life of simplicity and adventure. Getting these letters meant everything to me. I was feeling deeply vulnerable about climbing, my path, and about life itself. But this community was telling me that I still had a place and I was contributing something. I wasn’t worthless, though I’d felt that way after being unceremoniously dumped by both of my main sponsors and losing my spouse, and that strong, positive community was there, even more than I’d imagined. They were a lot more numerous, though a lot less loud, than the few unhappy people writing on chat-board forums under fake names, and they made me feel like a part of something pure again. Though things were unclear and not easy, as usual, I wasn’t going to stop doing what I loved. Things would work out somehow.

  Harder to resolve were my feelings toward my estranged husband, Dean. With no warning, he had concluded that we should reunite and make things work, and he had suddenly appeared in Moab, with the idea that he would move back in and everything could be fine from now on. I felt that it was almost another life since I’d driven out of Yosemite, though it had been only four months. The life-altering experiences I’d had through the summer, on the Diamond, in the air, and in my mind had transformed me even more than many of the extreme experiences we’d had together on walls and mountains. He wanted to “try again,” as though things were the same as they’d always been—which was perhaps not unreasonable, since we’d been in a regular pattern of breaking up and getting back together since we were twenty-three years old. But nothing was the same anymore, although Fletch was clearly delighted to have both her humans together with her.

  He’d been jumping for several years already. Now that I’d suddenly started to skydive and learn to base jump, and he’d suddenly decided he wanted to be married again, he saw it all as an ideal opportunity to reunite and start over. He wanted to help me learn, and to act as my mentor, in the longstanding tradition of base jumpers. He hoped to show me that things really were different, that we could start something new together, with him helping me. It sounded nice, more than nice, and I wanted to believe in the promise of a happy future together. But I’d heard it before. I wasn’t sure I wanted to mix the complications of our relationship with starting to base jump, but realistically, it was all hopelessly mixed together and had been since the first day I’d jumped from the Otter.

  Seeing him made me feel torn in half. I couldn’t believe he’d decided to show up now, just when I’d pulled my life back together on my own. I knew for sure I didn’t want to go back, ever, to where I was that day in El Cap meadow four months ago. That was a risk I would not take. And rationally, I didn’t see how I could try again this time. After living through the experience of being left on my own when my life fell apart, I knew that when I most needed support, I could expect to be abandoned. It’s strange to love someone who’s let you down so dramatically. I wanted to trust again; I just didn’t know how. Still, I couldn’t seem to tell him to leave, though I knew I should. I suggested that he rent a different place, and we take it from there, but he found that impractical. I took what I knew was the easy way out and told myself I would just let things unfold, despite my better judgment. I was done with trying to take things in hand and manage them, and to a certain point, the simple reality was that he would do what he wanted to anyway, as he always had. What I had recently learned was that taking action felt better than agonizing over emotional distress. This new development was almost too much for me to deal with. It was easiest to ignore my concerns about the murky situation and pour my energy into the new project of base jumping, which he was eager to join. I just wanted to start jumping, for things to stay simple and good as they’d been all summer when Fletch and I were in Boulder. I was tired of the emotional roller coaster.

  We walked together to the top of the Tombstone, on the trail we’d walked together so many times before. Together, we’d made the first free ascent of the crack line up the center of the face, so we’d spent many hours on this rock, working out the difficult moves. I dropped my stash bag and sat on the top, looking around at the familiar view, the brown cliffs and canyons stretching out for miles around, the Colorado River smoothly flowing, the ravens circling in the blue sky. I felt a lot of doubt. Why exactly did I want to do this again? I remembered how shocking it was to watch people jump off the top of this cliff, to see their bodies falling. I wanted to do this jump, but I also wondered why I wanted to do it. I put on my base rig, knee pads, and helmet. I felt comfortable here, as much as being in my own yard. It was nothing like the bridge. As I walked toward the edge to look down, I realized I had no idea how to jump off without holding on to a railing behind me. The cliff felt empty and exposed. I had imagined that I would feel totally confident because of all the jumps I’d done at the Perrine. I thought I would just take a few steps and jump off, but as I looked over the edge, I felt a sharp stab of panic. I knew I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t been this deeply afraid maybe ever. I was surprised by t
he level of fear I felt, making me unable to do anything. I’d never been totally stopped by fear before, but that’s what was happening. I simply couldn’t run off the cliff.

  “I don’t know how to exit without the railing,” I said. “I didn’t realize how different it would feel. I wish I’d been able to jump off the bridge without having the railing there, to learn that feeling of going off the edge with nothing. I don’t think I can do it.” I looked down, feeling hopeless.

  “I can PCA you,” Dean said. He would be standing right behind me, holding my pilot chute. All I’d have to do is step off the edge, just the same as my first bridge jump.

  “Okay.” I turned my head to watch as he pulled the pilot chute and the bridle out of the spandex pouch at the bottom of my rig. He folded the bridle and held on to the top of the pilot chute, and we stepped to the very edge of the Tombstone. Trust is a strange thing. Though I didn’t trust him with my heart, I had an unwavering trust in his ability here on this cliff. He’d been my partner in mountains and storms, roped and unroped, and in those life-and-death physical and psychological situations he had never let me down. In all the years we’d climbed together, I’d known that I could count on him more than anyone else to keep it together in high-risk moments in the mountains. Together, we’d never been hurt and never had an accident, though we’d pushed the limits of risk regularly and had many arduous and frightening experiences on rock walls and glaciers. In the wild, natural environment, he was the best, most reliable partner I’d ever known. He stood close behind me, holding my pilot chute. Though in two seconds I’d be in the air on my own, I no longer felt quite as exposed. It was the extra hand I needed to get through this moment of go or don’t go.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes, okay, on three,” I said. I took a shaky breath.

  “Eyes on the horizon and arch,” he said mechanically. “Try to give a good push and get away from the wall.”

  I looked out where the sky touched the distant canyon rims and cleared my brain of everything. It was strangely hard to function. All I had to do was step off the edge. I took another breath.

  “Okay.” I would need to start the base jumper’s countdown to get my feet to move. “Three. Two. One. See ya!” I shouted, and stepped straight off the edge, without giving anything like a good push. Almost immediately, my body twisted as the parachute started to come off my back. The lines stretched tight and straight, and the canopy flew forward while I rotated around under it. For a moment I saw the wall, and then I twisted back around to the front, flying straight ahead, and the panic disappeared. I grabbed the steering toggles and pulled them free. The large boulders at the base of the Tombstone were getting closer as I flew over them. I turned left and lined up with the dirt road that stretched out ahead of me like a perfect runway, pulling the brake lines down hard as the road started to rush up toward me fast. I landed hard, gasping for breath, the parachute puddling over the hard-packed dirt. I heard the pounding of feet behind me as Dean landed.

  “Wow” was all I could manage. I stood there for a solid minute before I could start picking up my parachute. “Wow. I want to do it again!”

  “Maybe tomorrow.” Dean looked drained of energy.

  At home, I looked at the calendar. October 24, exactly four months to the day since my first skydive. It was getting almost eerie, the way these completely unplanned events continued to fall on successive calendar dates, insistently reminding me of when and how it all began, the string of events that had brought me to now. I might be trying to forget or just to let it go and move ahead, but every twenty-fourth seemed to be shaking me by the shoulders and trying to snap my attention back to June 24, to El Cap meadow and the door of the Otter.

  Tombstone free fall

  Having survived the first cliff jump, it seemed all right to do a few more, since the slope is always slippery. The hardest thing for me with jumping was the inability to practice new things before doing them. There was no way to rehearse jumping off the edge of a cliff for the first time. I’d just had to do it and hope for the best, literally jumping into the unknown. My natural confidence and strength were rooted in discipline and practice. I found it difficult to do dangerous new things knowing I didn’t have any practice or experience to rely on. But continuously pushing myself to break through and enter this new style was teaching me how to go into the unknown and manage things as they happened. It gave me a new type of confidence, seeing that I could handle the unexpected.

  On the next two jumps, the extreme fear of leaving the edge had subsided, at least enough for me to execute a decent base jump, giving a good push off the edge and pulling out my own pilot chute in the air.

  As I packed and folded my canopy on the living room floor, Dean looked at the clock. It was just before noon.

  “Maybe we should do Castleton,” he said offhandedly.

  Castleton Tower is perhaps the most iconic rock in the Utah desert, at least for climbers. It’s a square-sided column of sandstone that rises straight from the pointed top of an enormous pile of sand, rock, and dirt. It takes about an hour to walk up the steep, thousand-foot trail to the base of Castleton, and then anywhere from one to five hours to climb up the four hundred feet of sheer vertical rock to the summit. The only way up is to rock climb, and the only way down is to rappel with ropes—or jump. Castleton was first scaled in 1961 with pitons and hemp ropes by my climbing hero, Layton Kor, with Huntley Ingalls. Now it’s climbed regularly by one of several routes of varying difficulties on the four different sides. Many people arrive at the summit, exhausted and exhilarated, with an enormous rack of gear. I had taken to free soloing one of the standard routes, the North Chimney, carrying a shoestring-like four-millimeter rope on my back for the rappels back down. I’d also climbed it a few times with my husband in the past years since he’d become a jumper, watching him go off and then rappelling back down alone. As a base jump, Castleton is about the same vertical height as the Tombstone, but with a much longer distance to fly under canopy because of the long hillside under it. But unlike the Tombstone, no two-lane dirt road stretches out in front.

  “Where do you land for Castleton?” I asked. I couldn’t picture any large, open space in that landscape, but maybe I hadn’t been paying attention in that way before.

  “On that dirt trail we cross in the beginning of the hike. It’s a long runway, it’s just narrower than the road at the Tombstone. It’s fine,” he answered.

  It was impossible for me to judge what was fine and what wasn’t fine. This was my fourth base jump from a cliff. I trusted his judgment.

  “Don’t you think it’s kind of late? We’d still have to organize, drive out there, and walk up and climb and haul the rigs.”

  “There’s plenty of time. We’ll just free solo together and it won’t take any time to get up there. It’s a better jump for you than Tombstone.”

  “Okay.” I finished closing the pins of my container and folded my pilot chute into the pocket. “I need to get my shoes and chalk bag, and we can go.”

  We drove out to Castleton Tower, feeling almost furtive, as if we were doing something wrong. We both knew I should be jumping taller, safer objects for these first jumps, and we knew Jimmy and Marta would disapprove. In the car, we agreed that after this I would stop jumping in Moab until it was time to go to Europe and jump the bigger cliffs. We wound through the sandstone canyon to the large trail that had once been a dirt road. I looked down it. It was narrow, no more than three feet wide in some places, though it had sections that were closer to five feet wide. Although generally a long, straight stretch, the trail sloped up and down and made small bends. Stout, scrubby juniper trees and boulders hemmed the sides in between the wider parts. It looked much different from the wide-open dirt road at the Tombstone.

  Castleton Tower, Moab, Utah

  “We land here?” I asked doubtfully.

  “It’s a huge runway,” Dean said authoritatively. “You just line it up straight. It’s one of the easiest landi
ng areas around.”

  I turned toward Castleton Tower, the familiar square spike rising out of the talus cone. We hiked at our customary brisk pace up the steep trail, carrying only our base rigs, climbing shoes, and one thin rope. The North Chimney was perhaps my favorite route on the tower, and one that I’d guided countless times in the past. Many cracks ran up the straight wall, leading into a giant chimney that split the side of the tower. Like all sandstone, some blocks and edges were loose, but the cracks themselves were straight-edged and completely positive. It was four hundred feet of vertical climbing to the top of the tower, with three small ledges along the way where you could stop. For most base jumpers, Castleton falls into the category of dream jumps. The top can be reached only through technical climbing, which is prohibitive for those who don’t climb much. My climbing skills made it extremely easy for me to get to the top of pretty much anything I wanted, and to feel comfortable there. For a new base jumper, this seemed like a big asset.

  We free soloed together, as we’d done so many times before in Yosemite and Patagonia, stopping at the small ledges to pull the rigs up with the thin rope. It was a bit hard to remember that it was now, when everything was different, in every way.

  It was early when we climbed over the top of Castleton, onto the large, flat summit. I looked around in all directions, at the other sandstone towers lining the ridge and the faraway mud castles of Fisher Towers to the east. The La Sal Mountains were delicately pointed and coated in snow, in contrast to the red rim below them. Grayish sage and deep green junipers dotted the rusty ground below us. It was hard to discern the contours of the landscape from above. Everything looked kind of flat, and having just walked up a hill for an hour, I knew it was anything but flat. But I felt more excited than nervous. The jumps from the Tombstone had revived my feelings of confidence. This would be very much the same, followed by a skydive-length canopy ride, and I had plenty of experience with that.