Powerscream

Highway 550 has never seemed natural. Growing up on Colorado’s the front range, I always cherished my time in the high-country, where highways snaked through long canyons between mountains with long ridges and round tops. More hills than anything else. 550, on the other hand feels more like a hiking trail, hugging tightly to the mountainsides and piercing patchy forests of spruce and aspen before winding up into the flats of Molas pass ringed by needles and spires of stone that put most of the front range to shame.

These were the thoughts I had watching the curves fall away, climbing into the high-country yet again in my small ford ranger, this time to scale the tall cliffs above the Animas River. With me I had my childhood friend Zach and a short funny man named Ryan, a good friend of mine who never fails to scare the shit out of me when he’s on the other end of the rope.

At the top of Molas Pass we pulled off the highway and parked in the red dirt lot, donning packs and setting off into the highlands of early August. We hiked down from the tundra into the thinning spruce forest and down through the thick and rocky old growth of the Animas River canyon.

I was studying anthropology in school, and I spent a good deal of time thinking about transitions and liminal spaces. People are always changing, always growing and redefining themselves, and this affects the way we see the world. These mountains, the ones that stand so high above the desert, seem to be worlds unto their own. Places where the flowers glow too bright and the breath is hesitant to enter your lungs. Wet and moss covered, the rocks are red like fresh meat or blood and the elk stare from the trees like the eyes of the world. The San Juans have a dream-like quality, as though they are a liminal space and a world unto their own. you could arrive home and question if the events of the day were real or if the place of nodding onions and ancient trees cut by clear streams was a work of the imagination.

Hiking into the four-thousand-foot-deep canyon of the Animas, the transition between worlds was clear. We started by following established trails, but gradually found thin climbers tracks leading down long sloping ledges in the quartzite domes. Hanging fields of razzberries were just beginning to ripen atop the flowing stone and the air was already holding the weight of the storm to come. We followed Ryan through a series of ledges and cliff bands, down and down, until after a while we reached a long grassy bench beneath a massive wall of semi-translucent quartzite. Bolt hangers gleamed in the morning light.

We put on harnesses and dumped our packs onto the thinning tundra and began to climb. Ryan led first, clipping bolts and pulling through an overhang to the anchors with ease, seeming to ignore the long spaces between gear and the potential for big falls. He’s a bold climber.

Zach and Ryan had both been climbing since their middle school years, but I started when I got to college and often ended up following them around and belaying without trying very hard myself. If you spend enough time around climbers you begin to hear a lot of talk about effort and commitment. All too often a climber gets stuck on a route because they can’t manage to commit to a move they a capable of making for fear of falling, or are able to make the move on occasion but fail to try hard enough when it comes time to finish the route at hand. It was through these conversations about effort that began to hear about the powerscream.

The term “powerscream” is self explanatory. When faced with a great challenge or large fall, climbers will often resort to screaming before and during the hardest moves of a climb. Some people grunt, others shout or make karate-like noises that draw stares from the hikers on the ground. The powerscream is the last ounce of effort leaving the body, the indication of finding one’s limit. In many ways it could be equated to a war cry-the only sensible reaction for a person whose fear and physical ability are the only two things keeping them from failure-or worse-injury.

Zach and I took our turns top-roping the warm up route before we moved on down the crag. We followed the ledge down still, until the wave of quartzite above broke into a long slightly overhanging slab no more than 20 feet across. Ryan pointed up and said

“This one is The Raven”

We all looked up for a moment at the length of it, the smooth rock, the constant angle. It was beautiful.

Route names have a mystical quality. They can be jokes, political commentary, puns, book titles, songs or pseudonyms. The hardest and most prestigious routes have mythical names, the way swords have ancient titles in medieval myth. There are a few that everyone knows: Freerider, the Dawn Wall, Silence, Bibliographie. In Durango there are mythical routes as well, Breaking Ben, Valhalla, and Close to the edge to name a few. But few compare to The Raven. the scale of the landscape, the quality of the rock along with the intensity and difficulty of the moves made it special. Despite this, few climbers know of it’s existence and it is rarely done.

Today it would see a rare free ascent.

Ryan loaded his harness with gear and started up the route. He hung on a few bolts, trying the crux moves near the top, but resting and moving slowly to avoid the possibility of a big fall, one that would be mandatory if he made one wrong move through the section of thin quartzite edges and slick footholds. He was stumped. If he didn’t finish the climb he would have to leave gear on the wall with no guarantee of getting back. He let Zach and I try to finish the climb, and as I moved through the steep and technical moves to the first ledge the sky began to darken. A storm was blowing in from the North, shading the 13,000 foot peaks and dramatic canyon walls of the Animas. Zach breezed through the first half of the climb, but was also stumped by the crux. The wind began to blow.

When Zach touched the ground we discussed what to do. I expected us to leave the gear and bail before the storm hit, but Ryan was determined. Quickly he pulled the rope, leaving himself no choice but to lead the route again. I had seen him like this before, getting quiet and tying in, chalking up and blowing on his fingers, never fully hearing what you said as though he were listening to another voice entirely. The wind blew as he started upwards, a faint rumble of thunder in the distance.

He climbed faster this time, dialing in the moves, chalking and resting every twenty or so feet. He made quick work of the first half of the climb, gaining the ledge as the first drizzles of rain cascaded down the cliffs. He had to move quick, quartzite is nearly impossible to climb when wet and this was his last shot for the day. The moves above him were hard, going at 5.12b, and he would have to ace them on his second try. In the rain.

Ryan is not a fearless person, nor are most climbers. Everyone gets scared and It’s how you respond to that fear that determines your boldness, your headgame. Ryan is good at continuing upwards, even when he risks a serious fall. His climbing doesn’t change (if anything he climbs better) with one exception: he begins to scream.

Starting off the ledge, a crack of thunder echoed through the canyon, reverberating down to the river. Ryan started breathing loudly, feet scrambling on the wet and overhung rock, pulling his feet high and loading himself like a spring. He was breathing heavily and Zach (who was on belay) was tense, ready to catch a big fall. Ryan pulled it together, and screaming at the top of his lungs, shot upwards as lightning flashed across the boiling sky.

Ryan’s screams are unique. He doesn’t grunt, he genuinely screams. like someone sunk a knife into his back, or as if his mother had died. There is something desperate about it, ragged, like the sharp edge of a serrated knife. In fact, later in the summer, we had search and rescue called on us because a hiker heard his screams and thought he was dying at the bottom of Cascade canyon.

He stuck the move and pulled through to the next bolt as his screams bounced off the canyon walls and came back to us in rounds through the patchy rain and thunder. The rain came with intensity as Ryan clipped the anchors and lowered off, thunder still rolling through the canyon. The sky was dark now and the world began to shrink the way it does in a storm. Climbing was over for the day, so we hiked down to the rivers edge and along the very base of the cliffs, tangling in the thick snags of current bush and skunk cabbage, taking breaks in mossy tree wells, hearing little but the rushing of the river.

Rain is catharsis. It brings a welcome relief to the landscape, one that is tangible and obvious in every form of life. All you need do is breath in and smell the petrichor. Rainstorms remind me of crying, the feeling of holding something in and releasing, then basking in the calm after the storm. My favorite thing about being in nature, specifically while rock climbing, is that feeling of release. Scaring yourself shitless on the cliffs often helps balance the turmoil inside with the calm you try to present. It’s often said that a breakup can make you climb a grade harder.

In this way, climbing (at least for me) becomes a right of reversal, and activity that allows the kind of release that isn’t acceptable in daily life. How often do you get the chance to scream? To cry? How often do you have the opportunity to drown everything out, see nothing but the colors of your emotion and use them to achieve a goal?. This is what climbing does. It gives you an opportunity to scream.

These were the thoughts I had watching the river rise in the bottom of the canyon, now soaked because I had forgotten rain pants. We started back up, pulling on roots and trunks, up the winding ledge to where we stashed our gear, then up again through the muck to the trail. I began to see colors I hadn’t noticed before, the dark green of aging aspen leaves and yellows in the lumpy field of grass. Even my truck had changed, washed clean and shining dark blue against the red packed dirt of the parking lot. Driving down the winding trail of Highway 550, we recounted the events of the day, with Zach and I telling Ryan how his screams had mixed with the thunder. Clouds shifted around the mountains, and we opened the windows on the final stretch to home, feeling the release of a long awaited rain and soothing aching throats. The storm was now calm, having screamed and finally fallen to earth.