I placed my first bolt on lead during a golden weekend at the end of intern year of emergency medicine residency. I thought about this bolt a lot during the following years, not least because I sustained six months of meralgia paresthetica, or lateral cutaneous nerve palsy, from hanging in my harness for the five hours it took to hand drill into the granite wall. To be clear it should not take five hours to hand-drill a bolt. But this was my first bolt and it was placed awkwardly, up to my left as high as I could reach to protect a slab traverse on our first attempt at a new climbing route.
The bolt was placed in a a fit of madness - I'd been working for 12 days and had my first day off and my eye on a wall on the western edge of Mount Silliman in Sequoia National Park. I'd seen the wall and taken photos while climbing Silliman via the easiest route to the summit, a slabby hike up the drainages south of the peak. To my untrained eye it looked like a series of flakes formed a moderate and aesthetic route to the top of the wall. An internet search revealed no routes in this location. And so on this rare two day weekend GG and I hiked 3 hours to the base of the wall with heavy packs and I started climbing.
The bolt was placed on our first hour on the route. I only made it about 20 feet before I was faced with a slick slab traverse to my left to connect two flake systems. I knew enough about climbing and physics to determine that if I fell on the traverse I'd swing back into the corner I'd been climbing with some amount of force. Without good gear options I called down for the bolt kit. To hand drill a bolt, you hammer a bit into the granite, turning the bit every few strikes and blowing out the rock dust. I made painfully slow progress. I was hanging slightly off center from a six inch cam while my belayer, GG, had tied me off and was listening to podcasts in the rocks below. I felt my legs go numb and my skin start to burn from the high altitude sun. But I didn't stop, even when the first attempt to seat the bolt proved the hole too shallow and I had to start up again.
The (now bolt protected) slab traverse
I think a lot about why I maniacally drilled that bolt as an intern, sleep deprived and thirsty and anxious from hanging from a single cam 20 feet above the ground. It had seemed imperative that I make progress on this route during my limited free time. For the last decade medicine had consumed my attention. As an intern I knew very little and relied on the experience and direction of older physicians. But the work was monotonous, spending hours collecting and regurgitating data and writing notes. Much of the day in the hospital I existed in a state of mixed anxiety and boredom. Maybe I wanted something of my own that was utterly useless from a career standpoint. Maybe I wanted to be someone who wasn't a doctor in training.
The bolt eventually slid in and I fitted a hanger, clipping the rope to this new permanent fixture of the wall. By this time the sun was hanging low and I descended. We cached gear under the boulders and made the trip back to Fresno. On my last day off we returned and climbed two fortuitously simple pitches before leaving the route dormant for the next two years.
We left the route alone in part because the schedule of residency hampered my climbing fitness, in part because of a historically heavy year of snowfall that rendered the high Sierra inaccessible through most of a summer. But it would be disingenuous to say that we didn't avoid the route in part from fear. Those first two pitches had been without significant incident, but climbing into the unknown is frightening, especially in an alpine setting where help is slow to arrive. Training as an emergency medicine physician worked against me - I often took calls on the radio from park rangers planning to evacuate fallen climbers from backcountry locations. For years we stuck to well documented routes in Yosemite Valley and Tuolumne meadows.
As I entered the last year of residency training the unfinished route nagged at me. I didn't want to leave the area with this chapter still open, waiting for me in the Sequoia backcountry. As a senior resident I enjoyed my work more than I had as an early trainee; I spent more time thinking and making decisions, I felt like I played an important role for patients. But I'd also accumulated a lifetimes' worth of minor trauma. Mistakes that I'd made that I felt had hurt people. Folks with problems for which there was no right answer. Familiarity with a health care system that prioritizes profit over patient well being. I still wanted to protect a piece of myself that was utterly compartmentalized from medicine and productivity and career advancement. I wanted to experience a little more of the wild joy that comes from doing useless things.
GG and I scrounged about a month of sporadic climbing training together and were blessed by beautiful October weather in the high country. We humped the huge packs, with a bolt kit and enough gear to climb El Capitan, to base of the West Ridge of Silliman. I'd studied pictures we'd taken from the last belay and couldn't quite figure out how we were going to escape onto the flat upper ridge of Silliman. At the end of the route, the rock steepened into a huge headwall. A dark chimney cut through onto what we guessed was easier ground. Cracks of indeterminable difficulty split the granite to the right of the chimney.
I led the first two pitches smoothly. I was grateful for the bolt that my younger self had placed - the traverse it protected was glacier polished, slick, and unprotectable without it. On revisit the lower two pitches were delightful - clean cracks and corners surmounted by athletic laybacking and delicate footwork. At the last belay we paused looking at the maw of the chimney above. The climbing look steep but featured. I thought it might go.
I led through steep grass and hummocks to the base of the chimney were I was horrified to find only thin seams and face features and an abundance of vegetation occupying the only protectable cracks. The chimney itself was wet and composed of crumbling weathered granite, pieces of which broke off in my hand. I thought of the park rangers calling in to the hospital for fallen climbers. I called down once again for the bolt kit.
I again found myself in a state of compulsive activity where retreat felt like an impossibility. I hammered in a piton, unwilling to commit the time to bolting at this late hour in the day. The piton placement was timely as just moments later I slipped on the grassy slabs and fell, bringing my weight down on this archaic bit of gear. I regained my footing and set to clearing a crack to the right of the chimney of its grass and shrubs, slowly aiding upward as I cleared each section. Fear and frustration caused tears to well up. But as in medical training, in climbing sometimes the only way to the end is through relentless forward progress.
I finally pulled through my last small cam onto the blocky summit of the wall. "5.9 C1", I exhaled into the radio to GG, acknowledging out loud that we hadn't been able to establish a free climb; that the aid designation might deter future climbers from venturing out to our new route. But as I belayed him up the last pitch I knew that Green Swing, as we would name the climb, would remain for the time being an aid climb. I wasn't coming back.
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