4.20.99 til' Infinity

It’s rare to be told by an editor that you can write whatever you want, but that’s how this essay got started.

Since the seed was planted, the publication with said editor didn’t come to fruition, but I wrote out this piece, and I want to share it.

This story is about where this crazy climbing life all started for me, as it started for many of us in this modern world: my first climbing gym.

I was experiencing a mental health crisis when I started climbing. The year was 1999 and I’d never heard words like self-care or mental health. I didn’t even really know what depression was, or that my mind was tormenting me with intrusive and delusional thoughts.

I’ve written a memoir about this time in my life — American Climber — so if you want the full story pick up a copy, but the short of it is climbing offered a way for my mental health to improve, and I’m still here today and I try to freely tell my story to anyone who it might help.

I started in that gym, Upper Limits, located in my hometown of Bloomington, Illinois, in April, and by that August I was already gone to Gunnison, Colorado, leaving behind the plastic of the gym for the granite of Gunny.

Once I tasted the freedom of the big walls of the west, gyms were merely places to pass time in the colder months, I viewed pulling on plastic as passive practice for a quick pump.

If you’re lucky to live life long enough, things come around full circle. At one point the big walls stopped calling my name, and I had to find a place for my passion to go; I still loved the act of climbing as much as ever, I just had to downshift, and recalibrate.

Where was all this love going to go?

In some ways it went back to where it started: the gym. After twenty plus years of climbing I did something most aging crusty trad dads rarely do: I started training.

Which is what led me back to my original climbing gym in the land where I was born: I was jonesin’ for a good workout.

I hadn’t been back to Upper Limits in years, because a nicer, friendlier gym had opened up: The Proving Ground. Other than my parents house, The Proving Ground is the only other place that really feels like home in my hometown. But, The Proving Ground had to be moved — something about a pickleball takeover of the rental space — so it was back to that place where it all began.

Upper Limits was billed as the largest climbing gym in the world in the 1990s, and the place hasn’t changed a bit since. As I checked in, they had records of my original visits in 1999, but I still had to fill out 20 different waivers, and then also get a tour of the facility, with oddly specific rules.

Near the end of the tour, I asked if they had any weights, and the employee showed me to a milk crate box with two ten-pound plates. No wonder I didn’t start training when I started climbing, strength training barely existed!

After the tour that seemed to go on forever, I finally was able to begin my workout, and I strolled down memory lane in my mind.

The gym consists of connected old grain silos, with slick 1990s holds; some of said holds being spinners that were spinners when I started climbing there! This gym was also never a very friendly place, and the overall feeling as I tried to warm up, was not very inspirational. Yet, at the same time I was able to travel back in time, back to being 20 years old, back to the 1990s.

I hopped on to an auto belay and got the blood moving; jamming to some Grateful Dead on my head phones, and tapping into a zone. If the good vibes weren’t coming from the place, I’d create my own from within.

I’ve done a lot of internal work and healing over the years, and especially a lot in the last couple years since I started therapy. One technique that my therapist uses when I’ve talked about the pain of the time period when I was severely depressed and suicidal is to have a conversation with my younger self.

At first it seemed cheesy, but I’ve since found it is a good technique to heal, and to forgive myself and the world around me.

And what a better time to have this conversation than at a place that was like walking back into 1999. As I shook hands and looked face to face with twenty-year-old me, he would have been proud, even astounded.

While forty-five-year-old me sometimes wonders why this growth took so long, the twenty-year-old me would be amazed that it ever happened. Amazed at the places I saw, the friendships that came out of those adventures, and the beautiful women that were attracted to me, once I found confidence within myself.

The day I finally mastered the figure 8 knot was April 20th, 1999. It was something to feel good about amidst a chaotic mental state of delusions and haunting intrusive thoughts. That night I learned of the Columbine high school shootings, which marked the beginning of an era of insanity in these so-called United States of America; a trend that still tragically continues to this day, in a country that seems to love automatic weapons more than children.

I’ve seen the highest of highs since those days of the lowest of lows. I’ve been on the mountaintop, and often it wasn’t the high I expected, but occasionally it was even better.

I believe in a higher power based on what I’ve seen and experienced, but so much is a mystery rather than a certainty. One thing is for sure, I know I’m here to not only be a climber, but more importantly honestly write out all the highs and the lows for someone else to benefit from.

Eventually, once I was warmed up from enough laps on the auto belay I made my way to the hangboard set up in a darkened corner; an afterthought in the design of the place. By then I queued up Shakedown Street, the Grateful Dead album that was released the year I was born, an album I never get sick of.

Usually, when I hangboard I prefer hip hop, but this day I channeled a different kind of energy. Endorphins started flowing, the energy of climbing that I love so much bonded with the good ole Grateful Dead, and I felt that perfect high that is climbing; in a dusty, crappy gym, in an imperfect world.

Climbing and the community, has been there for me in one way or another since I first tied in. As an OG in this world now, I know I am here for it. For you. For us. To try and turn this thing around, with one stroke of positivity after another

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