The Place Where Murder and Climbing Meet

From October 20-22, hundreds of climbers descended on Oregon’s Smith Rock State Park for the American Alpine Club’s annual Craggin’ Classic event. And nobody was murdered.

A strange parenthetical, if ever there was one. But really, what isn’t these days, where nothing is too strange to be true, nothing is unprecedented any more, and nothing is beyond the pale, here in 2023, the year of our lord, in the United States of Freedom Loving America? 

Sadly, the only thing unusual about this story is the fact that it was the first time a climbing event was targeted for a mass shooting. Outside of that curious detail, what we have here is basically business as usual. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been more mass shootings than days this year, the latest of which transpired on Wednesday October 18, just two days before the Craggin’ Classic kicked off, when 18 people were gunned down by U.S. Army Reservist, Robert Card, at a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine. 

If you paid more attention to Garner’s failed plot than Card’s successful one you can be excused, I think, for succumbing to the inexorable pull of the new and novel. Eventually, we lose our taste for the more commonplace tragedies that pepper our lives. The border war, the Black Lives Matter movement, bombs over Baghdad—they all had their moments in the limelight before being replaced by shinier objects. At the rate of 500-plus per year, mass shootings hardly register on the Richter scale any more, relegated instead to the lesser-visited corners of our minds beside seemingly interminable wars and the natural disaster du jour, whose body counts pile up like ticker tape on the stock room floor. 

So-called climbing tragedies are getting to be this way, too. “What Really Happened on K2, And Why 100 Climbers Stepped Over a Dying Man on Their Way to the Summit.” “Deadliest Season: 17 Deaths Reported on Mount Everest in Spring 2023.” “Climbing Guide Falls to Death on Yosemite’s El Capitan.” Just a handful of headlines from 2023. More ticker tape for the backs of our minds. Climbing fatalities are not so unusual in the greater scheme of things. It’s the bullet holes, more than seeing blood and guts and bits of viscera splattered around the base of a popular crag, that would have given us pause.

As a climber, it’s hard not to feel like Garner had some particular ax to grind with the climbing community at large. Perhaps it was a generalized disenchantment with the direction climbing is going in this country, or with the Mazamas, or American Alpine Club (Garner was a prior member of both). Maybe he was perturbed by the growth of the sport, the increasing shift from trad to sport, tick marks, drones, dogs at the crag. Did Garner draw a metaphorical through line between the birthplace of sport climbing in America, and the current state of things in the climbing world? Could he have pegged Smith Rock as the origin point from which widespread consumerism and mainstream culture began to seep into a sport that was once so counter-cultural, and anti-establishment? Being a climber used to mean something: an identity for pariahs and iconoclasts, and a code of ethics which they risked their lives to adhere to. Now, it’s everyone’s Instagram profile pic. 

Or maybe none of that factored into Garner’s motives. Maybe some part of him was just a “horrible, psychopathic monster,” as he wrote in an email to a recent romantic interest. Curiously, I didn’t attach particular significance to the choice of venues for Card’s mass murder. I assumed that Card chose the bowling alley at random. Smith Rock may have been just as random to Garner. Indeed, he had also fantasized about enacting similar violence on his recently-divorced wife and her family in Michigan, as well as opening day skiers at Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort. The answer to the questions Why climbers? Why Smith Rock? may be nothing more than the relative proximity of the Craggin’ Classic event to Garner in space and time at the zenith of his mental collapse.

And it was a mental collapse that precipitated Garner driving out to Deschutes County with a car loaded down with guns and ammunition, just as it was a mental collapse that led to Card’s brutal slaughter of 18 innocent people in Lewiston, Maine. Officially, “people with mental illness account for a very small proportion of perpetrators of mass shootings in the U.S.” At least that’s what Ragy Girgis, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University says. I wonder if perhaps that fact alone doesn’t suggest a need for expanding the parameters. What else could you call a mass shooter than mentally ill? Certainly you couldn’t consider them sane. Right? Or perhaps that’s a Pandora’s Box better left unopened.

Could it be that there is also a massively underdiagnosed mental health crisis among a certain subset of climbers in this country? Namely, 20-and-early-30-somethings—typically males—who live in vans, covet attention, sponsorships and summits well beyond their grasp, make climbing the focal point of their lives, and post conspicuously capricious photos and videos of themselves going YOLO free solo on social media. Look, I get it. I am intimately familiar with the thrill of climbing with such wanton abandon that it feels as if you’re daring fate—or God, if some part of you still entertains such a notion, however dimly—to smite you down for your hubris. I used to solo plenty. But I never stopped in the middle of a solo to take a Goddamned selfie. The brashness, the unfettered ego, the complete lack of respect for the stone itself, for gravity, for one’s parents and loved ones, the culture of complacency that infests climbing like a virus these days—if you’ve lost friends to climbing accidents, if you’ve seen climbing deaths firsthand, you tend to have a little more circumspection around the risks you and the people you love take. 

But I’m ranting. I haven’t been the same since Hayden Kennedy’s death. I did not know him, but like so many climbers, admired him from afar. He was a climber’s climber. Pure of heart. Perspicacious. His decision to pull back from cutting edge alpinism after losing so many friends showed impressive restraint and maturity beyond his years; and yet, simultaneously, struck me as the only rational thing to do. The circumstances surrounding Inge’s death, and the decision he made in the aftermath, made me feel more acutely than ever that the entire gestalt of our sport, if not my own life, amounted to nothing more than one big Greek tragedy. All the stoke, all the gear sold and purchased, all the film fests, photos, articles, climbing clubs, climbing festivals, vanlife, sponsorships, dawn patrols, moments of transcendence, hours spent fondling stone, what good is it all if it only leads to life cut down in its prime, and the inevitable heartbreak that follows? I couldn’t really blame Kennedy for what he did (though I wished he didn’t); not after seeing what he saw. 

Perhaps it took me so long to see because I didn’t want it to be true, if for no other reason than because it would mean my parents were right. Back in 2007, they accurately perceived that the purported reason for my early forays into free soloing—namely, the pursuit of some dubious kind of satori—was largely bullshit. But it took me ten years and nearly as many friends lost to climbing to see my motives more clearly. Really, all I wanted to do was climb my brains out. But I incorrectly concluded that the best way to achieve that goal was by going pro—which for me, meant risking life and limb. I wasn’t a good enough climber to make it on skill alone, but I was bold and dumb. I had no qualms about getting myself into idiotic situations, almost dying, and then writing a great article about it. And judging by the lay of the land, that was pretty much the only way to get sponsored if you couldn’t send V10 or 5.14. I could’ve just become a nurse instead, and made good money working three days on, four days off. But nobody told me that, and I was none the wiser.

I also would be remiss not to mention that certain life events led to an uptick in my soloing and risk-taking. Namely heartbreak, bouts of depression, and oscillating extremes of narcissism and self-loathing. The times when I was most prolific with senselessly bold climbs were times when I should have been on the couch with a shrink, or even just on the phone with a good friend. We wouldn’t call it suicidal ideation in our community. I certainly didn’t think of it in those terms at the time. But if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t really know what else to call it now. I didn’t feel like I was suicidal because I wasn’t sad. But I sure as hell was curious what it might be like to have a foot slip way up high, and see the ground racing up toward me. I recall with crystalline clarity multiple instants on multiple climbs, spread out over multiple years, when I wondered, “is this it? Is this the last move I’ll ever make?” And I know I’m not alone in this. I could reel off a handful of soloing deaths that, off the record, were probable suicides. But most friends and families don’t want to remember the dearly departed, especially those who exuded such potent joie de vivre, in such dim, gloomy light. 

I can’t help but wonder if, to non-climbers, the death of a climber and the death of a mass shooting victim come across as equally tragic, equally pointless, equally galling examples of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If anything, the climber’s death is arguably more tragic, since climbing is eminently risky, and patently avoidable. Moreover, there’s a certain insanity to both scenarios to the uninitiated that places comprehension firmly out of grasp. Someone lacking a murderous mind can perhaps no more easily understand the actions of a man like Garner than a nonclimber can fathom choosing to test his or her mettle against a so-called Killer Mountain. What choice is one left but to throw up one’s hands at the sheer inscrutability of it all? It’s called Killer Mountain for a reason, one might say, what did you expect? 

This is a dark road to go down. Nobody, seemingly, wants to talk about the possibility that climbing has a mental health crisis. But consider the ramifications if such a crisis did, in fact, haunt our community. Surely a distinguishable curve could be drawn through a scatterplot of lives that included, as data points, Lama, Roskelley, and Auer; Potter and Leary; Copp and Dash; Steck, LeClerc, Gobright, Nelson. Perhaps more notable still are the lesser North American climbing celebrities whose stars did not shine bright enough for major sponsorships or recognition on a global stage, but who amassed something of a cult following among the trad climbing cognoscenti of the American West. Climbers of this echelon somehow seem even more tragic, as they tend to die pursuing a level of prowess and acclaim which probably would have always eluded them. Gobright—doomed to live forever in the shadow of the likes of Honnold and Leclerc—struck me this way. Folks like Andrew Barnes, Corey Hall, Austin Howell, and Aaron Livingston—who died not long ago, four short years after watching his friend, Nolan Smythe, meet his own demise down in Mexico. I’m certainly not suggesting that mental health played a part in all these deaths, but even if it contributes to five percent of them (and I would suspect the number is higher), that’s something worth considering.

And yet, I have little hope for progress on this subject. You know that feeling you get when someone says “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”? That maddening, gaslighting feeling that surely nobody could be so hopelessly obtuse, so utterly impervious to all logic and reason, as to actually believe the asinine spew that comes from their own mouths. The way we deal with death and risk in climbing gives me the same unstomachable feeling; though perhaps to a lesser degree. I’ve long ago passed a point of tolerance with the mindless platitudes that rule the day: “He died doing what he loved.” “It wasn’t a death wish, it was a life wish,” “Maybe the climbing companies and media are complicit, but he would have done the same risky climbs even without the attention.” Oh really, Mr. YOLO Free Solo?

Climbing’s mental health crisis doesn’t lead to mass murders (fingers crossed), but the result is, in a sense, the same: tragic, pointless, and unnecessary deaths. You stay in the game long enough, and you start to become intimately familiar with this fact. Like mass shootings, you see it so much you start to get numb to it. Sometimes I wonder if I have any feeling left in me. I didn’t feel anything about the Lewiston murders, didn’t feel anything about the narrowly-averted Smith Rock plot, didn’t feel much of anything but an unsettling numbness when I heard about any of the many climbers who have died in the last few years. Maybe we’re just not built to feel these things in such abundance. The information age has given us an unprecedented ability to learn about all the horrors of the world, but there has not been a commensurate increase in our abilities  to fix them. 

Maybe we are built to digest deaths best when they hit closest to home. Sometimes I picture the people and things I love as existing in concentric circles around myself. Closest is family, then friends, then acquaintances, humans, mammals, etc. These concentric circles look unsettlingly like a target at a firing range. Each climber I’ve lost over the years is like a bullet hole through the paper. Some hit closer than others. And there I am, dead in the center. I don’t know who’s doing the shooting, but the shots are getting too close for comfort. So far, nobody has hit the bullseye. Yet.

The definition of insanity, it has been said, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. For example, not reforming gun policies and improving access to mental health services, and expecting the mass shootings to someday magically stop. Or hoping for an end to the scourge of young climber deaths that plagues our community while continuing to believe that they have more to do with climate change than depression, histrionic personality disorder, and other mental health conditions.

Of course, writing all this down falls into the same category. Because I’ve written all this before. And so did many others before my time. Writing didn’t change things then, and I don’t expect it to change things now. 

And maybe that, in as much as anything, is a sign of the times. Strange, perhaps. But really, what isn’t these days, where nothing is too strange to be true, nothing is unprecedented any more, and nothing is beyond the pale, here in 2023, the year of our lord, in the United States of Freedom Loving America? 

The post The Place Where Murder and Climbing Meet appeared first on Climbing.