From American Heritage Dictionary: arête – noun; a sharp, narrow mountain ridge or spur.

The scariest climb I’ve done to date – and all I did was play monkey-in-the-middle. No leading, no gear cleaning, just climbing on belay. If you’re the kind of person who walks up to the edge of a parapet on a high building and leans over to take a look at the ants and their automobiles at street level, then don’t bother to read any further, because you won ’t understand.

Skyline Ridge was Susan and Dave’s gig. I just invited myself along for the climb because it was one I had never done before at Smith Rock (a climbing mecca in Oregon, in case you were wondering). It is a 5.8, three pitch climb up a knife-edge ridge soaring above Asterisk Pass and living up to it’s name in every detail. We wanted to get there first, so we were hiking down the trail from the parking lot by 8:00 am. The trail follows the windings of the Crooked River (which also lives up to its name), taking you past some of the most beautiful spires, sheer walls and flying buttresses you will ever see. The rock glowed ivory in some places and rose in others, lit by a desert sun that was already heating up the valley, making the climb to Asterisk Pass a sweaty endeavor. Being weighed down like miner’s mules didn’t help either. We hauled our gear up the “trail” to the pass (high 4th class scrambling) and gratefully dumped our loads in a narrow crack in the rock. We shared the pass with a large, rounded stone poised against the skyline and balanced on a tiny point. It is this stone which gives the pass its name. Unfortunately, we also shared the space with two other climbers who were already on our route. How dare they get here so early!

We bowed to the inevitable and began to get ready for the climb, waiting for the duo to move up so that we could start the first pitch. Asterisk Pass is about 10 feet wide and made up of weathered fins of jumbled rock that drop off on both sides. You either tiptoe over the narrow fin edges or wiggle through the even narrower spaces between them. I planted myself on top of one fin and let the breeze sucking through the pass flow through my T-shirt and dry the sweat of the climb. I took a good look at the edge of the arête soaring above us, sharply delineated into a yin/yang of light and shadow by the morning sun. As I looked at it looming above us like a finger of fate, I felt a whole squadron of butterflies lift off in my stomach and start practicing aerial loops.

Let’s talk about the concept of exposure here. Exposure is when you have to walk on a tightrope suspended 7,000 feet over the muddy river bottom of the Grand Canyon. Exposure is when someone (who has yet to win the battle with vertigo) is about to shimmy up a near vertical knife-edge of rock for a couple hundred feet, competing with an expanse of airy nothingness that takes up a full 355 degrees out of a possible 360. Exposure is when, assuming you survive the caterpillar crawl up the arête, you get to attempt a 30 foot traverse over a several hundred foot vertical drop dangling like a spider on a single thread. That’s exposure.

As I made my way back to the others and was dragging climbing paraphernalia from my dusty pack, Susan inquired as to whether I wanted to lead any of the pitches. I took another long, measuring look up the arête, noting the first stretch of completely unprotectable (i.e. if you fall – you break or die) rock fins leading over to the initial belay. Then I checked out the crumbly looking rock that kicked off the next section, and the vertical swoop of smooth rock above it shooting up, up, up, up…and regretfully declined. Accepting my position as middle person with the panache of the truly chicken-hearted, I settled back to let Susan lead the first stretch. She looked none too happy about doing it either, but forged ahead with steely determination. Once positioned at the other end, she belayed me over to her. I crawled over in a Notre Dame bellringer hunch, clutching at the rock and whimpering to myself. Even on belay I felt uncomfortable, and more than one section of rock looked about as solid as a house of cards.

continued in part 2