Climbing fiction, AI, and the death of Outside

My friend Duane Raleigh, longtime publisher of Rock and Ice magazine, once rope-soloed a first ascent on a tower in Arches National Park. He reached the top in the dark but didn’t have a headlamp. He knew that another route’s anchors were up there somewhere and had planned to use those to get down. Brave and unperturbed, like a cat on a windowsill in the night, he pawed his way along the edge of the tower, feeling around for something that felt like anchors.

Voila, he found them. He clipped in, and rigged his rappel. He pushed the ropes through his ATC device. He unclipped from the anchor and leaned back.

All at once, he was falling—down, down, down, into the pitch black void.

Duane thinks he fell about 200 feet off this 400-foot tower when he suddenly came to a violent stop in the middle of the air. He was hanging, not from his harness but from the gear sling slung under one arm. It was a homemade gear sling that his mother had sewn for him out of a guitar strap. Clipped to the gear sling was his tagline; the carabiner it was clipped to was bent halfway open from the fall. Somehow—and Duane knew not how— that tagline had just saved his Okie ass.

In the dark, Duane had pushed the rap ropes into his ATC, but had failed to clip the ropes throughhis locking carabiner. That much was clear because the locking carabiner with the ATC was still on his harness, and the rap rope was still threaded through the anchor on the summit of the tower. But what was holding the tag line? That was a mystery.

Duane snapped his ascenders to the tag line and started jugging. What else was there to do? Dangle there all night, waiting for a rescue like Toni Kurz? (“I kant go on anymore!” )

So, he jugged. Duane came to the end of the tagline, somewhere in the middle of the tower. In the fall, apparently, his tagline had whipped through the air, tied itself into a knot, and slotted itself into a V-shaped crack in the middle of the wall.

Was this fate? Religious intervention? A dumb fluke? Physics doesn’t have a word to explain what had just happened. What’s greater than a factor-2 fall? Only Duane knows. He touched the rope. The force of the fall had melted the nylon into a smoldering wad that burned his hand. Duane placed a nut, cut the rope, rapped down the tower, and the luckiest motherfucker on earth walked away to climb another day.

This story is one of the reasons I hate climbing fiction.

Climbing fiction, like all fiction, is hard to write. For some reason, mediocre climbing writers seem to be particularly drawn to this genre, the way I am drawn to bouldering, which means that most of the climbing fiction that’s ever been written is straight cringe produced by enthusiastic hacks.

But that’s not even my main gripe….