Death in Climbing, part 1
If you climb long enough you will lose friends to the mountains, either through soloing, errors, rockfall, or weather. Chances are you already know someone who died. Perhaps a friend of a friend, or someone you followed on social media. At the very least you can name a famous climber who’s body got helicoptered out or has a final resting place under a pile of snow.
Death is hard to deal with. It’s even harder when a shared passion we often use to connect and heal hurts us so deeply. If you’re currently suffering a loss, I want to first affirm all the feelings you’re having. Guilt, anger, depression, shame, and others are all real and normal. Please reach out to loved ones and get support. The AAC’s Climbing Greif Fund has wonderful resources that can help you in your journey through grief. They talk about the time immediately after a traumatic experience in a much more helpful way than I can. Instead of poorly rehasing the same ideas, I want to talk about my personal experience and what we can do after death.
Before I talk about my experience with death in climbing, I need to provide some background. I started climbing just before college. After a brief session at the now-defunt Vertical Edge wearing my sneakers I was hooked. That summer, I got a two-week pass (rental shoes included) to nearby Triangle Rock Club and climbed until I couldn’t open my car door. Upon arriving to college, I was dismayed to find out the university climbing walls were closed, so I got my fix climbing retaining walls around campus, eventually finding epoxied holds made of quartzite chunks as well as the pump tunnel.
When the walls finally opened one of the first people I met was Alexander Kenan. Alexander was a year older than me and led trad, so that automatically made he hold him in high regard. He took a gaggle of first-years under his wing and we ventured out to North Carolina crags like Stone Mountain. On my first outdoor route Alexander led me and other fledgling up Block Route and The Great Arch. We developed a mentorship relationship. Knowing I was ready, Alexander would repeatedly urge me on when I expressed self-doubt about leading, trying a mult-pitch, or attempting a “hard” route. I went to him for advice and beta. I listened in awe of his tales of rope soloing and pushing through fear on gnarly NC slab. When he left for his PCT “thru-climb”, aka The Longest Approach, I mustered up the courage to ask to borrow his rack. Though Alexander made me catalogue every piece I borrowed, he still gave me the tools to further progress my climbing while he was away.
As the years went on, Alexander and I tied in together from time to time. He convinced me to solo the first flatiron when I visited him in Boulder. He berated me on the calorie to cost ratio of my food choices on a trip to Looking Glass, NC (spoiler: honey buns reign supreme). He jogged ahead of me in the dark on the descent of Rewritten, likely still upset I spent way too long trying to booty a pink tricam. In short, I owe a lot of my life to Alexander. He may have just been looking for a gumby to mold into his perfect partner as he learned the ropes, but I accepted the role graciously and absorbed as much info as I could. I continued to dedicate my life to climbing even after Alexander was gone.
Alexander Kenan died in on August 22, 2017 on an attempt of the Grand Traverse in Grand Teton National Park. I got the news between choked-back tears on the other end of the line. There was little information at the time. I began to wildly speculate. He must have fallen on one of the 5.8 portions. Rockfall? Ice? Regardless, my friend and mentor was dead. Climbing was the thing that killed him.
I didn’t know what to do, but I know I didn’t want anything to do with climbing at the moment. This was a problem, At the time, I was working as a climbing and canyoneering guide in Moab, Utah. I knew I would have to get back on the wall eventually. I chose to do it sooner rather than later, going to work the very next day. I could feel myself shaking. Could my clients tell I was nervous to tie in? Why am I terrified at the top of a 5.5 sport route? How many double checks of a rappel set-up is too many? For those first few weeks after Alexander’s death I wore a pink tricam on my harness. The tricam, a staple of our NC climbing roots, was from our time on Rewritten; the carabiner it hung from was the first piece of booty I ever got, a gift from Alexander on the North Ridge of Table Rock. Those things gave me courage and connection, but it was still incredibly hard to act like I was enjoying myself when I was internally screaming.
At first, it didn’t even enter my brain that Alexander’s death was any fault of his own. I later found out this was the case. Despite Alexander’s father purchasing him an AAC rappel clinic (in response to the death of fellow UNC climber Eric Metcalf in 2013), Alexander made a rappel error. Alexander failed to tie a knot in each end of the rope. After a successful first rappel, he likely deliberately chose not to pull up the rope that fell past him, thinking that doing so would unnecessarily slow him down since faded middle-mark was likely near the anchor. Though he didn’t intend it, this was Alexander’s final lesson to me. Since then, I’ve tried to honor and remember him any time I get on the rock. His joyfulness, his light-hearted rousing, and his boldness.
Read more about how Alexander’s life and death shapes my climbing in part 2.
