Last week I did the best route in the world. Actually I didn't really do it. More accurately, after one of my mates decided his rate of progress was insufficient to get up the route before the onset of the next ice age, which at that precise point in time seemed to be only a few hours away, I tied in. That done, I defrosted my shoes and set out. Brilliant moves on thin holds led to something, which I am trying to remember. It was probably a good hold. I wasn't paying attention because I had to hang on the draw and check how many fingers had fallen off due to frostbite. Without my reading glasses I really couldn't tell so I carried on.
From here on things got improbably,impossibly, better. All things connected with the route, that is. Stemming, smearing, an astounding flat ledge in the middle of nowhere, a holdless groove, smooth black rock, bolts perched somewhere between me and infinity and the cold wind. I have never been on a route quite like it.
Sadly I thawed out only once I was lowering down so my ascent didn't quite match up to the quality of the climbing. I guess next time I am there I should tidy things up and redpoint it. But then again, perhaps not. I am not sure that is really the point, because the experience really couldn't be better than when I first went up it.
The next day was a sharp contrast. I spent the day at the Country Club of Johannesburg being A Professor. Different. Not better. Not worse. But very different indeed. The details are not relevant here.
And then the next day I shed my professor's skin and spent the morning at Paul's gym. I haven't led routes on a wall since the last millenium and the days of the national circuit. Does anyone remember those events? One year we were in isolation, which was on a slipway near Quay 4, for so long we ended up scraping barnacles off the hull of a boat and eating them for sustenance. And when you finally got to climb at 11:47 (pm), the temperature had dropped below dew point and you couldn't hold on to anything, unless you were David Olds. I wasn't David Olds. If I were ("were" is correct here, it's the subjunctive), this blog would not be called Stevenbradshaw.blogpsot.com, would it?
Back to the story. Paul had been setting routes for a comp so he kindly let me climb them beforehand. Awesome - big holds, long reaches, steep walls. It was a blast.
I left at lunchtime and cut across to the N14 to the airport, and just like a few weeks before, the brown hills, the haze, the cold wind, the blue sky, all of it, all of the dry, bleak and wind-swept highveld made me nostalgic for something that I now realise really is in the past.
Next time I shall tell what that is.
