Mito 5.8, Mud Spring Wing

Climbed on January 1, 2025. 

Fun Rating: Quite Fun

I find myself writing this having finished another read of Mark Twight’s stellar Kiss or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber. The last time I read it I was stuck at a farm in Missouri wallowing in the end of a 10 year relationship I’d been in since I was a teenager. I find myself now struggling with different but similarly black thoughts, and the edge and punk of Twight’s words have provided me with both a balm to comfort and razor that I can use to dig at myself in equal measure.

Why bother writing about the tour? Certainly not for other people. So few even know about my vanity project, and even fewer care. I think I started it as an excuse to put “pen” to “paper” and flex my creative muscles in a discipline that I love but have only ever dabbled in. Over time the flowery prose and overwrought ideas have fallen away some and now I don’t really know what the point is anymore. I’ve been on a long break from writing about the JHAT, and it’s been difficult to inspire the momentum I need in order to overcome my tendency towards laziness and acceptance of a life that Twight would have very little but disdain for, I’m sure.

Zak after allowing me to climb the first pitch.

I think the phrase goes, “kill your heroes,” or maybe I’m conflating two messages to something that speaks to me a little better. Why Joe Herbst? Why his climbs? Why do this at all? At first I think it was because I liked the idea of styling myself as a rebel within a sport that I had come to late in life, and had been born too late to experience it when it was exclusively practiced by rebels. I came to climbing through a mega-gym in Chicago, after having been reintroduced to it by a friend who occasionally climbed sport in Boulder. I don’t think you can get much farther away from the likes of Twight or Herbst than that. As a frightened man in my late twenties who’d spent my last decade at the time wasting my life playing video games I wanted to be something more, something different. I wanted to be punk.

What’s punk in climbing these days? What was punk in climbing ever? I think Twight touched on an aspect of it in his writings, of going harder and lighter and closer to the edge than most were willing to and striving for that ethic above all else. I’m not as brave a man as he is, and I’m too soft for the type of suffering that he sought. With that knowledge, I tried to find my own niche, my own way to fight back against an imagined corporatization of what to me is just a hobby, not a lifestyle.

Dealing with tat.

Ask most climbers what they hate most in terms of style and I think you’ll receive two answers at a higher frequency than most: slab and offwidth. I took naturally to slab and far less naturally to offwidth, but the “punkness” of it was a lighthouse I couldn’t ignore. If people hate it then I had to do it, to prove that I’m different or better or something. Imagine that. Imagine nothing could be further from the truth.

Years of this passed, still in the gym and trying to get out to the Red and Devils Lake and Jackson Falls and Elephant Rock as often as I could. Eventually I made my way to Red Rock and climbed some sport, bouldered a little. Eventually I made my way to trad, as I’d always wanted to (another discipline more “elite” than the ones I had already been doing) and revisited Red Rock. I was already someone who “liked wide climbing,” seeking out bolted chimneys and offwidths where I could find them, but this opened up so much new ground.

So. Much. Tat.

So then came the first Herbst FA that I climbed, Group Therapy, a climb in which my much more experienced partner gladly handed me the wide pitches with a smile and a “have at it.” I remember being a little gripped on the runouts but with a mantra I’ve come to repeat often, “you like this,” I continued up and after an embarrassingly bad hanging belay in a chimney we were done. On to the next one, and the next one, and the one after that too. I’ve built a reputation amongst my friends as someone who legitimately likes the wide, as someone bold and brave enough to get in there and chicken wing my way up some stupidly moderate crack, as if wedging yourself in a crack required bravery or boldness. Still, each time, I have to remind myself “you like this.” If I need to tell myself that each time, do I actually? You’d think it would come more naturally, or eventually get easier, but it hasn’t yet and I don’t know that it ever will.

Zak on his aborted lead of the first pitch.

I’ve been so uninterested, or unwilling, to set myself to continuing this self-directed climbing therapy that I let my domain lapse. It started when I wasn’t able to get out as often as I’d like, a combination of poor weather and poor spirits, and deepened to something I have trouble describing still. For awhile I wanted to call the whole thing off. If I don’t care then what’s the point? No one reads these anyway (for the few of you who do, thank you and I hope you find value in whatever it is we’re sharing here). As it is, I’m still climbing, and still doing the tour, and here we are writing about it again, for as long as I have the motivation.

Oh yeah, Mito is a 5.8 that is pretty fun. Zak insisted I mention that he backed off the first pitch, so I will record it here but I will also note it was because we didn’t bring enough gear and he’s been recovering from a back injury. He doesn’t tell people how much of a weakling I was in the Epinephrine chimneys, so I feel unfair mentioning that without giving him his due. He also then led The Schwa so that I could toprope it so take that for what you will.

The JHAT is dead, long live the JHAT. Or whatever.

The Schwa, a sneak peak of a future post..