I have a vivid memory from my childhood— I remember in height, not years, and I was about up to my Mom’s waist at the time. My family and I were hiking on a paved trail through the Smoky Mountains with a face of limestone rising on our left. As the family walked forward I lagged a bit, balancing on the ridge where the pavement met the cliff. I began to imagine that the ridge was all I could walk on, and that the paved trail was a massive drop-off. As was my habit then (and still is now), I began to narrate what I was doing. “She edged along the cliff, feeling for handholds in the crevices of the rock between the moss and ferns.” My fingers searched the porous limestone that was wet with dew and the misty mountain air, the mossy smell filling my nose. I closed my eyes and imagined falling to my death…
Today I opened my eyes, and once again felt adrenaline race through me as I tried in vain to steady my breath. My left hand clutched a chain, shining silver in the bright sun, as I crouched, dry mouth panting, sweat pooling on my upper lip. Gritty sandstone felt treacherous beneath my feet, and less than a yard to my right was a ledge. I told myself that I shouldn’t think about the ledge, and yet my mind knew with terrifying certainty that the drop, straight down, was more than four thousand feet.
Zion National Park spread out beneath my trembling self, a scale-defying set of canyons marked with huge pinnacles of rock that neither wind nor water nor countless eons could destroy. The rock sentinels stood silent, remnants of the most massive desert the world had ever known, crushed into sandstone over the millennia and carved by unrelenting waters. Zion’s rock was as living and varied as a forest: stained red with iron, bleached cream with the sun, striped black with trickles of water, and dusted with spatters of gleaming snow. Even now, after exploring the park for three hours, I couldn’t wrap my mind around what I was seeing.The idea that I should try to climb Angels Landing somehow got planted firmly in my brain, and I determined that I would complete the climb in less than four hours, which was the recommended length according to the park rangers. Two hours earlier, the L’s had let me split off from their group, and I barreled along the flat trail, determined to make it happen.
Within five minutes of the beginning, my ankles betrayed me, throbbing and spazzing like they never had before. I limped along the inclining trail, Lisa-swearing under my breath (“Oh, butterscotch! Split fricatives! Chaconne!”) and wondering if I’d have to turn back before the first mile. I figured that I could walk it off.
The trail began a series of switchbacks, climbing up the first huge rock face on my journey. My ankles began to feel a little better, but now I had two other enemies. The first was altitude— or at least, I hope it was the altitude that caused me to gasp and stagger as I toiled up the switchbacks. The second was a fear that did not bode well for the rest of my journey. As I cleared the first switchback and looked down the thirty-foot cliff to the path below, I felt my stomach flip.
Wait— I was afraid of heights? I mean, I knew I got dizzy on escalators and when I leaned over stairwells, but I had never had problems in the Smoky Mountains, or rock-climbing in Peremarquette State Park. It had never occurred to me that I had a fear of natural heights. Great, I thought. Just what I need.
I pressed on anyway. The path leveled out and delved through a narrow canyon of red rock, pockmarked with curvaceous cave formations and shaded by pines. Then a tighter, steeper set of switchbacks began, and I alternately plowed up them, swinging my arms like an Olympic speed skater, and stood in the shadow of the rock, gasping like a drowning man. At last I reached an summit, circled by open space and soaring canyon walls, and ahead of me I saw the rock rise to a point, topped with a lone pine tree. That’s Angels Rock, I thought. I’m almost there.
With this thought, I started forward across the wide rocky plateau. The landscape fell away on both sides, with barely six feet to spare on either side of me. My legs began to tremble, but I pressed on anyway.
Then came the first line of chains, which ran along the inner side of the rock, leaving the hikers to walk on the outer side, with about three feet of sloped footing on the other side. To get to the first chains, I had to walk across a steeply-sloping cliff that emptied off into a drop that made me shudder. I scrambled across the gritty sandstone, my gripless tennis shoes scrabbling to find solid footing. I crawled to the nearest boulder and sat on it, clutching the stone, my heart racing. I seriously considered giving up.
For five minutes I sat there, afraid to go on. Every hiker who returned encouraged me. “If you keep that smile the whole way up,” one guy said, “you’ll be fine!”
At last, I got the guts to try the treacherous chains. I grabbed ahold and scrambled around, resting the bulk of my weight on my sweaty, trembling palms. I fed the chain through my fingers, pulling myself hand over hand. I searched for the next set of chains, and I had to let go of the first to grab the second. I stared at the rock in front of my face, concentrated on the chains, and mumbled to myself, “Gee, it’s fun to climb on these cool rocks in Missouri. You know, it’s good that there’s not a huge drop-off on the other side. You know, a drop-off that could kill me. That would be really scary. Good thing that’s not the case.” In the meantime I scrambled up rocks, ignoring the landscape around me.
Before I knew it, I had reached the summit I saw earlier. I dragged myself out onto solid ground, looking around me with a sense of exhilaration. In front of me, Zion’s canyons stretched out, more beautiful than I could imagine. I had done it! I had conquered my fear and reached Angels Landing! I had…!
…Why was there another set of chains over there?
I walked closer to the edge, looking at the chains leading down from the vantage point. There must be a different way down, or…
My gaze traced the shimmering line of chains. They dipped down briefly, then ran along an impossibly narrow ridge, then rose up to a sentinel of rock twice the height of the one on which I stood.
My heart quailed. My knees quaked. My stomach did a few somersaults. But I knew I wasn’t turning back now.
Thus began the actual climb to Angels Landing, a journey that took me across a ridge so narrow that one misstep would send me hurtling into oblivion, up a slope with ledges spaced so far apart that I practically had to rappel to move upward, over slabs of sandstone with huge drop-offs on either side and no chains in sight, through step-like boulders where the trail’s path wasn’t always apparent, and finally up a steep incline with a chain to the outside, rather than the inside, for the first time in my climb. I was concentrating so hard on finding handholds, on carefully testing each footstep, and on staring at the rock in front of my face, that I almost forgot to look up.
I was there. After nearly an hour of inching along the sandstone and fighting constant terror, I had reached the summit of the mountain that the first white explorers thought could only be reached by angels. I collapsed on the white sandstone beside a scrubby pine and a sweet couple from Tennessee. For a while, I couldn’t look at the scenery or revel in my achievement. I just laid back on the solid stone and calmly hyperventilated.
The view was amazing, of course: stone sentinels speckled with snow marching away on either side, blue mountains in the distance, a verdant valley spread out beneath, and a cloud-ruffled sky breezing by overhead. Angels Landing, however, wasn’t as much about the view as it was the accomplishment itself. The Tennessee couple took my picture with a huge grin on my face, arms spread wide. I had conquered the summit, and it hadn’t killed me.
I realized that I had to get back down eventually, but for a long while I just perched on top of the world and breathed the sweet mountain air. For the first time in my life I had done something truly dangerous, and I was still alive.
~Lisa Shafter
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