Ankle Deep in Gasoline

Life is simple here. No rope. No gear. Just shoes, chalk, and calluses on crystalline granite.

Bath Rock is home base. The immaculate collection of 5.6 routes on its east side becomes my ritual for hundreds of feet of endless free soloing, lap after lap, up and down the beautiful chicken-headed face and featured granite cracks.

It becomes my morning coffee, my sun salutation, and my bedtime story. It’s climbing, but it’s much more: dance, meditation, worship. The motion is instinctual and the formation flows freely under me, 200 feet per lap. It is every high desert sunrise and quiet evening, listening to the changes in the wind with each topout.

My rhythmic breath matches the repetition of my upward movements, pushing and pulling, inhaling and exhaling. I run out of rock to climb, and hop around the elongated summit, avoiding the stagnant water pools, enjoying views of grey pinnacles in a dizzying 360 landscape. It’s finally June in City of Rocks, Idaho, and I feel like a content lizard scrambling under the direct sun.

Bath Rock becomes the bookends to these summer days filled with multipitch trad and crimpy sport climbing. I retire to sleep in the back of my Suzuki at the base of the formation, dreaming of the next day’s climbs, both roped and unroped. My hands are raw, my skin is sunburned, and my heart is soaring.

…

Fast forward to October. I’ve just destroyed both my body and my life.

I know immediately that my leg is broken. The pain is overflowing past my body, escaping out of me in demented shrieks, shrill cries, and deep sobs. There are no sounds to adequately portray the horrendous sensation of shattered bones and torn ligaments. The damage is so intense and so rapid that it consumes me.

“This can’t be happening to me,” I think and scream, over and over. I writhe on the ground surrounded by hunks of sandstone at the base of the boulder, the broken hold lying next to me.

Moments before, I was cruising up a warm-up problem in the picturesque boulder field, enjoying the Joe’s Valley Bouldering Festival. About 20 feet up, I’d matched my hands on the topout hold only to feel it crumble under my weight. I was surprised, and I desperately tried to grab back on to something — anything — with no success. Before I knew it, I was plummeting to the deck.

The fall was long enough to make a terrifying realization: There’s no crashpad under me… I. Am. So. Fucked.

Fucked, indeed. I cratered into the bare ground, all of the impact hammering into my right foot, breaking my ankle at a grotesque angle.

The funny part? The warmup boulder problem I fell from was named “Ankle Deep in Gasoline.” How fitting.

Thankfully, there were many selfless climbers around who improvised a splint and grabbed my gear as I howled in pain. I had three people at a time help me stumble down the trail (one under each arm, and one supporting my broken leg). Two climbers who saw the accident, Gaz and Kimberly, drove me to the nearest hospital in Price, UT. I vividly remember lying in the back of Gaz’s van, Kimberly holding my hand and calling my dad on the phone, gritting my teeth with each small bump in the road. Everything was excruciating, and my pain-meter was maxed out.

The following weeks were a blur of hospitals and surgeries. I’d fractured my fibula, shattered my talus, fractured the third metatarsal, and slammed the fourth and fifth metatarsals into my cuboid, which shattered. I also tore all of the ligaments in my ankle joint, and got some minor scrapes and bruises elsewhere.

The surgeon described my ankle as “horrifically unstable” after one of the surgeries, saying he could dislocate the entire joint with just his pinky finger. He removed bone fragments, sewed my ligaments together, and put in 11 screws and 1 plate to help stabilize everything. I was left with long incisions on both sides of my swollen ankle and foot.

One of the first things I asked was when I’d be able to climb again. The surgeon looked at me as if I was either a lunatic or had severe memory loss. Unable to comprehend why I’d want to return to the very activity that had nearly killed me, he shook his head and shrugged.

“You can hope for your ‘new normal’ after a year and a half of recovery. Crack climbing might be a few years away, if you’re lucky.”

My heart sank. I tried to remind myself that the fall could’ve been much worse. If I had fallen any differently, I would’ve hit my back and head on the rocks, surely paralyzing or killing me. I could’ve broken both legs instead of just one. Many other things could have gone wrong, so I held on to this shred of positivity as much as possible. On the worst days of recovery, I told myself:

I didn’t die. I’m not paralyzed. I had health insurance. I am so lucky.

Recovery pushed the limits of my patience and perseverance. I missed an entire month of college. I was totally non-weight bearing for the first 3 months, and didn’t walk without crutches until 4 months. I went through intensive physical therapy and relearned how to walk. I spent most days and nights sobbing in pain, still trying to make it through school and work. It was a dark, lonely time; the winter felt like it would never end.

Climbing was on my mind throughout my recovery. I was worried about regaining my strength, keeping my sponsorships, and maintaining my sanity. Without climbing, I felt like I was going mad. I’d furiously do pullups and situps in my tiny apartment, my casted leg precariously hanging in the air. I watched climbing videos, voraciously read climbing articles, and obsessed over all of the amazing routes my friends were sending. I was depressed, but I was also highly motivated to get back to the climbing lifestyle.

When I ditched the cast and got a removable boot, I started doing simple range-of-motion exercises, like drawing circles in the air with my foot. These small movements felt impossible. I couldn’t move my toes at all, and my ankle would just slightly bend a millimeter. Nevertheless, the doctor insisted I keep the blood moving, and that I’d eventually regain my motion and strength. It was an uphill battle, and the task often made me cry.

I felt as if my foot would be a swollen, stitched, stiff mess forever. I nicknamed it “Frankle” (‘Frankenstein ankle’) due to all of the scars and swelling. Frankle seemed to be a separate entity from the rest of my body, a big nuisance at the end of my leg. How in the world would I ever bend Frankle to smear on a slab again, or heel hook around an arete? Imagining climbing footwork or the impact of falling made me cringe.

Once I was semi-mobile again, I felt as if I’d opened a whole new world — now I could leave my apartment alone! I could drive myself to class and work! I could go grocery shopping! I could do my own laundry! I could cook! I had taken these seemingly simple tasks for granted prior to the accident.

Regaining my independence greatly improved my attitude. There were still struggles: it would take me an hour to walk across campus to my next class in my medical boot. But goddammit, I walked there, and that seemed like a miracle.

With my newfound positivity, I figured it was time to start carefully toprope climbing. I toproped in the gym with one leg, bending my bad leg at the knee to hold my medical boot back in the air to protect it. Hopping my left foot up from hold to hold turned out to be a great core workout, and my arms would pump out after just a couple 5.9 routes.

Climbing again felt amazing, albeit tiring since I was so out of shape. I noticed a new mental block that I didn’t have before the injury: I was scared to be up high. I couldn’t trust the rope. I’d warily glance up at the anchor, knowing full well that it was probably fine, but also letting my mind wander to the worst case scenario. I imagined the rope cutting or the anchor breaking, my body plummeting back to the deck. It was terrifying to trust myself, my belayer, and the gear.

With enough time toproping one-legged, I eventually figured out that I could put a kneepad on my bad leg so I could place my knee on holds! This was revolutionary, and I started climbing up to 5.11 with this tactic. My fear started to fade away as I felt my confidence in climbing return. I was less terrified of heights, but still worried about reinjuring my foot.

Over the following months, I was eventually cleared to walk without the medical boot, and then to climb with both legs. Testing the metal-filled ‘Frankle’ was a delicate task, and I had a few hiccups during my return to climbing with two legs. Over time, I could use my bad foot on increasingly smaller footholds, and I started sending harder on toprope. I finally almost felt like myself again.

By 7 months, I started leading sport climbs again in the gym. I didn’t want to fall and let my feet slam into the wall, so I started out slow. I focused on steep routes so I’d have clean falls.

Over time, I started to notice increasing pain as a bulge grew on the side of my foot. X-rays revealed the screws were ‘backing out’ of my bones, causing me to relapse in my recovery. The surgeon recommended removing them sooner rather than later.

I decided to take care of the problem before it was too severe. With the help of many friends and a GoFundMe campaign, I had a third surgery at 10 months post-injury. My surgeon removed the plate in my foot, plus 8 of the 11 screws. After a relatively short recovery and additional PT, I quickly returned to climbing.

Now, at 13 months post-injury, I am miraculously back to crack climbing despite all of the surgeon’s initial dire predictions. I lead with confidence again, with no pain in my ankle. When I climb, my heart soars just like it used to. The trauma-induced fear is slowly fading away. I’m stronger now than I was before I broke my leg.

I will likely never boulder or free solo again — I’ve come to terms with this fact, and I no longer resent it. I am embracing my ability to sport and trad climb again, trusting myself and the rope more with each route.

Some days I remember my years of bouldering and soloing, and I smile. I got lucky hundreds of times, with every hold that didn’t break, every bird that didn’t fly into me, every rope that didn’t get tossed down onto me. I relish those memories of freedom, of feeling purely alive and in control, ropeless on granite under the desert sun. I’m sure I’ll make more memories like that, but with the comforting thought of having a rope between my feet. Frankle will thank me.