An Anchor of Connection

 

Story by Astra Lincoln

Photography by Nicole Giampietro

 

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Early this past Saturday, I gathered with a hundred other climbers at the Arc'teryx Academy’s clinic check-in in downtown Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), British Columbia. A gaggle of lovebirds stood giggling under a flag advertising a couple’s workshop. Another crew stood awaiting their treasure maps for a course called “Climbing Treasure Hunt.” 

I joined a group of a dozen boulderers for a Mindfulness clinic, facilitated by Ashima Shiraishi and Sam Stroh. The group was, perhaps expectedly, reserved. People stood in a half-moon, sipping coffee. “At check-in, I told them I was here for ‘mindless climbing,’” one participant confessed, laughing. The Academy weekend was teeming; at least a handful among us had been out dancing at an afterparty until 4 a.m.. I wondered how many of my classmates had come here in the hopes of squeezing in a nap.

We caravaned to the Apron and then tromped into the woods, where we listened to the forest slowly wake up. Cars roared on the road beneath us. Overhead, an eagle screeched. We sat on the duff in a tight circle, close enough that I could hear the others breathe. 

 

 

Sam and Ashima welcomed us, and explained their objectives for the course. “With meditation as your anchor point, your experience will be broadened in ways you might not have expected,” Ashima explained. “It can deepen your connection to the place, to the people and to each other.”

And then Sam got us started with a 10-minute guided meditation—but not without offering a gentle warning first. “We don’t want the meditation techniques to come across as ways to improve your climbing. It's a possible outcome, but the intention is to connect more deeply with the experience we are having on the land and with each other.” He smiled and exhaled. We crossed our legs and bowed our heads and breathed, and breathed, and breathed. The morning shrunk and expanded into pine scent and dust-control chemicals, into high winds and engine sounds.

 

Listen to the scene:

 

Eventually, all of us blinked open. Ashima stood and smiled her light-beam smile down on us. It was time for a novel attention-expanding practice. She invited us to join her for rock-gazing. 

Ashima instructed all of us to find a rock to sit in front of. Close enough to touch it. Close enough to really look. As we sat and stilled, a bird shouted from the crown of an old-growth western red cedar. The granite twinkled in the dappled, pre-storm light. 

Minutes passed, interrupted only by Ashima’s occasional nudges: to scan for cuts and chips in the stone; to recall the rock’s geologic origins, its slow weathering from wind and rain.

At first, the practice reminded me of learning how to look at a Rothko. Once, in a museum with a scholar of surrealism, I was told to step beyond the museum’s arbitrary warning line, to stand close enough to the painting that its edges might blur and I could receive what the artist had intended: a pure experience of color.

 

 

I softened my gaze, until the draped moss and tick marks blurred together, and the rock had reassembled itself into a wide horizon composed of film grain and light leaks, movement and color. 

Ashima invited us to imagine the marks past climbers had made. For an instant, I thought of the impact of climbers on a landscape—the ways that conversations about conservation have flattened the possible meanings of the word impact. It leaves a sour taste in the mouth: plants trampled, cliffs left pockmarked with holes, holds chipped off under the force of so many hands. But it was the wrong meaning.

“Our fingerprints are among the many other fingerprints that have traveled across these rocks,” she said. “And what a gift.” 

And there, for a moment, I could see it—the technicolor print marks of all who had traveled here before, everyone’s handprints pressed together like a palimpsest, the language of others’ movement perpetually written in and erased. For the first time, I understood the marks that climbers make as additive, instead of only ever erosional. It was easy then to imagine catapulting into some distant future, where archaeologists might protect the chalk marks an ancient culture left behind in reverence. For the first time all weekend, I felt my mind go still.

We did climb eventually—though that never felt a singular focus of the afternoon. Although the clinic was among the quickest to sell out (in minutes), not everyone got so far as even putting their shoes on. Half of the participants had only climbed a handful of times outside before; one never had. A few were injured but “didn’t want to miss the chance to meet everyone.” 

 

 

The people who were psyched on bouldering seemed to be bouldering well. Around lunchtime, after workshop participant Nicole Meng had scampered down from the summit of a steep flake she’d just finished, I asked her if she noticed anything impacted by the morning meditation sesh. She didn’t take a beat to consider: it was the best day out she’d had in ages. There was a change, but it had less to do with the mindfulness, and more to do with the support. "I would never feel safe enough to try that problem if I was with a different crew," she said, gesturing out to the group that had been strangers just hours ago.

But the place had so many newly-sharp delights to offer up, now that we were looking with our minds stilled and our eyes right-sized, and only some of these treats were boulders. People climbed trees, talked about moss, and pet dogs and napped on logs. Eventually, the crew came to a conclusion about the beta on the hardest problem of the day. It wasn’t a climb at all. Cam, a San Diego-based Arc'teryx Ambassador, challenged us to walk 15 feet, between boulders and over roots, with our eyes closed, until reaching a flat rock that would act as the problem’s final hold. A handful of giggling participants lined up. 

Everybody sent.

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