I, and many other climbers in the Southeast, are forced to go through climbing withdrawal every summer. People who have lived here for awhile have come to terms with this, but I have been climbing year round for many years before moving here, and find it very difficult to accept the reality of the situation.  Each summer, I feel like I go through a withdrawal which got me thinking about how similar a climbing addiction is to a drug addiction.

When I first became obsessed with climbing, it consumed my life.  All I wanted to do was climb.  I moved to the middle of nowhere (its actually the middle of a climbing mecca) and limited my contact with friends and family, essentially cutting myself off from everything else.  I never watched television, payed no attention to social media and definitely had a limited awareness of current events. Instead,  I consumed myself with reading guidebooks and looking for climbing partners and got a job at a gear shop.  Everything was great, until my friends started to “overdosed”.

“Overdosing” in the climbing world is the same as what happens in the drug world.  People die.  When I first started climbing, I never heard about people dying.  I knew it was dangerous, but we weren’t doing dangerous things like free-soloing or venturing too far out into the mountains.  Then after a few years, I started hearing about people I didn’t know who were dying. They were friends of friends, which I still felt the effect but not personally.  Then Summer 2011 and Winter 2012 happened, I lost five friends and I bailed out of the self-consuming climbing lifestyle.

We all climb because we love it.  We love the adrenaline rush, the exposure, the views, the hard work, big payoff, the feeling of accomplishment, the adventure…  When it turned ugly, I got scared and ran away.  I decided that climbing wasn’t worth dying for.  You know, people always say when someone dies “At least s/he died doing something s/he loved” and I think thats bull.  Its just something someone says to make it seem ok to die young.

I sometimes feel that many climbers that are “living the life” are actually running away from something.  Maybe its a mental illness, a social anxiety, the dominant culture, a boring 9-5 job, or the fact that they are getting old.  These are all the same reasons people do drugs.  If these people don’t realize that they are running straight into a dead end, then it either ends in death or being  a sixty year old, broke and with no friends (because they have all died), just like what happens to a druggie.

Death scares me and being alone also scares me.

My apologies for such a dark post, but climbing isn’t all the glamourous lifestyle of living out of a van with no responsibilities.  It can be, but its important to not lose touch with the bigger picture.  I’m just saying that the climbing lifestyle isn’t sustainable, especially if you ever plan on having a family or a career.  But don’t get me wrong, people can climb throughout their entire lives but its really hard to be a homeless climber bum for a long period of time before you (or everyone that knows you) get tired of it.