In my desk here at work, I still have the license plates to my old whip, a beater Nissan Sentra that I sold only just a few years ago to a Latino father who was wearing a kitschy leather jacket with a giant Mickey Mouse head on the back. He paid me $800 in cash, with the last $200 coming in the form of crumpled $5’s and $1’s. At the time, the car had 270,000 miles, a portion of which I had racked up in my semi-annual commute from the Northeast to Yosemite. Its engine had been reconstructed at least once, it never started if it was too cold (below 40 degrees) and its chassis was the automotive version of Frankenstein with all its welded sutures.

Road tripping is the quintessential American pastime, especially for climbers. The American landscape pulsates with vital energy that it expresses in its myriad and varied vertical rock formations. As climbers it is our birthright to trace these meridians for as long as we can, on as little money as we can, all in order to chase that which we desire most.

I spent many hours alone in that Sentra, half-hypnotized by the barren ...

Jonathan Siegrist has repeated Necessary Evil (5.14c), one of the hardest sport routes in the country. This king line on the Blasphemy Wall of the Virgin River Gorge was bolted by Boone Speed, who worked on it and came close, but never managed to send it. The route was  first climbed by a teenage Chris Sharma in the late 1990s, and at the time remained one of the hardest in the country. The route begins with 30 feet of hard V-double-digit crimping, and then links into the crux section of Route of All Evil (real deal 5.14a).

Everyone knows that alpinism involves suffering. You walk uphill in atrocious weather carrying heavy packs. The higher you go the harder God closes his hands around your throat. You don’t sleep, food tastes like Pelspan, your brain swells, you cough up chunks and work like an oilfield roustabout. Even if you’ve never swung an ice axe you’re sure to appreciate the misery this special breed endures for the summit. That’s because any account of any climb up a high mountain is loaded with depictions of anguish, death and black digits hanging off appendages like little sizzlers left too long on the barbi.

What climber’s don’t dwell on is the bliss. Sure, people are happy when they arrive at the top and they write about that. But the period of addled summit elation only lasts as long as it takes for you to remember that you still have to find your way down and through the crevasses and back to some sad, stinky little tent and another meal of packing peanuts and cardstock. That’s not the bliss I’m referring to.