PROJECT WAIT

A LIFELONG CLIMBER CONSIDERS THROWING IN THE TOWEL

- JEFF JACKSON

I one-fell my Ultimate Project on a Saturday. A few days later, Michael Victorino, the mayor of Maui, issued the stay-at-home order about to take effect. I had cruised the first nine bolts and gotten to the rest fresh enough to trade out in the horizontal and think, This could be it. I might finally send.

I released the foot jam and swung like a tamarin, stabbed my toe at the shoulder-level horn out right and stuck it, locked down and grabbed a little sloping edge no bigger than a pencil and greasy as a Schüblig sausage. Boned up, flagged hard and started to cross when my fingers snapped off the edge and I plunged through the gulf, arms whirling, machine-gunning expletives, ungainly as a dodo bird.

After boinking, I pulled on without resting and sent the route to the top. Uncle Chris Janiszewski lowered me, and we bumped fists (remember bumping fists?).

“Next go,” he said. And then: Pandemonium.

I’ve had projects pretty much nonstop for 40 years. I’ve gone on road trips and picked a line and given it all my gorm for days. I’ve worked projects at local crags weekend after weekend. I’ve had projects in hard-toreach places, and spent years striving and training and visualizing, whispering positive aspirations and ruining relationships, gearing up, hiking in and trying hard, and then after almost losing my grip on reality, I’ve sent my lifetime projects and experienced that feeling of ecstatic release like the guy with a pimple on his leg who squeezed out a Tumbu fly maggot the size of his thumb. And then, 20 years later, I’ve watched Alex Honnold walk out with a friend one morning and onsight my nine-pitch megaproject.