Better Head
So many people want my secrets for a better head.
They confess to their patron saint, “I don’t have the nerves to make 20 foot runouts above loose nuts and rusted quarter-inch buttonheads!” And they plead, “Why, Nightmare, why! I want to be a big dog!” They’re afraid they’ll never get to climb whatever climb in Tuolumne then ask me to fix their fears by doing some insider trading about how to be brave and rich I heard from Alex Handhold in a hot-boxed sprinter and sprinkling them with my magic chalk✨
When I hear this, I’m flattered, and chalk is magic, but I’m not picking up on bad head game. The only sin I see is someone who doesn’t know if the gear they just placed at their waist is even good enough to take on, let alone dance 20 feet above with panache and quaking innards in the style of the first ascensionista.
When they tell me they are afraid of runouts or afraid to fall on trad gear, I’m thinking THANK GODDESS, I’m so relieved you’re scared. Because why, why, why, would you ever climb that far above gear you don’t know to your bones is good as can be?
Now that we’ve centered staying alive above finding the bolts on the Bachar-Yerian, you want the super duper top secrets sent down on golden zephyrs from granite angels who sang to me in rhyme? No they didn’t arrive on warm fuzzy winds, my dad taught me under the giant roof at the base of the great climb Horseman at the Gunks in the rain. He told me: place the entire rack. Stand on the ground and place the entire rack, nuts and all. Then take them all out and place them again. Then take them all out and place them again.
How will you know your placements are perfect? No instafluff, no youtube, no sprinters, not what the 20 year old at the gear store said. A totem with one lobe catching is not a perfect, or safe, placement.
Find someone eating peanut butter in an astrovan who started placing gear the same year as their vehicle and ask them their opinion.
First you learn to take, then you learn to fly.