“What is this, a hangboard for ants?!?”

Training is all about adaptation. Specifically what experts call a “stress-adaptation” – regularly subject yourself to a greater-than-normal stress, and your body adapts. When injured, quite simply you have to embrace other expressions of adaptation.

Hangboarding is something I can do in my current state, so I’ve been hitting it recently. I’d been hangboarding on and off over the past few years, I’m a fan of it and it seems to have not only longstanding, but recently resurgent, support from serious rock climbers (i.e. those far better than me) as a potent training tool.

Derek & a model of his School for Kids Who Can't Read Good.

When injured, you can choose to focus on what you can’t do. I can’t walk. Can’t run. Can’t bike, ski, or climb. Poor me. Except that attitude gets me nowhere fast, and so I’ll occasionally wallow that way for a few seconds (at most), and then focus on what I can do. It’s a form of problem solving, which I love. Did Derek Zoolander let his coveted “School for Kids Who Can’t Read Good (and want to learn how to do other things good, too)” die when he saw a model and threw a tantrum, asking if it was a school for ants and insisting that it had to be at least, at least…THREE times this big! (That’s the explanation for the opening line, for those not privy to the new shit, man – it’s from the movie Zoolander, second only to the Big Lebowski.) No. He went out and achieved anyway.

Someone recently asked about motivation to train when injured. In part, I’ve beat it into myself over the years to where training has become part of my life. Though I’m dealing surprisingly well with being gimped-up, of course I have ups and downs and of course it’s getting old, and I’m getting way twitchy. Can’t sleep at night, sit there all fidgety during half the day, sometimes have to get up and just shake my arms and jump around. Being active has been an enormous part of my life for a long time. Beyond that, though, I suppose part of it for me has to do with gratitude, appreciation. Focus on what I can’t do? What bullshit. So I have one leg at the moment. That means I have another leg, two arms, ten fingers, my core (which runs from your hips to shoulders), and my brain. Plenty to work with.

"What is this, a hangboard for ants?!?"

Up at my little place in Estes Park, I made myself a gimp-sized hangboard stand, sized so my butt would hang just a few inches above my crash pad and I wouldn’t risk falling on my leg. Probably unnecessary, as it’s reasonable enough to carefully hangboard while standing off my good leg, but dudes love building shit. I wish I were good at building shit (and I want to learn how to do other things good, too).

Anyway, I’m down at Jenna’s place this week, thus away from my “Hangboard for Ants,” and so my great friend Matt Samet picked me up, took my gimp ass on some errands (I’ve got a margarita experiment in the works…I test all my margaritas on myself before subjecting it to you – and that’s my Kelly Margarita Guarantee!), and then to the Boulder Rock Club. I’ve come to fully dig the BRC. Got me thinking about what I like and dislike about different gyms, which I’ll bore you with soon.

Anyway, a sampling of what you can do with a broken leg. Yesterday’s workout:

• 45 minutes hangboarding. That’s way more than I’ve done before – when fully able, I don’t spend that much time hangboarding, in part because I climb often in the gym and outside, but this reminds me of the opportunity in my injury. Warmed up and worked my way into it with the bigger rungs, mostly 20–30 second hangs, then worked into harder ones, first-digit, 10–15 seconds max (hard for me), and down to some tip-hangs I could hold for only 5 seconds or so (smallest rungs in staggered position – one hand two rungs higher than the other hand). Mostly open-handed grip or partial crimp, to avoid the tendon-stressful full crimp. Usually shorter rest periods than the power boys recommend, generally starting each new hang/rep on the minute, as taking longer rest between reps annoys me. I did rest enough between sets (my sets usually = 3 hangs), though, to eventually read a good piece on the “just like me” idiot phenomenon of Sarah Palin, in the New Yorker, so that was cool (for the record, I don’t want a leader to be just like me. Our nation’s leaders should be a helluva lot smarter than me, and certainly smarter than the average dullard – look at what eight years of a moronic frat boy whom the average ‘Merican wanted to “have a beer with” got us?). Where was I? Oh yeah. Did my session on their overhanging campus board. The wooden rungs make for a great surface, friendlier on the skin and better than some of the hangboards out there. Their campus board starts close to the ground, and has a bunch of cushy pads beneath it, making it a perfect impromptu hangboard for ants.

• Some one-legged squats, or “pistols.” A great exercise for both strength and balance, in which I extend my gimpy right leg in front of me, somewhat parallel to the ground, and, from standing, squat on my left leg till my butt is down by my heel, then stand up. Another opportunity: since surgery on my left knee in 2005, my left leg has been a little weaker than my right.

• Some one-legged push-ups. Left foot on ground, right leg straight out behind me. Very easy/basic core stabilization, compared to doing push-ups with both feet touching.

• Muscle-ups. From a dead hang on the rings (rock rings and such work fine), pull up and turn-over your wrists and shoulders into the bottom of a dip, and press it out, continuous. So, essentially go from a dead hang to a full pressed-out position, like when you’re at the top of a dip. Haven’t done these in about a year, psyched I still could. Never spent much time on them, but kind of want to get to 10 consecutive. Maybe I’ll work on that. Did 3 sets (7-6-6), closely spotted by Matt in case I wiped out. Long (several minutes) rest in-between, strenuous exercise.

• Wrapped it up with some core work, including my all-important “pointer dog”/”superman” exercises for my spine (major spinal reconstruction surgery, with fusion, in 2005). I’ve had to increase my balance and core stability when I do the side with my right arm and left leg extended, which means my right knee and foot (and left hand) would be touching. But since I’m not supposed to put any pressure on my right lower leg/foot, I lift my foot and allow only my right knee to touch. Thus, I’m touching only right knee and left hand when I do the right arm and left leg extension – balancy! It inspired me to do the other side that way, too, in order to maximize benefit.

So there we go. Now I’m sore, feeling good, and not so twitchy. At least for today.

Time to lighten up a bit. All that accident analysis writing and pondering worked me. So, I’ll take some shortcuts today – both in length and depth (that’s what…oh, nevermind). My friend Peter Haeussler, who introduced me to the fun scale, was cleaning-up his office the other day and found a personal ad that he’d clipped (for amusement only, mind you — happily married for 25 years) from the Anchorage Press years back. Given that we all seemed to get a kick out of my total flop of a personal ad, as well as people’s great replies/comments with their own stories, this seemed a nice addition. Only question – where was this “goddess” around the time I posted my ad? Then again, something in the tone spells “psycho,” does it not? And that was one of my original qualifications: Psychos need not apply. As if I could be choosy. But I digress, and it’s worked out for the better anyway. Especially considering, as Peter wrote in email, “If she’s real, she might give you something that would make for Type 3 fun…” All you climber dudes up in AK, home to the wintertime adage, “She might not be much to look at, but she’s warm,” take note — the goddess could still be out there.

OK, enough already. We get it, you broke your leg. I know. Hard to believe, but even I am getting tired of talking about it.

Part of me hates to chalk it up to “bad luck,” but that may be the ultimate real-world explanation. Granted, I probably created, or certainly contributed to, my own bad luck. Perhaps it’s the flip side of that Thomas Jefferson line that I feel like I’ve lived for awhile now: “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”

Most likely two or three seemingly minor things conspired to create enough slack to un-weight my crampons from the ice bulge when I leaned back, right at that crucial “edge transition” from horizontal to vertical, and send me airborne.

1. I should have yelled “take” or “up rope” first, rather than skipping to my call of “lowering,” to ensure Steve had me as snug as possible. Especially important with stretchy ropes, and when transitioning from horizontal to vertical.

2. Directly related to #1, and adding to my fall, when Steve heard me call “lowering,” he naturally let out a little slack (two feet, at most). He then, cautiously, locked me off to ensure a controlled lower, which makes sense when you can’t see the person. My not doing #1, to suck up the slack & stretch, resulted in the additional slack of #2, likely creating enough to do me in. Most of the time – countless times in the past, I’m sure – I’d have been all right. But that ledge, right there, with the sharp drop over the edge and the swing into the ledge/corner, and it’s a rare but perfect storm.

3. Perhaps the rope was caught behind a bulge or an icicle, making it feel falsely snug, but then, under full weight, the rope popped free. This would let out some slack abruptly, as we’ve all likely experienced sometime when lowering. It couldn’t have been much, but maybe just enough.

***

A handful of seemingly random factors came together. Some minor pilot error by me – a little slack normally doesn’t cost you this much – with the simple bad luck of hitting the exact wrong spot, with my cramponed foot in the exact wrong angle, and we’ve got a horrible and rare scenario that transmitted hellish force into my leg, shattering it.

Perhaps I’m in denial, but this doesn’t bum me out as much as I might have thought it would. I mean, really, what can I do? It’ll hurt when I’m supposed to be in Alaska and Pakistan — the sorts of things that I live for — but I can’t turn back time. I’ll learn from it, though.

Randomness fills our world. Ever stop to think about all the forks in the road of life, and how one seemingly innocuous event – a dinner conversation with some person, or the time you decided to cross the street on this block instead of the next one down and then you ran into someone (or you got hit by a bus) – ended up influencing your life in untold ways? When I close my eyes and drift to the incomparable joys and treasures I’ve known in my climbing life, I’m grateful for the randomness of life. Though I’ve lived in shacks, sacrificed plenty and busted my ass, I didn’t make all of it happen myself. Some of it just came together. I don’t know how. Sure, we take opportunities and we work with them, as Jefferson said, but still, sometimes randomness works for or against us, and we have to accept the good with the bad. Such is life, there is beauty in randomness.

Great Andean Condors, circling above Jim Donini & I for an hour or more, at times swooping so close that we could hear the wind ruffling their wings. Northern Patagonian Icefield, Chile, Jan 2009.

Since my accident, I’ve posted the story version of what happened, some gnarly photos (here and here), a personal ad (why not) and various other drivel. Now comes the accident-tech-geek stuff. Details, details, a dry report – but it has a nice splash at the end.

More Details:

• After I topped out the route, walked out of sight to the anchor tree and clipped the ropes through, and then walked back to the edge, Steve heard me call “lowering.” I hadn’t yelled anything else. The rope felt snug, so I did not first yell for him to up-rope or pull me tight before I leaned back. Upon hearing my “lowering” call, he thinks let out a little slack (it’s hard to remember every detail) – less than a cycle through his ATC-Guide (two feet of slack, max) – and finished the payout by instinctively locking off. Makes sense, as he couldn’t yet see me, and I often do the same – let out a little bit, but don’t start fully lowering just yet. He recalls having me locked-off because he was starting to yell up about how we should manage the top-rope for him to follow (since, as I mentioned in the Accident Story, I’d forgotten that the route was more than a half-rope length). Then he heard me yelling “Too fast, too fast!” and saw me falling, giving him a horribly confused feeling since he had me locked off and had not yet started to actively lower me.

Click for clearer version (no idea why...)

• As I fell, I got pulled slightly rightward into the true fall-line, and extended my leg to anticipate the impact. My foot was in a dorsiflexed position, which is like letting your foot off the gas (lifting the top of your foot toward your knee). Apparently this position created the perfect storm for a nasty Pilon Fracture, sending the full force through my talus bone (in the foot) and into my tibia (my lower leg bone that got destroyed) where the tibia has the smallest cross-section and where the greatest stress occurs. To get a feel for how vulnerable your tibia is in this position, dorsiflex a foot and then tap that heel against the floor. Then imagine striking not the heel first, but just in front of it, between the heel and the arch, and you can almost feel your talus bumping up against the tibia. I just did it with my good leg, and though it might be just me, just now, that alone felt spooky.

Falling sideways also increased the actual distance I fell – think the hypotenuse of a triangle being its longest side. Steve and Pete went back the next day to recover the gear and study the scene, and it’s maybe two meters from the edge (where I stopped and yelled “lowering”) to the small ledge/corner I collided with. Add a couple of feet from the edge up to my tie-in point and some stretch (I ended up a little below the corner), and I fell probably 10 feet.

• Steve feels confident that he didn’t get jerked forward – makes sense, given the amount of rope out, friction in the system, and his being 20+ pounds heavier than me.

• We were climbing on two 7.8 mm ropes (Metolius Monster, dry treated). They’re rated as doubles and also as twins. I used them as doubles (clipping pieces alternately), as I mostly do, due to the reduced impact force on my pieces in the case of a fall. I clipped both through the anchor. The ropes were dry, stacked neatly in tramped-out snow, which I mention because we’d considered things that could have caused the rope to slip through Steve’s hands.

• Steve belayed with a Black Diamond ATC-Guide device, which is rated for use with ropes from 7.7 to 11 mm. Not likely that the ropes, which were dry, slipped through the belay device. He wore mid-weight liners with good dexterity and feeling, and had me locked-off. I’ve used this device with these ropes countless times without incident.

• None of the gear or systems was novel to us.

• No traverses; the route was straight up.

• No gear pulled. While lowering, after the fall, two equalized nuts (my first gear) popped due to the outward pull on the one rope. This didn’t drop me at all, since nothing popped on the other rope.

Notable Considerations:

Steve Halvorson, at the base of The Thrill Is Gone.

• When Steve was cutting my back pad for part of the splint (he did a brilliant job – my Cobras, the pad, several slings that he cut and used to cinch into hitches, plus a half roll of athletic tape and a jacket), he first sized it against my leg and mumbled “too big.” Through gritted teeth I replied, “That’s what she said.”

• Steve, an M.D. who works in the Emergency Department and is involved with wilderness medicine and SAR courses, did an amazing job of thinking clearly, staying calm, and being resourceful. While sitting there, I wondered – with all respect to my other climbing partners – if many other people I know – myself included for sure (note to self: time to take a WFR course, as mine is 15 years old) – would have any idea of what to do. Sure, he had to stop and think from time to time, but that’s great. It’s one thing to learn those things in a course, it’s another for him to have a good friend with a flopping leg and be on the spot to figure out how to best splint it, and how to get me down. He’d pause, breathe, remaining calm always, think, and then act. He could not have done any better.

I made Steve snap some photos. After not laughing at my "that's what she said" crack, I think he felt obliged.

• We created a pretty cool little butt-seat sled out of my pack (“My CILO GEAR pack, which literally saved my ass, I never leave home without CILO and neither should you!” – er, oh, wait, wrong channel…but thanks for the tequila, Graham!). We rigged it like a diaper-seat, connected to my harness, and ran slings up along my inner thigh and under my arms toward my upper back, so that Steve could drag me backwards downhill. That, and ample parts of pushing, pulling, me doing dips to get up and over fallen logs, and the full Jane Fonda Workout ab-routine of keeping my injured leg lifted the whole time, got us out in about four hours. No painkillers in either of our packs, though – I’m saving some from my surgery, to add to a half-roll of tape and a belay knife, for my future first-aid kit. The tape and knife proved super useful in rigging the splint. Taking a full-bore first-aid kit is typically absurd, I don’t do it and don’t know anyone who does (unless they’re guiding) – but being McGuyver-like with a knife and some tape sure helps. And drugs (if you have ‘em).

• Steve and some of his SAR and doctor-professor geek friends are doing some modeling about the accident, forces, etc. Eager to hear more if/when they come up with some numbers and scenarios. For now, it seems apparent that with 140 feet or so of rope out, it’s easy to drop at least five feet just with initial stretch. Add to that my failure to call for tension – thus another foot or two of slack likely in the system– and my calling first for “lower” – another foot or two – and we have my fall.

Winter Dance, on the other side of the canyon in Hyalite, and one of the best ice/mixed routes I've climbed.

• Crampons make things worse, for sure – the spikes catch and bite into things, concentrating the force. There can be no doubt that ice/winter climbing is generally more dangerous than rock climbing. It’s also fun, and being intimate with the winter landscape unlocks untold beauty. Plus, I can’t quite bear to sit around like a whiny bitch complaining about the weather. I love every season and I never get bored as a result. Once again, however, even 16 years into a climbing life that includes a fair bit of “spiky climbing” around the world, I’m reminded that ice climbing requires serious attention to detail.

Possible Preventive Measures:

• Suck-up the slack hard before lowering. If in doubt, try to pre-stretch the rope, both belayer and climber, by having the belayer lock off and sit back hard, then suck forward while taking out more slack, locking off, and repeating a couple of times. Especially helpful with ice climbing, as it seems unlikely that I’d have broken my leg, at least to this degree, without crampons on. How many times have we dropped a few feet while lowering on a rock climb – the rope pops around a bulge, for example – and your feet just dance around the rock? Happens often.

• Be clear in communication/commands. I’ve done a lot of climbs where my partner and I could not hear each other, and so we think, we feel what’s going on with the rope, and then we act. But in this case, I should have been more clear. I should have called for Steve to “up rope!” or “tension!” or “take!” first, and then called “lowering.” Generally, what I did, and with an experienced partner like Steve, doesn’t seem disastrously remiss or out of the ordinary. But it cost me. Such a simple mistake. Neither of us feels good about it, given how badly everything turned out. Steve wrote to me:

“I could just as easily have asked if you were at the lip. My mistake was placing you in the snow above it. I’d had a fleeting feeling of uncomfortableness with this – a nudge to check in – which I should have listened to. I realize that’s why I’d given only a short cycle through my ATC and started to call up, finally acting on it. I think this is at the heart of why I feel so responsible. I think communication goes both ways, which is what ultimately this is about: listening to ourselves, each other and acting on the responsibility to speak up if you don’t like something. You’re questioning your thoroughness in calling down, but I could just have easily – and had reason to do so – called up or clarified the plan before you even started up the route. Good belayers do that.”

• Not a preventive measure, but one that helps with reality: acceptance. Shit happens, and part of the beauty of climbing lies in its unknown elements. Of course we want to embrace these in a good way, and we want to remain vigilant to prevent accidents like this. It is always easy to second-guess afterward (just check any injury/accident forum on the Internet), and being extra careful never hurts. Nor does it guarantee anything (I have some interesting thoughts on risk, surviving, and learning; maybe I’ll write about it sometime). Our climbing world obituaries are filled with the phrase “He was the safest climber I know…” So, I’d say be cautious when it matters – but not too cautious, not too timid, don’t live in fear – and remember to think and to learn, and to accept that things can happen. Either that, or stay on the couch, reliving that dyno you did that one time, drinking margaritas.

Speaking of which, this post is too damned dry. Tomorrow I’ll finish by posting my Conclusions. But for now let’s loosen-up – Uri Fridman just sent me this marg recipe. Sounds really fucking good, and I’m ready for it. Need some lemons, though, but I can crutch to the little grocery up the street in about five minutes…

Mix: [seems Uri likes to have plenty of mix on-hand…but it’s good to be prepared.]

1 cup sugar

2 cups water

Mix well until sugar dissolves, then mix in:

1 1/2 cups of fresh lemon juice

1/2 cup of fresh lime juice

Add a dash of salt.

The Marg:

1 1/4 oz Hornitos or Herradura tequila

1/2 oz Cointreau

3 oz mix

Splash of orange juice (very little)

Mix all items in a shaker, add crushed ice to a glass, pour.

(Optional: dip rim of the glass in lime juice and add either salt or sugar to the rim)

Where to start with a description of how I broke my leg? How ‘bout some dialogue – they say dialogue engages the reader.

“Oh fuck, FUCK, Steve, I broke my leg, I broke – fuck! OK, fuck! My leg’s broke!” I shouted down after slamming into a corner with a small ledge. Steve said he looked up, saw my lower leg flopping side-to-side, and almost puked. Yup, I think I’d agree with your diagnosis, he thought to himself. Steve is my good friend Steve Halvorson, who lives in Bozeman and was one of my first climbing partners some 12–15 years ago, when we both lived in Missoula.

Hiking from the trailhead in Hyalite Canyon, with Winter Dance (the tiny-looking dagger far off, in center of photo) in the distance, perhaps the best ice route I've climbed.

Only he went on to become an E.R. doc, while I went on to waste my life becoming a climbing bum. Great stuff for us both. We had a terrific trip to the Bugaboos in August, and the Black Canyon in September, and I’d just finished a few days in Cody and was psyched for Hyalite Canyon, one of my old stomping grounds and home to so many great memories. Hyalite’s Unnamed Wall has a bunch of superb single-pitch routes, and the morning we left for the canyon I posted one of the original “Sketchy Kelly” stories, about a route there called Black Magic, with Pete Tapley about a dozen years ago. Steve and I pulled into the parking lot and, I’ll be damned, we saw Pete – first time I’d seen him in years. Big hug, huge smiles, a few minutes to catch up, and we made plans for beers after climbing that evening. Except I’d be going to the hospital, not the bar.

Steve and I hiked the 40 minutes or so to the Unnamed Wall – seemed a fitting place to spend the day – and I’d led our day’s warm-up climb, The Thrill Is Gone (sure seems that way now), a classic Jack Tackle mixed route that I’ve done at least a half-dozen times over the years. It’s great. Every time. Moderate but keeps you thinking, as it did this time. I climbed well, smartly (for once, I know…), placing good (mostly) pro and a fair bit of it, carefully running it out only when I had to. Topped out the main chimney/corner, hit a sloping little ledge that I’d soon hit again, and placed an ice screw in the body length of steep ice remaining – just to be extra careful. I love the feeling of self-control amid the improbable. Absolutely love it.

Steve below the Unnamed Wall. Behind him, to the right is Bingo World. The Thrill Is Gone is to the left.

Cruised up, hit the flats, now out of Steve’s sight, and plowed through some firm snow, mid-shin deep, to the tree anchor maybe 20 feet back. The tree already had a double strand of new one-inch webbing around it, but I added my cordalette to be sure, and clipped them both with two ’biners (one locking, one non-). Perfect, couldn’t be any safer. Steve probably wouldn’t be able to hear me from the tree, and he knew I’d topped out (it was obvious, and we’re familiar with the area), so I walked back toward the edge without yelling down, him paying-out slack by feel as I moved. I stopped at the top of the ice step, and the rope felt snug. The rope looked to be running clean. Again, all normal.

At this point, I can’t remember exactly, but I think I first felt the rope tight against me, and thus thinking no need to call “take” or “up rope” – a scenario by no means uncommon – I skipped a step and just yelled down, “Lowering!” as I leaned back. Suddenly I accelerated, screaming, “Too fast, too fast!” and then I slammed into the little ledge and corner, only about six feet down. Add a couple feet to account for the distance from the ledge up to my waist, and the total fall was maybe 10 feet. A couple more for rope stretch, perhaps, as I dangled below the ledge, my lower leg bent slightly but grotesquely to the side.

I’d forgotten that the route was more than 30m, even though I’ve done it before (typical…). Steve was just calling up to me about this when I leaned back and fell. Would have been no biggie, standard fare for my dumb ass, I’d have just batmanned back up and belayed Steve from the top. So many “ifs” – same as anything in life, when you think about it, with its innumerable forks in the road – like if I’d remembered the length, I’d have just brought Steve up and none of this would have happened. Then again, were I smart, it wouldn’t be me now, would it?

“Lower, Steve! Lower, slowly, slowly, aaarrrgghhhfuck!” – once my leg was broken, I just wanted to get the fuck down. Every time I’d accidentally bump the rock or ice with my right leg, my bones grinded together. I kept watch on the ends of the ropes and called down to Steve to do the same (he was already on it). With 10 feet of rope left on Steve’s end, and me 30 feet off the ground, I had to stop and, from a hanging stance on one leg, grit my teeth and build an anchor.

Steve's superb and resourceful splint job.

It’s interesting what emergency or desperate situations can do. For whatever reason, I’ve found over the years that I tend to handle them fairly well and can retain, even heighten, my focus without freaking out. So, I focused hard and cold and built a trustworthy anchor, thought it through, clipped in direct and then clipped-off the blue rope (on the side coming from Steve) to my harness to keep me from losing it. The green rope was still going through the tree anchor and back to me. Next I untied from blue’s end and pulled it (from Steve’s side, by where I clipped it off to my harness) through the tree anchor above, took its end once it came down and tied an overhand-bight that I clipped to my belay loop with a locking ‘biner, and then freed the clipped-off part (the part I’d originally tied-off to my harness for safe keeping). I took the blue rope going from my harness and clipped through my new anchor and called to Steve to take-up blue’s slack and lower me on it while keeping me on with the green rope – the remaining 10 feet on green (still going up to the tree) would serve as an extra backup to my new anchor, testing it for a short bit before green passed free through Steve’s belay device and I came exclusively onto the single rope (blue) running through my new anchor. The last thing I wanted was to make anything worse.

Soon after I was down, Steve splinted me and we began the four-hour haul out – the beginning of an even longer haul that awaits me.

—

The other day, Steve came across a passage in Farewell to Arms, a great book by Ernest Hemingway (though The Old Man and The Sea is my favorite – read it twice in a row, back-to-back):

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

—

Tomorrow or Thursday I’ll post more details and an analysis (almost completed) of the accident.

Ever feel like Wile E. Coyote, in the old Roadrunner Cartoons, when he falls off a cliff and an anvil follows him down and smashes him after he’s already decked? Splat-Bam!

A few months back I wrote positively about the things that I value. But people whose fundamental life values center on materialism make me sick. I feel it physically, in my gut, when such people try to force their shallow concept of living upon me. Of course I shouldn’t care, and since we tend to self-select our peer groups, I usually avoid it well enough. But things don’t always work that way. Sure, we’re all materialistic to a degree, especially here in the U.S., and I am a hypocrite like everybody. But travel the world and see how most humans live, and you see that even the most minimalist of our community live privileged lives. I always return home grateful for my life and the things that truly matter. And so maybe it’s the lack of perspective that so repulses me.

If someone accosts you with their pathetic and antiquated ideas of what constitutes “life,” while berating you for living what feels like – what you know is – a fulfilling and passionate existence, and for that derides you as a loser and a bum, how should you respond? Yeah, sure, you should feel sorry for them. But I’m tryin’, Ringo, I’m tryin’ reeeeal haaaard to be the shepherd. So it goes. Security is an illusion, life is precious and it can be lost in so many ways.

And so, though I’ve been meaning to get that accident report going (maybe this weekend), in the spirit of living life I’ll post a slide show (look out, trying to get fancy…hope it works). A sampling of some memories that fill me with love, physically, in my heart, and make me grateful for all that I have. Even if I am a bum. The bums will always lose!

Nah. Long live the bums.

Ding-dong, the witch is dead, the ExternalFixatorNastyMedievalTortureDevice is off my leg, off my leg, off my leg. No longer am I the dog with the lampshade over his head, bumping into things everywhere I go. I’m in a cast, more mobile, and the hardware store that is my lower right leg contains three plates and twenty screws (though I count fewer on the films). Now, I must wait. Wait for the bone to re-grow, and wait for it to fill-in the areas where it went ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

It’s weird, in that my un-trained eye has seen far more gruesome-looking X-rays. But I guess the consistently grim words I hear about mine relate to the location and complexity of the fracture, not necessarily the big-looking damage. Things like the joint surface being destroyed, and that powder-back-to-bone stuff.

“I’m not going to lie,” Melinda, Dr. Desai’s excellent and normally cheerful P.A. told me at my post-op appointment Friday, her voice turning somber. “You’ve suffered a devastating injury.” She explained what they found while doing this third, and hopefully final, surgery – things like a bone “nugget” from the distal end of my tibia that had rammed several inches upward into the solid bone. They fished it out and re-placed it. The anterior tibia had this bone plate of sorts, visible in an image I posted after the last surgery update, that had split down the middle and crumpled inward, each half partially overlapping the other. But overall the surgery went well, and they put the big pieces back together like a jigsaw puzzle, and the dust particles should eventually calcify into real bone. And, critically, they made the joint surface as smooth as possible.

“A complete recovery to your previous level would be a champion event,” Melinda continued. I know they give you the most conservative outlook, and I’m trying not to over-think it. I sense that I might be coming down off some weird initial high, as the short-term events (surgery, removal of the X-fix, etc.) pass and the epic grind ahead becomes my immediate reality.

I should be allowed to walk in three months. PT and stationary bike before then – can’t wait. Bone growth takes time. I understand, and I will stay strong. Melinda optimistically says we should shoot for me to do some hiking by mid-summer, and some easy climbs by fall. Jesus (you said it, man). Of course I expect to progress much faster – as if I can control how fast my bones re-grow – and at some point I’ll explain to her how things like overhanging top-roping in the gym actually present very little risk to my leg. But that can wait.

An a voice shouted down: Walk! I commandeth you, Walk!

Right now, I’ve got a month in a cast, but I can do push-ups (with only my good leg touching), hangboard (spotted or close to the ground), and activities designed to eliminate fall risk and put zero pressure on my leg.

They released me after surgery Wednesday night, I loaded-up on drugs, struggled like hell with pain Thursday morning but made it through, spent all day on the couch, watching TV, drifting in and out of consciousness, allowing myself to do absolutely nothing. I suppose it’s OK on occasion. But enough of that – a guy like me can’t afford much more brain rot. And it’s not just brain rot, but there’s a mentality that I find important, one of symbolic little victories along the way that help keep the all-important edge, things like I talked about with getting off the painkillers as soon as possible; things like finishing strong on hard training sessions; like insisting on walking the final few feet to the truck in Hyalite one month ago today, rather than being carried. Things like taking my rock rings to the workout room at Jenna’s apartment complex Friday evening – while carefully protecting my leg – and doing just a little, but, dammit, doing something.

It is alive!!! Two of the four incisions.

Here’s one I wrote for Patagonia’s blog, The Cleanest Line, last spring. Seems fitting given that I recently finished driving (with a buddy, at least, versus the solo drive, a.k.a. “California Carpool”) through Wyoming and Montana, then flew back — hey, the plane was going anyway. Besides, I’m not going anywhere for awhile. Here goes:

“Nice, low-carbon climbing. But I’d do it in a heartbeat,” John replied. Despite his admission (and despite his being my boss), I can easily dismiss John with the undisputed trump card that our environmental crisis boils down to overpopulation. He and his wife have a kid. I have none.

Dougald replied, “You bastard.”

That bastard has no room to talk, anyway – he drives an SUV, which, even though he claims it’s a “mini-SUV” that gets 26 mpg, makes him the devil incarnate. My car gets 40 mpg, so I am clearly a better person than Dougald. Dougald and his wife have no kids, either, also making them clearly better people than Juan. Except that John – now ‘Juan’, befitting his move to Mexico, where he doesn’t burn fossil fuels heating his house like we do – is a good person whose writing and Imax movie inspire countless people with an appreciation for nature, which might make all of us act better – an influence reaching far beyond one person. And John has a beautiful family and he and his wife raise their daughter with a mindset that could have her as part of a generation that literally saves the earth – or, more correctly, saves our ability to live in it. We’ll need it with all these people. But they’re doing a net-minus-one, which makes them champs compared to people living in Africa. Clearly better people than those people, right?

“I’ll bet 95% of people don’t even know what a carbon footprint is and don’t care,” Scotty said on the drive from the airport to Yosemite Valley. He’s probably being optimistic. We definitely need more awareness, so maybe we should do one of those expeditions that flies halfway around the world to “raise awareness” for global warming.

“Besides, the plane was coming here anyway,” he said with a half-smirk.

“As created by the demand of the passengers, like me,” I replied. In fact, the flight was packed. Most were likely traveling on business, which, it seems, we all accept as necessity. So, let me get this straight, if you’re contributing to this house-of-cards with unsustainable consumption called our economy, then the carbon doesn’t really count. I suspect some vacationers like me were on-board, too, but they might have been visiting family, which also seems OK. As for the pure vacationers (it was spring break, after all), well, as they say in the credit card commercials, you work hard, you deserve it. And I love climbing, I deserve it. Surely more than the executives at AIG, anyway.

Scotty D on Red Zinger (the climb, not the airplane above), Cookie Cliff.

Besides, if I didn’t go, Cracka Boy (that’s Scott) planned to just go soloing anyway, so in a sense I may have saved his life. Then again, getting back to the population-resource thing, if Cracka splats… and, on top of it, if I didn’t fly out and he splatted, then I would, indeed, have followed the path of the righteous man. But that doesn’t seem quite right. Besides, our first day – an afternoon at Cookie Cliff – had me so in love with the world I destroy that I didn’t care about any of that shit.

Day two: Three-quarters up the first pitch of the day, hail turning to a full-on deluge soaked us and we bailed. Karma. Clearly. High carbon climbing karma. The universe does, as it turns out, revolve around me. We bailed and went for a trail run – it doesn’t get much more carbon-neutral than running. We drove to the absurdly ornate Ahwanhee™ Hotel and poached a parking spot. After an hour on the trail it was barely noon, so we had the day to kill. Marg-thirty. We’ve worked hard, we deserve it.

Back at the room, I showered, but where’s the soap? The housekeepers apparently threw away the soap – I’d used it once – and so I opened a new one. They lined the trash buckets with new plastic bags, despite our having just a couple of food wrappers in the “old” ones. Washed the sheets on our beds. Washed the towels. All totally unnecessary unless the housekeepers wanted to keep their jobs. I open my laptop. If the weather stays bad tomorrow and we can’t climb, I’ll have done enough to call this to a work trip – like everyone else on the plane – making it OK. Besides, Scotty’s on the clock.

I squeeze the limes, pour the Patron, and look at the packaging. Says right there on the box: Hecho en Mexico. I’m supporting businesses and helping people feed their families. Simple. And I’m sure the plane was coming up anyway.

Last night I finished my final marg for several days. Hmmm, come to think of it, maybe that’s why I endured such horrible post-op pain last time? Maybe it wasn’t the nerve block wearing off, but rather the lack of margs. The Dilaudid drip didn’t do shit. But a Patron drip? Think I’ll suggest it during surgery prep.

Anyway, since I’m light on the pain meds right now, only taking them only before bed to help me sleep, a marg seemed in order. Call it a “Here’s to Dr. Desai and his fine fingers having a great day” marg. Figured that, in the spirit of things, and since I’ll have to refrain in the druggie days immediately following surgery, I should make it a great one. Dr. Desai does complex surgeries, I do margs. We all have our gifts.

Groping for the best limes. Priorities, baby.

Wednesday afternoon is my third, and hopefully final, surgery. I’ll probably need another a ways down the road, to remove the freakin’ hardware store in my leg, but this operation – if all goes well – represents the end of my surgical repair and the official beginning of my recovery. Fuck yeah. Plus, I’ll get the medieval torture device off my leg – ever heard of someone so excited to get into a cast?

So it seemed fitting to sip just a little bit of a top-shelf marg. You don’t waste great tequila by mixing it with junk, if you mix it at all, so I took a small lime, rolled it carefully to soften it up, squeezed it, heated the simple syrup, then cooled it, added a splash of OJ, and I had the best, purest marg mix around. (Scroll down on this post for the exact recipe.) Skipped the triple sec – great tequila doesn’t need the softening, because it’s already so smooth. The tequila? Tried a new one: Corzo Silver, out of Jalisco, Mexico. Normally I only sip stuff this good – actually, a guy like me doesn’t normally own stuff this good – but, damnit, I wanted a marg. What fine tequila, Corzo Silver, a terrific blanco with a refined flavor and finish (as I discovered while sipping it on occasion in the past week or so) – thanks tons to Graham, Doug, and everyone at the Alpine Training Center’s recent community night for the unnecessary but tremendously appreciated “Kelly’s tequila fund.” It’s going to great use.

In fact, this marg tasted so damned good I made some extra to share with Dr. Desai this afternoon. Wait, come to think of it, maybe that’s not such a good idea. The whole steady fingers and concentration thing… So maybe I’ll save it for when we celebrate my return to days where I watch the sun first crest the horizon from the trail, the orange rays spilling across the mountains, when again I can breathe air that tastes even finer than fine tequila, when my heart pounds, my lungs burn, my mind eager and anxious and ready while racking up, those days where time disappears into nothingness and I feel like I’m soaring into a world so wild I could never, in a million years, have dreamed of something so captivating. Yeah, maybe I’ll save it for that.

Colin Haley just above the Col of Hope, midway up our new link-up on Cerro Torre, 2007.

“Oh sweetmotherofmercy, give-me-drugs!” For all my tough-guy banter about getting off the pain meds, I’m full of it. Twelve hours after surgery on Wednesday, I whined like Nancy Kerrigan.

One of the two incision spots from last Wednesday's surgery. The medieval torture device stays on until the next surgery.

The nerve block on my leg wore off way too soon. In addition to general anesthesia, they completely blocked-out (numbed) my leg, which greatly helps control post-op pain. So long as it lasts the expected 24–48 hours, anyway – through the most brutal period. But apparently the length of the block’s effectiveness can vary, due to factors like individual metabolism. Mine wore off after about 12 hours (damnit, shouldn’t my being a total couch potato for nearly three weeks have paid off in some way??), leaving me in excruciating pain, far worse than the no-pain-meds four-hour drag/crawl/carry out of Hyalite, with my bones grinding together. My little pain pump thingy by my bed seemed like a kiddie toy that didn’t work, and they injected me with a mg (?) of Dilaudid (hydromorphone), a super powerful synthetic opiate, apparently up to 10 times stronger than morphine. A couple of injections, combined with regular hits on my pain pump, got me through the night. They held me for an extra day, not wanting to release me until the pain was controlled. Sounded good to me. I got out Friday and spent the weekend sleeping (with help of oral pain meds) and sitting on the couch.

Can’t wait for this coming Wednesday, surgery #3, hopefully the last (at least until sometime a ways off when we might need to remove the hardware).

X-ray showing a couple of the rods of the external fixator.

So, to review, the first surgery, a fairly minor one, happened in Bozeman, when they installed this external fixator contraption on my leg. My leg was too swollen to do the major surgery then, so this thing went in to hold the bones in place until the swelling would allow for the big surgery(ies). BTW, I figured they just tapped the rods a half-inch into the bone or something, but the X-rays show that the damned rods go most of the way through my leg. As the swelling has subsided (mostly), I can feel the metal going through my bones. Too weird.

This past Wednesday was the first big surgery. They installed two plates and 11 screws, if I remember right. One plate spans my fractured fibula (a slender bone on the lateral – outside – part of your lower leg), which is the simplest to fix. Fairly clean break, not into the joint, no biggie. I’m happy to have it bolted back together now, because as the swelling decreased, the broken bone ends shifted back and forth damn near every time I breathed, making it hard to sleep. Didn’t hurt, it just creeped me out big-time.

The other plate went in on my posterior distal tibia. The tibia is the big lower leg bone, commonly called your “shin bone”; distal means the “far end” (the end by my ankle); and posterior means backside (by my heel). The posterior plate (and screws) holds together the chunks on the backside of my tibia, down by the ankle. They moved the big chunks back into place and let ‘er rip with the power drill, basically (though a bit more delicately than hanging sheet rock, I trust).

CT scan of my Pilon Fracture.

My distal tibia is a mess. It’s where I have this nasty Pilon Fracture. The outer surfaces of my distal tibia form a spiderweb of fractures. Much of the inner part – like the inside of a cone – is “heavily comminuted” – medical lingo for pulverized. You’ll see on the CT scans that it looks like there’s no bone there, since the bone got turned to dust. In this type of Pilon Fracture (disclaimer: this info is mostly correct, but I might have a thing or two slightly off), my talus bone – big bone in the foot – was stronger than the end of my tibia, and when I smashed onto a ledge after the climb (accident analysis coming soon), it acted like an upward battering ram and shattered my distal tibia (and snapped the fibula in the process). The hugest problem, as I understand things, and what could threaten my future mobility, is that it pretty much destroyed the upper part of my ankle joint.

This Wednesday, in the next (and hopefully final) surgical stage, Dr. Desai’s big task will be to install a plate or two to repair the anterior, or front side, of my distal tibia – check out the images…nasty. Will post-up post-surgery images when I get them. Man, I’m gonna be setting off metal detectors all around the world.

So, apparently once things are puzzle-pieced into place with help of the hardware, the big bones fuse together, and the dust inside somehow gravitates toward the bigger chunks and begins to fill-in and grow back into real bone.

This takes time. I’ll likely be in a cast for 4–6 weeks, which is great. Anything to get out of this medieval torture device thing – ever see those dogs with the lampshades on their heads after surgery, and they’re always bumping into things? Right… And in 8–10 weeks I’ll probably be allowed to start walking again. Limited impact for 3–4 months. Beyond that? “We’ll have a better idea after about six months,” Melinda, Dr. Desai’s excellent PA, told me.

For now, this Wednesday feels like a big deal to me, because it will officially mark the start of recovery. And while it could take 6–12 months until I’m feeling physically capable again, right now I’m just eager to move beyond the surgeries and into the long, uphill grind to recovery.

Another X-ray.

Another CT scan view.