When you climb enough you develop an implicit trust in the gear you climb with. When you don’t climb for a while, that trust disappears and everything gets a lot scarier. Casual, safe falls onto a rope become grippingly terrifying. So, when I got back to the States, after working in Bangladesh for six months, Beans and I decided to take a trip to the desert to get scared on Ancient Art.
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Ancient Art is one of the most amazing, freakishly exposed lines out there. The experience of standing on the summit was like standing on a manhole cover with 600 feet of desert air on every side. Probably my favorite climb of all time, and actually not as terrifying as I expected.