It was sometime around 4 o’clock in the afternoon –– my boyfriend Ben, Max, Bear and I were many hours deep into the drive that stretched from the coast of San Luis Obispo to the inconceivable happenings of Las Vegas. The car speakers roared with Brewer & Shipley’s song “One Toke Over The Line”; Max wanted it rolling as we thundered on through the barren highway into Barstow because it played in the first scene of his favorite film. I looked back at him from the front, smirking. I knew somewhere near his seat amongst the heaps of climbing gear, food stoves, z pads and chalky clothes lay his beat-up copy of Hunter Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. He had already read it, and so had all of us. We were all-too familiar with “the Bat Country” that Thompson –– or Raoul Duke, his fictionalized character in the book –– high on mescaline and muddied down by hallucinations, had coined the land we were just now passing through.

We kept singing along as the lyrics came: “And now I'm one toke over the line, sweet Jesus.” I sat looking out at the fiery sun behind us and the pink aura hugging the horizon line. I liked feeling time slowly warp and stretch the farther we got from our school town.

With Red Rock Canyon Campground in our GPS, we sped past our usual climbing exit towards Bishop. I felt rebellious and full of exhilaration, rolling over this imaginary line past the crags we knew and loved into the arms of a new climbing territory. 

It made me think of the characters in the book, teetering over the dark side, often one hit over their own lines, meddling with what Thompson described as "a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…” As climbers, we keep tucked away the notion that one toke of adrenaline too many opens the door to accident.

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To set ourselves free into the quiet of the desert campground, nestled among the rust-colored sandstone cliffs, we first had to pass through the mouth of the city. With all its self-delusional grandeur and faux sparkling diamonds, the landscape tried to swallow our car whole as we rolled down The Strip.

Humanity jumped out from all sides with “Spin to Win $400,000+” billboards and hustler clubs neighboring gun ranges nestled near drive-through wedding chapels. The space needle stood stoically; the otherworldly Luxor Hotel pyramid spewed light into the mouthwash-blue sky. The sights and sounds of it all whirling by us was something from a dirtbag climber’s midnight nightmare.

Where was the hum of nature’s bliss amongst this concrete jungle?

But we managed to look at it in a manner that allowed all the irony, bleeding from grand hotel to grand hotel, to define the satirical state of things. Head hanging out of the window, I imagined how The Strip felt to Hunter Thompson and the Samoan attorney that accompanied him on his Vegas reporting jaunts in the early ‘70s, pulsating under the tires of their red Chevrolet convertible.

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"One of the things you learn from years of dealing with drug people,” Raoul Duke ponders in the book Fear & Loathing, “is that you can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug. Especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eye." Ambiguity hovers over the definition of what constitutes a drug, but the druggie is steadfast and plainly true. I know this because all my college buddies and I, packed in nine cars dotted along Highway 15 toward Red Rock Canyon, were chasing the same knife’s razor edge: the peaks and boulders our bodies yearned to climb.

Raoul and Dr. Gonzo, in the novel, speed across the Mojave Desert with LSD-addled brains set on Vegas, and we were not so different––steering the wheel toward our drug of choice, feeding that eternally hungry beast inside us that growls with an insatiable appetite to climb.

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Ben and I saw Vegas the next morning, but from the vantage point we had wanted all along. I had just led the first pitch of Frogland Buttress, a 5.8, 6-pitch climb on Whiskey Peak in Black Velvet Canyon. I slung a tree and belayed Ben up to me.

Through the trees we marveled at this alternate universe of a town, nestled in the crotch of two adjacent hills. From that angle, Vegas looked like nothing more than a plot of land in a sea of barren desert. And looking up at the pitches we had yet to climb, my small frame felt just as insignificant amongst the towering grand wall that defined it.

This insignificance was the sublime feeling we chased all weekend long and it woke us early amongst the biting cold of each morning. It had us cooking breakfast and shuffling gear by the roadside like dirtbags, so we didn’t have to pay park fees. Ropes were strewn across our backs as we hiked the approaches to crags like The Gallery and Wall of Confusion to test ourselves on lines classic to the area to meet back up with this feeling––all while the rock beneath our fingertips bled burnt ochre from the iron oxide in the sandstone.

Some split off from the pack to boulder at Kraft under sprawled crashpads; another went and met his high school teacher to do a long multi. Our final day was spent at Sandstone Quarry, where the 5.12a test piece “Where Egos Dare” waits, etched into the wall, which millions of years ago was beneath a shallow sea, and later sculpted by nature’s erosion and sedimentation.

I yearned to test my own ego on the climb, but the cold of the early morning seeped past my goose-down layers and straight into my bones as I sat in my harness halfway up a warm-up 5.10b, weeping silently into the wind. My fingers, numb to the world, screamed in visceral pain. But still, we savored the last of the addictive nature of feeling infinitesimal before traversing back across our vast state of California that day.

But nothing beat the way Ben and I ascended Frogland Buttress in a dance that first morning. Swinging leads, setting up our choreographed systems at each belay, embracing as the other approached the next anchor point.

On the third pitch, I stepped out onto a wide overhanging flake, tangoed up a slight dihedral and found a belay by making do with the remaining gear dangling on my harness. I chose to lead again, this time under a roof on the exposed slab traverse. My trusty three-finger drag got me past the small edges to a crack, where fear seeped in. Gravity demanded me back to Earth as the 500-foot drop incessantly tapped on my shoulder.

I called down to Ben, my voice quivering, but he could barely hear me and had no way of helping –– this was my battle, I remembered. Frustrated by my body’s willingness to give into this fear, tears welled in my eyes. I continued.

Ben took the next lead. I followed it, climbing through a tunnel created by a huge chockstone wedged into the crack. Girth-hitching my pack to my waist, I hauled both it and my body through the small hole, smearing my feet on either side of me.

It was tight as a coffin.

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What replays in my head more than the climb was the drive to it. I can vividly remember turning off the highway and following the snaking road of the Late Night Trailhead on our way to the route on Whiskey Peak, which loomed in the shadowy canyon. I filled the groggy morning silence with existential questions: Why do we do this all the time Ben? What is it about all of this–– why are we drawn to these rocks, so addicted?

“It doesn’t know who you are,” he responded after thinking for a while. “The wall just doesn't care.”

Sloping boulders and potholes under the wheels rocked the car as we continued down the dirt road. These sudden jolts took hold of my pen as my hand, scribbling this sentiment on paper, shot up across the page and back down again, like some invisible presence moving fingertips across a Ouija board. 

I couldn’t help but think of the truth of Ben’s phrase, how unforgiving the rocks we dare to climb are, and how it was as if this notion’s reality lay dormant until seconds from the lot, waking up and lurching as the harbinger of forthcoming tragedy.

I’d say we didn’t cross any lines that day, but now, almost a week later, I’ve learned the line was, in fact, crossed. All it took was one toke too many and a new grave had to be dug and the family of the 30-year-old woman climbing with her partner just 10 miles north of us in Pine Creek Canyon had to be told news we all fear most.

She was pronounced dead at the scene.

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The hours of the early afternoon peeled away every pitch. On top of Whiskey Peak, I plopped down on a rock a safe distance from the edge and looked out across the canyon –– the red striations in the rocks reminded me of the pink and white taffy I ate as a kid. I’d climbed my whole life, and since the age of 5, had been married to risk.

There were no bolts to rappel down, and I sulked as we descended on foot past the cairns marking the faint trail and to the car. The sun was bowing its head to the horizon; soon day was to be folded into night. I ignored this, relishing in anger. Ben and I sat in silence for a while, looking through the windshield sluggishly.

A faster pace, an able body, a stronger drive to smile while suffering –– I wished upon these things. I didn’t crane my neck to that sky, though, and back at my partner, cup my gratitude in those calloused hands that were safely returned by the rock to our seats in the car.

I see now what a dangerous thing it is to feel familiar with climbing –– it holds too much space for peril. She fell to her death after rappelling off the wrong end of the rope, around the time we were reaching the car. A party across the canyon is said to have witnessed her body slice the air and ricochet, hitting the rock she had just climbed up three times.

She was only 30 years old and certainly not ready to die. But the rock is an unforgiving force, and now she’s dead.

There’s a point in the story where Hunter Thompson’s Raoul hits a breaking point after toggling just over the line for days at The Mint Hotel in Vegas. He’s at the mercy of heaps of cocaine and adrenochrome he took. Insanity waves him on into the darkness of nightfall.

There has always been a line we as climbers must train ourselves to recognize, embody and exist near in a symbiotic fashion –– just must not dare to cross it. There are those who throw themselves into risk and succumb to the unforeseen elements of the high mountains, for it is there that their reward lies. It’s where they must be to feel much of anything at all, where their hunger feeds. Rock climbers, however, coexist with risk in a different fashion. Rarely are there storms blowing us towards mortality; it is our choices and movements up the wall that determine that fate.

After that Saturday, another one of us is gone, and now this community of adrenaline-seeking climbing junkies –– no better than Raoul and Dr. Gonzo –– has to sit with the knowledge that safety is not always more in the hands of nature than in the rough, calloused palms of our own. 

We head to the rock because that’s where we meet ourselves and truly live. But a strange game it is to play, teetering on the line between the brightest thing you’ve ever known and the dark, all-too fatal ending waiting to take you.