From Bolts to Cams: My Journey to Trad Climbing
Edited by Kit Fitzgerald
With my harness loaded up with an array of jewel-covered cams, I looked up and eyed the canvas of deep-red desert rock above. Not a single bolt in sight.
In the absence of the familiar mental security of those shiny mile-markers, I plotted my own course. I spotted a few logical stances to place gear, and predicted where I’d have to move quicker without resting. Ultimately, I knew the plan would evolve as it was in motion.
I knew I could trust myself and my gear to adapt to the conditions of the rock. The only way to know how things would work out was to leave the ground and go for it.
I didn’t need trad. I used to say that trad climbing really just seemed like a more expensive way to do the same thing as sport climbing. We’re all just trying to climb rocks, right?!
I lived in the Midwest and had everything I needed in sport climbing at the Red River Gorge. I loved the mental and physical challenge this place afforded me. I could throw myself around, fall into nothing but air, and occasionally, stick a few moves. The Red was a fantastic playground, but I was starting to wonder if climbing could take me farther.
Climbing overhung sport routes in the Red River Gorge
On a late summer day in Chicago, my climbing partner and I hatched a somewhat reckless idea to climb an 18-pitch bolted route in Mazama, Washington, called Flyboys. I had never so much as climbed a two-pitch route and I found the idea slightly terrifying. But the photos on Mountain Project captivated me. Looking at climbers high above the wilderness below, I couldn’t help but wonder what that would feel like. I imagined myself moving above tree lines, above fellow peaks, up and over the limits I had fallen into. Something about becoming that tiny speck of a climber in a sea of rock called to me. So, with only three weeks of planning, we flew out for the weekend... and left ourselves a generous weather window of one possible day to complete the climb.
Miraculously, it worked. We had this glorious, well-bolted, 1800-foot climb completely to ourselves. This was the first time I’d felt real exposure on a climb. The Red River Gorge is beautiful, but it's a river gorge. You’re hiking down into it to climb out of it. Flyboys was the first time I’d felt so much air beneath my feet.
My first-ever hanging belay
The ground started to feel distant by pitch 4; my movement became more calculated, like moving through water. As the ground faded, my connection to the rock grew. At every belay, my partner and I would look down at our white rental car parked at the trailhead, getting smaller and smaller as the day went on.
It was the first time I’d experienced the type of objective you can’t just walk away from in the middle of it. It was a committing, freeing experience. Long after we completed the climb and got back into our rental car, we were still completely stoked.
Topping out at dusk after 18 bolted pitches
A few days later, we returned to the gym for one of our usual weekday sessions. But as soon as I stepped in the gym, the stoke generated by big outdoor objectives dissipated and I was smacked in the face with the realities of gym climbing. Compared to the expanse of multi pitch climbing, the crowded gym looked like a mosh pit. Almost every route seemed occupied. Metal music was blaring. It was a beautiful sunny day outside, but you’d never know it through the opacity of the ceiling.
Three days prior, we’d been questing into the sky on unknown terrain–now we were back to the same greasy plastic holds that simulated a loose idea of what we had just experienced. It felt like visiting your old middle school: everything seemed smaller, and what was once comfortably familiar now felt dull. I knew something had fundamentally changed.
My climbing partner and I both felt it. We had been bitten by the bug of chasing challenging, far-fetched objectives. On a phone call, we chatted about what we could chase next. “I’ve heard of this place called Wadi Rum,” he offered, “it looks pretty sick.”
A quick Google search confirmed that it did, indeed, look pretty sick. It also looked impossible. Rock climbing in a remote desert in the Middle East?! Yet only a few weeks ago, Mazama's 1,800-foot climb seemed unreachable, and I had proven myself capable. Why couldn't I do it again?
The endless sandstone of Wadi Rum
While the location and scale of Wadi Rum was intimidating, it was nothing compared to the most glaring issue: it was almost exclusively trad climbing.
I had never even touched a cam. My understanding of trad climbing was drawn from Devil’s Lake–a climbing spot known for finicky gear placement and a recent fatality that stuck in our gym community's collective consciousness. I intentionally learned as little as possible about trad climbing.
But I stopped myself short of saying “never.” I had experienced the way life expands in the pursuit of climbing. Climbing is this constant pull towards the perceived impossible. It’s a temptation to expand our limits, exposing an incomparable freedom in finding life beyond rigid expectations. I’d experienced this in my simple feedback loops in sport climbing. Through an intent to engage with what felt scary or out-of-reach, I’d experienced the most joyous, deeply satisfying moments of my entire life.
I flipped through a few Google search images of the vast, remote desert of Wadi Rum and felt that familiar cocktail of excitement mixed with fear. Something about the place was so captivating that, instead, I told myself “someday.”
Two years later, I was no closer to giving any fucks about trad. I had moved to the West Coast, though, where trad climbing was a lot more common, and had the potential to open up entire new worlds of rock climbing in my new backyard. The energy to explore greater horizons was palpable.
And yet, day in and day out, I found myself living old patterns: work, climb in the gym, sleep. Clip some bolts outside on the occasional weekends. I came to California to expand, but the safety of familiarity gripped me tightly.
I was climbing, sure, but that expansive feeling that I crave–that pursuit of the impossible and unknown–was distinctly absent. I spent my days bored at my desk, watching YouTube videos of Emily Harrington describing her fairly recent El Cap in-a-day ascent: with fire in her eyes, she spoke passionately of setting and achieving lofty goals in climbing.
I was 29 years old and gaining awareness that these types of goals don’t just present themselves. It’s not like ‘going to college,’ which is a goal that arrives at your doorstep after finishing high school. It’s not like ‘getting married,’ which is a goal that asks for your attention after a socially acceptable length of relationship. Certain goals have to be dreamt and actively sought. 29 is still young. I was fit and I was hungry for climbing to take me farther.
And then I remembered Wadi Rum.
This place still called to me.
With still no trad experience and no trad friends, I hopped online and started googling Wadi Rum trips. I surmised that the fastest way my impatient self could make this dream a reality was to hire a guide and go with four British strangers. (Okay, yeah, they didn’t have to be British, but that’s just how it worked out.)
In one committing moment, I booked my trip. It was official: I was going to climb in Wadi Rum. Now I just needed to learn how to place a cam.
On a sunny day in November, a good friend and I day-tripped to Yosemite from San Francisco for a crash course in cam mechanics and leading easy trad climbs (Are there crack climbs closer to San Francisco than Yosemite? Yes. Would I be satisfied with doing this the easy way? No.).
My first-ever trad lead
The first mental shift I experienced in trad climbing was wayfinding. In sport climbing, you get to follow a line of shiny bolts. You know where you’re going because the bolts show you the way. That is not how it works in trad climbing. A trad climb more-or-less asks you to start at the bottom and go up. That’s easy when you’re at a crag—less so when you’re 1000 feet off the ground, staring at multiple crack systems that may or may not lead to the intended finish of the climb.
Wayfinding on a trad climb asks you to study the rock: not just what’s in front of you, but what’s ahead. Not just can you climb it, but can you protect it? How big are the cracks, and what gear do you have? How will the rope move once you’ve executed your envisioned route? Trad climbing is an adventure of your own design. Wayfinding is a lot more than figuring out which way to go.
The next thing about trad climbing that always seemed insane to me is how the heck you actually place a cam in rock. In sport climbing, you protect the climb by grabbing one of about 12 identical quickdraws off your harness and clipping it to the shiny bolt. The quickdraw gate opens automatically when you push it onto the bolt, then you push your rope through the bottom carabiner, and bam! You are ready to keep going, onwards and upwards. You can do it while pumped out of your mind—the pieces don’t change and your muscle memory knows what to do.
In trad climbing, there are no bolts. Your cams are all different sizes. The rock you are protecting is all different sizes. So, you have to steady yourself enough to get a good look at the proposed crack you’d like to place a cam in. Then you assess the gear available on your harness, choose your fighter, and position it in the rock.
Tools of the trade
A correctly deployed cam will exhibit a certain shape, so you’ll want to get a good angle to be able to see what’s happening. You’ll also want to give it a tug to make sure it doesn’t move (definitely don’t think about how fall forces are a hundred times greater than what that little tug is doing).
Sometimes you choose the wrong fighter and you’ll have to start again. Sometimes you don’t have the fighter you need for that crack and you’ll have to look around for a new crack. While this is all happening, sometimes you’re chillin’ in a comfy and stable position, but sometimes, you’re holding it together with careful breathing while your toes balance on a credit card and three mangled fingers are wishing for bigger knuckles in an awkward crack. This is insane. Why would anyone do this?
And so, with two whole pitches of 5.8 trad climbing under my belt, I flew to the other side of the world.
Driving across Jordan to meet up with my climbing crew
It took two flights to get to Amman. From there, I rented a car and drove across the entire country of Jordan to Aqaba, a coastal city in the country’s south. I met up with the rest of the team at the Aqaba airport (which offered more flight options for Europe & the UK than for me, the lone American). We exchanged hugs like old friends, even though none of us had ever met and we’d only communicated through WhatsApp for the past few months.
I was the only one in the crew who had barely done any trad climbing. I had been up-front about my measly two trad leads, and was excited to learn from a more experienced crew. They called me the “sports climber.” They poked fun at the hangboard I hung up in the common area, but quieted down when not one of them could hold a single edge. It was all in good fun. I was strong and eager, but oh so clueless.
In Wadi Rum, you can drive further and further into the desert and continually find yourself surrounded by new giant formations. I wanted to be up high on all of them. The expansive desert of Wadi Rum is incomprehensible: thousand-foot-tall red sandstone cliffs are scattered throughout an otherwise flat orange-sand landscape. You’re not enclosed, the way you are in Yosemite Valley, and you’re not perched above, the way you are in Ceuse. It’s something else. Endless exploration feels possible.
The approach to the crag
We spent our days climbing routes that were 500 ft and longer, exploring in every direction from our home base in town. After a few days of getting used to the rock and following the pitches my teammates led, I built the confidence to practice leading more and more. The first pitches I led in Wadi Rum were on pre-placed cams that another party in our group would leave behind for me. Leading pitches hundreds of feet off the ground with no bolts to guide the way at first felt wildly intimidating. Gradually, though, I began to trust myself more and more. Rock faces that once looked totally uncharted and confusing began to come into focus as I learned to move within crack systems. I became less intimidated by the unknown the more I practiced deploying my new arsenal of trad climbing tools.
Climbing a 5-pitch route just outside of town in Wadi Rum
After nine days of climbing in Wadi Rum, I was feeling a lot more comfortable in this foreign and faraway place. One of the Brits, Cherry, and I had formed a solid partnership, and we set out on our own for a 5-pitch climb with a long approach. After about an hour of hiking, the first lead was mine, and I was psyched. I looked up at the climb: a reddish brown corner with a clean, beautiful crack splitting the two faces. There were some variances and undulations where I’d have to change the way I climbed, and I could pick out a few secure stances where I knew I’d get a break if I was pumped.
I clipped as many different-sized cams as I could to my harness. I could see the crack in the corner was fairly consistent, but there was a chimney afterward, and I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d need. Racked up and ready, I took hold of the rock and set my sights upwards.
In the overcast morning air, the rock still was still cool to the touch. I exhaled deeply, slid my hand into the jam, and pulled my body away from the ground and onto the rock. The angle of the corner called for a layback, so I pasted my feet high to create friction against the smooth sandstone. Steadily, I moved hand over hand, foot over foot. I paused to place a cam, taking another deep exhale to assure myself of the security of my stance before sliding a red BD piece into the crack and releasing the trigger to wedge it in securely.
As I moved upwards, I found a rhythm of movement and breathing that encompassed my whole being. My eyes took in what was in front of me and what laid ahead. In moments of stability, I reached for my harness to place a cam. In moments of flow, I continued onwards, steadily and confidently—just me, my breath, and the rock. I was enthralled with the creative freedom of having the tools I needed to look at a rock and climb it, safely.
And that’s when I fell in love.
I clipped the anchors of the pitch and reveled in what I’d just accomplished. Looking out over the vast red-orange desert landscape of Wadi Rum, I knew climbing would never be the same.
I said goodbye to my British crew and began the long journey home, already making plans and tick lists for climbing trips back as soon as I returned to California. I was absolutely on fire for trad climbing and all the places climbing could take me.
Trad requires an amount of self-reliance that suits me well. It requires creativity, patience, grit, and tenacity. It’s a space where I get to make my own rules. The path is not necessarily laid out before me—it’s mine to explore and create. Finding this mindset in climbing has given me the hunger for more in all areas of my life.
A few months later, I left everything behind to take a job cleaning bathrooms in Yosemite, allured by the opportunity to live in the heart of the world’s most premier trad climbing destinations.
Getting more trad experience, shortly after moving to Yosemite
It took a while to shake off my sport-climber defaults. The first few months of learning proper crack technique had me feeling like a gangly deer who didn’t understand its limbs (classic me).
Over time, I went from second-guessing every single piece of gear to firing cams and moving above them with confidence. I am no longer that sport-climber friend whose gym strength is useless on granite. My year of trad boot camp has led me to challenging climbs that require both sporty gymnastic strength and level-headed trad assuredness. I am fully addicted to everything this sport demands of me.
Trad climbing isn’t what I thought it was. It’s more than a heavy rack of gear and an uncomfortable way to get to the top of a rock. Trad climbing trains me to trust my own judgment and ability in tenuous situations.
Trad climbing is practice for the type of life I want to live: a life of my own design; a life where the path is not neatly laid out before me.
In the years since, I’ve seen my love for trad climbing grow and grow. Reflecting on these experiences, I’m incredibly grateful for the chances I took and the people I met along the way. Trad climbing is about so much more than just rock climbing. My strong belief in this fact is a huge part of the reason why I love sharing my passion for this sport, and why I’m designing a coaching program specifically for trad climbers.
If any part of my journey to trad resonates with you, or if you’re curious about how to take your trad climbing from comfy moderates to limit projects, you can join my waitlist to be the first to know when 1:1 coaching spots open! I’ll be releasing more details about coaching throughout the summer, so stay tuned!
