Author shares love of rock climbing

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'High Infatuation' details one woman's need to cling to sheer rock walls, perch on summitsDavid Watts Barton McClatchy Newspapers Spider-Man may be able to cling to sheer rock walls, but so can Steph Davis. And Davis is real. Davis, 34, who lives part of the year in Yosemite and part in Moab, Utah, is one of the top rock climbers in the world, and the second of only two women to solo climb Yosemite's El Capitan. Now she has a book in which she tells some of the

stories she has accumulated during 15 years of climbing. And as indicated by its title, "High Infatuation: A Climber's Guide to Love and Gravity" (The Mountaineers, $16.95, 224 pages), the book is about more than gear and climbing routes. Davis is a bit of a nut, which she freely admits. It's nothing for her to travel thousands of miles to Patagonia, only to spend weeks camped in a cave, waiting for a clear day to climb; spend several weeks hanging on a portable ledge on a sheer rock face in Baffin Island in northern Canada; perch on a pinnacle in Pakistan. "It is kinda kooky," she concedes by phone from Moab, where she lives with her husband, Dean Potter, another top climber. "It's very stripped-down. I was having to explain to someone about big-wall style, and he was asking, 'Why would you want to do that?' "And I said, 'It's simple: It's stripped-down, you have a tidy mission, to go up, and it's very clean and pure.'

"Life is so fast and built up and manufactured that I have to make this strong effort to get to a simple, natural place." But there are a lot of natural places to go that don't involve climbing straight up sheer rock faces with little more than rock and some other gear to protect you - and sometimes not even that. Why doesn't the danger put her off? "I got the idea fairly young that I would be safe if I was out in wild places alone," she says. "But the first story (in her book, about two sisters who had been raped and murdered in a canyon where she was climbing) was a jarring reminder that no, it's not safe. Nothing is as straightforward as you think. Or as safe." Davis' time clinging to sheer rock walls, sometimes in the most remarkably bad weather, for weeks on end, has given her time to think about such things. Death, for instance. "It's funny with death," she says. "Because it's the one thing we know for

sure in life! So I think, we're all going to die, and of all the ways to go, other than dying in bed when you're old, this is a good one. "I would rather be in wild places, risking what dangers they may offer, than the urban dangers." A less-dire musing has been on the nature of time. "Climbing makes you think about how variable time is, that it's a perception," she says. "You spend 20 days on a wall - that alters your perception of time." Such thoughts have led Davis to study Sufism, the Middle Eastern religion of the poet Rumi. However, the book isn't all philosophical musings by any stretch. Davis writes at length about equipment, approaches to certain mountains and the personalities of other climbers. Casual readers might be surprised by her regimen for keeping in shape. Unlike most climbers, who are omnivores and lift weights regularly, the 5-foot-5 Davis

eschews both. Instead, she is a vegan (no animal products or sugar) and a student of yoga. "When I was younger, I was into strength training, but five years ago, I found that time spent doing yoga is much more beneficial. You're always trying to do a different move with the least amount of energy, and other times, you're trying to rest one body part, so if you've trained your muscles to relax in odd positions, you save a lot of energy." She found veganism indirectly, by trying a lot of different diets, as many athletes do. She remembers being sure that one diet she wouldn't use was veganism. "Climbers have always said that you need animal protein to climb," she says, "But I tried all these different things, and at one point I did a cleansing fast of about a week, and when it was time to start again, everything was unappealing. But after a couple of weeks, I found that I was eating vegan. "So I went with it. And

strangely, I started to make these leaps in my climbing and even in running. That's when I free-climbed El Cap in a day. Then I climbed even better in Patagonia. "With the one diet that wasn't going to work! So that was a lesson to me."Peter H

 

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