Maleki:

Thankfully, I didn’t crumble under the weight as I moved my hands onto the first holds. The stones were rigid but solid underneath my palms, allowing me to hang with all our weight until I was ready to leap forward to the next foothold. Miko’s weight was bearable, but I severely underestimated how difficult it would be to maneuver and readjust with him on my back. My fingers were adjusted to my own weight, but I just added a little more than half my own. Stretching my spine to make the beginning positions possible was much more of an issue now since most of his weight was situated right on my back. I needed to be able to move upwards, so a lot of my muscles would need to be activated quicker so that they don’t tire out as fast. With this in mind, I pushed straight from my heels to the bottom ridge under my toes and grabbed the next hold above me. I couldn’t make as big of movements, so improvising would be necessary moving forward. Doing a one-handed grip would only give me a few seconds before I slipped, so two hands at all times would be required, and even that assumes that my feet are comfortable. Either way, I must do this, so thinking about it won’t help. The longer I am up here, the more tired I will become, which risks the whole trip, and if I fall - all my weight is landing on Miko.

I was able to get the first fifteen feet or so fairly easily before my fingers ached and needed a pause. The rock was cracked inward for about four feet, so I grabbed into it and rested my shoulders, and let the blood drain back into my arms. My palms and fingers bore the weight during this, which recharged me long enough to continue. Miko shifted around a few times to stay balanced, but his grip stayed tight throughout the initial ascent. He wouldn’t get any time to rest up here, and eventually, he would burn out his arms if he didn’t rest them. “You alright? If you want to rest your arms, you can hold on with just your legs here. It only gets worse from here on out.” He let his arms go, and his legs tightened to prevent him from slipping out of the makeshift strap. After about thirty seconds, he pulled his weight back up and locked his arms back into place.

This much-needed break gave us the recharge to keep moving upward. Grabbing above me, I climbed one step at a time and placed my feet and hands in the juts of the rocks that elevate up the stone section. My steps were slow and methodical, with each new move forcing my body to carefully contort in a usual manner so as to support both my and Miko’s weight. I was able to climb this slowly until we got to the vertical crack in the rock, and the first position made me rethink the entire plan altogether. We had made it this far on improvised climbing and what little strength I had stored up, but we had now reached a critical spot in the climb. This crack was hard enough to climb with only my body; the only saving grace was that I knew the hand holds and pinches. I scanned to my left and right for a new path that we could make, but it was essentially flat and would offer no real leverage compared to my current predicament. We could downclimb and try to find a different route, but even as I scanned the thirty feet below us, nothing could be seen that didn’t end up as flat walls. It might be more dangerous for me to climb down with Miko’s weight at this height since I don’t have the flexibility to see below me and hold us both up. That left me moving forward as the only available option. Deep breaths.

With my feet horizontal to the fragment of rock in front of me, I leaned forward and collected my weight so that I could dust up my hands. I placed my ankle into the grove and stepped up with the other foot to use the misaligned part of the crack as a foothold. I reached my arm into the crevice and pulled my weight forward, repeating this process several times over until my arm was no longer able to. My fingers, palms, and forearms ached, and my spine felt like it was going to crumble, so If I didn’t find a new position to rest fast, it could mean trouble. This is too much weight to move with, but I was too high up to second guess my actions. I can do that when I either get to the top or hit the bottom.

The outsides of the crevice had occasional blunt teeth that were separated just enough to fit my feet, but that would require me to pull my legs up higher than I could comfortably move. If I could get this spot, it would give me a chance to relocate and recharge, but it was still a long way to move in terms of my relative safety. Waiting any longer would only harm me, so I told Miko to hold on, and I jumped up and grabbed the inside of the rock while stabbing my feet into the blunt teeth in a quick jolt manner. I made it. I could relax for just a breath of fresh thin mountain air, hopefully enough to let me realign. My knuckles felt stone-like in my right hand, my fingers felt warm in the other, and my toes were cold in my thin leather shoes. It cushioned my sole against the jagged rocks on this cliffside, but one or two of my toes felt broken from the impact. The warmness in my left hand drifted away until I noticed two drops of blood slide from my forearm and into my shoulder. The rocky chalk-like substance I had rubbed into my hand fused with blood from a cut I had gained in that maneuver. I had gained the hold, but at a cost. My hands were now caked in a thin layer of crusted blood that sealed the chalk to the bottom of my palm. The longer this dries, the more restricted my hands and fingers will become.

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“We have to keep moving, Miko. Rest now for a moment, and then we do the remaining climb.”

He did as before and rested while I leaned into the crack in the mountainside to accommodate his weight shifting, which also allowed me to give my spine and triceps a break. My whole body was sore, and my fingers felt like how Grandpa’s looked. After the break, I kept moving upward at a decent pace. Where I left my bag was only another twenty feet, which gave me a decent boost in energy and confidence. The hardest part was over with. Having only climbed fifty steps or so, Nomen was still visible from this height, but I could only catch a shadowy peripheral glimpse of him sitting down with the angles my neck was capable of at this moment.

Five feet or so crossed by before I noticed a loose spot ahead of us where a smooth stone hung over. In theory, it would be a great place to step, but I didn’t make it in the last route. However, we would have to be creative for this last bit of climbing since I’m carrying a bag of bricks with me. I stepped up with my right foot a foot or two above and leveraged my sole and ankle against the rock so that I could step out to the left another two feet to the smooth section of the stone. I grabbed the handholds that I planned for, but my previously cut fingers and palm slipped through the grip due to the caked-up material that bonded to my hand. My ankle rolled on the smooth surface of the rock in an attempt to hold all the slack of my mistake. Above me, my hand fumbled around to find the hold again; I then tried to swing my legs to the right, side to side, to get my right ankle back up to a higher point, but Miko’s weight weighed me down at the waist, ultimately restricting my movement. In the sheer effort of the fall and holding myself up with one hand, I accidentally clanked heads with Miko, and the pressure built up in my head behind my eyes. I finally caught an inch of a ledge on my right side, and I was now at a forty-five-degree angle between the ridge of the two makeshift ‘juts’ in the cliffside if you even call them that, since they were practically as flat as everything else around me. I shimmied up the side of the rock for another five feet until my head pounded.

A limestone shelf was in front of me, taking up the last five feet. I knocked the shelf with my balled-up fist and listened to its sound, much like testing the branches on a tree by estimating their tension and thickness. It was randomly hollow in certain spots and solid in others. This newly opened shelf was probably broken by a much higher rock hitting this cliff sometime recently. Nonetheless, I climbed forward by bludgeoning the bridge of my toes against the flat, jagged lime shelf instead of using the soles of my feet out of fear of burdening them and slipping again. I stepped out to the left onto a growth of rock that stuck out and then found a pile of the shelf above my right foot to step onto. My hands braced another part of the shelf above me, but I needed to bring my elbows flat above my shoulders for the next move to leverage our weight and climb to the flat section where my bag was. I brought my right foot onto the shelf and bore my weight down onto it to prepare for the next lurch upwards, where I would flatten my elbow onto the limestone shelf at my eye level, push off of it, and then grab the final edge of the cliff. However, as soon as I pushed with all my weight down on it, the shelf I was standing on cracked like a lightning bolt, bringing with it a large piece of the part I had just climbed below. The crack rippled through the rock until it was unlatched from the side and started to tumble down towards Nomen. I didn’t have time to think about that, and simultaneously started the jump and slammed my elbow and forearm against the white yellowy stone. My forearm scraped and cut against the sharpened by time ridges of the lime, and my chin slammed against the flat section I was held against. Thankfully, Miko couldn’t scream or talk as I did all this; it would fill me with more anxiety than I already have. I just pretended to be a courier with a cumbersome set of valuables and that there wasn’t a human being strapped to my back weighing me down, falling distance above a cliff. Warmer air emptied off the edge of where I was climbing to, which gave me a newfound strength to finish what I had started.