High Times

Collins is driving again. The silver Civic traces Highway 71 South, takes the Blue River Road exit by a firefighters' memorial and crisscrosses the cracked pavement of side streets. Entering Swope Park, Collins makes quick turns and impromptu stops, then accelerates flat out until he recognizes the sliver of guardrail fencing between barren trees in the distance and slows. He parks near a pile of trash bags covered in curled leaves. Pushing back brush and ducking under limbs, he treads away from the abandoned street.

In general, the locations of illegal climbing areas remain secret.

"Watch out for bodies," Collins says. Clomping through the frozen woodland, he heads toward the river bottom and emerges beneath the concrete shelter of a 40-foot overpass; the clamor of engines and tires above him drowns out rushing water from a nearby creek.

He is directly below Bruce Watkins Drive.

Someone has epoxied brown, white and red rocks to the wall above him, with a few bolts the size of quarters running up its face. It's Collins' first time here. He got directions from Burns, who is rumored to be responsible for creating these "glue-up" routes.

"As far as we all know, they were just born that way," Burns says about the glue- ups. "I'd go to prison if the city thought I did that. We just stumbled upon these areas while hiking around, looking for something to climb. And poof -- there it was."

The beginning of the route is set amid head-high swaths of orange-and-green graffiti.

"Looks interesting," Collins says, lowering a pair of orange aerodynamic sunglasses to his face. For protection, he will use "quick draws" -- two aluminum snaps bound with seatbeltlike material -- to clip rope into bolts above him as he ascends.

The quick draws clang a chorus along his harness as Collins places his right foot on the lowest rock and hops up, grabbing a pebble-sized hold. Slowly, he switches his feet on the hold, whistles and leans his right foot out to touch a vertical concrete lip running upward along the face.

Unlike other extreme sports, which measure accomplishment in big air, allies and kick flips, climbers celebrate incremental victories.

As Collins moves up the wall, the miniature holds in front of him change. Every movement presents a new potential outcome. Going up, Collins encounters a myriad of if-then choices. He passes small rocks and moves on to tinier holds, pinching them between his forefinger and thumb. Like in a high-flying game of chess, once he touches a piece, he's committed. No do-overs. He's above the tree line now, a spot of red against a washed-out sky. Dusting cobwebs from his holds, he's calculating, moving so slowly that the effort seems tedious.

In climbing, the risk boils down to an equation. Generally, a fall equals the slack in your rope from the last anchor point times two -- you'll fall the distance to your last anchor and then the same distance below it. Collins' last safety bolt is about 5 feet below him now. Moving farther upward, the fall equation expands exponentially.

There's a foothold at far left, and a handhold at far right, just beyond his reach. Collins stretches out his leg, reaching for the foothold.

"I gotta commit."

His shoe touches it. Collins pushes himself left, hands free now, entering that limbo between solid footing and falling, stretching upward to snatch another hold. His other foot slips out behind him and slides across the wall below as his fingers clamp a Lego-sized brown rock. He's got it. Everything stops. He begins the calculating process again. Skid marks left by his shoes look like accent marks above the graffiti-lettered concrete.

The route ends a few feet beneath the overpass. Collins clips into a pair of chains mounted below a whizzing plane of traffic and descends.

"There are two kinds of fear in climbing," Collins says later. "Fear of failure and fear of injury or death. One is healthy, one is not. ... My main fear is obviously hitting the ground. All other fears are beside the point."

Collins has a chip in his front tooth from where a copper nut popped out on him while he was climbing in Colorado. He says the difficulty of glue-ups changes constantly as old holds break or fall away.

"You always hear something each season about people getting hurt out there using gear incorrectly," Collins says.

"People get excited," he adds. "They buy a catalog, a bunch of crap with credit cards, read a magazine and think they know everything. Then they go out and screw around out there. And they're playing with death."

He has three derogatory designations for poor climbers: newbies, bumblies and yahoos. Newbies are just ignorant. Bumblies should know better but climb ignorantly anyway. Yahoos (or backwoods yokels) simply make up climbing moves and rig slipshod safety precautions as they go along.

Jake Wolfe is a senior at the University of Kansas and, therefore, a presiding authority within the Lawrence climbing scene. He acknowledges the contributions of Collins and Burns.