"When I knew I wanted to make a career in the Mountains"
by Christian Santelices

In the mid '90s I was living in Berkeley, California and working at a
climbing gym called CityRock. I had finished a degree at Berkeley in
Anthropology and was working as a climbing instructor and guide while
I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I had been working at
the gym for several years and had some incredible climbing mentors,
all of whom were cutting edge climbers in Yosemite.

One winter I came up with the idea of teaching a big wall climbing
class at the gym I wanted to pass on some of the knowledge that I had
learned from big wall climbs in Yosemite and elsewhere, as well as
make some extra instructors wages at the gym.

The class was two nights a week for one month. We covered hauling
techniques, aid climbing, following on jumars pitches that included
traverses and pendulums, equipment concerns and how to set up a bivi.
The class progressed will and my students were psyched with the
information. We finished with a "final exam" where the participants
had to perform the tasks that we learned over the course of a month.

Several months after the course I was on one of my weekly climbing
trips to Yosemite. It was late in the afternoon on a beautiful summer
day as I sat enjoying a pizza in Camp Curry. I heard my name called
and turned to see two students from the big wall class approaching me
with big grins on their sun-browned faces. They explained that they
had just completed the South Face route on Washington Column, a
popular two-day climb directly across from Half Dome.

It was their first big-wall climb on their own, and they had used
every technique that I had taught them to good effect.They were
elated, a fact that could be seen in their eyes and body language and
heard in their voices. For them, completing the South Face route on
their own was the door to many other future adventures, and I could
see that they could hardly wait to get started. As for myself, I was
thrilled by their enthusiasm and the thought that I had helped open
that door to their climbing careers. I knew then that I wanted to
continue on my path as a guide, showing people the way to personal
discovery.

Learn more about Christian and Aerial Boundaries on marmotpro.com.