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The calm before the storm |
Eldorado Canyon. May. Casey Newman and I are two pitches off the ground on “Rewritten.” The morning's white puff clouds have doubled in size and taken on a gray tint since we left the ground. Is there enough time left to finish the route before those swelling clouds become thunderheads? We think yes and go for it.
Casey's leading the crux traverse two pitches later when the first drops of rain strike. We thrash up the last two pitches as lightning flashes and thunder echoes through the canyon. We scramble through the trees and down the trail at a dead run. By the time we get to the car, Casey looks like a cat in a bathtub with his gray hair matted against his scalp. I shiver in my shorts and T-shirt. We're wet through to the skin and our gear is soaked. If we had paid more attention to the clues the sky was offering, we could have avoided some risk and misery.
To me there are two types of weather: climbing weather and not climbing weather. The scientists also have two kinds of weather: frontal and local. Frontal weather occurs when two different masses of air—say cold, dry air from Canada and warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico—collide and cause a storm that sweeps across the United States. Local weather is caused by local conditions like temperature, humidity, winds, and mountains.
Those puff clouds over the foothills billowing up into thunderheads? That's local weather. A slow steady rain that lasts all day? That's frontal weather. Everybody knows what the weather is doing right now, but predicting what the weather is going to do over the course of the next few hours or the next few days is an art no human has been able to master.
The sky constantly offers us clues about its future behavior. If we learn to recognize those clues and what they portend, we can make ourselves safer climbers and reduce the amount of suffering we have to endure.
Where are you going?
What do you want to do?
