First Ascents and Adventures

I went looking for untouched rock. What I found was somebody's backyard.

For years I chased the same thing every climber is taught to want: the untouched line, the peak no one had stood on, the blank spot on the map. I put up new routes in places the sport had barely reached, the sandstone towers of the Ethiopian highlands, the granite of the Namibian desert. First ascents. The whole vocabulary of them assumes you are the first person who ever mattered here.

Then I kept meeting the people who were already there. In Ethiopia I climbed to summits below churches carved into the rock a thousand years ago, past a memorial to a massacre, through terraces built against a famine the whole world once watched on television. In Namibia I drove for days toward a rock face I'd seen in a photograph, and when I finally reached it, the Himba family living at its base gave us the smarter path forward.

I climbed a small two-pitch line near that family instead of the big prize on the mountain nearby. The big one would have been the better first ascent. The small one meant more. Separate a climb from the people and the history around it, claim the ground as yours, and it is just a line on a map. I stopped wanting that kind of first.

That shift is the whole reason Legado exists. I could not go back to climbing as if the people at the base of the wall were scenery. What I do now, I do because of what those mountains taught me: nothing you find is truly separate from the people who already call it home.