It was sometime around 4 o’clock in the afternoon –– my boyfriend Ben, Max, Bear and I were many hours deep into the drive that stretched from the coast of San Luis Obispo to the inconceivable happenings of Las Vegas. The car speakers roared with Brewer & Shipley’s song “One Toke Over The Line.” Max wanted it rolling as we thundered on through the barren highway into Barstow. I looked back at him from the front, smirking. I knew somewhere near his seat amongst the heaps of climbing gear, food stoves, z pads and chalky clothes lay his beat-up copy of Hunter Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. He had already read it, and so had we. For reasons undetermined, the storyline bleeding from the novel’s pages and film adaptation’s every scene felt to be a necessary companion on our journey. Embodying Brewer & Shipley’s song lyrics as they played felt similarly imperative, for it filled the desert silence in the film’s opening scene, where Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo barreled down the very road we found ourselves on. Riding down the belly of Barstow, the four of us felt all-too familiar with “the Bat Country” that Thompson –– or Raoul Duke, his fictionalized character in the book –– high on mescaline and muddied down by hallucinations, had coined the land we were just now passing through.

We kept singing along as the lyrics came: “And now I'm one toke over the line, sweet Jesus.” I sat looking out at the fiery sun behind us and the pink aura hugging the horizon. I liked feeling time warp slowly and stretch the farther we got from our schooltown nestled along the Central Coast.

Rebellious I felt, every long weekend when we would pack our things and steer away from that familiar sea air to traverse deserted climbing areas where time becomes a mirage, and heat waves shimmer forever on black asphalt. With Red Rock Canyon Campground in our GPS, we sped past the freeway exit that regularly spins us around and sets us northbound towards Bishop and the eastern Sierras. Now, more than ever before, I sensed risk neatly packed in the possibility of this unfamiliar place. I just didn’t know why. 

Rolling over this imaginary line past the climbing crags we knew and loved into the arms of a new territory, however, made me think of the characters in the book, teetering over the dark side often one hit over their own lines, meddling with what Thompson described as "a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers.” As climbers, we keep tucked away the notion that one toke of adrenaline too many opens the door to catastrophe.

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To set ourselves free into the quiet of the desert campground, nestled among the rust-colored sandstone cliffs, we first had to pass through the mouth of the city. With all its self-delusional grandeur and faux sparkling diamonds, the landscape tried to swallow our car whole as we rolled down The Strip.

Humanity jumped out from all sides with “Spin to Win $400,000+” billboards and hustler clubs neighboring gun ranges nestled near drive-through wedding chapels. The space needle stood stoically; the otherworldly Luxor Hotel pyramid spewed light into the mouthwash-blue sky. The sights and sounds of all the excess whirling by us was something from a dirtbag climber’s midnight nightmare.

Where was the hum of nature’s bliss amongst this artificial playground?

But we managed to look at it in a manner that allowed all the irony, bleeding from grand hotel to grand hotel, to define the satirical state of things. Head hanging out the window, I imagined how The Strip felt pulsating under the tires of the red Chevrolet convertible of Thompson and the Samoan attorney that accompanied him on his Vegas reporting jaunts in the early ‘70s.

It must have been buzzing with life, I assumed, for lining Sin City’s every street were casinos whose doors called upon every gambler to enter, like Sirens luring hapless sailors to their deaths. Just around the corner stood ATM machines, waiting to guide the innocent finger into temptation’s irreversible wrath –– just across the button pad, the poker table, just one toke over the line towards losing it all.

We were nearing the safe arms of nature, we thought, down snaking desert roads where sin and the itch of impulse ceased to take reign over the body. Or so we ravenous climbers pride ourselves on thinking.

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"One of the things you learn from years of dealing with drug people,” Raoul Duke ponders in the book Fear & Loathing, “is that you can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug. Especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eye." What constitutes a drug, I didn’t know, until I found myself once again with my college buddies, packed in nine cars dotted along Highway 15 toward Red Rock Canyon, chasing the same knife’s razor edge: the peaks and boulders our bodies craved to climb.

Cemented in clarity is addiction: Raoul and Dr. Gonzo speed across the Mojave Desert with LSD-addled brains set on Vegas, the gambler’s hand spins the wheel against the body’s shameful weight and we were not so different –– steering the wheel toward our drug of choice, feeding that eternally hungry beast inside us that growls with an insatiable appetite to climb.

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Ben and I saw Vegas the next morning, but from the vantage point we had wanted all along. Waking earlier than the rest, who were still bundled in the sea of vibrant tents that dotted the chalky, desert grounds, we arrived in Black Velvet Canyon long before the sun arched across the sky to beat down on the rock. For half an hour, we meandered up the twisting dirt paths that underfoot looked like deep red Martian soil, while necks remained craned to the sight of Frogland Buttress: a 5.8, 6-pitch climb on Whiskey Peak where we would soon find ourselves.

Through the trees we marveled at this alternate universe of a town, nestled in the crotch of two adjacent hills. From that angle, Vegas looked like nothing more than a plot of land in a sea of barren desert. And looking up at the pitches we had yet to climb, my small frame felt just as insignificant amongst the towering grand wall that defined it.

This insignificance was the sublime feeling we chased all weekend long.

It woke us early amongst the biting cold of each morning’s alpenglow, had us cooking breakfast and shuffling gear by the roadside like dirtbags, so we didn’t have to pay park fees. Ropes were strewn across our backs as we hiked the approaches to crags like The Gallery and Wall of Confusion to test ourselves on lines classic to the area and meet back up with this feeling, while the rock beneath our fingertips bled burnt ochre from the iron oxide in the sandstone.

We were all drawn to the same thing: hands swathed in chalk and bodies flung towards rock, though we seeked that rush in different forms. Some split off from the pack towards Kraft boulders, spending hot afternoons in the Calico Basin sprawled under crashpads. Another went and met his high school teacher to climb a long multi-pitch route and catch up on lost time. Our final day was spent at Sandstone Quarry, where the 5.12a test piece “Where Egos Dare” waits etched into the wall, which millions of years ago was beneath a shallow sea, and later sculpted by nature’s erosion and sedimentation.

I yearned to test my own ego on the climb, but the cold of the early morning seeped past my goose-down layers and straight to my bones as I sat in my harness halfway up a simple warm-up route, weeping silently into the wind. My fingers, numb to the world, screamed in visceral pain. But even still, we savored that last dose of the addictive nature of feeling infinitesimal before traversing back across our California’s vast body that day.

But nothing beat the way Ben and I ascended Whiskey Peak via Frogland Buttress in a dance that first morning –– swinging leads, setting up our choreographed systems at each belay, embracing every time the other approached the anchor point.

I floated up the first pitch’s 100 feet, wrapped a sling around a tree trunk protruding out from the rock and belayed Ben up to me. The route, I came to anticipate, was a scramble demanding less physicality and more efficiency and style. We had climbed much harder grades in the last years, feeling danger tapping on our shoulders in more incessant ways –– the early August thunderstorm rolling over the Diechterbach valley of Switzerland as Ben and I quickly lowered off the towering granite slab and scurried over water crossings back to the mountain hut, a shattered ankle that caught itself in the gaps of crash pads as my fingers ripped off the last hold of a 20-foot boulder in Tahoe, a razor-sharp crimp line in Owens River Gorge spitting both he and I off every time our bodies pleaded with it to keep us on.

Frogland Buttress was instead, to be a waltz that invited space for play. After following up the first pitch, Ben was to lead the next, this time wedging the cams and nuts for protection deeper into the hand crack that pointed like an arrow upwards. He pulled the rope’s slack that dangled between us until it was taut in my harness; I was again the follower, receiving space to climb the next 100 feet with fuller breath and a calmer mind, protected by the above anchor and not the cams I deemed trusting enough not to rip if I were to fall.

On the third pitch, I stepped out from the comfortable ledge onto a wide overhanging flake, once again leading up the fiery red sandstone. I tangoed with the slight dihedral for 70 meters and found a belay, shoving the remaining gear dangling on my harness into the rock’s slots. I belayed Ben up and chose to lead again, but soon found the fourth pitch leading me instead. The wall’s protruding roof we marveled at from the ground was now overhead. I trusted my shoe’s rubber as I tip-toed onto an exposed slab, traversing its paper-thin edges. My gaze focused intently on hands, then feet, left then right. I noticed Ben was out of sight now, the bright green rope curved around the corner as a reminder he was on the other end. My trusty three-finger drag got me past the small edges to a crack, where fear flooded out of and seeped into me. Gravity began demanding me back to Earth as the 500-foot drop nudged my seemingly confident demeanor.

I called down to Ben, my voice quivering, but he could barely hear me and had no way of helping –– this was my battle, I reminded myself.

This was always how it went: a sudden burst of terror eased by familiarity and trust. Even climbing indoors at five years old I felt this, though I lacked words to place it. As I clung onto the small edges near the end of the fourth pitch, I scooped heavy breaths of air and dipped into my brain with eyes closed shut –– I am okay, I am okay, I will be okay.

Addiction takes priority in the bones, luring mine to the most exhilarating and uncomfortable spaces. Frustrated by my body’s willingness to give into this fear, tears formed a well in my eyes. Above me rested a blank wall, and below was my boy who I could not see. Between us was the rope’s slack, getting shorter and shorter as I ascended. I needed to find a place to make an anchor, and wanted simply to be told what to do. I weeped out of fear, I weeped out of burning love. I continued on.

Ben took the next lead.

I followed it, climbing through a tunnel created by a huge chockstone wedged into the crack. Girth- hitching my pack to my waist, I hauled both it and my body through the small hole, smearing my feet on either side of me.

It was tight like a coffin.

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What replays in my head more than the climb was the drive to it. I can vividly remember turning off the highway and following the snaking road of the Late Night Trailhead on our way to the route on Whiskey Peak, which loomed in the shadowy canyon. I had filled the groggy morning silence with existential questions: Why do we do this all the time Ben? What is it about all of this–– why are we drawn to these rocks, so addicted?

Words were not spoken by the boy behind the wheel, he who remained a constant in my life on and off the wall, an unrelenting partner who squeezed through the confines of risk and charged toward reward with a hand outstretched to me.

Sloping boulders and potholes under the wheels rocked the car as we continued down the dirt road.

“It doesn’t know who you are,” Ben responded, his thoughts now gathered. “The wall just doesn't care.”

These sudden jolts took hold of my pen as my hand, scribbling this sentiment on paper, shot up across the page and back down again, possessed by an invisible presence, like floating fingertips across a Ouija board.

I couldn’t help but think of the truth of Ben’s phrase, how unforgiving the rocks we dare to climb are. It was as if this notion’s reality lay dormant until seconds from the lot, waking up and lurching as the harbinger of forthcoming tragedy.

I’d say we didn’t cross any lines that day, but now, almost a week later, I’ve learned the line was, in fact, crossed. All it took was one toke too many and a new grave had to be dug and the family of a 30-year-old woman climbing with her partner just 10 miles north of us in Pine Creek Canyon had to be told news we all fear most.

She was pronounced dead at the scene.

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The hours of the early afternoon had peeled away every pitch. Soon, Ben and I found ourselves on top of Whiskey Peak. I plopped down on a rock a safe distance from the edge and looked out across the canyon –– the red striations of the canyon reminded me of the pink and white taffy I ate as a kid. I’d climbed my whole life, and since the age of 5, had been married to risk.

There were no bolts to rappel down each pitch, and I fell into a sulk as we descended, along with the day’s light, on foot past the cairns marking the faint trail and to the car. The sun was bowing its head to the horizon; soon day was to be folded into night. I ignored this, relishing instead in my unnameable anger.

Ben and I sat in silence, looking through the car’s windshield sluggishly.

A faster pace, an able body, a stronger drive to smile while suffering –– I wished upon these things, for what my body ached to do most was look risk and thrill in the eyes and ride that high of freedom as easily as possible. The day’s route gave us that chance, though my weaknesses dulled that ensuing pleasure.

Silence continued to wash over our exhausted bodies, that by the end of the day felt spat out from the teething mouth of that canyon. What I didn’t do, though, was crane my neck to that sky and back at my partner, and cup my gratitude in those calloused hands that were safely returned by the rock to our seats in the car.

I see now what a dangerous thing it is to feel familiar with climbing –– it holds too much space for peril. A woman fell to her death after rappelling off the wrong end of the rope, around the time Ben and I trotted back down along the trail that skirted the pink cliff band and to the car.

A party across the canyon is said to have witnessed her body slice the air and ricochet, hitting the rock she had just climbed up three times.

Oblivion became our safeguard as death, unbeknownst to us, pounced on its next victim in the canyon’s corner one over from our route. Ben and I were not met with the news for four days, until articles splattered red across our Instagram feeds.

She was only 30 years old, Climbing Magazine wrote. Certainly not ready to die, I thought to myself sheepishly, but the rock is an unforgiving force, and now she’s dead.                      

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There’s a point in the story where Hunter Thompson’s Raoul hits a breaking point after toggling just over the line for days at The Mint Hotel in Vegas. He’s at the mercy of heaps of cocaine and adrenochrome he took. Insanity waves him into the depths of nightfall.

There has always been a line we as climbers must train ourselves to recognize, embody and exist near in a symbiotic fashion –– just not dare to cross it. Mountaineers throw themselves into risk, succumb to the unforeseen elements of the high mountains, for it’s there that their reward lies and hunger feeds. Rock climbers coexist with risk in a different fashion –– rarely are storms blowing us towards mortality; it is our choices and movements up and down the wall that determine that fate.

After that Saturday, another one of us is gone, and now this community of adrenaline-seeking climbing junkies –– no better than Raoul and Dr. Gonzo –– has to sit with this phantom-absence of a woman who none but a few came to know personally. Like it has and always does, the way death seamlessly passes through our climbers represents the omnipresent reality that gnaws at our conscience for the rest of our outdoor ascents to come.

We head to the rock because that’s where we meet ourselves and truly live. But a strange game it is to play, teetering on the line between the brightest thing you’ve ever known and the dark, all-too fatal ending waiting to take you.