How to spend less on gear. Where to learn how to climb the Matterhorn. When is the right time to start an adventure and where. Finally, how to find climbing partners
How?
Narrowing down the equipment and sources of information? While experimenting to search for fresh ideas.
Once we chose what we would like to do and why, which I invited you to reflect on in the first part of this article (How to Focus and When to Chaos [Part I]), it is usually time to choose the materials we use to master a hobby and reach a goal. By material I mean both physical equipment as well as the intellectual source of information. Do you give those things a second thought in the heat of the initial enthusiasm?
When it comes to climbing, as in my example of “hobbies”, I like having the minimum required equipment at the start. This way I can get straight into the activity rather than spend hours choosing products. It is expensive, environmentally immoral and simply misses the point. Just imagine digging through a pile of textile and metal every time you want to reconnect with nature. So while it might be exciting to have new toys, getting too many comes with more hassle than fun. Personally I find it more rewarding to focus on the experience I came for in the first place.
Saying that, while a different colour harness every year is unnecessary you will have more climbing partners if you don’t insist that they carry the heavy equipment that you inherited from your grandfather. So leave souvenirs on the shelves. Get modern lighter kit, preferably fair-trade and recycled if you can afford it or second hand in good condition.
Then when it comes to knowledge on the topic we each have our preferred way of consuming information. To choose a mountain route and know how to climb it we could ask a friend, attend a course, read a book or learn from the internet. I like to minimise the noise and go straight to the highest quality most researched sources first. So a guide book or an advice of a professional, like a mountains guide, or an alpine club course are all primary source. This is especially true at the start of our journey with a hobby like climbing. I invested in excellent instruction at the beginning. If your guide is honest, like mine was, they will teach you what you need and send you off to have your own adventures, if this is what you are after.
Most of all, make the effort and cross reference the information and increase difficulty of the chosen routes gradually. There is a bravery that sparks from watching videos of pro athletes and as we discuss adventures in pubs that is unmatched with skill and knowledge. We then think it is always only about pushing beyond the limits. True tenacity is to back off a route after all the effort you put in, reorganise, work, wait and go back to double the effort. It took me years to know when to let go . I had to actually hear it from the mouth of a mountain rescuer.
Saying all that, I think it is o.k. to try new things with an uncertain outcome from time to time. If you don’t play you can’t lose but neither will you experience the thrill of adventure. As long as there is an escape plan other than the mountain rescue!
Focusing on a chossy ridge: A go pro video of someone climbing the Matterhorn is nothing close to climbing the thing. The picture captures
my happiness after soloing the Hornli Ridge on the Matterhorn in 2015 starting from Zermatt the night before and without using lifts.
What the insta picture does not show is how scared I was first time I stood at the feet of the mountain years earlier. Back then I was on an alpine course with Martin Moran Mountaineering. They had to convince me I’d be fine. My guide for the day, Graham Frost, explained the ridge to me bit by bit then.
I did a couple more courses with Martin Moran including one for leading on mixed terrain in Scotland and on glacial terrain in the Alps. One day, Martin got me to help with leading some of his clients down a 4000 m peak. Once back in town he told me I should go have adventures of my own now.
A confidence was installed.
I climbed for days, months and years with different climbing partners. Then I studied the Matterhorn ridge by heart and acclimatised well before
I came back to climb up it alone. That night a friend of mine, local to Zermatt, tried to talk me out of it. But I felt ready and walked all the way up that chaotic ridge without moving a single stone out of its place. I had great mentors.
A few years later, Martin Moran disappeared in an avalanche in the Himalayas. His family created a foundation for young adults with a passion for the mountains in his name:
https://www.martinmoranfoundation.co.uk/martin
WHEN and WHERE?
Now is the time
If you want a fast answer the right place and time is almost always here and now. If you are mega serious about your goal just stop reading this article and start working on it. Seriously I won’t get offended I would have reached a personal goal in motivating that one more person.
We start life with a feeling that time is infinite. Then we learn that it is precious and fleeting, but this terrifies us. We fear making the wrong decisions, so keep wasting the days dreaming about the future and regretting the past. I personally only know a few people that live grounded in the now. To do that, you need to train your focus.
The obstacle is often not time or money but the inability of the modern person to stand up to one task at a time. The anxiety of missing out in our times is so big we end up practically doing nothing. This made concepts like “getting into the flow” trendy. But while focus is easy in a state of flow, there are only that many times you can put your body and mind through such manic obsession before you get exhausted and burned out. Little and often wins the race in the longer term.
You do not need to be 100% focused all the time to do more of the things you dream of. A little bit of distraction can help avoid boredom and keep you working for longer. In fact, if you keep preparing yourself for a big session you will more often try to avoid it. Instead Just show up, ideally with a treat, and soon you will train your brain to see it as fun. Distraction is not all that bad. Once you have a direction you are going in, you can talk to a friend on the way. Once you know what you want to write about you can play music in the background. But first you need to choose to do it.
Right here is the place
Most of the planet has already been explored, and we haven’t yet reached new planets and so we search further for new objectives for our adventures. There are also more people that have access to once privileged places like the European Alps. Yet there is room for everyone if done ethically. Besides, the essence of adventure was always to think creatively. The spirit and meaning of adventure never changed. Tell a friend about your deepest desires for off grid struggles and crazy ascents. If you get a polar reaction of either them quitting their job in excitement to follow you or them resisting and calling you mad, then you know you are up to a good start. The plan might need refining from there on, but it is a good test. The big part of an adventure is the unknown this has never changed.
So the where only depends on what is new and exciting for you. You can choose a hard line up a boulder in the forest behind your house and chip at it all summer. Then again you could choose to spend months in a foreign land, adapting to altitude, adapting to food, studying the weather and every bit of a glacier and snow fields above you. It does not have to be in fashion it does not have to be what is expected of you.
Once you reconnect with what’s within you and around you, the choices become clear. Beauty is waiting everywhere and happiness is a thing to create. Sometimes we just need to stop running in-between things that are not for us to notice what is meant for us.
Adventures run deep: My tiny tent in Kara-Su Valley in Kyrgyzstan. Two members of my team were already in the mountains. Meanwhile, my climbing partner for the next few days was not feeling it at all and just hiked out early. I was left with the puzzle of how to get our gear out of this valley alone.
I found a shepherd that found me a horse. He told me that we could join the main campsite faster if we cross the high river instead of taking the bridge. I decided to trust him and thought it would not be a problem as I’ve ridden horses before. Right in the middle of the river, the water reached nearly saddle high, and the horse started losing the firm ground.
The shepherd’s eyes widened, and he raised his voice, calling the horse towards him. I thought it ironic that I was going to die by drowning on a horse during a climbing trip. Luckily, it was a strong horse. Goes to show adventures can find you even in some of the safer destinations.
WITH WHOM?
The right one
In the climbing community, I hear of people constantly searching for climbing partners. How is that possible that those people can’t find eachother? Well, they do. It is just that the experience and goal spectrum is so wide that the search for the ideal climbing partner becomes more complicated than finding a love match.
Mainly, everyone is looking to have a good time. Beginners look for someone who is experienced but does not want to climb too hard. Intermediate climbers want an excellent climber who would support them in their personal goals, as if they had none of their own. Then the experienced climbers, look either for someone strong with whom they can reach new horizons, so none of the previous two groups, or someone fun and safe with whom they can climb something that is too hard for beginners but unsatisfying for the intermediate climber’s ambitions. In short, it’s complicated. Finally, there are the frustrated, lonely wolves who give up searching for anyone and just solo.
Perhaps, this is fine for some. Yet to me it feels a bit of a stalmate game where no one fully wins. While it is good to keep a focus on goals, mixing with other climbing groups sometimes is not a bad idea. Say for the intermediate climber to take a beginner while training for bigger things. Or the beginner to not to be insisting to go to a crag with only easy climbs if they want the intermediate climber to join them.
From what I observed the group that got to understand those dynamic the most are the experienced climbers. They love climbing so much and they do it so often that they end up climbing with whomever decent they find available. They simply adjust their training to the day. Want to become better and still enjoy the process of reaching very specific goals? Learn from the best by being more flexible with your training and climbing partners selection.
Climbing with the Best: Pictured, me enjoying climbing the Pilier Rouge du Brouillard. Jon Bracey spotted my post on social media, where I was looking for a climbing partner for this route, and he volunteered. My friends did not want to believe that he climbed it with me for free. They thought I hired him as a guide.
Yet that is just Jon. Passionate about mountains and has a big heart for anyone who is clearly enthusiastic about them. His wife drove us to the bus station in Chamonix. We caught the bus to Italy with his kids waving goodbye and walked up to the Monzino hut.
We started from the hut at 2 am the next day with him leading up the glacier. He then let me start the mixed pitch in the cold morning hour. We alter lead the rock pitches and along the delicate rocky ridge. Then he dragged me up the final snow to the top of Mont Blanc as I started feeling the altitude.
Once at the summit, Jon asked me politely if I’m all right to descend to Les Houches on my own. he wanted to run down for dinner with his family and to prepare for his guiding work the day after. We both knew I should be fine as I had soloed the normal route earlier.
He started rushing down, then stopped a couple hundreds of meters away and ran back up. He handed me some more gear and made sure that I had at least half of it and a rope and not less, then off he went. I slugged my way slowly down. Jon followed my progress via messages and sent me a picture of a can of coke from the Goûter refuge!
She made us royal salmon sandwiches, which unfortunately dropped out of her ultra-running/skitouring mesh backpack and went flying all over the cliff. She insisted that I lower her back to collect the salmon. We also finished late and were quite thirsty once reaching the midi plan. To our surprise, someone had left some cans of beer in the middle of a snow patch!
With no one around to be seen, Karren did not think twice before opening one. The rest of the night was super fun. Giggling, we kept trying to locate our sleeping bags that we earlier hid between the boulders.
Karren did not do a steep ski descend that day, and it wasn’t the climb of my life, but gosh, this was fun.
Epilogue. Further Tips and Read on Focusing:
I was writing this article by the window of a coffee shop. At some point I looked up through the window to gather my thoughts. There was a car parked in front. Suddenly, at one end of it’s front window tens of little arrow shaped shadows appeared. They wooshed one after another to the other end of the window at a speed of fighter jets. It was the reflection of a flock of birds. Awareness of surrounding is at the frontier of focus and distraction.
If you are serious about going to the next level of focus in anything you are doing in life. Try the below, if you haven’t yet, to refurbish your creative brain, unlock free time and some peace of mind:
1) Read Deep Work by Cal Newport. Which convinced me to quit facebook forever in a few minutes.
https://www.audible.fr/pd/Deep-Work-Livre-Audio/B01DM8OWNC
2) Even better just Read. Read anything.
3) Start a new creative hobby: playing an instrument, learning a language, playing chess, drawing or writing. What does it have to do with climbing? Just try it and see what happens.
3) Meditate deeper. You don’t need an app for it and I never used one before this one. I am convinced though that one can learn faster if they have someone experienced explaining it to them. So currently I use the app below as a quick source of knowledge:
![How to Focus and When to Chaos [Part I]](https://suzanaelmassri.blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/20250112_141419.jpg?w=1024)
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