I was taking some photographs
last weekend and got hit with some serious vertigo.
There's a large boulder that sits cantilevered off the top of a route adjacent to the two routes in the photo. A quick look at the boulder, and you'd think it's going to slide off; however, I've been on it enough to know it's stable, and the balance point is far enough from the edge. To take these photos, I approached the boulder from the upriver side, the side that looks more precarious, and when moving out towards the edge, I got hit with an unrelenting feeling that this whole thing was cutting loose. The whole time I was taking the photos, I felt like I was falling. Not fun.
Ironically, I've done both of the climbs shown in the photo, and felt just fine.
And here's a breakfast photo taken
several years ago.
We'd been on the wall for several days, and in the vertical pitch leading up to this ledge, from the belay, it looked so casual and flat that both my belayer and I commented that it looked like I could unrope and just walk up it. Of course, that turned out
not to be the case.
Funny how the mind works.