December 2022: A week without sleep was starting to take its toll. I was out of breath, far more than I should have been. I followed along the trail behind Josh, an old climbing partner who had tempted me out of a years-long climbing hibernation. The southeastern sun warmed our backs through leaf-bare trees as we meandered through the boulder-strewn forest. Ahead, the granite wall of Rumbling Bald came into view. We aimed for a dark, fist-wide fissure in the grey stone.

I had barely touched my rack of gear in three years. Now, as I clipped the cams to my harness, the feeling of the weight on my hips seemed foreign, unfamiliar. I momentarily thought I’d forgotten my chalk bag in the car before realizing that it was clipped around my waist. Sleep deprivation was causing me to forget things, and forgetfulness had become part of normal, everyday life. I chastised myself to refocus, to not miss the important bits: a proper knot, belay on. I ignored the guidebook sitting on top of Josh’s pack, not wanting to feed excess data into the fog of my brain. Setting my fist in a constriction in the crack, I pulled myself off the ground.

The crack put up more of a fight than a look from below had suggested. It flared when all I wanted was a secure hand jam, and it changed direction just as I started to get a rhythm. But I managed to get to the end of the crack, where I spied a bolt on the face up to the right. I placed my last large cam in the crack and hesitated—the lobes bit into the rock but threatened to rotate out when I yanked on the stem. I reset it, without much improvement; it was the best I was going to get. I reached across the rippling granite, hunting for camouflaged holds. Stepping onto the finest of edges, I was making my way to the bolt when I found a protruding quartz crystal that had a friendly bite into the rubber of my climbing shoe. I clipped a draw into the bolt and grabbed a handful of rope. But before I could slide the rope through the gate of the draw, the pebble under my foot broke loose. The crystal ricocheted down the wall, with my body following shortly after. I felt my lungs empty of air as I thumped and scraped along the rough stone. 

I came to a halt, thirty feet later. The questionable cam placement had held. I grasped the knot at my waist to reassure myself that I wasn’t going to fall farther. Blood dripped from my hand onto the rope, blending in with the dirt-stained orange. 

“Are you OK?” Josh called up to me.

I took a deep breath. “I just need a second.”

***

Two and half years earlier, in late March of 2020, I’d walked into a climbing gym in Pennsylvania only to find that, without notice, everything suddenly felt hazardous. Should I be touching these holds? Should I be breathing this air? The Covid-19 pandemic was escalating both in severity and in confusion. Masking mandates had yet to become common, and it was uncertain what—if anything—would keep you safe. My friends in the medical field had warned of things getting much worse. All of this weighed on my mind as I bouldered in a lonely corner of the gym. Someone sneezed near the check-in counter, and dozens of eyes darted to the front to find the culprit. I caught myself holding my breath, not sure whether it was from fear of catching Covid or from the overwhelming tension emanating from so many anxious people in one space.

As I finished climbing, I saw my friends were also packing up their gear to leave. I’d become accustomed to planning adventures at the end of a climbing gym session. But now, instead of making plans, we offered what felt like final goodbyes. I walked out of that gym and didn’t step foot in there again. 

The next day I went to my office and relocated my work things to my apartment—all 200 square feet of it. I used to have that tiny place so that I could easily leave it. Saving on rent allowed me financial freedom and the ability to roam. Each of the previous two years, I’d spent a month in New Zealand. In between those longer trips, I traveled frequently to other climbing destinations—from El Potrero Chico to the Sawtooths to the Wind River Range. What used to be a diving board, a place to spring off into the world, now felt like a cupboard. I rolled out of bed and took one step to sit down at my work desk. I stood up from my desk and took two steps into the kitchen. And I repeated that, day after day.

Losing sleep started slowly at first. The acute stress at the beginning of the pandemic resulted in a few nights of bad sleep, but I would usually rebound after a long bike ride. After a rare good night of sleep, I would convince myself that my insomnia was a temporary phase. I recalled alpine climbs completed on a couple of hours of fitful sleep. But the anxiety that I’d experienced before a big climb was driven by tangible dangers that awaited me: the maw of a crevasse, the rumble of falling rock and ice. Now, even with no scary climb facing me in the morning, my body seemed to vibrate in the same way. At times, a few nights would pass where I didn’t sleep at all. During those nights, the advice of a doctor on the other side of a video call felt a little cruel: “If you can’t sleep for more than twenty minutes, get out of bed and go into another room.”

Throughout 2021 I leaned on bike racing to provide me with a sense of achievement that had been missing along with my climbing partners. For a time, these races felt like a solution to my insomnia, putting me at ease after a particular accomplishment. But as I clung to these accomplishments, my grasp on sleep became more and more tenuous. A bad result would place a bit more pressure on the next race and on the need to sleep well. This culminated in my not sleeping at all for two days leading up to a 100-mile mountain bike race that summer. I made it through the day and finished the race respectably, but I was left wondering how healthy it was to be pushing that hard on so little sleep.

By the summer of 2022 I stopped racing altogether, and I instead put my efforts into a romantic partnership. Dating earlier on in the pandemic had seemed nearly impossible. Now, with vaccinations being widespread, for the first time it felt reasonable to meet someone new, in public, crowded spaces. I imagined that a relationship could provide a solution to my insomnia, giving me purpose beyond myself. But again, the more I tried to emphasize my partner, the more my sleep felt in jeopardy. Friction in a relationship became an immediate problem that needed to be solved. In retrospect, this friction was just a sign of a mismatch, but at the time the worry I felt over these moments caused many sleepless nights. Shortly before the end of a recent relationship, my partner woke in the morning to find me lying awake, eyes open. “Did you not sleep?” When I responded that I hadn’t, she said, “I feel like you aren’t even trying.”

As the pandemic restrictions lessened in 2022, I relocated to Asheville, North Carolina. I wanted to be close to the mountains and find a community that was aligned with that desire. And in December that year, I ran into my old friend Josh, who was in town visiting family. We quickly started recounting old adventures, and it wasn’t long before Josh asked if I wanted to get back out and climb again.

***

Josh waited a few beats as I dangled on the rope above him. “Hey, man, if you want to come back down, no worries,” he said. 

As the adrenaline subsided, I gave myself another check. All of my limbs were intact, despite many impacts with the wall. And aside from my bloodied hand, I was surprisingly OK.

  “No, I want to finish this,” I replied. 

The daze from not sleeping was momentarily shaken loose, and I could see things more clearly. Thirty feet above me, my empty quickdraw swung gently in the breeze. If I stayed in the crack longer, I saw that I could traverse horizontally and make a few less-tenuous moves to reach the bolt. 

I started back up the crack, finding it much easier to make progress this time. Josh offered encouragement as I passed the cam that had held my fall. I moved over the undulating granite with clarity and purpose, past the bolt and up to the anchors. I came back to the ground and sat next to Josh, feeling alive in a way I hadn’t in years. For a moment, I was able to forget about the failed relationships and the lost time of climbing and adventure. I was able to be present. And I was ready to try, fall and fail again.

As we collected our things at the base of the climb, I felt the fog of exhaustion creep back in. I looked in my bag to make sure I had packed away my shoes. Then I looked again, as I couldn’t remember if I had actually seen them in my bag. Josh had stood over me, already packed, but now he sat back down. Both of us faced away from the wall, looking into the valley and lake far below. Despite being excited to get on his project next, Josh didn’t rush me. Instead, he listened as I explained the fog I was in most days. He said he understood the alienation and exhaustion I felt. 

I certainly wasn’t cured of my insomnia that day. I still don’t sleep well most nights. But in that moment, I found a point of clarity in the haze. And when we walked over to the next climb, a steep chunk of granite with a triangular and shadowed roof, I wasn’t thinking about my insomnia. I was thinking about how I was going to clear that roof and sink my hand into the crack that seemed just out of reach.

—Andy Munas, Asheville, North Carolina