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We Shall Continue with Style: 50 @ 50

By: Steph Davis

By KAVU

December 14^th, 2021

Indian Creek is known for its long, relentless splitter crack climbs, and it’s also known for wearing holes in your skin and making your feet scream in pain. So when my good friend Chris Kalous told me he was thinking of climbing 50 pitches in one day as a 50th birthday challenge, my first reaction was......

“That sounds HORRIBLE!”

Chris did a 40 at 40 birthday challenge 10 years ago, so he knew what he was getting himself into, mostly. He trained for the 50 @ 50 by instructing at my Indian Creek Crack Clinic and putting up a few moderate pitches two weeks before, and then his wife Steph (the other Steph), sent out an email to a bunch of good friends with a sign-up google doc so we could pick time slots to belay him. My buddy Lance and I took the 11:30 to 1:30 slot.

It was a Saturday in late October, which meant that sun could still be blazing on the cliffs all day, magnifying the foot pain issue a hundredfold, so I was thrilled to wake up to cloudy skies and 45 degree weather that morning. Lance and I drove down to Indian Creek, and found our old friend Alan Porter in the Super Crack parking lot cooking up coffee and pancakes for the 50 @ 50 team and any other climbers who wandered by looking for some food. We radio-ed up to Steph and found that Chris was going strong, 20 pitches in, after a 4 am start.

Lance and I headed up to Battle of the Bulge with 3 ropes and intentions to get a few pitches led so Chris could get a break and do some quick TR runs, but when we got up to the cliff, we found Chris leading his own pitches with Steph, and then almost the entire cliff beyond him strung up with ropes already from various teams prepping for him. We found a route to climb and set it up, and then circled back to give Steph a belay break for a few hours.

Shockingly, Chris said his feet didn’t hurt at all, and he cruised through the late 20’s with us until we passed him off to another belay crew and headed over to Super Crack Buttress to do some more climbing and wait for Chris to move over there.

By evening, we’d had our fill of climbing and cheering/heckling Chris, and we headed back down to the parking lot to grill up burgers and cheer from below. At this point, he was only 4 pitches shy of finishing, and he grabbed a little food when he came back to the parking lot and then headed up to Donnelly Canyon.

We watched the headlamps ascend the final pitch and then broke into cheers from below and got dinner ready for the night crew, along with some PBRs.

We obviously had to make sure Chris got passed a beer as soon as his feet touched the asphalt.

The next morning, Chris was up bright eyed and bushy tailed, and it almost looked like he was ready to head up and climb some more, but it turned out he was just walking back to the cliff to find the jacket he’d forgetten up there the night before. 50 pitches at Indian Creek, no matter what age you happen to be, is a truly massive climbathon…

..... kudos to Chris and the whole crew!!

Steph Davis

Steph KAVU

Footnotes

Steph, Ian and Cajun are living their best KAVU life. For full-value, Klear Above, Visibility Unlimited inspiration, follow their adventures on KAVU channels!

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FootNotes

Steph, Ian and Cajun are living their best KAVU life. For full-value, Klear Above, Visibility Unlimited inspiration, follow their adventures on KAVU channels!

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