In my head, I did the math and reckoned there are between sixty-three and seventy-two pounds of toe and fingernails spread throughout the Buttermilk and Chalk Bluff Boulders in and around Bishop, CA. Decades of clipped keratin strewn about the high desert. With all the degradational speed of an empty two-liter plastic bottle, it’s all still there. I was sure of it. The who’s who of the climbing world interred for all time in these parched soils. But math, like climbing finger cracks, never came easily to me so—six times five, carry the three—so, I could be off by a factor of ten. Math is hard. These thoughts wove through my head as I pared down my claws and let the clippings fly willy-nilly to the sand beneath the splitter Cannibal.

After I had trimmed my nails, I taped my hands. As one commenter on Mountain Project put it, “tape is your friend on this one,” and I couldn’t agree more. I’d worked it on and off over the last month on top rope and know firsthand that if my technique wasn’t sound, this rattly fingers Cannibal would make a meal out of my knuckles.

You call yourself a climber?
I am a climber.
Then why are you taking so long with the tape?
This thing eats fingers. It’s the Cannibal. I need to tape.
You’re scared. You dishonor to all those who clipped their nails before you.
It’s good to be scared.
Good like how good?
Good like keeps us safe good.
Might as well go home then. You’ll be safest on the couch.
I don’t think so. Sitting is the new smoking, haven’t you heard?
I chuckled to myself. “What’s so funny?” asked my partner, Charlie.
“It’s me. My mind is all over the place,” I said.

I slipped the tape roll back into the top pocket of my pack where a coldish bottle of Old Rasputin waited for my post-send lips like a thawing turkey the day before Thanksgiving. The bottle’s black and gold label glowed and, I’ll be damned, that deep-socketed, Russian mystic showed me the beta—right hand, thumb out. This is how you must jam to pull through the crux. Now get your head in the game.

I stepped up to the base, tied in, and pulled through the lower boulder problem. I stuck a number one Camalot up high below the crux. “You can drop a truck on that thing,” I reassured myself. Charlie or Rasputin whispered to me from below, “high right hand, thumb out; catch the meat of your palm in the bite”. It could have been either, I just don’t know, I was feeling the flow.