Ever since my last visit to Piedra Parada I had been craving to go back there and having met a fellow climber who wanted to visit it, we decided to go climb there for a week.

It’s a special place to visit. No internet, no luxuries, camping each night in the desert cold and being out in the desert heart while all your food is tied up in trees to protect it from the mice, skunks and armadillos. Why would you make a 8-10 hour journey to go to the middle of no where just so you can suffer?

For most people this would make no sense at all but for those who love climbing, this is like a pilgrimage. Disconnected from the world, washing yourself each day in the river and coming back to the wall to try a new route pushing your body to do that which it never knew it could do. Except for a handful of day hikers, everyone who comes here comes for climbing.

There is a special kind of beauty to see passion so pure around you. As you sit each night tired and exhausted from a full day of climbing, you can see almost every table busy talking about their climbs. Even if you don’t understand the language they speak you get everything from the hand movements. A cupped left hand flying up, followed by a furious right hand flying to the right and finally the left hand reaching out to grab something invisible in the air.

Wearing the same dirty climbing uniform each day, you can recognise anyone in the several kilometre long canyon of Piedra Parada a mile away. As you walk through the canyon plastered with climbing routes left and right on 50 million year old volcanic rock walls towering 150m up, you can hear the echo of distant screams of a climber falling caught by their rope. The climbers aren’t screaming only out of fear, most of them are screaming in frustration that they weren’t able to finish the route in one go. It must be such a strange sight for the condors flying above. Shouting humans, climbing up on rock and hanging on ropes next to their nests.

I feel one with nature and myself whenever am here. Everything else in life just dims out and the only thing I am left to tackle is me and my fear of falling as I scale one wall after another. Having had a deep fear of heights growing up, I can finally say I have definitely defeated the irrational fear I was born with and am only left with the rational fear that most people feel.

I don’t like living a life of fear and I have worked hard on tackling my fears the last decade by constantly exposing myself to that which I am afraid of. We all have but one life on this earth and a life lived with fear is a life compromised. I still have much to overcome and new fears emerge as I go older but I know that I won’t stop fighting each fear as it comes till the day I live.

For now, I feel content, I feel strong and I feel blessed to have become who I am and to have met incredible people around me with whom I could share this journey.