As Jason Haas clears off a tabletop littered with fake fruits and vegetables, piling them into a plastic shopping cart that barely reaches his knees to the sounds of his giggling son shuffling across the kitchen, the mountaintop solitude that defined his life 15 years ago seems far off. Now a full-time math teacher with a wife and two kids and owner of climbing guidebook publisher Fixed Pin Publishing, Haas is juggling his priorities. Anchored to the delicate balance between the responsibilities of a husband and father and the call of the mountains, Haas has started planning ways to find the adventure and introspection climbing offers him a little closer to home, and he’s setting out to help others do the same.
After graduating from Michigan State University in 2003, Haas says, he had a degree, but no idea what to do with it. Tired of the routes in Red River Gorge he and friend Brian Young had cemented into memory, the two decided to do something different, bigger. The two decided to venture far from the scruffy, chossy sandstone that lined the faces he first top-roped while in college, to Mount Kenya. More than 10 years later, that experience is still shaping Haas’ approach to climbing and the stewardship that goes along with it.
Following what “may have been a coin flip” to decide whether to head to Thailand or to Africa, Haas says, he and Young packed their bags for the 17,000- foot Mount Kenya. They had both been climbing for around two years, working their way through the grades together, but had minimal gear and little experience outside of the 70-foot sandstone cliffs they’d sharpened their teeth on.
“It was a lot of fun in a lot of ways, very character building, [but] it was a trip that we were fortunate to come back from,” Haas says. “There were just a lot of things that were stacked up against us that we were too naïve to realize. The weather wasn’t good [but] we still went up. We couldn’t see anything. I mean, we were in a cloud all day, [but] we still kept going up. We weren’t on a route, at all. Maybe we were doing a first ascent — maybe we were following someone else — we don’t know. Clearly we weren’t in any guidebook description. We were just going up, higher and higher, and we just didn’t have the skills. It kept raining and snowing and we just kept going up.”
Shivering through his down jacket and Gore-Tex coats, they topped out at a spire, Haas says, but thick cloud cover prevented them from seeing how much rock was left to go. With an inadequate rack, they started the eight- to 10-hour descent. Neither of them was familiar with multi-pitch routes, and having knotted two different-sized ropes together, Haas watched the knots come undone while Young was rappelling. He reached out and grabbed both ends of the rope as they came apart at the anchor. Young had un-weighted the ropes just before the knots came untied by stemming in a corner, giving Haas the precious seconds necessary to save him from falling and re-tie the ropes.
“I think it really reveals what kind of person you are, and what kind of person you want to be,” Haas says. “When you’re in danger and you might get seriously hurt, or die, you get to really see a side of yourself that I have a hard time seeing otherwise. And I’m not saying that I need to put my life in danger all the time, but you need to go beyond comfortable.”
After three double-rope rappels, they had to cut their ropes when they got caught in a roof crack, leaving them with only 60 feet to work with, forcing them to free solo deeper into the seemingly endless cloud that held tightly around the mountain. Haas stumbled on a piton he easily removed from the face that would later become the inspiration for his business, Fixed Pin Publishing.
The clouds began to part, revealing a ledge that, if they could reach it, would be the key to them getting down to the glacier and off the mountain safely. Tying together what little rope they had left, they spread the rope through a new anchor they’d made, and Young began rappelling down. Haas says the rope was cracking and popping, and after quickly losing Young in the clouds, all he could hear was Young swearing, the rope moaning and screaming before a “thud.”
“So I’m freaking out,” Haas says. “And then he just goes, ‘It’s fine, come on down.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, God, it’s my turn.’ So the rope is maybe 10-feet shy of a ledge, a really good ledge, so you’ve got to drop on to this ledge. The problem is that the rope is dangling at the edge of the ledge, so if you miss, you’re going [down] the rest of the way to the glacier.”
In order to land on the ledge, Haas had to swing the rope and drop. Luckily, Young slammed Haas into the wall as he reached the ledge, allowing them to scramble down to the glacier.
“We’re still friends, but I don’t think we’ve really talked about that trip since,” Haas says. “I was very much outside of my comfort zone, and I didn’t want that again, but I wanted to still be outside of that comfort zone. I think we didn’t talk about it because in a lot of ways, in my eyes, it was a defining moment. It was what we were looking for, what’s the kind of person we’re going to be? How am I going to move forward in the world? And I thought that trip really did that, for both of us.”
Spending only a few days in Michigan after returning from the month-long stint in Africa, Haas says, he and Young set off on a nine-month road trip across the U.S., climbing every chance they got. Mount Kenya may have shown him that there were skills he needed to develop, Haas says, but it also helped him realize that he needed to mature on, and off, the mountain.
“It’s just you and your partner and you’re alone for a month, near nobody else you know and typically near no other humans anyway,” Haas says. “And you just have an honest conversation with yourself about, ‘Why am I here?’ There’s no glory in it. What am I hoping to learn? What am I hoping to achieve? You top out, is that really what the objective was? Is that why I came here, to summit? I mean, yes. But if that’s why you came here alone, I think you’re not going to stick with it for very long.”
After dodging a storm while climbing at Denali National Park in Alaska and having to hike eight miles on a broken leg after punching through a snow bridge in Peru, Haas says, he started reexamining where he was headed and where he wanted to end up.
“When I came back I was like, ‘Why am I suffering?’” Haas says. “These alpine trips, they’re suffering. For me, they’re suffer fests. … There’s always some heinous weather, eating bad food, you’re tired and freezing all the time. Am I tough enough at this point that I can stop? [I had] this moment of, ‘Why am I still doing all these things?’ So I shifted gears, to wanting to seek that introspection and self-discovery but not be so cold all the time. Not have to go so far from home to be able to have those experiences — which I still think are really important and make me a better person.”
Haas returned to Michigan, took the GRE and applied to grad school. Eventually earning a master’s degree in special education, he settled near Boulder, the “Hollywood of climbing,” Haas says. Ten years, two kids, a wife and a guidebook publishing business later, Haas teaches math at Pomona High School in Arvada, but that’s not the only subject he’s hoping to teach.
A board member on the Flatiron Climbing Council for nine years and a founding member of the Boulder Climbing Community, he says he’s trying help others find adventures, discover more about themselves and explore, without having to brush as close to death as he did in Africa.
“I wanted to share things and I wanted to give back, but I wanted something tangible,” Haas says. “I knew how to place bolts really well, and there are a lot of bolts around here and there are just not a lot of people replacing them. It still goes back a little bit to Africa — we went up, we went up, we went up and we shouldn’t have. But we went up and we were fine. The real problem was going down, and I’ve seen a lot of accidents with people going down. To me… to this day, the scariest part of climbing is going down, because I’m fully, 100 percent relying on the gear. It’s no longer me and my physical abilities and my judgment calls, no. I’m going to get on this thing, and hopefully this tree or whatever holds.”
By hosting re-bolting events — most notably Mickey Mouse Wall in Eldorado Canyon, where 120 old bolts were replaced by nearly 40 volunteers — and clinics teaching local climbers the processes behind properly removing bolts, Haas says he’s working toward creating a “Re-Bolting Day.” He says the events and clinics show climbers that the gear they’re relying on when they fall isn’t all that reliable, and if they’re putting all that work and skill into getting up, they should be able to safely get down.
“The problem with it is that, in any given community, you can probably count the amount of guys replacing bolts on one hand, even in Boulder,” Haas says. “People that were doing it regularly, probably four or five guys, they all burn out [because they’re like], ‘Ah, I don’t want to keep giving up my weekends to do this.’ So I took that concept of, these people know what they’re doing, they’re replacing bolts and giving up their day, and try to pass that torch.”
Old bolts that have been previously removed from re-bolted routes show the clinic’s participants that the bolts used by many developers in their first accents aren’t built to last, and that by replacing them with stainless steel hangers and bolts, as well as upgrading webbing anchors, the safety and sustainability of routes can be improved.
“We have the bolts for educational purposes and for marketing to raise awareness for the BCC. [You can say], ‘This is what’s in the wall. This is what you’re climbing on.’ People don’t realize [because] they just see the surface, they don’t see how far in it goes. And when you show them it goes this far, that’s what you’ve been taking these falls on, or you show them a video of, ‘Here’s your hanger, [and] here’s your hanger under a load’ and it snaps — [it shows] these things are not as good as you think they are.”
Rather than snapping off bolts and drilling new ones every 20 years, he suggests using bolts that will potentially last for hundreds of years. By expanding the education available and offering participants the equipment and knowledge necessary to responsibly replace bolts, Haas says re-bolting can be lifted from a select number of individuals to the climbing community as a whole. And between running a full-time business, working full-time as a teacher and trying to be a good husband and father, Haas is spending more time with two feet on the ground, making the need for others with his drive and skill set that much more important.
“Climbing’s the first thing to go when I have to make sacrifices, [it’s] just what can you cut into,” Haas says, his two-month-old daughter draped over his shoulder as he gently rubs her back. “And really the only reason I can do any of this is because of [my wife].”
In June, he plans to travel to Yosemite to climb three big routes in two weeks — Lurking Fear on El Capitan (5.7 C2), the Regular Route on the northwest face of Half Dome (5.12a/b) and Romantic Warrior (5.12b) in the Needles of California.
“I’d hope to think that it’s not my last hoorah, in terms of a big trip, but it will be one of few,” Haas says. “With Yosemite, I recognize that this is perhaps my one, probably is, honestly, my one shot at this objective. … So I’ve got to make the most of it.”
Standing in his garage, pointing out the different holds canvassing the wood paneling he’s fashioned into a climbing wall that covers nearly all the empty space in the dimly-lit room, following the multi-colored tape detailing each meticulously planned route with his eyes, there’s a sense that Haas left a piece of his identity on that spire on Mount Kenya 15 years earlier, and that climbing offers him the endless pursuit of filling that hole, exploring that mystery in the clouds.
“I get the whole ‘back to Africa’ thing,” Haas says. “What’s my path? It’s always evolving. I always want something changing, and I always want to learn. [It’s] a key piece of why I’ve done all the things that I’ve done, these alpine things to different climbing styles to stewardship, I just want to keep learning.”
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