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"FORGET IT, SAMET. I'm not reading that crap," I said. Matt Samet, Climbing Magazine's then-senior editor, had just called me into his office, where he was trolling the message boards yet again. Ever since high school, rock climbing had been more than a recreational pursuit for me — it was my life. A long-term relationship fell apart, I derived income from shitty temp jobs, all in the name of going climbing. But now that I'd worked at a climbing magazine tor nearly five years, I was more than a little jaded. Climbing had become a job, a dreary, rat-in-a-box job. As the editor-in-chief, I felt I'd seen, read, heard and written about everything that has, does or will occur in climbing. There certainly wasn't anything I needed to learn from a message board. Matt sat hunched over his keyboard, books and papers scattered about the floor and the shelves of his office, the fluorescent lighting picking out the gray hairs on his head among the black. In the first photo, a free soloist stood in front of a wide chimney between two leaning summits. His head was cocked a little, looking at the camera: Was he smiling? The photo was too small and too grainy to tell. Although he was wearing some odd-looking rubber shoes with socks, his forearms were cabled, and a white tank top was tucked neatly into his black tights. In the foreground his wife and three young sons sat in a row on a flat, boulder. Their backs were to the camera, but their posture seemed relaxed. By the third and fourth photos, the children craned their heads to watch their father free soloing the chimney high above. In the filth picture, near the top of the chimney, his arms stretched out even wider. One leg left the rock. THE FINAL IMAGE SHOWED HIS BODY carried away on a stretcher by eight men, shirts off, heads bowed. The family was no longer visible.
Kostik had written below the images: "These are photos of Vladimir Teplyh's last climb in 1989. He was a well-known soloist in the Stolby Reserve in Siberia". Seventy-four-year-olds dying... while free soloing... in Siberia... since 1851? "Google it," I said to Matt. While I rifled through an atlas, Matt began searching the Web. Soon, he pulled up more details. Hidden away in the vast foothills of central Siberia, at the heart of nearly 200 square miles of dense taiga forest, were dozens of up-to-400-foot-high syenite domes, fins and spires. They looked like the City of Rocks, Vedauwoo or Joshua Tree. Seven kilometers away lay the USSR-era apartment blocks and battered roads of the former Gulag hub, Krasnoyarsk, where the government had sent people to exile and prison-labor camps from the days of Old Russia until the last decades of the Soviet Union. But for more than a century and a half, hundreds of Krasnoyarsk citizens of all ages had also been climbing at Stolby. By now I'd heard about too many 5.14c redpoints and VI4 sends to care, but a "community" of free soloists in Siberia? That was juicy stuff. In an instant, my long-dulled curiosity sharpened once more into something like hope: the climbing world might still have mysteries. I immediately began pricing airline tickets to Krasnoyarsk.
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