“A man doesn’t go to drink coffee after climbing. Coffee is an integral part of the climbing.”
– The late and unquestionably great Wolfgang Gullich
The Spanish youth half squatted, hunching around a hissing Whisperlite stove on the peeling Formica counter. In the doorway of the small rented camper, steam swirled around him and was sucked out the door and dissipated out into the crisp spring morning. The stifled roar of the stovetop espresso pot quickly died as he took it off the dirty flame.
He silently gestured with the pot: Did I want some? I had never seen a stovetop espresso device. I declined with a wave of a cracked and chalk-stained hand, then watched as he poured the entire carafe, still bubbling and steaming, into his morning bowl of oatmeal.
My body language must have given away my confusion because he turned and said, “What? This is strange for you? I savour both and get to climbing faster.”
Climbing has always held hands with coffee, whether it be the long-boiled and bitter acid of a diner off the 395 or the small-batch roasted, farmer co-op coffee of a Portland boutique café. The stimulating aspect of coffee is well known and definitely of use when you sit up, still entombed by your sleeping bag, and set the jet boil alight. You ladle tablespoons, not teaspoons, of Starbucks instant into a dirty bowl and balance the works on the cold stone ledge you slept on last night, thousands of feet off the ground.
What’s even more interesting, and infinitely more varied, are the personal rituals and routines that fill this special time of the day and what it represents. Gullich’s view, as illustrated in the quote, is that coffee is simply part of climbing.
It could be during silent minutes at dawn as you cradle your cup and stare at the coming sun. It could be the espresso-infused oatmeal of my friend as he shoulders his pack for the hike to Ceuse’s walls. It could be a midday lunch complete with stove and pot at the cliff, as we did in France. A friend once claimed that spooning instant coffee straight into his dry and cracked mouth was the only way he took his coffee on El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. Mike Chapman, owner of 1914 Coffee Company and a bouldering developer, saw his relationship between climbing and coffee transform from pure pre-climbing stimulant fuel to social and chemical experiment after working for local roastery Galileo Coffee. As his passion for coffee grew, he began packing along an aeropress, stove, kettle and ground coffee with him on his backcountry excursions to search out new, unclimbed boulder problems.
Post-climbing, coffee plays an important role too. I can’t count the number of times I sadly wished I had time left in my session to head to a local café and relive my day’s events. Maybe the most important thing that coffee gives us is its magic.
Coffee is a social stimulant and a way of slowing down time. It provides us a moment when we can stop and revel in our past actions, reliving and retelling our stories to better understand their lasting effects on us. The caffeine is absorbed into our bloodstream and begins to work on our nervous system, and I swear it lets me wax and philosophize more deeply about that lefthand crossover, what direction that smear needs to be weighted or what nut to place mid-crux.
So, as days become darker, colder, wetter, shorter, take time to relive and love those moments outside with friends over a coffee. Use those morning minutes before heading out climbing to slow down, savour your coffee of choice wherever you choose to find it and really get excited about and focus on the climbing ahead. Squamish coffee roaster and climber Tim Knutton of Counterpart Coffee put it best when he said: “Coffee is the thing you do before you do anything else.”
Whether it’s climbing, biking, skiing, working at a school, guiding someone up the Stawamus Chief, framing a house or working at the port, coffee acts as a pause-and-reflect button during our waking hours for the time we spend awake and alive.
