Pallbearers

“I’ll be in Vegas in an hour,” Stanley texted me. Sean “Stanley” Leary had earned his handle 20 years ago in Yosemite, when, instead of bringing a real climbing hammer on The Zodiac, El Capitan, he produced a humble carpenter’s tool. It was a Stanley hammer.

“I’m sport climbing in Mesquite for a few days,” I replied. “An hour east.” Stanley wanted to climb together on the limestone around Vegas, but he couldn’t wait for me.

“I’m blasting to Zion,” he texted. He had just left Los Angeles, where he had flown in from Sacramento, renting a car to go rig a video of British television personality Alex Jones climbing Moonlight Buttress in Zion National Park, six hours away. “I have to work on a BBC shoot,” the text read. “But if I have any days free I’m psyched to go sport climbing.”

There was a pause, then another message arrived: “Or wingsuiting.”

The Three Marys- Stanley was found at the backside of the formation on the middle left.

I texted him the following day, March 14th, but Stanley never returned my message or called. I thought that odd, but our friendship often went through bursts of activity separated by stints of silence, and I attributed his lack of communication to his work schedule.

Stanley’s flight from Los Angeles back home to Sacramento landed on March 23rd. But Stanley never stepped off the plane. Anna Meika, Stanley’s seven-and-a-half months pregnant wife, sounded the alarm. She hacked his email account and found a note from the BBC crew wondering where he was: He hadn’t returned his rental car, he’d never shown up for his nine-day BBC rigging job, and he hadn’t been heard from in 10 days. The search began. His BBC coworkers failed to hear back from him.

Stanley had tried to cut into the area between this perch and the wall.

On Friday March 21, I drove from Mesquite to Zion to meet my friend Jonathan “JT” Thesenga, a climber from Salt Lake City. The following day we swung leads and free climbed Moonlight Buttress. Flush with success, we drank beers in the bar of Bit and Spur. While drinking that evening, friends of Stanley’s and mine texted me that he hadn’t returned home. The realization that Sean had neglected to return my texts clicked. JT and I began searching that night, finding Sean’s rental car at the base of West Temple, tallest peak in the main area of Zion. Its sandstone walls towered 4,000 feet above Springdale, the small town at the entrance to Zion National Park.

At about 10 am on Sunday morning, March 23, the thud of the National Park Service helicopter’s spinning rotors echoed off West Temple’s walls. I scrambled up a sagebrush-choked gully, searching for a body—Stanley’s body.

A Zion SAR member informed JT and I that on the evening of March 13th, from the top of West Temple, Stanley had texted a photo of the exit for a jump to another base jumper, (I don’t remember who it was) Stanley wanted to check the exit. We envisioned three possibilities: He fell from the exit point and his body would be at the base, he crashed in flight and landed on a ledge, or his chute failed and he was lost in the jumble of bushes. Stanley had to be somewhere between the exit point and his rental car, at the base. I scanned the gullies, the ridges, everywhere. Was he even dead? Maybe he survived 10 days in the Zion desert. Maybe he just needed me to find him and give him water. I shook my head, fighting to be pragmatic. Would we be able to smell a dead body? JT stared through his binoculars, glassing the desert for a bright blue wingsuit. Only 12 hours before, we’d happily celebrated a great climbing day. Now, suddenly, we were on a manhunt. Where was Stanley?

The hillside was untracked, steep and loose. Zion’s desert furnace burned my face. Cactus needles punctured my shoes and stuck into my feet. Bushes tore my arms and legs. The NPS helicopter flew overhead, cutting through to the base of West Temple. I scanned the area and sweated.

I felt useless—I needed to do more. I wanted to scream Stanley’s name but he wouldn’t hear me. He couldn’t be alive, could he? His body was somewhere between the top of West Temple and the base. I held my breath and looked behind a boulder. Nothing. I felt relieved. I felt destroyed. I hated the idea of finding my friend’s dead body, yet I felt responsible for finding him. Did I want to remember him that way? Did it matter what I wanted? Where the fuck was Stanley?

The helicopter searching for Stanley’s body

September, 2011. Stanley and I watched the Washington train run below the crag in Index, Washington. Stanley had jumped off Mount Baring that morning and then joined me at the Lower Town Wall to establish a new route.

“Think we could do a train luge?” I asked. I shared my strange daydream of lying on the tracks, watching the locomotive rush above my nose. We checked the distance. A body would fit. The tracks showed scuffs, though, where loose chains dragged. You could die. Or you could live.

Most trains ran clean but if one had a chain hanging …

“Maybe,” he said. “Are you gonna do it?”

A train rumbled below the crag. I knew BASE jumping was a dangerous game, akin to lying on the tracks. I shook my head. I wanted to live like my friend, but I couldn’t. Stanley was one of the boldest people I knew. Sean never danced with death; he ignored it. But I was too aware and too scared. We worked on and climbed a new route on the Lower Town Wall. Stanley named it Train Luge.

Mid-morning Sunday, the thud of the blades dissipated as the copter flew south, heading back to its station at the Grand Canyon National Park. Did they call off the search? Did they find Stanley? JT and I dashed to the parking lot, where a half dozen Zion Search and Rescue personnel had previously congregated. Maybe they knew? We missed them by minutes, watching them leave the parking lot as we ran to the pavement. I called the park dispatch and left a message. I left a second message and a third.

We parked at the visitors’ center, ready to interrogate the desk staff, unsure of where to go or who to contact. Finally, Cindy Purcell, Zion’s head ranger, called me delivering the news.

“We found the body in an inaccessible area on the side of a cliff,” she said. The body. Stanley was dead.

I caught bits of her report, only retaining the key details. “We were unable to perform a helicopter recovery because of winds … His sister, his wife and his mother are flying into Vegas … We are planning on meeting this evening at 8 to discuss recovery options.”

A few minutes later, Jimmy Haden, one of Stanley’s closest friends, arrived, having blasted from a climbing trip in Vegas to Zion a few hours before to facilitate the search. He parked next to JT’s van.

“What’s the update?” Jimmy asked.

I relayed the information to Jimmy as best as I could. Stanley … side of cliff … 10 days … still in his wingsuit … dead.

“Goddamn it, Sean!” Jimmy spat and leaned against his truck. Anger. Sadness. Confusion. JT and I shared the same emotions.

“Should I tell Mieka?” Jimmy asked us. Anna Mieka hadn’t received the news. We had all hoped that Sean somehow survived 10 days alone in the Zion desert. “Am I the one who makes the call?”

His eyes moved to West Temple. JT rolled a cigarette. I stared at the pavement. I didn’t have the strength to make that call. Jimmy had been to their small wedding in El Cap meadow. He knew Mieka better. In his truck cab, he removed his hat and dialed. Through the closed truck windows, I heard a pregnant widow sobbing.

Anna Mieka hiking down from the Third Mary

Summer 2012.

“One … two … three … go!” Stanley said, laughing. Stanley hit go on the stopwatch and I sprinted up the steep granite of the Nose route on El Capitan. Sickle Ledge. Stove Legs. King Swing. I looked down. Stanley was 15 feet below me watching birds fly across the granite monolith. Great Roof. Changing Corners. Bolt Ladder. Stanley was yelling.

He later shouted down from the summit, “Run! Run! Run!”

I touched the tree at the finish, panting hard. Stanley laughed. I wasn’t sure what just happened. I’d been attached to a bullet. We’d just climbed the Nose in six hours.

I wanted to rest and eat elk burgers. Stanley wanted to boulder at the Cathedrals. Stanley had an unbridled, manic energy. Somehow, after a half mile of unrelenting steep cracks, he wanted more.

In October of 2010 Stanley’s speed climbing obsession gained him the coveted Nose record with a sub three-hour ascent, 2:36:45, done with Dean Potter. He free climbed El Capitan and Half Dome in 22 and a half hours in 2008 with the British climber Leo Houlding. He climbed three El Capitan routes—The Nose, The Salathe and Lurking Fear—in a day with Alex Honnold. He traveled to Venezuela, Baffin Island, Antarctica. Adventurous, he had been bold and gifted from the start: In his first few weeks of climbing, Stanley onsight free soloed a 5.10, Stegasurus at Eagle Peak near Lassen Mountain. He was 18 years old and pretended he could feel a toprope pulling on his harness, which he’d left on for realism.

Somehow over the next 20 years Stanley escaped most of the limelight. Despite his impressive climbing resume, Stanley received less recognition than he deserved. Partly because putting together a ticklist for Stanley was so hard. He often forgot what he did and did not do. He freed the initial corners of the Dihedral Wall before Caldwell did the first ascent. He established hundreds of difficult sport routes in Oregon, Northern California, and across the world. He may have done a solo push of Native Son on acid. He remembered the acid trip but forgot what he climbed. He didn’t know or care. He just wanted to climb.

In the past few years, we had climbed together less and he had been BASE jumping more.

Stanley on the phone in the meadow shortly after we climbed the Nose

Sunday, March 23, 9 p.m. Bottles of water sat on the conference table. Names and phone numbers of friends and family were pinned on a whiteboard along with a photo of Stanley. Cindy, the head ranger, introduced herself to the room at large. The search and rescue members shook hands with Jimmy, JT, Stanley’s family and me. They displayed the helicopter’s pictures of the accident site, pinpointing our friend’s location. We could see by the blue wingsuit that Stanley’s body lay crumpled on a steep dirt slope on the north face of the nine hundred-foot-tall Third Mary, part of a small ridge line between the West Temple exit point and the parking lot. I drank three bottles of water. Erin, Stanley’s sister, corrected the spelling of his name on the white board from Shawn to Sean, the Irish spelling. Zion Search and Rescue would attempt a recovery Tuesday if the winds calmed and the Grand Canyon helicopter was available. On Wednesday, a storm was forecast and the recovery might be delayed, or canceled.

From the top of West Temple, on March 13th, Stanley had tossed stones over the edge, testing the steepness, trajectory and the time allowed to generate speed and forward momentum. He had called Jeff Shapiro, a close base jumping friend, to discuss the jump. A month prior, Jeff and Stanley had jumped from the same spot but the exit point had only seen three other jumpers since. Stanley called another BASE jumper, Scotty Bob to discuss exits, switching from a risky jump site on West Temple to a safer one on the northern. Alone, Stanley would have felt the slight downdraft at his back and stared across a thousand feet of space at the ridge of the Three Marys, running perpendicular to West Temple. Stanley had backed off jumps before, but on March 13th, he went for it.

From the exit point, Stanley flew for 17 seconds. He began an S turn that would lead him over and through a notch separating West Temple from the Third Mary. Jeff Shapiro reckoned a lack of depth perception from the low light or wind-related turbulence caused Stanley to impact, killing him instantly.

Monday, March 24. An hour after dawn, Anna Mieka, Jimmy and I hiked the steep hour-long climber’s trail upward to the base of the Mary formations. The pregnant Anna Mieka needed the hike, a chance to exercise and talk.

At the base of the First Mary, Anna Mieka and Jimmy found shade. I traversed across a dirt slope to scout the approach to the Third Mary, knowing Mieka wanted to see where Stanley crashed. When I returned, I could hear Anna Mieka sobbing. Another realization had hit her, had hit Jimmy. From a sunny rock, Jimmy called his wife, Sarah. He cried. I wondered how I should be feeling.

We began the slow walk down, our emotions up and down. We talked about the amazing scones we’d just had for breakfast from a Springdale coffee shop. Anna Mieka baked scones. I had entered a few pie-baking competitions. We talked about our recipes. She said my pies sounded good. I told her the bun in her oven sounded awesome. We laughed.

At mid morning we returned to the parking lot, to a crew coiling ropes and sorting climbing gear. Late the previous night Dean Potter, one of Sean’s closest climbing and wingsuiting friends, had flown in from British Columbia. His emotional arrival caused a groundswell among the half dozen base jumpers and climbers who had arrived to help, rallying everyone to action. Dean and Stanley had agreed that if something like this happened, they would find each other’s bodies before the authorities did.

Three of the crew blasted up Gentleman’s Agreement, an 800-foot 5.13 on the steep south face of the Third Mary. Three others charged a loose 5.10 gully on the northeast side. I stared at the Third Mary from the base. Did I want to see Sean’s body? I had spent the entire previous day battling that fear. Did our crew want to retrieve Stanley’s body without NPS help? How would we get the body down from the wall? We could reach him, but we were ill-prepared for a recovery.

I cleaned my car. I talked with JT’s wife, Brittany Griffith. I talked to my friend Hazel Findlay, and my ex-girlfriend, Kim Groebner. She knew Stanley. The three of us had had dinner together, had camped together, had gone to weddings together. She told me about her new boyfriend, all the great climbing she’d been doing in Hueco Tanks and Indian Creek, and her Moonlight Buttress dreams. For the first time in three days, I started to cry, though my tears had little to do with Stanley.

I hiked to the base of the Third Mary and jumared 800 feet of ropes that Dean and the others had just placed. I needed resolution. Across the small valley and 1,000 feet above, the late afternoon light illuminated Stanley’s exit point was illuminated by the late afternoon light. Near the summit of the Third Mary, I found the climber sitting on a smooth flat rock, smoking. The sun was low in the sky, but it was still warm. After 10 days on the north side of the formation, Stanley wasn’t alone anymore. We sat a hundred feet above him. His friends were here.

Stanley’s half-brother, Christian, called us from the base. NPS would be sending a helicopter shortly to recon the site for tomorrow’s recovery attempt. The park service wanted to recon the carry out today for a Tuesday extraction. Anna Meika spoke with Jimmy, telling him he should say a few words to Stanley, then leave. The Park Service voiced concerns that we would tamper with their investigation of the accident. We decided to leave Stanley’s body for NPS to recover. They were better equipped physically and emotionally to remove the body.

“If we’re going to get down to Sean, we need to do it now,” JT said.

Potter and Jimmy scampered the hundred feet down fourth-class ledges. The other men established ropes down to where Stanley lay. I stayed on the top with JT. I didn’t need to see my friend’s body.

An hour later they returned.

“He’s crumpled,” Jimmy said. “His legs are badly broken, but it’s Stanley.”

We descended to the parking lot, where a crew of BASE jumpers had arrived. More friends: Charley Kurlinkus, Scotty Bob, Jordan Kilgore, Walker Mackey, Jeff Shapiro and Graham Hunt. They had driven from British Columbia and Salt Lake City. JT broke the news to them. We were exhausted. They were exhausted. We all stumbled into town.

“NPS said four of us can help with the body recovery tomorrow,” Jimmy explained at dinner. “We go in at 6:30 a.m. for a rescue meeting.” He looked at Dean, who nodded. JT volunteered as a third. I said I would go.

“We might have to handle the body,” Jimmy cautioned me.

“I know.”

Spring 2010. I pulled up shrubs and tossed them in a pile. Stanley ran around the yard, sawing trees at random. A Yosemite local had hired Stanley to clear brush from his yard to reduce fire hazards. I listened to Stanley complaining. He loved to complain. It was during prime climbing season, and his beautiful wife wanted to see him, so he had to drive all the way from Yosemite to Sacramento. His upcoming Arctic expedition meant he’d never get strong enough for his Jailhouse sport project. An English knight once deemed Stanley an honorary Brit for his ability to complain so well. Sometimes Stanley could transform gold to iron.

Stanley surveyed the brush piles and said, “The owners are paying me a ton of money not to climb.” I offered to help. I needed a climbing partner. If we finished the job, then we could both go climbing. We spent half a day toiling in the heat before Stanley lost motivation. Stanley hated working. He preferred living.

“I’ll give you money when I stop by the ATM,” Stanley said. I shrugged. Stanley had agreed to climb the West Face of the Leaning Tower with me tomorrow and that’s what I wanted. Snow fell while we worked the route all day. Stanley freed a steep section of granite, a thousand feet off the ground. He heel hooked on the ramp while large white flakes of snow filled the sky. He climbed behind the white curtain. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. I worked on the route for a while and eventually freed it. Stanley sent me an excited note of congratulations.

“Oh, yeah, I finally made it to the ATM,” Stanley said a year later. We were standing by the Yosemite lodge. I’d long forgotten about the job but still remembered him climbing in the snowstorm. I laughed as he opened his wallet and stuffed money into my hand.

Stanley jumaring the West Face of Leaning Tower

Monday, March 24, pre-dawn. The wind shook my home, waking me at 4 a.m. I crawled out of my Saturn station wagon. At the 6:30 a.m. meeting we were told that a two-person SAR team would be dropped off on the summit of the Third Mary, descend to Stanley and attempt a long-haul recovery. If the winds proved unfavorable or complications arose, the Raising Team—Dean, Jimmy, JT and I—would rig a body recovery. The wind blew across the Watchman trail base, where the NPS personnel, SAR team and helicopter crew gathered for the early morning briefing. They gave Jimmy and me radios. Jimmy knew how to use one from his rigging work. I couldn’t figure out how to turn mine on.

We hiked to the base of the Third Mary and ascended to the top of the fixed lines, where we waited. The chopper cut through the calm sky, flying by on the opposite side of the cliff—Stanley’s side. Jimmy radioed in.

“Operations, this is Raising Team,” Jimmy said. “We’ve reached the top of the fixed lines.”

“OK. Rescue Team on site and packaging the body. We will provide further instruction.” We waited, listening to the radio. JT smoked his 38th cigarette. My pants felt loose. In the last few days I’d stopped eating.

“We have the body in the tuna net. Bring back the helicopter,” reported a SAR member. The chopper cut the silence. The rotors hovered. A few minutes later the heli came into view, then the long line, then … Stanley. The heli followed Stanley’s intended flight line. I watched his body fly over the ridge and into the open air. I breathed deeply. Stanley had finished his flight.

I’d never wanted to be a pallbearer anyway. At least I was here, though.

“Goodbye, Sean,” I whispered.

Monday, March 24, evening: Back in town, we met up with the rest of the tribe and drank beer. I felt exhausted and delirious. I hadn’t slept in four days. I ate a sandwich. Dean disappeared to his hotel-room bed.

“I need a shower and a hug from my wife,” JT said. “That would go a long way.” With that he got up and hugged everyone, reaching me last. He told me, “Let’s not do that again.”

Jimmy left the next morning. Then Stanley’s brothers left. Stanley’s sister and mother had left the previous day with his remains. As rain fell in Zion, I watched West Temple disappear in my car’s rearview mirror.

Sean at Taft Point, a few minutes before jumping off.

On Yosemite’s Taft Point, in the summer of 2012, after we’d climbed all day, the sun settled toward the horizon. The low light provided protection from rangers, though the legality of his enterprise affected Stanley little. He was conscious of the fines and tried to be careful, but Stanley lived beyond the law.

He always made me think of these words by Tom Robbins: “Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here.”

Stanley put on his wingsuit, made the motion of pulling his chute a dozen times, watched for cars, tested the wind. I felt nervous looking at Stanley’s toes hanging over the edge. Then he jumped, plummeted 10, 20, 100 feet, rocketing towards the slab below. I held my breath, waiting. His wingsuit caught the air and Sean became an arrow. He flew around the large Lost Brother buttress. I never heard his chute pop.

“Are you dead?” I texted him.

I walked two miles to the road and drove half an hour to the valley floor, frantic. Where was cell reception? I needed to find Stanley.

“HAHA!” he texted back when I go to the Valley. “Do you think I would ever do something where I thought I would die?”

Cosmic Debris