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Death to “Pinklebear”—Why I Stopped Logging My Ticks

matt samet
·8 min read

This article originally appeared on Climbing

Back in the Aughties, my local gym--the Boulder Rock Club, in Colorado--gave itself a facelift, revamping the lead walls in its Expansion Room and retexturing the walls throughout the facility. Part of that effort was renaming each panel/sector. On a hanging clipboard, I randomly suggested the name "Pinklebear's Pavilion" for a bulging wall by the entrance, writing my idea under the likewise snarky "Jub-Jub" someone had penned in. Neither suggestion won, but I sure did entertain myself, giggling like a schoolgirl at my own cleverness the rest of the day, much to my wife's chagrin.

"Hahaha, Pinklebear's Pavilion," I'd say over and over. "A laugh riot!"

"Yes, yes--I get it," she'd respond. "Hilarious...very mature, as usual."

The name had been inspired by a fake Match.com profile I'd set up a couple years earlier: Hot Pinkler, who was four feet tall, weighed 300 pounds, and liked to speed-walk around the local shopping mall while wearing a fanny pack (in front, of course--the better to access his breath mints, notepad, and chewing gum). The Match.com profile got a few hits and LOLs, but it was mainly a vehicle for my own amusement. From "Hot Pinkler" came "Pinklebear" and "Pinklebear's Pavilion," and then my friend Derek and I put up a route called Pinklebear in the Poudre Canyon in Northern Colorado. Around that time, I was also working as the editor at Climbing, and I wanted to reduce my online presence to keep people from pitching via personal channels. And so, I set up a Mountain Project alias as "Pinklebear," eventually adding a photo of a pink teddy bear with giant red glasses that my buddy Kevin had posted on Facebook.

For years this was the Mountain Project profile I used until, in late spring 2023, I killed off Pinklebear as coldly and without remorse as a mob Don ordering a hit on a rival boss.

*****

"Why aren't you on 8a.nu?" my friend Chris chided me for what felt like the five-hundredth time while we were cragging one day in Boulder Canyon. "You should totally get on there."

"Why?" I asked. I had never really understood the site. To each their own and everything, but 8a.nu just seemed like a bunch of fuzzy math and made-up rules and weird color-coding and unapologetic spray, mostly pertaining to Euros I'd never heard of climbing at areas I'd never visit: "Jurgen from Burgen climbs Flurgen-Gurgen at Splurgen, downgrading to 8c+--but should Jurgen get a 'yellow card' for 'off-piste' kneelocking?"

"It's fun," he said. "You can compete with your friends. Plus, I bet you'd have a killer 'all-time' ticklist."

"A what?"

"All-time ticklist--a list of all the routes you've ever done."

"Oh, hell, I can't remember what I climbed last month, let alone ten years ago."

"I bet you could," he said. "Don't you keep a logbook?"

"No."

"Really?"

"No--I never have. It seems pointless."

This was a bit of a lie. In high school, my mom had given me a climbing logbook as a Christmas present. One afternoon, bored in high-school English class, instead of taking my usual head-down-on-the-desk-in-a-puddle-of-drool stoned nap, I'd instead broken out the little brown book and started logging my climbs, beginning with The Castle in the Tatoosh Range below Mount Rainier, which I'd seconded at age 12. I'd gotten about three routes in when Kelly, the heart-stoppingly beautiful blonde cheerleader who sat in front of me and for some reason (Boredom? Pity? Both?) liked flirting with my disheveled ass, turned around, fixed her big blue eyes on me, and asked, "Are you journaling?"

"Uh, no, not really," I said, not wanting to look like some lachrymose, weak-armed, emo-kid navel-gazer. "It's, like, a rock-climbing diary," I said, which for sure sounded way manlier.

"Oh, cool!" she said. "How does it work?"

"You just write down the climbs you've done and when you did them, as well as any notes about what happened."

"Fun!”

But really, it wasn't; I found the whole exercise rather tedious. What difference did it make if I documented all these climbs? Who would care other than me? Sure, I could look back on the routes later and try to imagine the particulars of that day from the narrative I'd written down, but how accurate were my memories anyway? About ten routes in, once I'd logged the 5.8 East Face of the Pulpit in the Sandia Mountains (spring 1987, led by the New Mexico Mountain Club), I stopped, put my head back down on the grafitti-covered desk ("Chancho loves big wieners!"), and drifted into nepenthic slumber.

*****

At some point also in the Aughties, Mountain Project added the "tick" feature, which essentially lets you use the site as a digital logbook. (These days, Mp.com ticks break down into the subcategories of "Flash," "Send," and "Attempt.") I ignored the feature for a while--it felt a bit too "8a.nu"--but then started using it sporadically, mainly on road trips to help me remember what I'd climbed at areas with homogenous walls, like the Red River Gorge or Ten Sleep Canyon. That way, if I visited again, I wouldn't inadvertently get on the same route twice. Ticks also felt like a nice, low-key way to remark on a climb in the background, without having to post a comment at the bottom of the page, where the site's thirsty pundits savage each other over ratings, protection, approach beta, and what-have-you like the bloviating talking heads on cable news.

Over time, however, despite my proclivities toward not being a route-logger, I became obsessed--such is the slippery slope of digital addiction. Not only did I get a little dopamine hit from logging each route; I'd then get bonus dopamine later when friends or acquaintances trolling individual climbs or my Mountain Project profile looked at my ticks and commented to me in person about this-or-that send. Soon, the morning before a project, instead of waking up and visualizing the beta, I'd instead picture myself at home that night or even at the crag (if there was service) logging my tick, a self-satisfied smile on my face. All that began to matter was getting that little checkmark and commenting on how quickly I'd done a climb; the process became immaterial, subsiding into the background until it vanished altogether.

I'd drifted away from what Arno Ilgner in his classic mental-training book The Rock Warrior's Way labeled "the journey," and it was starting to show in how I felt on the rock. Instead of cultivating try-hard in the present moment--where, writes Ilgner, "Success and failure do not exist, only effort and action exist"--I was instead succumbing to "destination thinking." This made me climb poorly, riddled with anxiety, shaky and staccato in my movements, consumed with terror over what some phantom audience might think if I took too many tries to send some random climb.

The only thing I was feeding now was my ego (after all, I could have made my ticks "private" on Mountain Project if they were truly for me only), and the ticklist began to matter way more than the actual climbing. On some sleepless nights, phone in hand oozing unhelpful blue light into my retinas, I'd creep on my ticklist, looking at back at seasons or single days I'd had in a near-onanistic, self-congratulatory reverie.

Gawd, I'm so good at climbing. I'd think. Just look at that epic ticklist!

Of course, I'm not so good at climbing. I'm just a midde-aged dadbod punter, but for a time my little digital logbook had me convinced otherwise, until I realized I'd become that which I'd abhorred: a spraylord. "Ah, the mighty Pinklebear," my friend Pete joked last autumn when we were out at the Red. "What has he sent today?" Which got me to thinking, maybe it was time to kill off Pinklebear; maybe the world--and I--had had enough. The whole Pinklebear affair had begun to feel hollow.

The thing about deleting Mountain Project profiles is that it's permanent, but this spring I went for it anyway, part of an effort at digital declutter that will likely never end, unless I take a sledgehammer to my iPhone or cut off my thumbs. A couple days in, I must confess that I was weak and tried to log back in as Pinklebear, only to realize the profile really was gone. Damnit--Pinklebear was dead! After that, I stayed away from the site for a week or so...before I created a new profile, ostensibly to post some updated protection beta on a route I'd added a bolt to in the Flatirons but also because I'm powerless against its digital siren song. My new alias has not yet added any ticks, but I'm not sure I trust him. So if you see "Bobby Peru" logging a tick, let him (er, me) know and I'll cut off his fucking thumbs.

Matt Samet is a freelance writer/editor and longtime climber based in Boulder, Colorado.

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