Wasatch Tales: Sawyer Wylie's blog: September 2016

Fighting the friction with iron will power.

The ranger just laughed at us. "You boys thought you could swing by last minute on Labor Day weekend and pick up a camping permit for one of the most popular spots in the Sierras? Ha!" In a way it was just what I was expecting.

Earlier in the summer we decided to go climbing in the Wind River Range over the long weekend. We felt confident we were going to crush, then the weather changed two days before we hopped in the car. Since we were hoping to actually climb and not sit in the rain, we decided to go to the Elephants Perch, until the weather guaranteed rain there too. Over the next few days we watched all sorts of areas succumb to rain. Zion, Rocky Mountain National Park, the Black, the Tetons, Red Rocks. All promised rain. "How about the Sierras...maybe Temple Crag?" Feeling like we had been let in on a secret since that was the only place the skies promised to be cobalt blue and temperatures promised to create good conditions, we scrambled to pack for our leave time a few hours later.

Before I ever had to deal with these compounding problems, Carl Von Clausewitz explained how to. He was a Prussian military strategist who is credited with the concept of "friction" as outlined in his book On War. He said "everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly...friction is the only conception which, in a general way, corresponds to that which distinguishes real war from war on paper". In layman's terms, friction is all the little things that built up against you and prevent you from succeeding. They are all the things that you cannot imagine dealing with before hand, yet threaten your goals when working on them. So how do we deal with friction? Clausewitz says that the primary way to prevail is a powerful iron will which will crush the obstacles.

This concept of friction is used in our modern day world. The United States Marine Corps Leading Marines handbook says "Friction operates on every aspect of combat....Countless minor incidents combine to lower the general level performance so that one always falls shot of the intended goal. Iron willpower can overcome this friction. It pulverizes every obstacle. Whatever form [friction] takes...[it] will always have a psychological as well as physical [toll]. Friction is inevitable. [You] must accept it, do everything in [your] power to minimize its effects and learn to fight effectively in spite of it." In that same manual it explains that the way to combat friction is "the ability to adapt [which] makes you comfortable in an environment dominated by friction".

Alpine climbing isn't synonymous to the combat that marines experience. The lessons can be applied though, so with this in mind, I worked on being adaptable and developing an iron will. After changing our plans numerous times, we chose Temple Crag to be the focus of our iron will and when we got laughed out of the Rangers office, we decided it would be a car-to-car mission. Not a big deal, it was just the next obstacle, and we're adaptable. The next morning we hiked so fast up to the second lake that we had to use willpower to sit and shiver for over an hour in the wind and cold waiting for the sun. Throughout the day, the promised cobalt skies were there, but there are always things that are not perfect when we climb. Frozen hands, missing water filters, lack of camping sites the night before, the list goes on. Friction existed as it always does in the mountains, but we crushed.