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The June 2025 Writing Contest asked writers to describe the most important move of their lives in 500 words or less. The following submission won fifth place and a one-year Outside Digital subscription.
The move wasn’t hard. But it was stupid.
The kind of stupid that sneaks up on you mid-route—where you’re too far off the ground to backtrack, but not far enough to justify your life flashing before your eyes.
We were a few bolts up a route at a scrappy little roadside-crag, one of those neglected blips of rock that doesn’t show up in the guidebook unless you squint and tilt your head. Still, it was better than staying home.
The beta said to step around a bulge and pull onto a blank face using “creative feet.” Beta that uses the word “creative” is almost always lying.
I moved up anyway, smearing through dusty footholds and sun-warmed lichen, until the ledge thinned into a mossy corner. No obvious holds. Just a damp smudge of green and what looked like the suggestion of a rock feature if you squinted with emotional investment. It smelled faintly like mildew and panic.
I pressed against the wall like a nervous date, overthinking every inch. My right foot skated on something that didn’t deserve to be called rock. My left foot dangled, waiting for its moment. I hugged the arete like it might change its mind if I showed enough affection, forehead resting on stone, whispering quiet, half-serious bargains to whoever might be listening.
“I just don’t want to die doing something I’m not even good at,” I muttered. “Is that too much to ask?”
There was a flake—thin, fragile, barely attached. I needed it to shift my weight and get balanced, but it looked like it would break if I exhaled too hard. Still, it was that or take a sideways fall into a bush that looked like it hadn’t moved since 2003. I’m not sure if it was alive or just quietly decomposing in place.
So I did the move. Left foot onto a smear of lichen. Left hand on the flake. I held my breath like that would make me weigh less, and pulled.
Somehow, everything held. For one slippery second, I was levitating on moss and prayer. No muscle, no style—just the ghost of a miracle. Then I was over the bulge, back on solid ground, heart hammering, laughing too hard to clip the anchor.
When I got down, my friend said, “That was the most unnecessarily stressful five feet of climbing I’ve ever witnessed.”
Fair.
But the thing is, I can still feel that moment. Not the fear, not even the flake, but the fact that I moved anyway. I wasn’t confident. I wasn’t strong. I wasn’t having some epic send day. I was just willing. And that, somehow, was enough.
Climbing hasn’t made me fearless. But it has taught me how to be scared and move anyway, to lean into uncertainty with my whole shaky self and a little bit of hope—to try even when nothing feels certain.
That day, it was a flake. Tomorrow, it’ll be something else. But now I know: Even when I’m terrified, I still reach.
And sometimes, the rock holds.
Read more winners from the June 2025 Writing Contest at the contest results page.
