Max Tepfer
Primary Outdoor Sport: Climbing
Pitches Climbed in 2023: 1,249
Favorite Beverage: Water
Sunrise or Sunset: Sunrise
Non-Outdoor Hobby: Making Sourdough Bread
Favorite Season: Fall
Guilty Pleasure: Television
Book Recommendation: The River Why
Three Words to Describe You: Tough, Persistent, & Kind
“My parents were both pretty outdoorsy. They tried to take me outside and I wasn't into it at all. They'd take us cross country skiing and take us hiking or whitewater kayaking and camping. I was just like, ‘This sucks. I hate this.’ I didn't want to do it.
Then in high school in Eugene there was this mountaineering club. It was basically a youth group, but a mountaineering club in the high school. All my friends were doing it and I was like, ‘Oh, that kind of seems cool.’ So that was my introduction.
It was a slow process to fall in love with it because at first I was really gripped the whole time. In hindsight, working as a guide, it was not very tightly run risk management-wise. Looking back on how they managed terrain relative to our ability levels, it was super aggressive and not how you'd want your kids learning about the mountains. But, it was sweet for us because we had this really fast learning curve.
There was a lot of fear for me. I’d be climbing North sister and not really using a rope and a lot of places you should really use a rope. That was my second climb. I was very scared the whole time so it took me a while to be like, ‘Yeah, this is for me. This is something I'm actually capable of doing and can pursue.’”
“The thing I’m most proud of in my climbing is the stuff I've done here at Trout. I've probably climbed here too much. I started climbing here in college and was instantly obsessed with the place. Ultimately, I moved here to climb and spent years, as long as it was open, just climbing
I fully came up through the grades. When I started climbing here, I think I only onsighted two pitches, Gold Rush and Wonder Twins, two of the 5.10s. All the other 5.10s I tried took me multiple goes or multiple sessions
I started climbing here in 2008 so over 16 years I’ve chipped my way through pretty much all the established climbs.”
“The things that most inspire me in climbing are hard single pitch crack climbs, like gear protected climbing, and multipitch free climbing that's hard for me.
I think what I like about the single pitch style of climbing is that it's these little, micro puzzles to solve. They are fairly adventurous feeling because you're always a little bit scared with the gear and stuff.
Multipitch free climbing that's hard for me is kind of like that on steroids. You have the puzzles going on cause you're like, ‘Oh, I'm doing hard moves. I can figure out how to do them right and send.’ And, it's this massive adventure in a super cool place.”
“The most epic feeling climb I've ever done was in Yosemite Valley.
I just had shoulder surgery that winter and was feeling generally weak, but a friend of mine wanted to climb Golden Gate, which is 13a, Grade VI. I had only been rock climbing for a month after rehab at this point, but I was like, ‘I'm good enough to at least draft on top rope.’
We started climbing and spent three days climbing the first two thirds up to the move pitch. It’s the first 5.13a crux. Our plan was to bivvy at the base and we got to that belay anchor right at dusk. It was perfect. I got to the anchor, clicked my headlamp on, and we're like, ‘Sweet.’ Except that the bolts were kind of old and we weren’t psyched to sleep there and hang our portaledge from those bolts.
We were familiar with the pitch above us, which is mostly not that hard with one very hard bolt protected crux. And we were like, ‘Oh, we can just kind of do some free climbing and then mostly aid climbing and get up this pitch and camp at the next anchor.’
So I'm leading up this pitch. It's dark, but I kind of knew what to do and where to go. At the end of the intro climbing into the hard boulder where you start pulling on gear there is this kind of committing move where you're rocking up on a high foot and you just have to grab tat.
I was pretty tired because we've been climbing all day and we were multiple days in so I was feeling insecure about that move. I looked down and I was like, ‘Oh there's a bolt right there. It'll be a fall but not dangerous or anything.’ So I committed and I kind of chickened out because in my mind I was like, ‘I'm gonna reach for the tat and it's gonna move and I'm not gonna stick it.’ I didn't want to do that so I just half assed the move and fell and the bolt came out. I fell 60 feet.
The force of the fall ripped my headlamp off my helmet. Through some weird rope physics thing, Pedro didn't feel any rope tension when I fell. It was dark so all he sees is this headlamp fall 60 feet and then continue falling to the bottom of the cliff and he doesn't feel the rope come tight. So there was probably a moment there that he thought I was dead.
So we slept there that night cause I was done and he didn't want to go do that cause the bolt was gone.
We were faced with this awkward decision in the morning because the route traverses off of the main trade route fairly significantly. I think you probably could rappel it, but we didn't know how to. So we felt kind of committed and we didn't feel good to be like, ‘Okay, let's just start rappelling.’
So our strategy was to free climb as high as we could until the last viable gear placement and then basically start to hang on that thing and top step it aid climbing. We had this tent pole for our portal ledge and we were using that as a cheater stick to try and hook the tat with our tagline.
Pedro is 5’2” and he was too short to get that so I went up after he tried, eight hours after taking the biggest fall of my life in one of the craziest places I could imagine. I managed to hook the taped open wire gate into the faded nylon sling. Then, the next step was to jug the 6mm tagline.
We got up it and got through and as Pedro is jumaring behind me after I got the rope fixed, he tore something in his right shoulder and couldn't lead after that point. We actually considered calling SAR because he's good friends with the guy that coordinates it.
We're like, ‘Well, we're kind of out here. Are we going to fuck your shoulder up worse by continuing higher?’ That's the beginning of the hard climbing. There's two more pitches that get graded 5.13 and a whole lot of scary 5.11.
Ultimately, we decided to continue. I was like, ‘I can get the rope up these pitches, but it'll take me some time. So we kept going and most of the climbing wasn't that bad, but it was just fatiguing enough that it was grinding me down mentally. Constantly being the guy putting the rope up exacerbated that significantly.
After all the hardest pitches, there are these features called the razor flakes. It's the last five or six hundred feet of climbing. It's these granite pancakes that come to this really thin thickness. You're just laybacking and hand jamming them, but they're so thin that you can't put cams behind them.
Basically there were moments where the flake would get big enough that you'd feel better about a cam being there. So I'd sprint as fast as I could to one of those spots and then hang and get it all back and then just kept doing that. That was continuing to just totally destroy me mentally and physically.
There's this one move at the top of the last 5.11 pitch that's this short corner. It’s a body length of climbing and there's a fixed piton, but you're totally out of sight of your belayer. You're a ways up the pitch and I was so done. I was just like, ‘I do not want to be here anymore. I just want to aid through this move and get to the top of the mountain to be done,’ because from there, it's 30 more feet and you're on top of El Cap.
I couldn't do that because the piton was too low and the move was too insecure. So I was probably up there for thirty minutes, just trying to figure it out. And finally, I mantled onto the thing and I was like, ‘I'm done. I've got nothing left.’”
“I think the biggest thing for me is just the puzzling. I love going to the bouldering gym and working moves and being like, ‘Well that didn't really work, let me tweak this one variable and now I can do it this way.’ I find that process very engaging.
I think in climbing and in life there's outcome oriented people and process oriented people. In climbing, there's so much value in being a process oriented climber. You spend so much of your time just bashing your head against something you can't really do.
It's kind of funny, because there's that phrase about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result. But, that's literally what we do rock climbing every single day and somehow we get a different result eventually.
Climbing makes you really good at bashing your head against the wall and working problems. Not seeing failure as failure, but failure as you just haven't succeeded yet.”
“In all things in life, you experience setbacks. You have this goal that you're working towards and shit happens. You don't move the bar in the direction you wanted to.
I think it'd be easy to be like, ‘Oh, maybe I'm just never gonna do this thing.’ But, I think one of the lessons of climbing is that you can totally do that thing. You just need to identify what it was that wasn't working and try again.”
“Historically I was not a detail oriented person at all. I wouldn't really think too much about what I was doing or how I was doing it. This style of climbing, where you have to be really deliberate and careful with how you approach a given pitch has taught me to pay really close attention to what I'm doing and be really analytical and always show up as prepared as I can be for a thing I'm doing. Because, if you're not prepared, things can go wrong and you get yourself in trouble.”
“Early on in my climbing, in that youth group, there was this kind of toxic idea that was thrown out there that you shouldn't identify yourself too heavily through climbing. You shouldn't wrap too much of your identity in your climbing.
As someone that was obsessed with it, I had a hard time reconciling that. I internalized that value of, ‘Okay, I need to be a well rounded human being but I love this thing more than anything in the world. So how do I do that?’ Ultimately I was like, ‘Wait, that's bad advice. I should just do this thing that I love doing.’
It's super therapeutic. There are days up here where I've got stress from some aspect of my life and a lot of busy thoughts that are overwhelming on some level and I just come up here and ropes solo on the project. All of that stuff is gone by the time I'm back on the ground.
In the same way that Buddhist monks train for decades to achieve a state of not thinking about anything, trying V hard for me is like instant not thinking about anything.”
“I'm grateful that my life is structured in such a way that I get to go do this all the time. It's kind of ridiculous. I have this job that I work a hundred to a hundred fifty days a year and it is very much climbing and talking about climbing. So it's this thing I love doing. And then, I get to go do what I want to do the rest of the time all over the world. That's kind of amazing.”
