Edgar Allen Poe spoke of it in his short story The Imp of the Perverse:
There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.
People call it vertigo but that’s not the correct word. I call it The Willies. It’s a very unpleasant sensation down in my lower abdomen, and it’s the feeling that you could fall over, plunging to your death, at any instant. I have written of it before, for instance in this post where I was standing at the edge of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.
Here, to refresh your memory, is the overview of the trail:
In my previous post, we got as far as point 6, up on top of the black Proterozoic bench.
I did not have a fear of heights until one day, somewhere around the age of thirty, it became necessary to use a commercial building’s fire escape to get from the fourth floor up onto the roof. We needed to work on some air conditioning equipment up there, and no one could find the key to the roof hatch.
So we went out onto the fourth floor’s fire escape landing and climbed the fire escape ladder from there to the top. As I swung off of the ladder onto the roof, I looked down…
It hit me all of a sudden. Right there. No warning. Suddenly, FEAR filled my body. The fear of my fingers slipping. The fear that I would do something stupid, such as let go. It never went away. I’ve been afraid of heights ever since.
I don’t remember why I picked this particular trail in the Colorado National monument for a hike. Considering my fear of heights, it was folly to do so. But I had gained the bench, and for some reason I was eager to go on up the face of the cliff.
This shot was taken from Point 6, looking up at the cliffs.
Here we can see the very soft, very crumbly Chinle Formation rock up close and personal. It is deep-red and contains uranium. The Wingate Formation lies above it.
The first little stretch up to Point 7 wasn’t bad. Not scary at all. Here’s the view from a switchback somewhere between points 6 and 7:
Here’s a shot of the trail itself on the last switchback at point 7:
OK, still not bad. It’s a little narrow but it’s sandstone: not slippery. And not very far down to the next ledge, where that tree is growing.
But then, minutes later you find yourself WAY up high, and it’s pretty much straight down!
Yeah, this is Willies-inducing. I get them sitting here at my computer, just looking at this shot. But I kept going. Then it got scarier.
By the time I got to this spot, I had a serious case of the willies. As Poe spoke of, you shrink in horror from the edge, but there is that demon, that Imp Of The Perverse, telling you “Look Down! Go ahead!”
Aargh. I was getting shaky. I was wearing good hiking boots with a good grip, but still… the trail surface was loose gravelly sand… “What if I slip? What if I lose my balance?” This was NOT fun. Still, the top was only a little bit further. I WANTED to see that rock named the Liberty Cap. But then I came to this:
And I said, “That’s it. I’m not going across that.” It was all I could do to get this shot before turning back. The fear of tipping over and falling down, down, down to my death was overwhelming.
I turned around. I never made it to the Liberty Cap. I was only a couple of hundred yards away from it.
It has been my mantra for years that good photography makes you FEEL something. I hope I’ve made you feel something with today’s photos; I know that I feel it just looking at these shots.
Good story, you had me thinking of that all-consuming fear. I have no fear of elevations so long as I am secured to something. It is when I have nothing to hold on to, such as a roof edge - then my knees buckle. It would be great if the photographs could be enlarged for a better experience.