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The Heist
Jackson Hole mountain guide Julia Niles got a second chance at life. As hard as she plays, she might need a few more.
By Aaron Gulley
Photos by Andrew Geiger
The surest way to know a person is to brush up against mortality with her. At the top of pitch four, with the morning sun blown away by a raspy, cold, reptilian gale and the neighboring Teton peaks that were minutes ago visible suddenly obscured by swirling black death-clouds, Julia Niles and I are about to get acquainted.
It’s just before noon, and we’ve ascended some 750 feet of a classic Jackson Hole climbing route called the Snaz, eight pitches of granite undulating with wide cracks and stair-step overhangs. Approximately the same separates us from the summit—weather permitting, that is. “We have two choices,” says Niles, smooth and unblinking. “Either we go down, which could be…complicated,” she says, taking an inventory in her head, “or we go up and we simul-climb.” It’s a technique alpinists use for moving fast, climbing simultaneously with just a few pieces of protection between the two partners—and serious repercussions should you fall.
Niles looks upward; I’m game. A distant, guttural growl of thunder rolls through the air, as if the mountains want an answer. Later she will think back on this moment and say, “You get to that point when you have the feeling like, Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could pull this off? It would be a heist.”
At age 27, with a shock of blond hair, a square-cut jaw and sharp hazel eyes, a body like a tightly drawn hunting bow, and Katharine Hepburn’s blithe self-assurance, Julia Niles gets paid to make critical decisions like this. An American Mountain Guide Association rock- and alpine-certified guide (one of just a handful of women to have earned both accreditations), Niles has more experience in the mountains than many guides twice her age. Born in Holliston, Massachusetts, and raised in Tarrytown, New York, just north of the city, she developed her unflappable poise as a young climber in New York’s Adirondacks and Shawangunks, both of which have a reputation for heady, fearsome climbing. She’s been up Yosemite Valley’s El Capitan six times, her first ascent at age 19 with her then boyfriend and his climbing partner.
“The night before we started the climb, they took me up to El Cap, and I learned how to jumar and how to aid climb,” she remembers. Three days turned into five, and the trio ran out of food and water, but they eventually reached the summit. “We all ended up friends—eventually,” she says, demure as usual.
Niles speaks slowly and simply with a rare authenticity and a good-natured nonchalance that sometimes makes it tough to recognize the weight of her words. On the hourlong approach to the Snaz, she drifted from subject to subject as we hiked, telling me about her ascent a few years back up Aconcagua, the highest peak in the western hemisphere, then, “That’s when the whole tumor-in-the- lung thing was going on,” and then on to lamenting her taxable income of $6,000 in 2006. I almost had to tackle her: “Umm, wait! Did you say tumor in your lung?”
She did indeed. While guiding for Jackson Hole Mountain Guides after college, Niles became plagued by asthma attacks, bronchitis, and pneumonia. “I think I finally knew something was really wrong when I was playing ultimate Frisbee on the glacier at Denali base camp, you know, in crampons and all, and I just couldn’t run or jump,” she says. After two years of searching for the cause, a doctor finally discovered a benign tumor choking off almost 90 percent of her left lung.
“An experience like that distills your life down to the essence and makes you consider the things you like and the things you’re just doing,” Niles says. In February 2006, she had half of her left lung removed. At the time, she was a year into the University of Colorado at Boulder’s prestigious environmental-law program. “After thinking about it, I decided I didn’t really want to be a lawyer.” Though doctors warned that the lobectomy might impede her mountain pursuits, Niles was climbing three months later. Half a year after the surgery, she became the first woman ever to on-sight solo the Grand Traverse, a ten-peak enchainment of some of the wildest summits in the Tetons. With arduous route finding, 13,000 feet of vertical climbing, and serious consequences should the weather change, it’s a testing day for any skilled climber. For someone missing half a lung, it’s like doing 16 hours of wind sprints with a mouthful of cotton. And Niles promises there’s more to come. “I’m not fully recovered,” she says. “But I intend to be.” It’s as if having nudged up against the boundaries of her mortality—and then come back again—she realizes what she’s gotten away with. The perfect heist.
Perhaps that helps explain why, back on the Snaz, Niles is still calm as the electrical storm intensifies. No matter how you react in such a critical situation—fight, flight, or freeze—it’s not a moment you can fake. “If I were with a client, we’d be headed down,” she says. “In fact, we’d have never left the ground.” And with that she sets off into the tempest.
The cold, hard rain is on us now, and the fusillade of thunder sounds like an approaching army, but Niles is focused, climbing as methodically as if it were a cloudless summer day. The thunder churns our stomachs, and the electric hiss of lightning is everywhere, but Niles flies upward, imperturbable. The last 30 meters is a series of shallow corners turned cascades, a deluge of water pouring into our eyes and down our sleeves.
At last I reach the top, and the storm begins to grind northward, the rain now slacking off. Niles is belaying me from beside a tree, her wet blond hair plastered to her head and coat, a defiant smile to greet me. The sky is turning from night to steel, from steel to cotton, and we both realize the worst is over—we’ve made it. She stands to coil the rope, and with a nod says simply, “That was a little more drama than I prefer from a day of climbing.”
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