Seth’s Climb

Junior Seth Arvesen jumps down three wide steps into his kitchen that smells like Asian spices. “Electric Love” by Børns booms and his poodle, Aurora, curls up under him at the wooden kitchen table. Seth offers me freshly-made Singapore noodles wearing his favorite harem pants and a tie-dye T-shirt, despite the eight-degree weather outside.

His hair falls to his shoulders and he twists his singular dreadlock while reminiscing over his recent climb. On Jan. 11, Seth rock climbed outdoors at Cliff Drive in North Kansas City near Kessler Park on the “warm” 40-degree day. The weather wasn’t perfect, his hands were stressed and numb from the cold rock, but as Seth says, “life isn’t perfect.”

“Rock climbing gave me a passion and passion is purpose, so in a way rock climbing gave me purpose,” Seth said.

Before climbing, circa 2015, Seth’s days were filled with practicing for Frequent Friday’s at East. He began growing his hair out, but he wore his usual khakis and a T-shirt to school every day. The beginning of his sophomore year, his interest in theater dwindled until he did nothing. His hair continued to grow, slowly reaching his chin. Seth says he was just going through the motions, hammocking in Loose Park and going to school.

“I called his mom and she was like ‘I’m just trying to get Seth interested in something, you know give him a passion,” Seth’s lifelong family friend Collin Carter said. “And I said, rock climbing.”

Then, in March of 2017, the important invitation to Moab, Utah.

“I was like dude do you wanna learn this art? You wanna learn how to climb? And he was all about it,” Carter said.

RoKC, an indoor rock climbing gym in North KC became Seth’s new theatre – his three-day-a-week spot. After being invited to backpack and climb Seth practiced climbing to prepare himself for ascending the real rocks. He wasn’t convinced from his first few attempts at the wall, it was just an unfamiliar feeling and activity, until about his tenth visit.

“A guy working there said to me ‘yeah it’s like someone’s throwing a puzzle in front of you and you gotta figure it out with body positioning and balance.’ I was just like ‘wow,’” Seth said.

“That moment made me think entirely differently about climbing in general. Then, I started doing it every day.”

Inside RoKC he leans back, arms outstretched. His knuckles turn pale as his fingertips grip the small green nub on the wall. Seth pulls his body closer to the wall as he hooks his fingers onto the next rock and shifts his left foot up with it. He reaches the top and when he jumps down to the bouncy mat, his forearms are strained tight – his favorite feeling. The gym warehouse is chilly, other climbers wear hats and flannels. But Seth is sporting his usual harem pants, tie-dye T-shirt and charcoal climbing shoes and loudly proclaims the cold is good.

“[Seth’s] a goofball. He’s always super upbeat and cheerful about it all whether he’s really not climbing or he is,” RoKC employee Cody Sally said. “Everybody knows Seth.”

Sally loves climbing for similar reasons as Seth: the unexpectedness of it each time, the puzzle. No climb is the same and at RoKC, the routes change daily, so whether you have climbed every day or not, you won’t experience the same climbs. Seth now relates this to life, his own puzzle.

His long hair and his newfound love for rock climbing would be the corner pieces, a foundation for his puzzle of life – what he didn’t know yet, was how much of his picture would be of Moab.

He didn’t know what the trip to Moab for climbing would be like nor had he ever been backpacking. He ended up huddled in a cave with his buddies during a violent storm in the desert. He kicked back and the dark sky swallowed him and his six traveling partners, solely lit by the stars. He spent days in the heat climbing massive red slates of rock and learning to conquer the false sense: fear. He spent hours throwing himself into uncomfortable crouches and positions for climbs.

“The conversations you have with yourself climbing are phenomenal,” Seth said. “My foot was in this bad place and I was like ‘ooh my foot should not be there’ and then I was just like ‘well move it.’ That sounds like a dumb thing to say, but it kind of changed the way I thought about facing things rather than running away from them.”

When the piece doesn’t fit, turn it, fix it.  

The trip to Moab not only changed his mindset, but it peaked his love for immersing himself in nature and inspired him to climb more. A few months later Seth spontaneously hopped in a friend named Eric’s car along with Carter and drove to Kentucky for a weekend of climbing in the Red River Gorge in Kentucky.

Upon returning home, he spent the next few weeks applying for various National Park jobs over the summer, eating clean and still climbing every day. He eventually climbed to the point of developing tendonitis. Despite the long three weeks without climbing in order to heal, Seth made his way to Gypsum, Colorado on June 1. For the entire month, Seth cleared trails and built water bars with eight other juniors and seniors. This was smack in the middle of his “climb-every-day binge” and he found himself rolling over in his sleep, antsy to climb.

“Seth as young as he is, is a very enlightened being. He’s living purely and joyfully from his soul which many people never discover,” Carter said. “But, Seth being the little teenager dude with the big smile on his face and some funky little pants around his waist, is always spreading the light.”

Seth laughs, chin stretched out and his eyes squint just thinking about the relief of climbing, solving the puzzle. His next adventure awaits him in Denali, Alaska when he will travel with junior Mario Tamburini where he hopes to solve the next part of his puzzle. But until then, Seth will blast Moon Taxi and make his weekly trips to the walls dotted with blue and green rocks in North KC.