tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58944461053245859722024-03-13T08:09:24.153-07:00Ronin's RoadRock climbing, route development, trail building, camping, road trips, new discoveries and lost worlds.
Journeys on the Road Less Traveled with Michael and Cindy Gray. Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.comBlogger162125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-20077064229712719292022-12-06T08:12:00.001-08:002022-12-06T08:12:27.855-08:00Eagle Rocks: Old School Eagle Rocks is a vertical limestone fin jutting from the flanks of Cave Mountain. The Rocks are blessed with roughly 285 feet of cracks, edges, pockets, dihedrals, and aretes scattered across three main faces.<div><br><div><br></div><div>The 10th Mountain Division climbed here, as had God alone knows how many indigenous and later generations of hunters, explorers and sweethearts, exposed to the elements and subject at any time to any of a number of sudden, perhaps catastrophic geological changes. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>This formation is one of the icons of the canyon, and is located just 2.2 miles from the Route 220 intersection on the south end of the canyon. Opposite the campground entrance is the grave of William Eagle, Revolutionary War hero and local legend.<br></div><div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>The Rocks are covered with semi-detached flakes, stacks of loose stone, precariously-balanced blocks the size of stoves. Trees, debris, and indeed entire large portions of the numerous faces can and will fall off without provocation or warning. Apparently-solid rock can suddenly fracture and plunge earthward, taking you with it and sucking your belayer right through the first quickdraw. Massive sections of the talus slope below can shift or collapse without warning, including sections which have until then been stable for years, centuries even. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Trails were established by whitetail deer, black bear, local climbers and other unstable forms of indigenous life, and cannot be counted on not to hurl you to a painful and untimely death or even to get you to the crag and back again without winding up like the Donner party.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Venomous snakes, stinging insects, biting animals, Steelers fans and vicious plants can and likely will attack you for absolutely no discernible reason, at any time, anywhere. Being outside is a risky business, and you probably shouldn't do it if you are unwilling or unable to accept those risks as your own responsibility.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Climbing Eagle Rocks is especially dangerous, for the reasons noted above and many, many more. The face is spotted with old pins and ring angles left behind by soldiers before the Second World War, some of them patriotic saints, some psychotic killers, most of them just unstable young men terrified by the enormous exposure and pushed to the limits of sanity by bad food, homesickness, venereal disease, abuse from overbearing homophobic drill instructors and the challenge of trying to follow driving instructions from the locals. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>More modern gear like rappel anchors, face bolts, and cold shuts may have been and likely was installed by drug-addled, brain-damaged trad climbers with a pathological resentment of gymbies and newcomers, deeply-seated antisocial issues, no sense of personal safety or respect for the sanctity of human life, and an addiction to Yuengling Black and Tan.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>(Of course the author has no personal knowledge of this possibility.)</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>No anchor, bolt, piton or ring angle should be trusted to save your life. The carabiners left in the anchors are to better facilitate safely anchoring and descending. Please don't remove them unless it is to replace them.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>There is no real record of who first climbed the trad and aid lines of Eagle Rocks. Every first ascent is a theoretical first ascent in an area so devoid of shared knowledge and so commonly visited by strong climbers in the early days of climbing.</div><div><br></div><div>Smoke Hole is a place like no other.</div><div><br></div><div>Share the ride, share the road. </div><div><br></div><div>Respect landowner rights and please support our small local businesses, If you're climbing Eagle, stop at the campground check in and pay for a night of camping, even if you're not going to stay, in thanks for access. Make a note on your envelope.</div><div><br></div><div>Little things keep access open.</div><div><br></div><div>Climb smart, think hard, talk to your partners, stay on trails, leave it a little better than you found it, give lots of hugs, take lots of pictures, and with any luck you, too, will live long enough to tell lies about the good old days.</div><div><br></div><div>MG</div></div></div>Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-60983395654214185422022-03-15T08:49:00.001-07:002022-03-15T08:49:07.406-07:00Friends of Smoke Hole Climbing Management issues and proposed solutions <div><div><p dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-8eeec5dc-7fff-d77d-6655-91fd2615f31f"><b>Climbing Management Plan: Issues and Solutions for Smoke Hole Canyon, North Fork Mountain, and Reed’s Creek area crags</b></p><b><br></b><p dir="ltr"><b>Climbing areas: Smoke Hole Canyon crags, inclusive, Reed’s Creek</b></p><h1 dir="ltr">Introduction and Climbing History</h1><p dir="ltr">Prior to the discovery and development of world-famous New River Gorge, the region around Seneca Rocks and Germany Valley was an important cornerstone in the history of West Virginia and East Coast rock climbing. Pioneers who would go on to define outdoor sports in America came to explore and discover Seneca Rocks, and, in time, to spread their efforts and attentions out from that base, through the assortment of crags by which it is surrounded. </p><p dir="ltr">To the east of Seneca rises the green wall of North Fork Mountain, its wandering spine lined with cliffs of varying height and quality. Across those heights signs of vertical passage can still be found; the tattered sling, ring pins and pitons, broken flakes and leveled bases overgrown in greenbrier. The setting, perched high above Germany Valley, with the Alleghany Front rising before you, is among the most beautiful locations in the United States.</p><p dir="ltr">On the opposite slope, behind these cliffs, hides a garden gem of climbing and natural beauty, carved by the South Branch of the Potomac River from the bedrock of the Alleghenies, framed by the steep ridges of Cave, Middle and North Fork Mountains. Pins and pitons, fading webbing and anecdotal evidence give proof that the early explorers came this way, as well.</p><p dir="ltr">This is Smoke Hole Canyon.</p><br><p dir="ltr">The character and features of Smoke Hole are as varied as its inhabitants. For the wealth of history alone, natural and manmade, Smoke Hole is a treasure. </p><p dir="ltr">Like Germany Valley, home of climbing landmarks Nelson, Seneca, and Champe Rocks, Smoke Hole Canyon also offers a variety of opportunities for recreation and adventure. Spectacular views and quiet solitude wait for the visitor who wanders down one of Smoke Hole’s many trails and old roads, through hardwood and coniferous forests, wildflowers and gardens of ferns, past groves of cedar and pine in open mountain meadows beside the inviting waters of the South Branch of the Potomac River and its many feeder creeks. </p><p dir="ltr">From Smoke Hole, the scenic North Fork Mountain Trail can be accessed via four different trailheads. Single track enthusiasts can enjoy the trail from its juncture with FS 79 north to the final steep downhill at the northern terminus of the trail, just a half mile from Route 28/55. From the canyon‘s mouth just north of the town of Upper Tract, Petersburg is a rewarding weekend’s journey away for the paddling enthusiast. Heavier rains and deeper waters convert this quiet river into an adventure worth remembering for even expert boaters. </p><br><p dir="ltr">Climbers came to Smoke Hole after WW2, came back in the late 70s and early 80s as crowds of tourists increased at Seneca Rocks, and a new generation of guides, locals, and visitors continued exploration throughout the 90s and early 2000s. Today, most of Smoke Hole’s major crags have been visited and are home to at least one route, although there a untapped remaining walls and areas of some size in the lower canyon. New routes continue to go in, mostly developed by local residents, with the occasional addition of a gem from a visitor.</p><p dir="ltr">The dramatic nature of the canyon’s cliffs and steep ridges, the incredible and visible variety of wildlife and native plants, and the wilderness feeling of a place just off the beaten path seem to invite a lot of superlatives from visiting climbers, including the globe-trotters who have counted these scattered crags and routes among the best climbs in their lives.</p><p dir="ltr">Smoke Hole may be one of the best-kept open secrets in West Virginia. In an age of massive social media, instant internet rumor and on-demand beta, the canyon has always been something of an enigma; minutes from the main road, less than an hour from the tourist magnet of Seneca Rocks, marked by the blazing banner-in-the-sky of Cave Mountain’s limestone cliff band, with 40-80 foot cliffs lining the entrance and 300-foot Eagle Rock sitting five minute’s hike from the car, above the cool waters, numerous campsites and inviting swimming holes of the South Branch of the Potomac River, somehow, the canyon remained a place where few paddlers or peddlers explored and almost no one climbed. </p><p dir="ltr">Today, Smoke Hole offers escape from the crush of better-known crags, a satisfying variety of styles and formations, with a number of moderate routes for the beginning to moderate leader and more than enough challenges for serious technical climbers.</p><br><p dir="ltr">But like so many of America’s formerly “lost treasures”, Smoke Hole now sees more crowds than ever before, and the popularity of outdoor sports had been paralleled by impact to our outdoor resources on public lands. The recent pandemic only increased the crowds, refugees from the cities and suburbia with little or no outdoor experience, trampling the trails and crowding the crags and roads, campgrounds and riversides of the Canyon and nearby Reed Creek.</p><br><p dir="ltr">How best to deal with these issues is the question. Personal responsibility and proactive stewardship by a loose coalition of climbing activists has been the tradition in and around Smoke Hole for the last three decades, and to that end we semi-officially formed the Friends of Smoke Hole in 2017. </p><p dir="ltr">Since 1990, the founders and members have planned, funded and carried out over a two dozen trail work and trash clean-up days at various local climbing areas, created bridges between climbers and local businesses and in 2017 launched the Smoke Hole Anchor Renovation/Upgrade Project to replace the aging and substandard climbing bolts and anchors of the canyon region. The co-founders of Friends live in Franklin and are regular visitors to the canyon and area crags, where they routinely pick up trash, repair trails and help visiting climbers with questions about routes or access issues.</p><p dir="ltr">The founding members of Friends of Smoke Hole have, collectively, more than five decades of climbing in the U.S. and Europe, and the same number of years of route development and stewardship in Smoke Hole Canyon and across the Canyon region, as well as at crags across the continental United States. </p><p dir="ltr">Our recommendations are based on the responses to our survey among region climbers and residents, Leave No Trace principles, extensive research into scientific data, personal stewardship efforts in half a dozen National Forests, and conversations with hundreds of climbers, many of them veteran climbers and outdoor stewards, trail-building activists and engineers.</p><h1 dir="ltr">Position statement</h1><p dir="ltr">We the Friends of Smoke Hole feel that the management of outdoor recreation like climbing, its impact, development and sustainability can best be accomplished with a pro-active partnership of government and local climbing communities.</p><p dir="ltr">The goal of any management plan should be to preserve the greatest possible amount of current cultural, historical, natural and recreational resources while also allowing for the responsible development of potential new areas. </p><p dir="ltr">Sharing responsibility for communication, pro-active stewardship and responsible use and development among the local and regional user groups and businesses profiting from climbing, while promoting responsible, inclusive, sustainable use of public land and resources, is the best way to empower local and traditionally-marginalized groups while reducing costs and need for government support and personnel. </p><p dir="ltr">This in no way negates the government’s obligation to educate outdoor users as to best practices and guidelines in order to increase sustainability and access while limiting impact to natural, cultural and recreational resources.</p><br><br><p dir="ltr">The following is an outline of issues and solutions in which the climbing community can join the Monongahela National Forest and act to best protect recreational, natural and cultural resources in and around climbing areas of the Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks Recreation Area while providing for sustainable climbing.</p><br><h1 dir="ltr">Goals of the Friends of Smoke Hole CMP Proposal</h1><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Recognition of climbing as a valid and established use of Public Lands in the Monongahela National Forest.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Recognition that this effort must be cooperative and that it can only succeed with the support of local residents and the climbing community, since the Monongahela National Forest does not have the budget, manpower, or resources to patrol every crag in the northern 500,000 acres of the Forest.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="3"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Creation of clearly defined guidelines through a fact-based decision-making framework, using scientific data and input from all affected user groups, especially local residents, area climbing and environmental stewards, and active local climbing organizations, to supplement NFS on-the-ground data gathering and surveys and guide policy.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="4"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Recognition of Smoke Hole’s unique setting and characteristics to develop area-specific guidelines. The AAC Seneca Chapter, former Access Fund Regional Access Coordinator and the AMGA guides of Seneca have all recognized the very different nature of extant facilities, types of climbing and the various recreational communities of the Smoke Hole Canyon/Reed’s Creek area, from those at Seneca Rocks. Thus, any climbing management plan will need to address those very different needs and realities.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="5"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Creation of a coordinated network for climber and public education, information and engagement through use of existing platforms, i.e. official NFS pages, social media, email, Zoom and in-person interaction and discussion.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="6"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Engage the climbing community in cooperative management and stewardship, respecting local experience and integrating science and local solutions as well as popular opinion into the creation of guidelines and official policy.</p></li></ol><br><br><br><h1 dir="ltr">Smoke Hole Area Issues and Possible Solutions</h1><br><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Preservation of natural/cultural resources and impact mitigation</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">Greater popularity means greater numbers, impact, and demand on limited resources. </p><p dir="ltr">Solutions: </p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Commitment to preserving the existing historical markers and culture while expanding signage and available information to more completely educate the public about Canyon history and the indigenous cultures whose presence in the region predates the arrival of the first Europeans.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Expansion of currently incomplete climbing information on all USFS pages relevant to the Smoke Hole region to include links to the crags at Long Branch, the Guide Walls and the Entrance Walls, and Reed’s Creek.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="3"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Established parking limits for crag and hiking trail parking areas. </p></li></ol><br><ol><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Post No Parking signs on road shoulders at problem sites. </p></li><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Expand existing parking at Reed’s Creek</p></li><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Explore options for optimizing use of shuttles and carpooling.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="4"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Consistent enforcement of existing NFS regulations in cooperation with local law enforcement and rangers.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="5"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Consistent definition of acceptable and unacceptable impact, maintenance, conduct and regulations at all crags in the Recreational Area, trad or sport.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="6"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Improved NFS signage with accurate geological information and histories of the area, including traditional inhabitants, according to WVU and other accredited sources.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="7"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Limiting NFS info signage and kiosks with CMP and other pertinent info to Canyon entrances (Upper Tract/220 and Cabins/28), day-use parking areas, crag parking and/or trailheads. </p></li></ol><br><ol start="8"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Recognition of established standards for fixed climbing gear and its sustainable use.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="9"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Recognition of Friends of Smoke Hole as the local contact and go-to resource for information on Smoke Hole Canyon and Reed's Creek area history, climbing and ethics, as well as significant trail changes and/or stewardship and climbing events.</p></li></ol><br><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Engaging climbers in trail maintenance and other crag stewardship efforts</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">Solutions</p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Create mutual stewardship support agreements with the Access Fund and Friends of Seneca Rocks.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Groups that have completed 4 or more trail days with at least 6 people in a two-year period should be fast-tracked for approval of proposed improvements/projects on existing trails.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Informing climbers of trail and route closures for maintenance and safety, and completion of maintenance, in a timely fashion, using NFS information boards, social media, national climbing advocate newsletters, and email groups</p></li></ol><br><p dir="ltr"> </p><br><ol start="3"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Guided, gym and social group size and usage management </h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">Along with large groups connected to social media, guided groups connected to climbing schools and gyms have exponentially expanded in number and activity over the last decade, vastly increasing the impact on recreational and natural resources. </p><p dir="ltr"> Solutions: </p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Effective and universal management of the climbing community.</p></li></ol><p dir="ltr">Climbing Rangers should not be hired from any guiding service active at the crags where they will work, to ensure equal enforcement and regulation and any appearance bias and/or conflict of interest.</p><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Defining groups and the responsibilities of the leaders and/or guides, including daily or yearly fees and permits. If yearly, there should be a limit on frequency and guides/leaders should make an effort to utilize social media, climbing websites and email to post planned outings as soon as possible to limit overcrowding and reduce impact on resources.</p></li></ol><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">A group shall be considered to be six or more traveling and/or climbing together.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Leaders, organizers and guides are responsible for ensuring that group members are adequately experienced, equipped and educated regarding common climbing skills, best practices, local ethics, and Leave No Trace.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="3"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">An incentive of 10-20% discount on permits to operate in the MNF should be offered to guides any year that they complete a total of 32 hours of trail work, per guide, with the LCO. Discount would apply to guide fees for the following year.</p></li></ol><p dir="ltr"> </p><ol start="4"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Guides operating outside Seneca Rocks, i.e. in and around Smoke Hole, at Reed’s, on the cliffs of the North Fork, should have a maximum 1:4 guide-client ratio, with a max of 300 clients/ year </p></li></ol><br><ol start="5"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Guide activity at these crags should be no more than 1 guide/25 routes at a single crag on any weekend day, 1:50 on weekdays.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="4"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Events</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">Large scale climbing events attract hundreds, sometimes thousands of out of state climbers and spectators and create massive impact on recreational and natural resources, as well as local traffic, infrastructure and EMS. Careful, thorough planning needs to take place well before any such events are permitted in the SR-SKRA.</p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Create a covenant for event organizers requiring</p></li></ol><ol><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">$1000 unacceptable impact bond</p></li><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Plan for parking, trash, human waste, camping, lodging, shuttles, and traffic control </p></li><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Coordination with local EMS and Law Enforcement.</p></li><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Provision for on-site EMTs and first aid/hydration stations at the crags and parking.</p></li><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Adequate prior improvement and/or reinforcement of crag trails, belay areas and hardware.</p></li><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Commitment by crag organizers to support, promote and participate in future stewardship events at that location for a period of not less than two years from the end of the event.</p></li><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Coordination with local businesses to ensure equal opportunity for participation by all, big or small. </p></li><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">30 days of public/climbing community notice on social media, via email, text, message boards, forums and newsletters.</p></li></ol><br><br><ol start="5"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Parking</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">Parking throughout the Canyon and at Reed’s is a longtime problem. The increasing popularity of Smoke Hole for hunting, fishing and camping, as well as hiking and climbing, have created unacceptable conditions that create traffic congestion, impact the resource, and negatively impact the enjoyment of shareholders. </p><p dir="ltr">Solutions: </p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Expanded/improved parking where needed </p></li></ol><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Reed’s</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Entrance Walls</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Long Branch</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Reduce NFS requirements and fees for shuttle services to operate to and from canyon and area campgrounds.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Create separate Jess Judy parking area, upstream (south) of group sites, open sunrise until dusk for free day-use parking on weekends, towing enforced.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Carpools- as part of permitting process, require groups to park at sites like Industrial Park/Swilled Dog and Shadows of Seneca and carpool from there, or use shuttle services. </p></li></ol><br><ol start="4"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Work with Pendleton County and LCOs to create a green trail from Industrial Park parking to Reeds on the W side of 220, and improve trail from Shadows to Yokum’s/Gendarme.</p></li></ol><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Encourages foot traffic from camp grounds and/or shuttle usage and carpooling.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="5"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">North Fork Trail, Dolly Sods and Spruce Knob need No Parking signs, parking limits, and/or parking passes; 40 cars for a 10 car parking area is not unusual on peak weekends. This will encourage people to hike the other trails or hike in other areas and ensure equal enforcement and regulation for all user groups.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="6"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">NFS/DNR needs to get a handle on hunting and fishing traffic for consistent enforcement. Stocking truck “caravans” and dog hunting groups clogging roads and parking does not present a picture of equal enforcement or regulation.</p></li></ol><br><br><br><br><br><br><ol start="6"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Crag access, route access and descent points</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">Solutions</p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Creation of a trail on the North side of Reed’s Creek Road, to reach from the proposed new parking lot to the existing trail at the base of the crag, ensuring safe access by climbers that does not interfere with local traffic or other users.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">All crag trails clearly marked with standard blue blazes.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="7"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Anchors and bolts- standards and replacement</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">There are currently no standards for bolt materials, sizes, placement/replacement or fixed gear in the SR-SKRA</p><p dir="ltr">Solutions: </p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Clear definitions of acceptable hardware materials (stainless steel or titanium), bolt types (stud, sleeve, and glue-in), and sizes (3/8” or ½”, 10mm or 12mm)</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Anchors should be titanium or stainless steel and manufactured by commercial gear manufacturers like Petzl, Metolius or Climb Tech. </p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Bolt replacement should be carried out by active route setters and volunteers with hands-on experience, from within the LCO</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation"> Where possible, new bolts should use the same holes. Where the same holes cannot be used, relocation distance needs to be minimal. Current standard is 6-10 times the bolt diameter (3 inches for 3/8”, 5 inches for ½”). </p></li></ol><br><br><ol start="8"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">New Routes</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">Creating new routes at existing crags is an established activity in the NFS. Given the lack of overall familiarity and experience with the process on the part of the NFS, new routes should not be regulated by the NFS beyond establishing guidelines and participation in assessment to fulfil the legal requirements of the Service.</p><p dir="ltr">Solutions:</p><br><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">NEPA assessment of established crags in the Seneca Rocks-Spruce Knob Recreational Area (SRSKRA) for improved understanding of potentially-impacted natural and cultural resources by the NFS and climbing community.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Climbers wishing to learn the art of bolting and anchor installation should do so by participating in mentored bolt replacement efforts.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="3"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Bolt installation should left to experienced route setters who have worked with bolt replacement efforts or mentored under an experienced tutor.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="4"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Permadraws should be kept to a minimum and camouflaged with three layers of weather-resistant paint.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">The use of extension chains rather than swaged-cable permadraws should be discontinued.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="6"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Route setters should be responsible for creating and maintaining spur trails and belay areas required to access and safely climb their proposed route.</p></li></ol><p dir="ltr"> </p><ol start="7"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Any gear left on red-tagged routes should be removed in 72-96 hours. </p></li></ol><br><ol start="9"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">New Crags</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">There are currently no regulations or guidelines for establishing new crags in the SK-SRRA.</p><p dir="ltr">Solutions: </p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Submission of new crag/route proposals to a committee made up of one NFS staffer and two LCO members with route setting experience; one from Friends of Seneca and one from Friends of Smoke Hole.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Establishment of new crags should require NEPA assessment, as well as trail work and maintenance plan and schedule from developers, with a 4-year minimum commitment, taken on by LCO beyond that point.</p></li></ol><br><br><br><ol start="10"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Restrooms and Human Waste</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">At present the nearest bathrooms are in Ruddle Park, 5 mi. S of the Canyon, which is closed from late November until early April, Jess Judy, two miles North of Long Branch and technically off-limits when the campground is closed, usually late November until April 1st, and the rotting pit toilet just off the day use trail and parking lot at Big Bend. </p><p dir="ltr">This means that just as the prime fall seasons for climbing, fishing, and hunting begin in the canyon, all nearby bathroom facilities are closed to the public or non-functional.</p><p dir="ltr">Solutions:</p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Repair and maintain pit toilet at Big Bend Day use parking.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Establish a wag bag supply and drop off point at Long Branch/Guide Parking area. The same company that services Jess Judy and Big Bend could provide removal, and the fees could be part of BB/JJ operator’s contract.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Jess Judy toilets need to be open to the public on a year-round basis. Friends of SH will volunteer to clean and restock, as the founders have years of experience with those duties as NFS volunteers in AZ and CO.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Pit toilets need to be left in place where currently located rather than upgraded to running water systems. </p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Install pit toilets or wag bag station at Reed’s once parking is expanded.</p></li></ol><br><br><ol start="11"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Camping</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">At present, all major NFS campgrounds in the Seneca Rocks-Spruce Knob Recreational Area are operated by American Land and Leisure. AL&L campgrounds in the district close in October, the month which traditionally marks the beginning of prime climbing season, as well as the start of hunting and fish stocking season. </p><p dir="ltr">The majority of profits from those campgrounds go out of state and there is no guarantee that the revenues that remain will be used where they originate. </p><p dir="ltr">Facilities in Smoke Hole have suffered from a lack of consistent maintenance under contract with AL&L; the historic picnic area, now dismantled and abandoned, and Jess Judy campground, with minimal mowing, picnic tables rotted away too badly for use and the pit toilet windows that have had holes in them for almost a decade.</p><p dir="ltr">Solutions:</p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">NFS campgrounds, at least in Smoke Hole, need to be operated by locals and open year round.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Campground operation and cleaning could just as easily be done by a Friend of Smoke Hole host and volunteers of Friends of Seneca/Smoke Hole in lieu of fees for 4 parking passes per year for each organization. Training for volunteers required, online and paid for from general fund, along with cleaning supplies and PPE. </p></li></ol><p dir="ltr"> </p><ol start="3"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Camping fees collected during what is currently the off season, from October through April, could fund many of the improvements and added infrastructure detailed in this proposal, without the implementation of new, onerous fees.</p></li></ol><br><br><ol start="12"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Dogs</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">Dogs don’t stay on trails. Many chase wildlife, dig up areas adjacent to the trail, get into the packs and snacks of other climbers, and their barking impedes communication between climbers while it detracts from the quality of the outdoor experience.</p><br><p dir="ltr">Solutions:</p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Pets need to be on leash, maximum length 12 feet, at all times when on approach trails or at the crag.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Dogs are to be tied up on sturdy surfaces and leash length should not allow interference with trail traffic or nearby climbers. </p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Owners/group members need to be in sight/within 50 feet at all times</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Dogs that bark incessantly need to be taken away from the crag.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Dogs that dig should not be brought to the crag and need to be taken away from crag areas and trails immediately when/if they begin to dig.</p></li></ol><br><br><br><ol start="13"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Drones</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">Solutions</p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Pilots need to be registered with MNF ($50 fee per year to be paid into general fund to support purchase of trail work tools, signage, first aid supplies and PPE) </p></li></ol><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Set up on-line check-in for each crag and require check-in on the day of operation. $50 fine for first offense, $100 for 2nd, 90-day ban from operation in Cheat-Potomac and $150 fine for third. Violation of 90 ban or 4th offense: loss of drone, $200 fine, 1 year ban from operation in Cheat-Potomac, all fines to be evenly divided between NFS operating costs for regulation and trail work fund. </p></li></ol><br><ol start="3"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">NO drones within 200 feet of climbers/crag. Limit 1 drone operator per 100 routes per day.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="14"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Slacklining</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">Slacklining is not a traditional activity in any portion of this Ranger District.</p><p dir="ltr">By opening the door to this activity at Seneca, the Cheat-Potomac Ranger district invites and tacitly condones its expansion throughout the region. It would be naïve to think that practitioners would ask permission, rather than forgiveness, for such expansion.</p><p dir="ltr">Slacklining or highlining creates the probability of additional impact on climbing trails and anchors, as well as the natural resources at the crags of Smoke Hole and Reed’s Creek, and throughout the MNF. That places additional burdens on crag stewards, NF Law Enforcement, DNR and the EMS community through the region, in places where EMS receives none of the financial, tactical or logistical support they receive at Seneca Rocks. At many of these locations access and extraction would be much more difficult and involved, with resources already strained and personnel at increased risk due to COVID-19.</p><p dir="ltr">There is no road or even a working trail to the far side of the South Branch, no phone service in the lower Canyon, no stash of EMS gear, no helipad or rescue squad closer than 7 miles away in Upper Tract, and that facility is a volunteer-only squad that has a hard time getting EMTs to respond to simple calls for falls and other typical injuries and health complaints. Search and Rescue is in fact carried out by the Franklin and Petersburg VFD/VRS, entailing even more of a wait for help.</p><p dir="ltr">Consider the complications of an accident on the cliffs of North Fork Mountain; limited, sporadic and undependable phone service and no paved or even gravel road for access to anything but a tiny portion of the cliff. Approach via the steep, uneven access trails at Landis, Redman and the North End would require 2-3 miles of carrying a Stokes litter and other gear up and back down for extraction. Coming from 33 could require as much as 6 miles of approach, and there is little or no established access to the W side of the 40-100 foot cliffs lining the west side of the summit, where such accidents would likely happen.</p><p dir="ltr">Some thought must also be given to the peregrine falcon population of those cliffs and the impact of slacklining and climbing activity there. </p><p dir="ltr">Solutions</p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Two-year FS Superintendent’s Special order, akin to the prohibition of camping within the defined corridor along the South Branch between 220 and Big Bend, needs to be applied to slacklining outside of Seneca. </p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Create a two-year study by climbing, slacklining, EMS and NFS to identify safe sites with minimal environmental and resource impact where slacklining can be developed. </p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Look at ways existing opportunities can be improved to create a portal for sustainable slacklining activities in the future.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation"> Prohibition on use of climbing anchors for slacklines; climbing anchors can be damaged and compromised by the direction and force of slackline loading.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Coordination with NFS and LCOs regarding new trails for slackline access</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Permit for slacklining activities, as they are not an established practice in the NFS</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">No slacklines over any type of roads or across creeks and rivers.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">No slacklines where there is no road for access by EMS.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Require LCO review and approval of new slackline anchors, to conform to standards for climbing anchors.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Require slacklining groups to inform NFS and utilize all possible avenues for informing climbing community of planned activity.</p></li></ol><ol start="15"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">Dry Tooling</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">Dry tooling is the practice of using ice tools and/or crampons to ascend rock climbing routes in order to train for ice climbing. This practice has exponentially more impact on climbing routes than normal climbing.</p><p dir="ltr">Solution:</p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Dry tooling practitioners need to avoid popular crags and peak climbing times, creating areas specifically for this practice, preferably where there is potential for ice formation. </p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Steps 2 and 3 in the section on Slacklining, above, can be used to explore and expand opportunities for sustainable dry tooling within the Canyon area.</p></li></ol><ol start="16"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">CMP review and revision</h2></li></ol><p dir="ltr">NFS should hold an annual meeting, in person or in virtual format, to allow review of how well the CMP is working, issues not addressed by the CMP, and suggested editing or removal of CMP guidelines. </p><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Public notification through social media, climbing club and organization newsletters and NFS web pages should precede the review by 30 days.</p></li></ol><p dir="ltr"> </p><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Email submissions should be a part of this process and accepted for 30 days prior to the date of the review.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="3"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">These meetings should be held not less than 12 and no more than 16 months apart.</p></li></ol><br><h1 dir="ltr">Action Items</h1><ol start="3"><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">years</h2></li></ol><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Create a Climber’s Covenant, agreeing on bolt standards, stewardship, areas to be preserved from bolting (Peregrine habitat on North Fork Mountain, hibernaculum on Cave Mountain, Sanctuary, the South side of Reed’s Creek), as well as off-limit preserves for conservation.</p></li></ol><br><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="3" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Create a separate Reed’s Creek parking area for climbers, behind the screen of trees at the back of the existing roadside pullout, entered from Reed’s Creek Road. Funding could come from Smoke Hole area campgrounds of run by local volunteers in cooperation with the NFS, as well as Mon Forest Town program grants, Friends of Smoke Hole fundraisers, AAC grants, and Pendleton County.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="3"><li aria-level="3" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Install composting or pit toilets at Reed’s and a composting toilet at the top of Seneca Visitors Trail, accessible from the Yokum’s Horse Trail.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="4"><li aria-level="3" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Explore pros and cons of wag bag distribution processing requirements and expenses at Seneca, Reed’s and Long Branch/Guide Walls.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="5"><li aria-level="3" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Create a well-marked trail along the north side of Reed’s Creek Road to allow climbers to access the crag from parking without walking along the road.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="6"><li aria-level="3" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Mark all canyon area crag trails with blue paint diamonds.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="7"><li aria-level="3" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Install a kiosk with more complete historical and geological signage at the ends of Smoke Hole Road (Upper Tract/220 and Cabins/28), including NFS regulations and a basic map of the canyon with campground and crag locations.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="8"><li aria-level="3" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Review and amend the current onerous requirements for shuttle services operating in the Monongahela NF/SR-SKRA in order to create opportunities for local entrepreneurs to reduce traffic and parking congestion and greenhouse gasses.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="9"><li aria-level="3" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Committee of NFS, LCOs, Steel city Slackliners to explore possibilities for sustainable slackline opportunities in the SR-SKRA.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="10"><li aria-level="3" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Committee of NFS, LCOs, SUOC/AAC to explore potential for sustainable dry tooling/ice climbing in the SK-SRRA.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="5"><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">years </h2></li></ol><br><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Install identifying signage at the end of crag access trails, and wall identification signage at trail intersections.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Replace all substandard bolts and anchors.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="3"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Create an agreement with Pendleton County and Swilled Dog to use parking at the Industrial Park, located just south of Reed’s on Route 220, for carpool and shuttle parking. This would boost business at Swilled Dog and reduce traffic and parking congestion at the crag.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="4"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Create/improve the old road/trail from Shadows of Seneca tent camping down to the Gendarme, Harper’s and Yokum’s.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="5"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Transition Canyon and Seneca Campgrounds to local operation by NFS and/or local concessionaire.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="6"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Restore the South Branch/Picnic Pavilion Loop with improved signage regarding history, conservation and nature.</p></li></ol><br><br><br><br><br><h2 dir="ltr">5-7 years</h2><br><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Open Jess Judy for Year-round camping.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Expand Jess Judy to allow area between dumpster pad and South Branch for day use by fishing enthusiasts, hunters and climbers.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="3"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Expand Jess Judy camping into the meadow South of existing Site C for walk-in only.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="4"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Create trail from Picnic Pavilion Loop to Cave Mountain, improve FR 802 to increase shareholder and EMS access from Cave Mountain Road. (NEPA RE:bats)</p></li></ol><br><ol start="10"><li aria-level="2" dir="ltr"><h2 dir="ltr" role="presentation">years</h2></li></ol><br><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Restore Smoke Hole Canyon Picnic Pavilion </p></li></ol><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">The reopening of this historically important facility would greatly benefit all canyon visitors and begin to restore the reputation of the NFS in a community where support for the Forest Service is sorely lacking.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Restoration through combined NFS and volunteer action would also be a great place to begin a positive interaction between local residents, NFS and LCOs. It would provide a place for local families to gather for reunions, birthdays, weddings and memorial services. Being central to the canyon, the SHCPP is a convenient location for socially-distanced gatherings for climbing, hiking, and other recreation groups. </p></li></ol><br><ol start="3"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">It would also provide toilet amenities to help mitigate human waste and littering issues in the Canyon, and could be maintained through a combination of concessionaire and volunteer efforts.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="4"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">The Concessionaire operating Big Bend would, as part of their contract, provide seasonal staff support and dedicate a portion of revenues generated at Big Bend and Jess Judy campgrounds to maintain the facility during their season, with Friends of Smoke Hole taking over in the off season to clean restrooms and dispose of trash.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="5"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">In the event that the NFS/Monongahela National Forest elect to operate SKSRRA area facilities without concessionaires, the Friends of Smoke Hole will volunteer to help support the Service in all aspects of that effort.</p></li><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Use of the Picnic pavilion and grounds should remain free for all shareholders. </p></li></ol><br><ol start="2"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Negotiate with landowners for 10 foot wide access corridor atop Reed’s and Guide Walls for hardware inspection and rescue.</p></li></ol><ol><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Corridor and private property boundaries to be clearly marked</p></li></ol><br><ol start="3"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Complete South Branch Trail from the Picnic Pavilion to Jess Judy for foot travel and MTB, with signage for cultural, historical and natural resources.</p></li></ol><br><ol start="4"><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Create a committee with NFS, DNR, LCOs, EMS, local merchants, County commissions, Chambers of Commerce and Tourist Boards, LEOs, AAC and AF to explore and set out guidelines and regulations for the first regional Craggin’ Classic or other national level event.</p></li></ol><br><h1 dir="ltr">Acknowledgements</h1><br><p dir="ltr">I first began working on the concept in 1995 when, after 5 years of overtime and side jobs in construction, I took 6 months off to explore America. </p><p dir="ltr"> </p><p dir="ltr">Climbing in Yosemite, The Sierra, Owens River Gorge, King's Canyon, Red Rocks Canyon, Joshua Tree, and RMNP, I shared ideas with and listened to literally hundreds of climbers. I filled an entire notebook with those ideas.</p><p dir="ltr"> </p><p dir="ltr">In 1996 I moved to Phoenix and was deeply involved in climbing access and development there, including discussions with Access Fund and Sierra Club admins and members about trails, bolting and climbing management/regulation in the Superstitions, Queen Creek, Jack's Canyon, the Cobra Grande Mountains, the Kachina Peaks, Mt. Eldon, Paradise Forks and Devil's Canyon. </p><p dir="ltr"> </p><p dir="ltr">I began laying out a CMP in 1998.</p><p dir="ltr"> </p><p dir="ltr">Another notebook.</p><p dir="ltr"> </p><p dir="ltr">This is the culmination of that effort, and all that input, tailored to this specific region.</p><p dir="ltr"> </p><p dir="ltr">Tyrel Johnson, Army Corps of Engineers consultant Brian Dziekonski, MTB trail rider and builder Brian Brydges, R Neil Arsenault, former Lyndon State College Outdoor Education Director Jamie Struck, retired DNR officer Gregg Willenborg and my wife Cindy all had a hand in the creation of the final product; research of dozens of other CMPs and articles about their successes and failures, proofreading, suggesting edits, emails, chats, callbacks and rereads.</p><p dir="ltr"> </p><p dir="ltr">Then there were the 93 local folks and visitors who took our Survey.</p><p dir="ltr"> </p><p dir="ltr">Credit must also go to Eddie and Tracy Begoon, Mike Artz, George Powell, Darrell Hensley, Tony Barnes, Heather Jiles, Mike Fisher, Kathryn Murphy, Nancy Stoner, Travis Wilson, Dan Rodriguez, Jane Bull, Steve Emswiler, Connor Pace, Michal Stewart, Michael Greene, Suzanne Shaeffer, Pat Frank, Bob DuBois, Ryan Lee Eubank, Ryan Coppage, Ben VanderStouw, Tim Bova, Evan Genay, John Riedel, Evie Brooks, James Mazzaferro, Tom Reid, Seth Myers, James Mash, Mark Winbourne, Dena Zavier, longtime Canyon climber Danny Rowand, local librarian Rebecca McConnell, and MNF staff members Julie Fosbender and Gray Buckles. </p><p dir="ltr"> </p><p dir="ltr">Every one of those folks shared their knowledge and perspectives on climbing, impact, the Canyon region, its issues and what they saw as solutions. </p><p dir="ltr"> </p><p dir="ltr">Everything I've written was shaped and informed by those conversations, my experiences and our survey responses.</p><p dir="ltr"> </p><p dir="ltr">My deepest thanks to each and every person who has helped with the effort.</p><br><h1 dir="ltr">Appendix I. Glossary</h1><br><p dir="ltr">Aid climbing: Aid climbing is the direct use of climbing equipment (pitons, wired nuts, “camming” devices) for upward progress. The challenge of aid climbing is to ascend very smooth faces with minimal tools. Aid climbing can also be a method to access these faces for installation of bolts for protection where no traditional gear can be placed. Although this type of climbing is particularly associated with “big-wall” areas such as Yosemite and Zion national parks, famous climbing areas where traditional climbing techniques (both aid and free) are utilized to ascend long routes on sheer rock walls, it can in fact be practiced anywhere there is vertical rock. </p><p dir="ltr">“Clean” aid climbing entails the use of hand-placed protection only, instead of using pitons or other types of protection that require being drilled or hammered into the rock.</p><br><p dir="ltr">Traditional climbing: Traditional climbing or “trad” is climbing protected by a variety of removable gear placed in cracks and pockets in the rock. Trad climb lengths can vary from a single rope length (“pitch”) to thousands of feet. Many trad climbs end at a summit, ledge, or other natural break in the face being ascended. The end of a climb may offer bolted anchors, like a sport climb, natural features like trees, boulders or outcrops, or require the climber to walk off rather than lowering or rappelling.</p><p dir="ltr">Traditional climbing has been practiced in the Cheat-Potomac Ranger District since shortly after World War Two.</p><br><p dir="ltr">Sport or bolted climbing: Climbs that are protected exclusively with bolts are called sport climbs. Sport climbs are generally a single rope-length (50 to 60 meters) or less. They rarely continue to summits but instead end at fixed anchors at the top of the cliff. Lines may also end where the sustained difficulty of the climb diminishes, the character of the rock changes, or simply at the half-rope point to allow the climber to descend by being lowered. </p><p dir="ltr">Sport climbing is pretty easy to learn, and requires far less commitment and equipment than traditional climbing. Due to the fixed bolted protection and limited height, it often provides a safer climbing environment than that found in a traditional climbing venue. Sport climbing has also allowed climbers to push the limits of athletic ability with little fear from repeated falls. </p><p dir="ltr">This accessibility with minimal expense or commitment, increased promotion by climbing advocates and their partner gear companies and a vastly expanded number of platforms for climbing-oriented media, all these factors have made sport climbing very popular with a huge number of relative newcomers to the outdoors in a very short amount of time, greatly increasing impact at climbing areas.</p><p dir="ltr">Like many crags in the U.S., bolted/sport climbing came to the region in the late 70s and early 80s.</p><p dir="ltr">Permadraws: usually a piece of stainless steel cable or links of steel chain, attached to a protection bolt and hanger at one end and equipped with a steel carabiner at the other, to eliminate the need for placing a piece of gear at that location. Often used where steepness of a route makes carrying and placing gear prohibitive to success on the clean ascent, or where abrasion can threaten the integrity of a nylon runner or aluminum carabiner. </p><br><p dir="ltr">Top roping: Top roping is (as the name suggests) the practice of establishing or clipping into an anchor at the top of a cliff or face and climbing that section of rock without placing gear or clipping bolts. It allows the climber to focus strictly on mastering the moves rather than dealing with the technical aspects of protecting the climb while mastering its challenges. </p><p dir="ltr">Climbers following a leader up a cliff are top roping, in a sense, although they often need to unclip from bolts or remove gear if they are the second person to climb following the leader. Subsequent ascents on the same rope and anchor are possible, and these would be considered purely “top roping”. This practice allows for numerous ascents of the same line by less experienced climbers and without the delay or technical know-how required to lead that route.</p><br><p dir="ltr">Bouldering: Bouldering is ropeless climbing that concentrates on difficult sequences of moves on short faces or boulders (hence the name) rather than completing long lines up entire cliff faces. Traditionally, falls were very short (a few feet) and inconsequential, but “highballs” involve ascending much taller faces where falls are potentially as long as 20-30 feet. “Spotters” usually friends and partners, wait during the ascent top help catch or redirect possible falls away from hazards and prevent head and neck injuries, while professionally manufactured foam pads, “crash pads’, soak up much of the impact to feet, ankles, knees, hips and back from any fall.</p><p dir="ltr">Boulder problems vary in difficulty, like routes requiring ropes and gear, and have a grading system all their own, from V1 (5.10+) to V15 and above. </p><p dir="ltr">Dry tooling: Dry tooling is the practice of using ice tools and/or crampons to ascend rock climbing routes in order to train for ice climbing. This practice has exponentially more impact on climbing routes than normal climbing.</p><br><p dir="ltr">Slacklining: Essentially tightrope walking using specialized tensioning devices and flat webbing stretched between two trees or geological features. Slackline practitioners typically wear a harness and lanyard to protect them from falling when cross ing a line far enough from the ground for a potentially fatal fall.</p><br><h1 dir="ltr">Appendix II: Yosemite Decimal System: </h1><p dir="ltr">The YDS is a system of grading route difficulty.</p><p dir="ltr">Movement is broken down into 5 major categories:</p><p dir="ltr">Class 1: walking a flat, established trail.</p><p dir="ltr">Class 2: hiking a steep incline, possibly requiring scrambling and using your hands</p><p dir="ltr">Class 3: climbing a steep hillside or ridge, requiring the occasional use of hands for balance or upward movement, with potential for a fall. </p><p dir="ltr">Class 4: Scrambling in exposed terrain where a rope may be the only means of preventing a serious fall</p><p dir="ltr">Class 5: Requires technical knowledge and climbing, use of a rope and protection, for avoiding potentially fatal falls.</p><p dir="ltr">Class 5 is, at present, subdivided into 15 grades of difficulty</p><p dir="ltr">5.1-5.4: Easy; a near vertical to vertical section or face with plenty of large hand and footholds that can be used by a complete novice with no technical skills</p><p dir="ltr">5.5-5.8: Moderate; available holds are smaller, experience and some technical movement may be required</p><p dir="ltr">5.9-5.10: Hard; steep, sometimes overhanging terrain with small holds that must be used in a limited number of ways, requiring not only technical skills but a certain level of fitness.</p><p dir="ltr">5.11-5.12: Difficult; small holds on vertical to overhanging faces requiring technical skills, experience and a level of fitness above that of intermediate climbers and weekend warriors</p><p dir="ltr">5.13-5.15: Expert; small holds that must often be used in a specific, unbroken sequence to ascend a vertical to overhanging face, requiring extreme technical skills, experience and fitness. For all intents and purposes, this is Olympic-level climbing.</p><p dir="ltr">Class 6: routes which require direct aid to ascend, rather than simply using hand and foot holds. See Aid Climbing<br></p><h1 dir="ltr">Appendix III: Bouldering Grades<br></h1><p dir="ltr">VB: 5.1-5.8</p><p dir="ltr">V0: 5.9</p><p dir="ltr">V1: 5.10+</p><p dir="ltr">V2: 5.11-</p><p dir="ltr">V3: 5.11+</p><p dir="ltr">V4: 5.12-</p><p dir="ltr">V5: 5.12</p><p dir="ltr">V6: 5.12+</p><p dir="ltr">V7: 5.13-</p><p dir="ltr">V8: 5.13</p><p dir="ltr">V9: 5.13+</p><p dir="ltr">V10: 5.14-</p><p dir="ltr">V11: 5.14</p><p dir="ltr">V12: 5.14+</p><p dir="ltr">V13: 5.15-</p><p dir="ltr">V14: 5.15</p><p dir="ltr">V15: 5.15+<br></p><br><br><br><br><br></div></div>Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-76107635965418252322022-02-27T07:08:00.001-08:002022-02-27T09:17:31.470-08:00No Time Like The Present<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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</div><br></div><div><br></div>While I understand that we are all somewhat overwhelmed by current world events, there's still no time like the present to plan for the future.<div><br></div><div>With that in mind, I offer the following:<br><div><br></div><div>Over the last four or five years, there's been some discussion in the MD/DC/VA climbing community focused on organizing a smaller version of the New River Rendezvous/AAC Craggin' Classic at Reed Creek; bringing together gyms, regional chapters, affiliates and outing clubs in the same way that advocates, affiliates and regional climbing groups will come together at NRG again this year. <div><br></div><div>An event like this would be a major economic boost for Franklin and Pendleton County, an opportunity for regional climbing groups and organizations which have traditionally focused on Seneca Rocks to participate in stewardship in the Canyon, and a great way to introduce a new generation of climbers to even more of the incredible recreational potential of the area.</div><div><br></div><div>Obviously, a lot of practical and logistical background work will need to happen before even a small-scale climbing event. and that's where the Friends of Smoke Hole sees many opportunities for the entire community, climbers and residents alike.</div><div><br></div><div>The Monongahela National Forest will also have to sign off on any such activity, and this would be an opportunity for them to bring the entire community of shareholders up to date on the long-overdue Climbing Management Plan and workshops, the NFS personnel and other organizations involved, and their future plans for public input and involvement.</div><div><br></div><div>Combining the knowledge and resources of the Monongahela National Forest, Pendleton County Commission, the Town of Franklin, the Friends of Smoke Hole, the Friends of Seneca, the DC and Richmond Chapters of the AAC, and the Access Fund's Conservation Team and local affiliates, the community can move forward with planning and preparation; strengthening trails and belay areas, working with local authorities to create a plan, obtain permits and promote the event as part of the Mon Forest Towns Initiative and to explore access to nearby parking at the industrial park, coordinating with local law and EMS for traffic and crowd control and climber safety, rescue and first aid considerations.</div><div><br></div><div>As climbers, stewards of the land and residents of Pendleton County, we believe that the goal should not simply be to create an event, but to see that the entire community has an opportunity to join in, creating new connections in the area, encouraging conversations between climbers and residents; increasing opportunities for local youth to experience climbing, for residents to better understand climbing and the diverse community of climbers, for visiting climbers to better understand the diverse local community, and for local entrepreneurs and small area businesses to become invested in long term benefits from the recreation economy, creating a synergy ensuring the sustainability of our recreational resources and the culture around them.</div><div><br></div><div>To keep events as positive and conflict free as possible, I will not be directly involved in organizing or administration, beyond answering any questions and sharing any tools, knowledge or insight I can to assist the effort. If I am there, it will be as a volunteer, local climber and excited spectator.</div><div><br></div><div>I've asked one of Rakkup's publishers, Rob Price, who is also President of the Access Fund's Board of Directors, to explore grants and Conservation Team support and reach out to the NFS and various affiliates. I wouldn't be surprised to see Tyrel Johnson or my wife Cindy in attendance, representing Friends of Smoke Hole. Friends of SH will also promote the event and reach out to volunteers from our trail and clean up days.</div><div><br></div><div>I'm inviting you to consider joining any effort the AAC DC, PATC-MS, MAC, DC Outing Club, Shenandoah Valley, Richmond or Charlottesville climbers might organize, and to encourage any of those groups to which you belong to do so if they have not.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Thanks for your time.</div><div><br></div><div>Climb on,</div><div><br></div><div>Mike Gray</div><div><br></div></div></div>Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-73497660696532376662022-02-05T07:08:00.001-08:002022-02-05T07:08:37.430-08:00Do Not Go Gentle<div>Do not go gentle into that good night,</div><div>Old age should burn and rave at close of day;</div><div>Rage, rage against the dying of the light.</div><div><br></div><div>Though wise men at their end know dark is right,</div><div>Because their words had forked no lightning they</div><div>Do not go gentle into that good night.</div><div><br></div><div>Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright</div><div>Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,</div><div>Rage, rage against the dying of the light.</div><div><br></div><div>Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,</div><div>And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,</div><div>Do not go gentle into that good night.</div><div><br></div><div>Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight</div><div>Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,</div><div>Rage, rage against the dying of the light.</div><div><br></div><div>And you, my father, there on the sad height,</div><div>Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.</div><div>Do not go gentle into that good night.</div><div>Rage, rage against the dying of the light.</div><div><br></div><div>-Dylan Thomas</div>Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-90284813993316728492021-11-24T10:46:00.003-08:002021-11-24T11:40:40.189-08:00Invisible Warriors<p> <a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-MW1QdyV-Nvo/Xd6i29n6T3I/AAAAAAAAM_w/KvwAK5VsakYUfQoWsJk5Qj7uH-m5PBi5QCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1574871765972770-0.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-MW1QdyV-Nvo/Xd6i29n6T3I/AAAAAAAAM_w/KvwAK5VsakYUfQoWsJk5Qj7uH-m5PBi5QCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/1574871765972770-0.png" width="640"></a></p><div><br></div><div>That radiant smile on my shoulder belongs to Cindy Gray, my partner, my wife, and the best friend I've ever had. </div><div><br></div><div>She's also disabled.</div><div><br></div><div>People who see Cindy smiling and laughing in pictures, out at the crag or on the trail, often say, "Wow! She looks great for someone with MS."</div><div><br></div><div>What they too often mean is, "How can she have a disability?" </div><div><br></div><div>They don't see the incision scars from reconstructive surgeries to her lumbar vertebrae, the silver dollar sized lesion on her brain stem or the three dime-sized ones scattered over her brain.</div><div><br></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-4MfSwLki_Zw/YTFZLKIpy2I/AAAAAAAAZHo/up2RiuIfdO0AbZt80CQFe9wz2xaN9UsbgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1630624040166395-0.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-4MfSwLki_Zw/YTFZLKIpy2I/AAAAAAAAZHo/up2RiuIfdO0AbZt80CQFe9wz2xaN9UsbgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1630624040166395-0.png" width="400"></a></div><i>Cindy takes a break atop the Gypsy Dome, Elevenmile Canyon, CO</i></div><div><br></div><div>They don't have any concept of the determination it took for her to regain use of one side of her body following a stroke in 2001, and have no clue about the titanium stents inside her skull from a massive aneurysm that nearly claimed her life in 2016.</div><div><br></div><div>Few of us can even imagine the incredible effort it takes for her to walk on a repaired patella and meniscus while coping with a sense of balance that can feel like she's on the deck of a ship in a storm.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Few comprehend the hours and days of pain; when Cindy hurts so bad that this former athlete and firefighter weeps in agony and frustration.</div><div><br></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ls73q1eSBnQ/Xd6i1YFNIVI/AAAAAAAAM_s/mxVahYxqM6s46LpJ5XnltHh3xgEtyUKvgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1574871760644466-1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5YeLV1v8FPY/Xd6iz9393rI/AAAAAAAAM_o/UGHqfut_Ly8CEYhYjXWZBSNCvagBVxgmQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1574871754842584-2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5YeLV1v8FPY/Xd6iz9393rI/AAAAAAAAM_o/UGHqfut_Ly8CEYhYjXWZBSNCvagBVxgmQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1574871754842584-2.png" width="400"></a></div><br></div><div><br></div><div>They don't see that every hike or climb requires two or three days of recovery, or know about the days that we set out for an adventure, but an unpredictable flare-up of Multiple Sclerosis ends everything before we set foot on the trail.</div><div><br></div><div>Not every disease or disability waves a red flag; not every sick or disabled person behaves in a way that announces their condition.</div><div><br></div><div>Ironically, many who campaign for diversity, inclusion and awareness treat those battling MS and other chronic but invisible diseases with a lack of sensitivity and awareness that manifests as impatience and borders on downright rudeness.</div><div><br></div><div>Too often, I've turned around on a steep, narrow crag trail that Cindy helped to build, to find a party of climbers who've never done a minute of trail work crowding her heels and mumbling, not quite under their breath, about this person impeding their blind rush to pose for selfies on a route Cindy helped to bring into existence.</div><div><br></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-NNnM15ZB0OU/Xd6iyekGtOI/AAAAAAAAM_k/tT-hnGN8O2Ew3PvJZiRVaMcRP7EqpjjmwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1574871747643392-3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-NNnM15ZB0OU/Xd6iyekGtOI/AAAAAAAAM_k/tT-hnGN8O2Ew3PvJZiRVaMcRP7EqpjjmwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1574871747643392-3.png" width="400"></a></div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Take a minute to understand that, as well as those with obvious disabilities, this world is filled with people who don't LOOK sick but who overcome more challenges getting to the trail or crag than most of us will ever know in a lifetime.</div><div><br></div><div>Take another to repair the trails you walk, to replace dislodged steps and stones in the trail, even if you didn't create the damage. </div><div><br></div><div>Make a conscious effort to keep walkways clear of ropes, packs, dogs and hammocks. What you consider a minor inconvenience is a major obstacle to those with mobility issues from neurological diseases or reconstructive surgery.</div><div><br></div><div>Remember that "those people" never asked for their lot in life; many were once as healthy as you.</div><div><br></div><div>The kindness you show today may someday be the kindness you need from others.</div><div><br></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--9NlbD7dkhY/Xd6iwFx-TBI/AAAAAAAAM_g/JrKuev4_WHchNA6jzg_RKOupGZajb6InwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1574871738436399-4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--9NlbD7dkhY/Xd6iwFx-TBI/AAAAAAAAM_g/JrKuev4_WHchNA6jzg_RKOupGZajb6InwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1574871738436399-4.png" width="400"></a></div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Edit to illustrate the capricious nature of her disability: since this original post on Facebook, Cindy suffered a compressed L3-4 disc when the prosthesis in her back broke loose from her spine and hip while walking across the kitchen floor. </div><div><br></div><div>No warning, out of the blue after three days of casual hiking and climbing a new trad line in the Canyon.</div><div><br></div><div>She spent months walking with a cane and living with extreme pain, awaiting surgical scheduling. </div><div><br></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="2448" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NpFIHEF-h0E/YZ6Eh8xbYNI/AAAAAAAAbSE/mtnJFdcXbpQQcpQNXp-VWv5Dw_QVLifuwCPcBGAsYHg/s320/20191201_135400.jpg" width="240"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div>In February of 2020, the old support screws and plates were removed and new hardware installed to fuse the lower 15 inches of her spine.</div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="2560" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Pry12VA66Vs/YZ6Ehw1UyvI/AAAAAAAAbSE/j_zTktguSvkCWLF3dD9gLgQEtrGEyjCnQCPcBGAsYHg/s320/20200215_085828.jpg" width="320"></div><div><br></div><div>In March COVID-19 shut down WV and much of the world.</div><div><br></div><div>After 14 months of rehab, Cindy began hiking and climbing again in April of 2021, and was once again slaying trout with the best of them.</div><div><br></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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</div><br></div><div><br></div><div>On Friday, the 13th of August, after a wonderful day in the Canyon and evening of good food and conversation, out of the blue, Cindy woke at midnight to dizziness and nausea. After 7 hours of fighting the inevitable, we drove to Virginia, where she was admitted to the hospital for two days.</div><div><br></div><div>A week later, we celebrated our slightly delayed 10th anniversary with a 2.5 mile hike up a steep ridge and back down along the creek below, then prepared and enjoyed dinner in a perfectly preserved CCC cabin.</div><div><br></div><div>In September, Cindy began a new treatment for MS, and was excited by an immediate improvement in her energy levels and greatly reduced symptoms of the disease.</div><div><br></div><div>On Monday, November 8, eleven months after her first hospitalization, doctors determined that she has Ménière's disease, effectively bringing to an end her ability to participate in climbing, hiking, or trail work.</div><div><br></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SXcbtJIQdlw/YZgdgCkscaI/AAAAAAAAbNA/wnhIcX6bYz8ymrFsKIjBxQ3pPVOKeKEpwCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/image.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SXcbtJIQdlw/YZgdgCkscaI/AAAAAAAAbNA/wnhIcX6bYz8ymrFsKIjBxQ3pPVOKeKEpwCPcBGAYYCw/w480-h640/image.png" width="480"></a></div><br><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The end of an era in Smoke Hole climbing and stewardship</i></div><div><br></div><div>Despite it all, Cindy refuses to surrender to despair or simply succumb to any affliction; between her weekend days at the Franklin town library, she's still leaf peeping on the North Fork, picking up trash along Canyon roads, chasing trout in the South Branch and watching for her big feathered friends.</div><div><br></div><div>Life goes on.</div><div><br></div><div>Remember that there is far more in Heaven and Earth than your rush to the crags or convenient sympathy for the obviously disabled and challenged.</div><div><br></div><div>Invisible warriors walk among you, many of them the very reason for the places in which you live and play.</div><div><br></div><div>Open yourself to the lessons and inspiration they offer, the history they would share, if not for blind eyes and deaf ears.</div><div><br></div><div>Thank you, Miss Pinkpants, for a decade spent cleaning up over half a ton of trash on Canyon area roads, of sponsoring, organizing and participating in over a dozen trail work events, feeding hundreds of hungry volunteers, putting up new lines, helping to rebolt old ones, and sharing your wisdom and experience with a new generation of young climbers.</div><div><br></div><div>It's no exaggeration to say that the last decade has been a milestone in the history of women, disabled climbers, and climbing in the USA, as well as a grand adventure of mishaps, lessons, magic and discovery that changed life forever for this Southern boy.</div><div><br></div><div>Thank you, my love.</div><div><br></div><div>MG</div><div><h1 style="text-align: center;">Cindy and Mike Gray: New Routes and FAs </h1><h1 style="text-align: center;">2009-2019</h1><h3 style="text-align: left;">West Virginia: Franklin Gorge, Smoke Hole, Reed’s Creek and Germany Valley </h3><div>1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In Your Footsteps 2/28/08</div><div>2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Going on a Bender 8/24/08</div><div>3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Little Eagle 10/16/08</div><div>4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fledgling 10/16/08</div><div>5.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Really Bad Eggs 10/17/08</div><div>6.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Last Laugh 12/08</div><div>7.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Feels Like the First Time 2/12/09</div><div>8.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Like a Wirgin, Captain 2/12/09</div><div>9.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Teeth of the Dragon 4/12/09</div><div>10.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Orange Dihedral 08/09/09</div><div>11.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Internal Dialogue 09/27/09</div><div>12.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Thieves in the Temple 10/19/09</div><div>13.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Second Rule 12/14/09 MF/CB </div><div>14.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>SuperNatural 12/30/09</div><div>15.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Winterharvest 01/18/10 </div><div>16.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Flying Below Radar 04/01/10 </div><div>17.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Hootenanny 05/05/10</div><div>18.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Mixed Blessings 06/22/10</div><div>19.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Gypsies </div><div>20.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>River Song</div><div>21.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Horse With No Name </div><div>22.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A Walk in the Park </div><div>23.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Blessed River</div><div>24.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Infamous</div><div>25.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Raindancer 08/18/10</div><div>26.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Bridgeburners 11/14/10</div><div>27.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Chasing Ghosts 12/24/10</div><div>28.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>My Silver Lining </div><div>29.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Castles Made of Sand 07/10/13</div><div>30.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Nightshade 07/12/13</div><div>31.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Ghosts of Christmas 12/25/13</div><div>32.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Little Khumbu 06/23/14 </div><div>33.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Jack in the Pulpit 07/05/14</div><div>34.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Synergy MG/CG/JP 01/17/17</div><div>35.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Pink Kung Fu 02/04/17</div><div>36.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>West End Girl 02/02/17</div><div>37.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Windwalker 03/08/17</div><div>38.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Ecstasy Loves Company 06/09/17</div><div>39.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Pernicious Twits 07/08/17</div><div>40.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Nick of Time 08/25/17 w/BB</div><div>41.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Colors of the Fall 09/28/17</div><div>42.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>MPP 11/15/17</div><div>43.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fire on the Mountain 11/22/17</div><div>44.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Smoke Eater 11/30/17</div><div>45.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>New Kid on the Block 12/13/17</div><div>46.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Let It Be 10/14/18</div><div>47.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Afterglow 12/18/18</div><div>48.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Take It To the Limit 01/01/19</div><div>49.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Not Very Sporting 03/25/19</div><div>50.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Running Against the Clock (est. w/MH) 04/26/21</div><div> </div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Arizona: Northern Ga’an Canyon </h3><div>51.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Pink Cadillac 03/18/12</div><div>52.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Three-toned Gs 03/19/12</div><div>53.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fisher King 10/4-5/12</div><div>54.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Working Class 12/08/12</div><div>55.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Gypsy Conditions 12/25/12</div><div>56.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Resolution 02/04/13</div><div>57.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Stoneblind 02/04/13</div><div>58.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Troll’s Shoulder 02/04/13</div><div>59.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Trolls Under the Bridge 02/04/13</div><div><br></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Colorado: Elevenmile Canyon</h3><div>60.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Gypsy Road 08/28/15</div><div>61.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Tenuous 08/29/15</div><div>62.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Owl, My Calves Are Burning 08/30/15 </div><div>63.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Gypsy Rain 09/06/16</div><div>64.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Calle Esposa 09/16/16 </div><div>65.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Li’l Sumpin’ Sumpin’ 09/25/16</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><div><br></div><div><br></div>Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-70313021987712720162021-11-19T06:02:00.001-08:002021-11-19T06:02:24.265-08:00High Hopes<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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</div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Beyond the horizon of the place we lived when we were young</div><div><br></div><div>In a world of magnets and miracles</div><div><br></div><div>Our thoughts strayed constantly and without boundary</div><div><br></div><div>The ringing of the division bell had begun</div><div><br></div><div>Along the Long Road and on down the Causeway</div><div><br></div><div>Do they still meet there by the Cut?</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>There was a ragged band that followed in our footsteps</div><div><br></div><div>Running before times took our dreams away</div><div><br></div><div>Leaving the myriad small creatures trying to tie us to the ground</div><div><br></div><div>To a life consumed by slow decay</div><div><br></div><div>The grass was greener</div><div>The light was brighter</div><div>When friends surrounded</div><div>The nights of wonder</div><div><br></div><div>Looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us</div><div><br></div><div>To a glimpse of how green it was on the other side</div><div><br></div><div>Steps taken forwards but sleepwalking back again</div><div><br></div><div>Dragged by the force of some inner tide</div><div><br></div><div>At a higher altitude with flag unfurled</div><div><br></div><div>We reached the dizzy heights of that dreamed of world</div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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</div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Encumbered forever by desire and ambition</div><div><br></div><div>There's a hunger still unsatisfied</div><div><br></div><div>Our weary eyes still stray to the horizon</div><div><br></div><div>Though down this road we've been so many times</div><div><br></div><div>The grass was greener</div><div>The light was brighter</div><div>The taste was sweeter</div><div>The nights of wonder</div><div><br></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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</div></div><div><br></div><div>With friends surrounded</div><div>The dawn mist glowing</div><div>The water flowing</div><div>The endless river</div><div><br></div><div>Forever and ever</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Source: LyricFind</div><div>Songwriters: David Jon Gilmour / Polly Anne Samson</div>Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-8728884893496802182021-10-14T07:28:00.001-07:002021-10-16T05:53:14.253-07:00She... is amazing, artistic, astounding, audacious, beautiful, brilliant, calm, captivating, caring, caustic, classy, comical, creative, curious, delightful, determined, direct, effervescent, earthy, faithful, fashionable, fierce, feminine, funny, gentle, generous, gracious, gutsy, helpful, humble, hilarious, indestructible, inspiring, inquisitive, insightful, imaginative, inventive, jealous (just a bit), kind, laconic, loving, misunderstood, maternal, maddening, moody, musical, naive, natural, no-nonsense, old school, original, outgoing, perceptive, personable, quiet, reserved, romantic, sarcastic, serious, singing in the rain silly, tasteful, tactful, undaunted, understated, unstoppable, untamed, unwavering, vivacious, voracious, watchful, wonderful, wilful, wild, wise, young at heart and filled with a zeal for life that nothing can hide.<div><br></div><div>She is Cindy.<br><div><br></div><div>And I'm lucky, because out of all the people wandering this old world, she chose to spend her days and nights with me.</div><div><br></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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</div><br></div></div>Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-18443724955289865582020-01-16T10:14:00.000-08:002020-02-12T09:20:44.997-08:00Unsung Heroes; Melissa Wine<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Writing about Melissa Wine is always a challenge. Melissa was, like most of us, a riddle wrapped in an enigma surrounded by a mystery. She loved quiet mountains and riversides, heavy metal and loud bars, could drink like a fish and swear like a sailor, had a temper like a thunderstorm and a heart that was sometimes as tough as whale bone and others as fragile as spun glass. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">She was my best friend in a time when that meant much more than it does in the Facebook age. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We drove up to Reddish Knob to watch meteor showers over the VA/WV border, listened to jazz and bluegrass on the Oldies Show on NPR, read and loved (or hated) the same novels and had long discussions about them, shopped kitschy pawn shops and backstreet jewelry stores, and once sang the entirety of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" while preparing lasangne for my housemates, who laughed at us the entire time. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Before we were bolting lines at any crag, Melissa and I were devouring climbing; we top roped and learned to place and fall on gear and set-up simple lines on the short cliffs of the Shenandoah Valley: Hidden Rocks, Hone Quarry, Lover’s Leap, Goshen Pass, honing our skills for the challenging sandbagged classics of Seneca Rocks. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Melissa at the base of Snakeskin Cowboys, Riven Rock Park, Rawley Springs, VA</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">We were humbled and challenged by the bulletproof sandstone of New River and the granite of Old Rag. We bouldered almost every stone over the height of ten feet in Gum Run and Rawley Springs, on Dictum Ridge and Second Mountain. We spent a lot of time in a little shop called Wilderness Voyagers, with a great crew of hard-climbing outdoors loving men and women. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">One absolutely frigid winter morning, as Melissa and I faced the prospect of another cold day at Hidden Rocks, store manager and NRG hard person Tracy Ramm handed us a set of topos to a place called Franklin, a sunny little river gorge which was only thirty minutes further from Harrisonburg. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">We found our way to Pendleton County, and to Franklin, where our lives changed, forever.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Working into the crux of Potential Energy, Contact Zone, Franklin Gorge</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">One run up the juggy faces, and we were hooked. Weeks were spent plotting, and our climbing days were spent learning at light speed around a core group whose names could be found in any guidebook to Eastern United States climbing; Burcham, Tracy and her future husband Eddie Begoon, George Powell, Howard and Amy Clark, Darrell Hensley, Angie McGinnis, Mike Artz, Tony Barnes, Tom Cecil, and Harrison Shull. These folks had created a climbing community which became a nursery for young climbers, a place for testing personal limits, pushing the grade and learning about the basics of bolting and the ethics of sport versus traditional climbing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">It was here that George Powell and I completed the first ascent of <strong>Anchor's Away</strong>, and shortly thereafter Melissa and I put up our first sport route together, <strong>Belly of the Whale.</strong> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Over the next four years, we put up <strong>Aloha </strong>and<strong> Hard Thang</strong>, and assisted Darrell and John with their routes <strong>Edge-U-Cation</strong>, <strong>Walk the Plank</strong>, and <strong>Rock Your World.</strong> Melissa spent countless hours in freezing conditions working with me trying to carve a working line out of the face just left of <strong>Belly </strong>before admitting that it just wasn't going to go. We climbed every line below 5.12 at Franklin and fell off several of the 12s with determined laughter.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Melissa on the first ascent of Aloha, Franklin Gorge, Franklin, WV</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Setting up for another day on the route that just wouldn't go, Franklin Gorge</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">We met some amazing climbers from across the nation and learned some hard lessons about impact when the area was included in several publications and traffic increased exponentially overnight. We watched and read as the problems plaguing our secret garden were debated and dissected in the national climbing press and, in some cases, the global climbing community.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">And, eventually, with a nudge from the previous generation, we found Smoke Hole.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Leading Batteries Not Included, Long Branch, Smoke Hole Canyon</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">After Troy Johnson and I had broken ground, so to speak,<strong> </strong>Melissa Wine and Rachel Levinson joined us in a wave of stoke, and between the four of us routes began falling like dominoes. </span></span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fCwG69Cfikk/XiCj9Y6o69I/AAAAAAAAN1Q/VYYF-OXarmw3S-aqiVGIrEAnghsN38KlQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/tj%2Band%2Bmw%2Bfaces3001.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1069" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fCwG69Cfikk/XiCj9Y6o69I/AAAAAAAAN1Q/VYYF-OXarmw3S-aqiVGIrEAnghsN38KlQCLcBGAsYHQ/s640/tj%2Band%2Bmw%2Bfaces3001.JPG" width="426" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The lady crushers ran up the FAs of routes like <strong>Hummingbird </strong>and <strong>Hippo's Head, </strong>repeated <b>Through the Looking Glass</b> and <b>Hawk</b>, then, further afield, bouldered in the Rawley Maze, on Second Mountain and Dictum, redpointed classics like <strong>Four Sheets to the Wind, Triple S, Rico Suave, </strong>and <strong>The Entertainer </strong>and kept coming back for more.</span>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In the course of one frigid winter, Melissa and I put up six routes, including <b>Batteries Not included </b>and<b> Overtime </b>in Smoke Hole, and <b>The Mushroom Tower </b>and<b> Rock of Ages </b>in Germany Valley. </span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cleaning gear and crushing moves on Four Sheets to the Wind, NRG</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">We were pushing our envelope, each exploring the boundaries of their own comfort level; sometimes progressing rapidly, cleaning and drilling a line in a single day on rappel, sometimes forging ground-up, often solo, in fits and starts. </span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Leaving the Endless Wall after a full day of sending.</td></tr>
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</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">I was working a construction job that had very little to offer the soul, and took the toll of a Titan on the body; pouring and finishing concrete three to five days a week, ten to twelve hours each day of wading shin-deep in material with the consistency of thick oatmeal, kneeling and trowelling for hours around some architect’s insane idea of a retaining wall; running jackhammer and building forms, tying rebar and then turning around to take it all apart again. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">The mountains were my only haven of sanity and balance. My small cadre of climbing partners was my family.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">L to R: Troy Johnson, Melissa, Tom Bunk and Owen Gartland, Ninja Walls, Smoke Hole Canyon</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">And Melissa was the star by which I steered, the sun that shone on my world, my enthusiastic partner in every hare-brained misadventure and exploration. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">Whether setting out into a -20F day to bolt new lines (we bailed), riding my GPz 750 Kawasaki down to Goshen to boulder and swim and just hang out, heading out at midnight to hear a band in a new bar with people we just met at the last one, or putting up new trad lines on lead with sketchy gear and bad landings, Melissa Wine was always good to go.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gunsight to South Peak top-out, Seneca Rocks, WV. Melissa led this as her first gear lead a week later, and went on to put up a dozen trad routes in the next year.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">Time passed, friends moved on or moved away, life changed, and the distance between two friends who fell in love with each other and climbing began to tell. A series of bad climbing falls, one on <b>Critter Crack </b>at Seneca and two more on a trad project in Smoke Hole, left Melissa with a hairline fracture in her ankle. Desperate for money, she took a job in the poultry industry, working in the nastiest of conditions, on an egg farm, in winter.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">After 6 months of this, she quit and accepted a job as a cashier at Wal-Mart, where she soon began to make new friends and move up through the ranks of employees.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Melissa and Caspian, North Peak of Seneca</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">When I decided to quit my hellish construction job and spend the fall and winter exploring the West, Melissa told me that she couldn't just walk away from her family, her new job and her life in the Valley. Three days later, she moved out of our cabin in Rawley Springs, and one of the most amazing chapters of my life came to an end.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">The rest is history; I went west and had many trials, epics and misadventures in Yosemite, Red Rocks, the Sierra, Joshua Tree, Owens River Gorge, and Flagstaff, the beginning of a life that has taken me to 47 of 50 states, putting up 200 routes and dozens of new boulder problems along the way, and finding the woman who has weathered every storm, shared every victory, and stood by me through thick and thin, famine and plenty, sunshine and storm, despite all my rough edges, extreme opinions, and un-PC judgements, the amazing Cindy Bender, who honored me by taking the last name of Gray. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">Melissa doesn't climb, now; she manages the Dollar General in a quiet little town just over the mountain from my home, and occasionally we run into each other in the grocery store or around town. She has weathered the years far better than I have, and her smile is just as bright when she thinks back on those days with a wistful nostalgia, those times "when my life was so much more exciting and interesting".</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px;">Melissa will forever be the amazing woman with whom I discovered so much of myself, the Shenandoah Valley, country life, and climbing, a country girl and old soul with whom I fell deeply in and never quite out of love with, not for many years after we parted company. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px;">If I often wish things had gone differently, it is not for myself or what-could-have been, but because I wish her life had gone down a different road, to a place of happiness and realization of her amazing potential, surrounded by friends.</span></span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Soloing up into the Gunsight Notch of Seneca Rocks</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">I've been trying to write this for seven or eight months, and it has been a challenge, for all the reasons above and because I lost my Dad in June and things with my family and that of my wife have just taken precedence.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "verdana";">Today I sat down and decided to finish this part, at least, to share with you, gentle reader, a glimpse, a snapshot, and my memories of an incredible woman who shared the journey and was a cornerstone of Smoke Hole climbing.</span></span><br />
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We all know heroes; friends and strangers who go out of their way for no better reason than to to pay it forward from a place of plenty, to hold themselves accountable, if only for a while, to a standard that we can be better, all of us. </div>
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To fail is to be human, to overcome defeat, to try to be more is inspiring and to succeed, divine. To spend as much time and love lifting up others as we do in pursuit of our own dreams is the highest path we can aspire to walk.</div>
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It is important to acknowledge and remember; we stand on the shoulders of giants.</div>
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These are the unsung heroes of Smoke Hole Canyon; I'm just the guy who was lucky enough to climb with them and call them my friends.</div>
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-65100189710702903192019-07-19T07:51:00.001-07:002019-07-19T07:51:59.203-07:00Days of Future, Passed<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">2011/11/15</td></tr>
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-62604969699146415782019-07-02T13:28:00.001-07:002019-07-03T12:18:47.128-07:00Godspeed<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
On Saturday morning, we bid farewell to my Dad, Gilbert Gray, laying him to rest with military honors and a small group of family and friends at a small country cemetery near Lacey Springs, Virginia.<br />
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My father was born in the hills of Page County, Virginia on August 24th of 1940 and grew up in Pine Grove, where his family lived life in a manner long since vanished from all but the poorest and most remote parts of this country.<br />
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Dad grew up running through the Blue Ridge Mountains with his brothers and half brothers and sisters and other country kids; playing on the grounds of Camp Hoover on the Skyline Drive, where my grandfather had become a journeyman mason and built many of the stone walls that stand to this day. <br />
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He attended tiny Page County Elementary school; after his parents separated, he went to live with his mother in White Post outside Winchester, Virginia and graduated from Clarke County High School.</div>
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When not in school, the family spent their days tending the garden, picking morels, cherries, raspberries and blackberries in the summer and spring, helping to make apple butter and cider, chasing down the hogs that ran wild in the woods and helping with the butchering and canning in the fall, hunting rabbit and turkey and deer to help fill the family's larder in a time when poor folks didn't really know they were poor. <br />
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After graduation, Dad left the hills of Kite Hollow and Page County to work in Washington, DC, where my grandfather had once worked with other CCC trainees to build the Memorial Bridge, one of the last bridges built with brick and mortar as well as concrete.<br />
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In Washington, Dad met my mother, Joyce Gray, a daughter of New Hampshire, where she had grown up on a 240 acre dairy farm after being adopted from unimaginable poverty. </div>
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Dad won fair lady's heart, joined the Air Force, and they were wed in Texas. I was born in a military hospital in Spain on June 21st of 1963.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Proud new father and wide-eyed son in Cadiz, Spain</td></tr>
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We came back to the States, where my sister Diana was born in Chickapee, Massachusetts. <br />
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Dad was stationed at Loring AFB in Maine and was part of NORAD's DEW development team, making flights to and over the Arctic Circle.<br />
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When Dad left the Air Force, we moved to Virginia, where Dad worked as a maintenance superintendent while pursuing a college education. After completing his degree, my Dad went to work for the school system back in Page County, where he had grown up, inspiring other country kids to dream beyond the limits of poverty and to reach for lives their grandparents could only dream of. During this time, we moved out of Neff Trailer Park and onto land near Keezletown, VA.<br />
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The four of us were still living out of a trailer with an addition built on for my parents' bedroom and a small sewing room where my mom made many of our clothes, when not working as a receptionist and secretary at Packaging Corporation of America in Harrisonburg, VA. <br />
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In order to move his family out of the trailer and into a home, Dad started his own electrical contracting business, and I went to work at age 11, spending weekends and summer vacations wiring residences which were springing up around the nearby Spotswood Country Club and helping renovate older homes in and around Harrisonburg and Rockingham County.<br />
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What few vacations we took were spent visiting with my Mom's family in New Hampshire and exploring the mountains and seashores of New England, wandering through the Smithsonian and museums of Washington, DC or visiting the Wright Brothers monument, learning to surf and beachcombing on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. <br />
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I had hiked most of the Appalachian trail in Virginia before I had my learner's permit. With several schoolmates and my friend Kris Kline, I discovered the underground wonders of the karstlands in VA and WV.<br />
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My dad went on to work for Ashland Construction as a superintendent, building CVS Pharmacies, Rite-Aid, Food Lion and Wal-Mart stores and shopping centers all over the East Coast. He consistently brought in contracts ahead of schedule, under budget and with few or no customer complaints.<br />
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Dad finally fulfilled the dream that had taken him into the Air Force and got his pilot's license, after which he became a member of the Shenandoah Valley REACT group, a local volunteer search and rescue operation. From there, he moved on to the Civil Air Patrol and was commander of the Shenandoah Valley Senior Squadron, as well as a member of several surrounding CAP groups. He spent weeks searching for a group of lost hunters in Hungry Mother State Park, among other missions, and after the bodies and plane were discovered, remained in contact with the families of the crash victims.<br />
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Dad loved to fly and another of his dreams was to attend the fly-in at Oshkosh, WI. He finally realized that hope with the help of his longtime friend John Scott, a crusty USMC veteran of the Korean War. John and Dad spent many happy hours aloft above the mountains and valleys of Virginia, and I was privileged to accompany them and to fly with Dad on many occasions, including the time he flew me over Seneca Rocks and Smoke Hole in appreciation of my love of climbing and knowledge of how much time I spent on the cliffs of both locations.<br />
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Dad was always a friend of my friends, as wild and woolly a bunch as they may have been, and he was a Southern gentleman in every way to my girlfriends and to my high school sweetheart and first wife, Deena Carper. When Deena and I split after three years, Dad offered a lot of good advice and was there for me in every way. He never became bitter with Deena, recognizing from his own past that people change and grow and make mistakes along the way that cannot be fixed.<br />
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On my twenty-first birthday, Dad allowed me to fill the yard with my friends, while Patrick Donegan, Jon Helbraun, Danny Teter, and Thomas Kent rocked the house to the tunes of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Motley Crue, Metallica and the Allman Brothers.<br />
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As I roamed America in the years that followed, Dad delighted in my adventures and often sent or deposited funds unasked. Without his inspiration and support, I would not have had the opportunity to explore Yosemite, Red Rocks, Las Vegas, Hueco Tanks, the Needles of California, Tuolumne, Sedona or Mt. Lemmon.<br />
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When I returned from my adventures, Dad invariably recruited me for work based on 3 decades of experience as an electrician, carpenter and equipment operator. Some of my fondest memories are times spent on the jobsite with Dad and the evenings we spent eating take-out and sipping cold brews in the hotel after a hard day on the job.<br />
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When I met my wife Cindy in Franklin, WV in 2008, I was living in Smoke Hole Canyon, where my parents both enjoyed joining us for hikes along the river. Dad loved sycamores and blackberries, and anyone who has been to the canyon knows there are plenty of both to be found along the banks of the South Branch of the Potomac.<br />
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Dad was instrumental in helping me self-publish my Climber's Guide to Smoke Hole Canyon in 2010, and in getting copies mailed out to buyers while my wife and I were volunteering and working as campground hosts and maintenance staff in Arizona and Colorado. He hand delivered copies to volunteers working on trails at Reed's Creek and fielded questions from climbers and buyers alike.<br />
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In 2012, Dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Due to his uncomplaining, stoic nature, the cancer had spread much further through his body than at first hoped. Cindy and I got the news in Boulder Creek, near Canyon Lake, on the Apache Trail in Arizona, and headed home in the spring of 2013.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Gypsies reunite with the Grays in Scottsville, VA, March, 2013</td></tr>
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In August of that year, our first grandchild, Shelby Grace Turner, was born. My parents set aside their own troubles and were as proud as anyone could have been of their first great-grandchild. Since then, Shelby has acquired two sisters, Emmalyn and Madaline, and both were sources of great joy and comfort to my Dad as his own health deteriorated.<br />
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In the winter of 2018 and spring of 2019, Dad began to question the wisdom of continuing with the experimental trials to battle his cancer. After a single chemo treatment, he said "What will be, will be" and discontinued all treatment.<br />
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In late April, his doctor revealed that the cancer which had spread to his bones had also entered his liver. He was given three to five months.<br />
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We joined my parents and good family friend Paul Quillen for a final trip to the Outer Banks in May, staying at Oregon Inlet for a week, drinking Cuba Libre's and eating barbecue, reminiscing and laughing and sharing time.<br />
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On Friday, June 21st, I spent the morning of my 56th birthday setting up medicine dosage schedules and assembling a hospital bed for Dad in my parent's living room, from which he could look through the window across the Shenandoah Valley to the Blue Ridge where it borders West Virginia.<br />
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On Tuesday morning, after days and nights during which my wife and myself traded shifts with my mother and my sister, talked to dad and sang hymns and old Creedence Clearwater tunes and prayed with my brother in law Marty Breeden, my father fell into a deep sleep. <br />
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On Wednesday morning, just after 9 o'clock, my father drew his last breath and set out "to join the innumerable caravan that wends its way from dawn to dusk".<br />
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Despite the disagreements and misunderstandings that plagued our relationship throughout his life, my father remains one of my greatest icons and inspirations, mentor, teacher, and friend. I know that the hole his departure left will diminish in the glow of the good memories and appreciation of his support and love.<br />
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But I will always miss his hearty laugh and his warm hugs, his unique perspective on being southern and an American.<br />
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Thank you, Dad.<br />
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Godspeed.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mb8DcXl-9BM/XRu-J6br-yI/AAAAAAAALqc/RUjI59ykfb4V4ydwLvcjuqvK_SYl98DRACLcBGAs/s1600/38615032_10214522959341778_7367832206615511040_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="1535" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mb8DcXl-9BM/XRu-J6br-yI/AAAAAAAALqc/RUjI59ykfb4V4ydwLvcjuqvK_SYl98DRACLcBGAs/s640/38615032_10214522959341778_7367832206615511040_o.jpg" width="636" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With my parents, Joyce and Gil, at the Lambert Hilltop Park Volunteer Center in Cherry Grove, WV</td></tr>
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-16242027327751070962019-03-19T09:54:00.000-07:002019-03-19T09:54:16.772-07:00Syracuse University Outing Club and SHARe/UP: Spring Break 2019 The Tradition Continues<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That's what friends are for...</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shelda Dewitt climbing Welcome to Reed's Creek... in boots.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andy takes a well-deserved rest at the top of Afterglow</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">All the usual suspects...</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The arrival of the pig</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rock Climbing Women Ambassador, MS fighter, stroke survivor, Friends of Smoke Hole co-founder Cindy Gray enjoying some time with the #slaydies of SUOC</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Young blood and old school; Otto Neiler, Ronin and Evan Genay</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lFNDJlhgYBk/XJEZ2IGagPI/AAAAAAAALN8/LM43APORMUkJyE3gbdJ19lP4sxP8SBJCwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_20190315_205758.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="1600" height="384" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lFNDJlhgYBk/XJEZ2IGagPI/AAAAAAAALN8/LM43APORMUkJyE3gbdJ19lP4sxP8SBJCwCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_20190315_205758.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Yes, he is licking the frosting off the knife..."</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oVGsYTglqt8/XJEZ6IGhsAI/AAAAAAAALOE/wbcz2WqXz4Yf--HcabTvTDmoVJxKu0MFgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_20190315_211440.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="1600" height="384" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oVGsYTglqt8/XJEZ6IGhsAI/AAAAAAAALOE/wbcz2WqXz4Yf--HcabTvTDmoVJxKu0MFgCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_20190315_211440.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"At this point, you old folks might want to just get a book..."</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unicycle stunts are always a favorite</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gypsies</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Rock Bar Crew </td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A new trail around the belay for Neverending Story</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Right there, dude... Gonna send that one..."</td></tr>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BquQuHE3X2Y/XJEaLMeEdSI/AAAAAAAALOs/c6ikvu2nnZs65hgFN1WSngeMnIaUoNR8gCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_20190316_135506.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="961" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BquQuHE3X2Y/XJEaLMeEdSI/AAAAAAAALOs/c6ikvu2nnZs65hgFN1WSngeMnIaUoNR8gCLcBGAs/s400/IMG_20190316_135506.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-O6q63pkng0U/XJEaUa3iKkI/AAAAAAAALPE/RlN9Xplm9xonfNXIEbveQQC7fyax7JSgwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_20190317_114426.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="961" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-O6q63pkng0U/XJEaUa3iKkI/AAAAAAAALPE/RlN9Xplm9xonfNXIEbveQQC7fyax7JSgwCLcBGAs/s320/IMG_20190317_114426.jpg" width="192" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s7YWUmlMyaM/XJEaVyCG1XI/AAAAAAAALPI/SubpGffdPQ8loQF3H7XrWA-fqYuDfH1owCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_20190317_114503.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="961" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s7YWUmlMyaM/XJEaVyCG1XI/AAAAAAAALPI/SubpGffdPQ8loQF3H7XrWA-fqYuDfH1owCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_20190317_114503.jpg" width="384" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--vkaPAkAkTA/XJEaa_jERfI/AAAAAAAALPU/CFp4XqYgDaI8mZmFJZmSPMLLsODDaJ3bACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_20190317_120543.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="1600" height="384" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--vkaPAkAkTA/XJEaa_jERfI/AAAAAAAALPU/CFp4XqYgDaI8mZmFJZmSPMLLsODDaJ3bACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_20190317_120543.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gJ025hZSlLc/XJEaa_dynnI/AAAAAAAALPQ/LTbQLGy18MwBPsGEAMjSI0JlPkWV6ozSACLcBGAs/s1600/Shelda%2BDewitt%2Bvs%2BCatfish%2BStrangler.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="978" data-original-width="777" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gJ025hZSlLc/XJEaa_dynnI/AAAAAAAALPQ/LTbQLGy18MwBPsGEAMjSI0JlPkWV6ozSACLcBGAs/s640/Shelda%2BDewitt%2Bvs%2BCatfish%2BStrangler.jpg" width="508" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shelda Dewitt, half an inch shorter than Lynn Hill, <br />
crushing the biggest roof at Reed's Creek, Catfish Strangler<br />
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Bad. Ass.<br />
Period.</td></tr>
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-8459131431897980652019-02-07T12:04:00.003-08:002021-11-22T07:03:02.021-08:00Unsung Heroes; The Early Days of Smoke Hole Climbing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The canyon that stretches from the hamlet of Upper Tract to the riverside community of Cabins is unlike any other, at least for the handful of climbers I came to know and love as friends.<br>
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Smoke Hole is where so much began and where so much ended, where inexperienced fear gave way to discovery and adventure, where solitary experience became community and lifetime friendships, where naïve trust became realistic expectations and personal limitations a matter of choice and willingness to go for it.<br>
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The two guys below were largely responsible for fueling the positive aspects of our transformation; Chris Riha is the belayer with the Boreal Aces and Izod colors, while Troy is the leader in purple.<br>
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Chris was a friend of Germany Valley legend Sandy Fleming, and was one of the most energetic, positive climbers I ever met, always encouraging us towards our better angels, trying always to commend ethics over convenience. </div>
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Chris undoubtedly holds the record for belay hours logged on a single line in Smoke Hole, because I know he spent a week without food or sleep lashed to a tree and fed intravenously while pretty much everyone in Harrisonburg tried to send Shattered Illusions.</div>
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Chris was there to belay and clean gear when I sent a dozen 5.10 lines at Franklin in a single day. Chris once hiked up Second Mountain carrying all three of our backpacks because he was training for an excursion out of country.</div>
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Chris drove to Seneca to meet me for a moonlight ascent of the classic 5.7 Green Wall. When I realized my headlamp and spare batteries were toast and moonlight was four hours away, Chris was game when I said we'd climb by starlight and waited half an hour for my eyes to adjust before I led us up three pitches of perfect hands and fingers without artificial light.</div>
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When I hit bottom after months on the road, living the dream out of a backpack, riding luck and my thumb to the next classic line, dumpster diving, and discovering a secret America with an amazing assortment of gypsies, one of whom stole every scrap of clean clothing, cash and food I had, it was Chris who sent a hungry, homeless Virginia boy $250 via the Flagstaff Western Union on Christmas Eve.</div>
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When I came home and tried to hand it back to him, it was Chris who almost punched me in the face for the first and last time, before commencing plans to use me shamelessly as a ropegun on a trip to the Wind Rivers.</div>
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When I smashed my knee without insurance after coming home from six months on the road with no job, it was Chris who, I suspect, covered the majority of my bill to get the collection agencies off my back. </div>
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For years after the group went their separate ways, Chris continued to stay in touch; when I flew into D.C. one stormy Christmas Eve, it was Chris who came and ferried me home from the redeye lounge, Chris who fed me a sumptuous breakfast before he handed me the keys to his truck and said "The tank is full, go see your family and Merry Christmas."</div>
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I haven't seen Chris in too many years. </div>
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Gonna have to do something about that, soon.</div>
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Troy Johnson was the grandson of the Berdeaux family, who owned and ran Endless Caverns in the Shenandoah Valley, but you would never have known his family had a dime more than anyone else to meet him. He lived in one of the rental cabins as campground manager and drove a beater truck or gas efficient small car the entire time I knew him. </div>
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His uncles were veteran cavers with whom Troy had crawled miles underground, and it was through that medium that he met Mike Artz and Ed Begoon. I climbed with Ed and his partner George Powell quite a bit back then, and was invited to a massive bonfire party at Endless where we met the wiry, energetic wunderkinder who would open his heart and home to a tribe of knuckleheads. </div>
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We camped at Endless, usually for free, explored the Blue Ridge skyline behind his home, fished and hiked, grubbed with Troy when he fixed enormous feasts and paddled around the Caverns pond by moonlight. </div>
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It was with Troy that I was invited by Darrell Hensley to explore and develop climbs in the lost garden of Smoke Hole Canyon and with Troy that I put up my first route there.</div>
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Whether you climbed lead or top roped, if it was 5.5 or 5.12, Troy was a great partner on trad or bolts, patient, supportive, encouraging, self-effacing, going out of his way for partners and friends at all times. </div>
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Up before dawn, Troy led us up the long and winding trudge into the awe-inspiring backcountry of Old Rag, sandbagging us onto gruntfests and spotting highball boulder problems on granite nubbins. </div>
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Troy worked at the ski resort on Massanutten Mountain, where he shredded on the ski team and is renowned as a great guide, employee and friend who loved to jam some serious tunes when things got hectic.</div>
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I have a picture of Troy grinning in rainbow tights, leaned against the wall of the JMU Music Building where we would often 'builder' on sweltering in-town afternoons. That's Troy in a nutshell, making silly look good, the impossible look easy, and laughing through it all.</div>
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Troy's life took a hard turn in 2003 when he was ejected from his car in a head-on collision on his way to work. Mike fisher and I were on our way home from a weekend of climbing when we got the news and drove straight through to UVA, where we became frequent visitors until Troy was released. </div>
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The fight back to anything like a normal life has been a journey of years, and like any route, has had cruxes and falls. I wish I could say I have been there for him every step of the way, but few of us are the heroes we wish we could be. </div>
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Today, Troy lives in Virginia Beach, where he is a Zen master in the art of extracting large fish from any body of water, and the myriad ways to convert them into fare fit for human consumption.</div>
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With my wife Cindy, he remains one of the most inspiring examples of courage in the face of adversity that I know.</div>
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We all know heroes; friends and strangers who go out of their way for no better reason than to to pay it forward from a place of plenty, to hold themselves accountable, if only for a while, to a standard that we can be better, all of us. </div>
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To fail is to be human, to overcome defeat, to try to be more is inspiring and to succeed, divine. To spend as much time and love lifting up others as we do in pursuit of our own dreams is the highest path we can aspire to walk.</div>
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It is important to acknowledge and remember; we stand on the shoulders of giants.</div>
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These are the unsung heroes of Smoke Hole Canyon; I'm just the guy who was lucky enough to climb with them and call them my friends.</div>
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-90166854249932267782019-01-23T10:46:00.005-08:002019-01-25T07:14:45.211-08:00Hard Bark<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">This is how it is.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">I'm known to the climbing community as a curmudgeon; a grouchy bastard who seems to have little or nothing good to say about anything. I’m tired and sore from about fifty-plus years of fairly adventuresome and demanding life, thirty-something of which have been spent becoming the the best carpenter and craftsman I could, working my way up from jackhammer-lugging grunt and rake operator to a foreman, eventually a superintendent, and working as a concert and theatrical rigger. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">During roughly the same period, I was doing everything I could to become the most versatile, well-rounded, impact-conscious, proactive rock climber I could possibly be. I learned orienteering and survival skills, was certified as an EMT and qualified as Field Team Member for Search and Rescue.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">I came up during the ecological awakening of the late 60s and early 70s, and even without the massive sea-change of those times, environmentalism meant much more to a kid whose grandparents lived right out there, in the country, instead of in some suburban landscaper's dream.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">You see, my people are the people who called the Skyline Drive their back yard before the country called it a destination. We're the people working those little stands in New England where our family farms used to be, before taxation without representation and tourists who couldn't give a damn about more than their itinerary plowed that legacy into the ground under the newest rest area strip mall in the name of progressive thinking.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">We've been cleaning up behind the latest popular movement for about as long as you folks have been hiring other people to do that, building the roads you drive in on, establishing all those quaint communities whose fossilized remains you love to hike through without ever really seeing the sad descendants of the original settlers going about the lives your endless appetites have left behind.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">All that aside, the forests are my first love, since long before puberty took hold of my endocrine system or Miss Cindy walked into my life like a sunlit thunderbolt. I love the mountains and I revere the gifts we have been given, I believe, by a benevolent if sometimes inexplicable universe. It is and always has been my duty and my devotion to give back to the places that have cradled my broken soul.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">So, for most of the past three decades, no matter how broke or exhausted or beat-up I was from days and sometimes weeks of brutal labor and long hours, I spent my free time looking for, finding, developing and (hopefully) sending new lines interspersed with sessions of repairing trail and picking up trash.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">I’m further from the beginning of my climbing career than the end. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">And I am determined to make an impact on the future, beyond the lines I will leave behind and the trails I have built. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">My climbing partner, Doctor Goodwack, would say that I'm wasting my time. He might be right. He'd say that you're all worthless and weak, and that the ones of you that aren't are either too comfortable, too old and beat down, or too young and stupid to waste time or rope on.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">He's got a lot of hard bark on him. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Hell, truth is, since I wrote this little piece the first time, I’ve grown an awful lot of hard bark myself; not from any one great wound, but from a thousand cuts of daily indifference, apathy and oblivion, spread out over the years. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Some days, I doubt climbing, and certainly the mountains and forests, the wild places in which the finest climbs live, will survive in any recognizable form. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">But I still hope that we’re wrong. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">I'm betting on it, in fact, that's why I'm sitting here typing on a laptop, tossing out messages in a bottle to a generation that mostly doesn’t know or give a damn who I might be, instead of sipping coffee or cold brews or heading off on another adventure with the lovely brunette who calls me her husband.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Because I want you to know that I <i>feel</i> you out there; sitting on a bus, or a train, or in some airport lobby or library, at your desk or table or in your car, where ever, picking idly at your skinned knees or gobied hands while you read this, feeling the aches, or the Hunger, when there are no wounds, no aches.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">So many of you have reached out through emails and phone calls, online messages and at the crags, over the years. The response on Kickstarter and gofundme was amazing and inspiring, a reminder of an energy I thought was lost.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Unimaginable as it may seem, I was one of you once, before all these miles and memories, these scars, all these years... all this hard bark.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">I know you, because <strong>I <i>was </i>you</strong>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">I know that, even with this tide of pushing for high numbers and press attention, trying to milk bucks or swag or just a moment in the sun out of this fickle, pointless, incredible obsession, there are dreamers out there, dreamers who dream not with their eyes shut, in their beds, but with them open, in the deep woods, on the big stone, or some tiny, unknown little chunk of rock lost deep in the forest. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">I think about you, sometimes, while I’m hanging there on hooks, gingerly pulling up the drill while flakes fall away, or working through some demanding sequence between clips, or laying hundreds of feet of trail for hours, piling stone and moving dirt, cutting and placing logs, marking the way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">And as hard as it may be to believe this, as much as I chew on you and rage at you and smash at the feet of your sacred cows, I actually <i>believe in you</i>, from all these many years down the road beyond my own folly, when the convenience of sheer numbers makes it easy to forget being young and proud, headstrong and reckless, hungry and open. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Even with all the blah, blah, blah that makes up most of the magazines, ezines and forum space these days, I can feel you there, just the other side of the page, dreaming of long, clean lines, of hard, steep moves, or of just clipping that next bolt, someday.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">You hear the green song while everyone else is racing down the trail, hell-bent for leather to be first. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">You know the peace of being last on the trail, and the serenity of that first moment, alone at a new belay, with a new climb behind you still ringing in your soul; a rope's length above your partner and the world and light-years from all the crap that clogs the gears and weighs you down.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">And you're doing incredible things; y<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">ou climb sooner, faster, stronger, and better than we ever did, and you genuinely seem to be trying to rediscover (or at least reinvent) community and true love for each other. You're pushing into the big hills and the hard numbers routinely, and that's one of the things that stir me to the keyboard. For all my hard bark, and despite the likelihood that few of you will give enough of a shit about what an old climber thinks about anything to give this a second‘s glance.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">So enough preamble, I guess we're gonna dance or fight, one of the two, so we might as well get it on.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">You're fallin' down on the job. You crank hard and you dress really cool but you're sloppy and careless and self-centered to a fault even in this narcissistic sport.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">(And no, this is not that "When I was your age we walked ten miles to school through burning hail, uphill both ways, and when we got home they beat us and killed us," crap... this is me, talking to you. Thanks for your time... I won't keep you much longer, I swear...)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Facts is facts, and the fact is that we did (and still do) put up the new routes, keep what few animals we ever had about in close check, and manage to not only <b>build</b> but routinely <i>maintain</i> the trail system at several crags, for years. Decades, even...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">All while holding down jobs requiring <i>at least</i> forty hours per week (in those days I averaged sixty-plus) and commuting at least an hour each way (in my case two and a half), and tending to all the sundry crap that life will try to tack on you in the years between your age and mine.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">You buy crap guidebooks, when not Xeroxing someone else's copy. Too many members of the climbing press have been printing minimal information and sending the masses hither and yon for years now, creating impact and land issues and cutting and pasting the same mealy-mouthed obligatory crap from rip-off to rip-off. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Leave no trace... unless it's on a crag located on delicate access land that no one bothers to mention. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Respect the earth, but not the climbers whose work they are stealing to make money of which we never see a dime. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Ask the people at the crag who put up the lines. If they can't tell you, find someone who can.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Any guidebook that doesn't list first ascentionists is crap. Period.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Downloading the MountainProject app instead of buying a guide that pays the route setters pennies for every dollar they spent putting up the routes is theft. Period.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">You want a mini-guide, call it that... but don't leave out the history of the routes and crag to avoid admitting that you stole the info instead of meeting the people and finding out their stories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Half of you don't know who Catherine Freer was, despite all your feminist pride.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">The other half have no idea who Warren Harding and Henry Barber were, although you can name all Sharma's hardest routes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">It's your history... and you're letting it slip away. People like me (and even a few nice ones, as well) are out there putting up lines, building trails, carving out crags you'll never hear about. Because we don't get good press from the magazines we criticize, we don't blindly worship the advocates you follow, and we don't think that every idea a Democrat espouses is the wisdom of the ages.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">We've tried being friendly and sharing and being part of a bigger community, and too often, we've seen what happens.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">At Franklin. At Hidden Rocks. At Muir Valley and Joe’s Boulders, Oak Creek Overlook, Paradise Forks, Jack's, the Supes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">The word goes out and people come, regardless of how many cars are there when they arrive, because they just gotta be on the scene. Gear left on projects gets stolen, and projects get worked with the red tags still dangling.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">The advocates' representatives make noises and posts but do little that doesn't promote their businesses while scheduling another fundraiser or membership drive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">And those who came for something that they cannot name pack their gear and move on to the next lost corner, in search of something that exists in moments of fear and wonder, a song that speaks in silence and the sound of the river, a calligraphy of shadows and stone.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">We're mostly working class citizens who spend hundreds of hours and thousands of hard-earned bucks (yes, thousands... priced a new rack, rope, battery drill, aid gear, and health insurance policy lately?) over the course of decades.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">We put time and love, sweat and blood into the routes that climbing shop hard persons routinely talk crap on, downgrade, and misname. Which is like having one of your relatives repeatedly call you by the wrong name at a family picnic... after a while, that crap kinda gets on your nerves.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">That is why I'm here, trying to keep a little of the beta stream unpolluted and complete, and potentially wasting an hour I’ll never get back to make a fool of myself, given my long and checkered past of internet feuds and hostilities, shouting at an invisible audience scattered miles and years away from me in time and space.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">So what? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">I’ve wasted more time on lines that didn’t go and partners that didn’t show. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">For what it's worth;</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Ask questions and pay attention to the answers and remember who gave them to you. I</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Climb with new people. Introduce yourself to climbers you don't know; who knows, you might meet someone who put up the routes that you love. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Go to Park Service meetings and read their proposed policy changes and management plans, then comment on them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">If you're a member who can stomach the innate hypocrisy of crying about climate change while adding fuel to the fire, attend those Access Fund Rendezvous and Cragging Classic events. But make sure you do more while you are there than suck up to magazine idols, cadge autographs, find sweet discounts and gather beta to the latest super-secret, cutting edge destination. Find out what they are fighting, where, how they are organizing, what is a real issue and what works in resolving those issues. They are your crags, and your responsibility.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Dig into the stories you <b><i>aren’t </i></b>hearing or reading about. If your dollars support the big organizations, your voice needs to one of those to direct its course. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">We've left you a legacy... the same one the generation just before left to us. We haven’t done the best by you, by any means, and out government has done less for all of us, to an even greater degree. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Of course, the last generation didn't collect a tax from every dime you earn, but your dear Uncle Sam does, without fail. Now is your time to prove yourselves worthy, to claim your birthright. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Ask hard questions, and accept no easy answers from the people and agencies that run your public lands, the people who lease away your old growth forests and whose quest for insuring gigantic corporate profits have trumped their mission to preserve our unique ecology and irreplaceable history, as well as their responsibility to local communities and their economies. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">There are good rangers and workers in the system, few and far between as they are. Find the good souls out there in that incredible juggernaut of a system and do what you can to sidestep the bureaucracy and incompetence to make things happen.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Before you get together over lattes and microbrews to congratulate each other for providing vast amounts of free PR for the advocates while coincidentally saving an acre of grid-bolted sport climbing or gruesomely overhanging boulders back here in the east, remember that there are still battles to fight. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Crags to save, destruction to halt.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Don’t just post a new status on Facebook, sign an online petition, use a new Snapchat frame or send a check. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Contact Congress, kick-start the Access Fund, scream at the Sierra Club and the American Alpine Club, then get out, picket, chain yourself to some equipment or a gate, get arrested, whatever it takes to drawn the public’s attention and get involved in the fight. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">They are our crags and our lands. Our heritage and legacy.<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Our responsibility. <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">It starts with the little things.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">There is a relatively small but enormously popular crag on private land at the edge of Franklin, West Virginia that is sliding away into eroded oblivion as I sit here typing; a</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"> place where Access Fund members have been bringing their dogs and friends and climbing for over 20 years. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">But it wasn't Access Fund members who organized or paid for the first Franklin Trail Daze, it was a non-member, something that has been true for all but one of the trail work events we held there from 2007 through 2010.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">It wasn't the Access Fund's Regional Coordinator who reached out from the distant city of Seneca Rocks to contact those landowners, but a working carpenter who climbed there on the weekends and shopped at Kemper's Grocery, the tiny store at the end of the road leading to the crag.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Because it doesn't take a title, or the ability to climb 5.12; it takes the willingness to ask and listen, to see beyond your prejudices and the online resume.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">In an age when climbers have no problem driving into Mexico or the ends of the earth and interacting with the locals, this small family business offered cold beer, snacks, and a window into the local community, and a contact point with the landowners.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Climbers who had been to Thailand and braved the highway banditos of the Sonoran desert, their eco-vehicles proudly displaying "Shop Local, Think Sam's Club", stayed away in droves. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">"That place looked sketchy." I was told.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">I've been to Mexico, the bad side of Juarez and some places that made that look like suburbia, and I can tell you that Kemper's didn't hold a candle to what real "sketchy" looks like.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">In fact, I never remember seeing very many other local climbers in the store at all, although it was always clean and the people were always friendly. Bob was a mechanical genius at repair, and Shirley kept some of the nicest plants to be found outside of a professional greenhouse.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">But even locals had come under the spell of convenience and "organic farming", loading up at "farmers' markets" dominated by commercial greenhouses, shopping for bulk discounts at package stores, staying in campgrounds run by out-of-state concessionaires and in general exploiting every resource of the location without the need to spend a dime at local businesses.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Those businesses watched with a sort of detached calm as the city folks poured by, never spending a penny more than they had to in order to use the restrooms or get in out of the rain; demanding, </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.54px; line-height: 18.92px;">condescending,</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"> self-centered, entitled, unconcerned and unaware of the people they walked right over in their quest for fun.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">They did their best to help and please people who came uninvited to walk across their lands, who laughed at them and ridiculed the only life the people of the mountains were allowed, when wealth flowed away, always away from the mountain state.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Kemper's is gone now, just another place that has finally been ignored to death by the masses of climbers who have no clue that these are the people who actually owned a portion of the land on which they were trespassing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Land trades hands, property lines are redrawn and the advocates and community have no clue.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">There's a lot of talk about why the Access Fund members and administrators, the much-ballyhooed Jeep Discount Sales and Conservation Team and all those headline-happy affiliates can't do trail work on private land, despite having no problem climbing there or sending other people to do so by the carload.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">But there is no whisper of an explanation why those heavily-funded paragons of impact control can't work on the trails that cross public lands.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.54px; line-height: 18.92px;">After all, despite being home to any number of AMGA certified professionals who profess LNT principles and espouse green living lifestyles, it isn't the members of the Access Fund that maintain trails right over the hill in Seneca Rocks.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.54px; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14.54px; line-height: 18.92px;">And it hasn't been the Access Fund out here, on the ground, replacing anchors and rebuilding the trails at Franklin, Reed's, and throughout Smoke Hole for the last twenty years.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Maybe they just don't know how to start.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Let me help you, fellas... I've done this sort of thing before.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">(After all, it wasn't until after I started writing about traveling the United States doing trail work that you created your Conservation Teams, was it?)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">It's simple;</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">If you move two stones on the trail and pick up two pieces of trash every time you go climbing, and if all your friends do too, you'll be amazed at what you can do in just a month. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Don't just seek to empower climbers, but widen your focus; support and reach out to the people in the communities surrounding the climbing areas, as well. Aren't they as worthy of your compassion and support as any war or drought or storm refugee in another land?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Work to make the climbing community a part of the larger community in which we travel and play while others live and work. Make sure the leaders of your advocacy groups <b>lead by example</b>; finding, contacting, and then <b>respecting</b> the rights and wishes of landowners, informing their membership of issues and decisions, ALL of the issues and decisions.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">If the Coordinators don't coordinate and the Presidents don't make decisions, get rid of them and find someone who will.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Get rid of the self-serving losers who let Nelson Rocks get sold (twice!) without a single effort to rally climbers, the people who are supposed to be educating climbers about respecting landowners and avoiding future access issues but instead publishes the following statement; "</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">In my experience, ringing a landowner's phone or knocking on their door to ask permission to climb on their land never turns out well."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Sorry, but isn't that how almost all access issues regarding private land begin?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">If you can't find anyone, try taking it on yourself; these are just folks, and as long as you treat them with respect and understand that "No" means "No", no harm, no foul.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial";">It doesn't take a guide or some administrative blessing from Boulder to acquire access.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Get out, get informed, get involved.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">And then they really will be "your" crags, because you're not just visiting, anymore... you're making all of it a part of you, and becoming part of it all.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">It's not brain surgery or astrophysics. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">I mean, after all, even Mike Gray can figure it out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Okay.... 'nuff said. I want to thank you for your time, and your love of the sport I also love so very much. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 18.92px;">Be strong, stand proud, question everything, try everything, give lots of hugs, take lots of pictures, keep a journal, pull hard and don't be afraid to fall, in life or on the stone. </span></div>
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-82107893981451276712018-11-01T11:11:00.000-07:002018-11-01T11:15:48.552-07:00An Open Letter to Rock and Ice<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Dear Rock and Ice Magazine,</div>
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I am writing in regards to your November 2018 article on Smoke Hole Canyon, West Virginia. The pictures of this beloved area were outstanding, and certainly made this former West Virginia resident of 30 years yearn for winding country roads, the smell of fresh cut red oak firewood in the fall, and conversations with the locals surrounding the canyon. However wonderful the pictures may be, the purpose of this letter is to outline a number of aspects wrong with the article (numbered and in bold), as well as ask you to amend them for your readers. As great as pictures are to the magazine glancing eye, getting the correct information out there is even greater. This is especially true when it comes to parking issues, local points of contact, guidebook information, and trail maintenance opportunities.</div>
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<b>#1 Smoke Hole and surrounding crags have great parking. </b>There are 3-5 spots at Smoke Hole for cars. There are a number of spots at a pull-off at Reed’s Creek, too. If those spots are filled up, people just start parking along the road. No big deal, right? More often than not, vehicles aren’t all the way off the road, clogging already narrow paths. Additionally, long before climbing, these areas were (and continue to be) storied fishing spots and peaceful escapes for the people who live in the area. Consider the other users of the canyon and the people who choose to call this place home. </div>
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Because of the proximity to a number of metropolitan areas, Smoke Hole is the first taste many city-goers have at clipping bolts outdoors. Also, it has become increasingly popular with the crowd who doesn’t want to tack on additional hours to drive to New River Gorge. Before venturing out to the crags, coordinate carpooling. If schedules don’t mesh up, drop off cars at a number of locations in the town of Franklin. Better yet, frequent the Smoke Hole Canyon Facebook page to get into contact with other climbers who frequent the area.</div>
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*By not providing this key information about the crags, it’s setting the area up for future conflicts with residents.</div>
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<b>#2 The headlining photo is a classic!</b> True, that 5.9 is quite a route. It is on private property and has no trespassing signs posted. While this area previously allowed climbing, it would be in everyone’s best interest to respect the “No” in “No Trespassing” means “NO”. Yes, the Mid-Atlantic Climbers webpage says the crag is de facto open; that is not an excuse to encroach on someone’s private property when there are other crags in the area that are open.</div>
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<b>#3 Smoke Hole Canyon magically has trails and rock steps leading to belay areas. </b>Trail maintenance is an ongoing project for the area. When you walk up the stone steps at Reed’s Creek or take the switchback up to the Guide Walls, one must comprehend the countless hours of work by volunteers to make our approaches easier, safer, and above all, least damaging to the environment. Stay on the trails that are already there. You can also go on Smoke Hole Canyon’s Facebook page and see updates of trail progress or important notes about problem areas. </div>
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Also, you can have a positive impact on the climbing areas you frequent by attending one of the local climbers’ stewardship events called, Trail Daze. Local climber and crag steward, Mike Gray, has been instrumental in organizing these clean-up and trail building efforts for years, while Tyrel Johnson has come on the scene in recent years. Mike’s even coordinated with the Syracuse University Outing Club periodically to make a cornerstone experience for many outdoor club members- a weekend of crag stewardship and climbing. If you’re on the fence about attending, just go. I made the choice years ago to attend Trail Daze and was rewarded with meaningful friendships and Mike’s homemade breakfast burritos.</div>
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Also of note: If you see an Adopt-a-Highway sign that says Friends of Smoke Hole, you can thank Mike and his wife, Cindy, for cleaning the road into the canyon. They do it for free and have sacrificed many perfectly good climbing days for proactive stewardship.</div>
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*By not mentioning the good things happening because of locals, you are not supporting their cause nor giving your readers access to that information.</div>
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<b>#4 When did all the new, shiny bolts start appearing? </b>If you have ever been to Smoke Hole, Reed’s Creek, or Franklin, there is a 99% chance you have climbed a route bolted by Mike Gray. Most times, we don’t think about the time/effort/money involved with equipping the routes we climb. We just clip the bolts and move on to the next one. We’ll even complain of the spinners or the rusted ones, or question why the bolter drilled in a certain location. Mike has been equipping and retro bolting climbs out of his own pocket for years. With a couple hundred routes now in the area open to climbing, Mike and Tyrel have dedicated a chunk of their time to taking care of reequipping routes in need. A GoFundMe page was created to help the cause and the experience is transparent—frequent updates to which routes have been bolted and what materials were purchased. If you clip bolts at Smoke Hole, consider donating to the bolting campaign. At the very least purchase the Rakkup guides!</div>
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*This is a critical piece to any crag write-up. </div>
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<b>#5 Is there a town close by? </b>Franklin, WV is close to all the climbing. It has local restaurants, accommodations, grocery shopping, etc. Don’t forget Shreve’s Store on your way into the canyon. Not many places like Shreve’s exist in today’s world. Do yourself a favor and put some money into the local economy.</div>
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<b>#6 I see a lot of out-of-towners in the climbing photos in the article. Are there any regulars? </b>Mike and his wife, Cindy are regulars. If you haven’t met them by now while climbing, you either a) live under a rock or b) haven’t researched the area you’re climbing. A little bit about Cindy- she started climbing in her 40s, has MS, and continues to outpace many volunteers at Trail Daze events. She is a no-nonsense, tell it like it is person who has a heart of gold. If you haven’t introduced yourself to her, you’re doing yourself a disservice and probably only care about the day’s tick list.</div>
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Tyrel Johnson is a frequent flyer from the Beltway. He travels the 3+ hours to crush AND give back to the crags. He has been an important figure in trail maintenance and retro bolting. Rather than spending entire weekends knocking off more routes, Tyrel balances climbing with giving back—including helping to digitize the climbing guidebooks so many of us use in the area.</div>
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Last but not least, there is Mike Gray (the one little photo of the gray-bearded man in the article). Mike has been a presence in the area for decades. More often than not, he and Cindy are the ones taking care of the crags, maintaining relationships with locals, and giving local climbing any positive image it has. Much like his wife, Mike is no nonsense and heartfelt. He is a true West Virginian (even if he spent his childhood years in Virginia), who leads by example and does not sit idle when things need to get done. He is a patient belayer, encouraging climbing partner, and an open book to all things Smoke Hole. </div>
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*These people are the reason the trails aren’t falling apart and new bolts are going in on old classics. It would have been nice to read more about them.</div>
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In closing, I hope you consider the above points and amend the Smoke Hole article in the next issue. Key points like parking, how to give back, contact info, local beta, are at the very least, beneficial when publishing a multi-page spread on the crag. Explaining to your readers the headliner photo of Blood, Sweat, and Chalk is on private property and does not allow climbing is a necessity. Otherwise, Smoke Hole will suffer a similar fate that much of our state faced with coal and natural gas extraction—giving up our natural resources to outsiders for little in return.</div>
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Best,</div>
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Steve Emswiler</div>
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Salt Lake City resident (but always a West Virginian)</div>
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From: <strong class="gmail_sendername" dir="auto"><span style="font-family: Thread-00000af8-Id-00000051;">Francis Sanzaro</span></strong> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:fsanzaro@bigstonepub.com" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;">fsanzaro@bigstonepub.com</span></a>></span><br />
Date: Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 10:20 AM<br />
Subject: Re: Smoke Hole article<br />
To: Steven Emswiler <<a href="mailto:kemswiler18@gmail.com" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;">kemswiler18@gmail.com</span></a>><br />
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Hi Steven,<br />
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Thanks very much for taking the time to write. We do our best to make sure our writers are invested in an area and give proper credit and information when possible. Area profiles are always difficult because there are a lot of variables. It seems a few things were left out, however. Should we publish this article online, we will weave in some of this information for sure.</div>
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Thanks for writing and we always appreciate the feedback.</div>
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Best,</div>
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Francis</div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Francis Sanzaro, Ph.D.<br />Editor, </span><i>Rock and Ice</i> | <i>Ascent</i> |<span class="m_391413265392549885m_-5936866225427181599Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Gym Climber</i><br />
1101 Village Road<br />
UL-4B<br />
Carbondale, CO 81623</div>
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<em><strong>Footnote: </strong>Yeah, that's a non-answer if ever there was one. Standard format disclaimer complaint response from a lowest-echelon editor.</em></div>
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<em>Small wonder that every bookseller we contacted had sent back their previous month's delivery of R&I and stopped carrying the magazine.</em></div>
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<em>Sad that an author who stayed in my house and ate my wife's cooking, spent time working on trails with us, camping and climbing, taking pictures of bolt replacement and putting up new routes with us, said so little and showed us nothing at all about stewardship or access issues.</em></div>
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<em>For accurate beta:</em></div>
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<em> <a href="https://rakkup.com/guidebooks/smoke-hole-canyon-long-branch-and-guide-walls-rock-climbing/">https://rakkup.com/guidebooks/smoke-hole-canyon-long-branch-and-guide-walls-rock-climbing/</a></em></div>
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<em><br /></em></div>
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<em><a href="https://rakkup.com/guidebooks/smoke-hole-canyon-reeds-creek-rock-climbing/">https://rakkup.com/guidebooks/smoke-hole-canyon-reeds-creek-rock-climbing/</a></em></div>
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<em><br /></em></div>
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<em>For images and updates: </em></div>
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<em><br /></em></div>
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<em>on Instagram @smokeholecanyon </em></div>
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<em> @wvmgray</em><br />
<em> @grayowlfeather</em></div>
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<em><br /></em></div>
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<em>For info about the local people, region and events, as well as climbing images, access issues, stewardship events and updates, check us out on Facebook </em></div>
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<em><a href="https://www.facebook.com/smokeholecanyon/">https://www.facebook.com/smokeholecanyon/</a></em></div>
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<em> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/friendsofSmokeHole/">https://www.facebook.com/friendsofSmokeHole/</a></em></div>
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-53124268798717810552018-10-05T08:33:00.000-07:002018-10-05T09:29:17.490-07:00Congratulations!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Kca7prialbw/U0HQZ5dEbtI/AAAAAAAAEDI/iNHMjxmU5O4plt_CU9fJtkT9ESuVL0plQCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_0835.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Kca7prialbw/U0HQZ5dEbtI/AAAAAAAAEDI/iNHMjxmU5O4plt_CU9fJtkT9ESuVL0plQCPcBGAYYCw/s640/IMG_0835.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Congratulations to Cindy Gray for being one of 20
Ambassadors chosen from a field of 150 by @rockclimbingwomen on Instagram!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Adopted from poverty and abuse into loving family, Cindy
grew up in Ohio, making the choice to rise above her beginnings. She's been
overcoming challenges ever since.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">As a teen, Cindy joined her family on mission in Nicaragua,
discovering the beauty of the jungle and native culture while working to
improve the lives of the people they lived with.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">After attending Eastern Mennonite College, Cindy became an
EMT, was one of the first women certified as a firefighter and crash truck
driver, and worked tirelessly for equality in that field. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Damage to her spine, complicated by degenerative disc
disease, required two surgeries to install rods and screws.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">That didn't stop her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">A copperhead snake bite hospitalized her and almost cost her
a leg.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">That didn't stop her or lessen her love of nature. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Cindy has been instrumental in organizing a dozen trail work
and trash clean up events, and was a founder of the Friends of Smoke Hole, a
local independent alliance of climbers giving back to the crags and the
communities that surround them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">She encouraged me to launch the Smoke Hole Anchor
Replacement/Upgrade Project and has spent days hauling gear and on belay to
support that effort.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">An aneurysm in 2015 and the 3.5 hour surgery that stretched
the capabilities of modem medical technology did not prevent Cindy from
returning to Colorado for a second year as a campground host and entrance booth
staffer in Elevenmile Canyon, nor did it prevent her from completing another
handful of first ascents and impressive hikes during our days off.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">To date, Cindy and the Punisher have done 53 first ascents
in Smoke Hole Canyon, Reeds Creek and Germany Valley in WV, in Flagstaff and Northern
Devils Canyon in AZ, and in Elevenmile Canyon in the Pike National Forest in CO.
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">A proud mom and grandmother, Cindy is still working to
encourage a new generation of climbers to reach further and rise above their
own challenges while giving back to the places in which she has both given and
received so much inspiration.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">After a decade together, I'm still awed and humbled by her
every single day, incredibly proud to be her husband and equally grateful for
her friendship.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Above: Cindy with the Lindy, our home on wheels for two
years, across thousands of miles and through a hundred adventures.</span></div>
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-60110644086644347702017-03-30T10:44:00.005-07:002017-03-30T10:57:52.962-07:00Blue Ridge Shadows<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I am a boy of 4 or 5, standing in the cold morning air of
the Blue Ridge, dressed in my Sunday best. Beside me, my sister Diana squints
into the frosty sunlight as my mother, Joyce, a slim, nervous woman from New
Hampshire, with dark hair and a wonderful smile, peers through the horn-rimmed
glasses that were stylish at the time and holds her daughter gently but firmly
in place. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My father is Gilbert, Jr., a slender man still in his
twenties whose face is too serious by far for the laughter it owns. Braced against
a great black car, a Packard, I think, his shoulders are square, the hair above
his well-shaped ears a thick golden frost, still shorn in tight military buzz
from recent service with just a touch of rise to a flat-top in front, a short
wave front of individuality. He is holding my hand, limiting me to small arc of
movement I have explored endlessly until the moment in which the picture is
taken.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">There is wood smoke in the air, the rank smell of livestock
and the green of a nearby garden, still thriving below the frost thanks to
dozens of carefully-placed milk jugs and a half-dozen feed sacks. Cats mill
around the back door, unmolested by the short, fat mongrel dog, Poochie, dark as
a sausage and just as round. Chickens scratch and cluck at the red and yellow
soil through patches of blackberries and rank mountain grass, fearless and too
feral for hawks, serpents, cats or hound, as if aware of their eventual date
with an axe and frying pan. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Beyond the white-painted wood and screen door voices mix
with laughter and the clatter of plates and pans as a shifting breeze carries the
smell of cigarette smoke, coffee, scrapple, bacon and eggs, onions and potatoes
frying in the lard of sausage freshly made from hogs which have grown to
maturity in the hog wallow behind the cinderblock garage, beyond which the
mountain drops down in a steep tangle of cedars, greenbrier, locust trees
wrapped in honeysuckle, goat’s head thorns waiting for unwary feet in the poor
soil that gives way to a boulder field. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Above, the Blue Ridge Mountains rise away in a shadowed mass
of hardwoods, sprinkled with ancient cedars and groves of pine, bone white
sycamores, catalpa and sumac adding their bright colors, fox grapes draping the
trees shadowing forest floors covered by pine needles, skunk cabbage and the
ever present poison ivy. Deer move through meadows bounded by autumn olive and
mountain laurel, sometimes bear and bobcats and the rumor of a ‘painter’ or
panther, something forest biologists deny with all their might despite persistent
rumors. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Skunks and possum and raccoons inhabit the forest, garter
snakes slipping through the leaves, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>vicious
copperheads and rattlers “big as your arm”, black snakes scaled like dragons
chasing wood mice, moles and chipmunks, squirrels leaping madly through the
high canopy, scolding the robins, sparrows and finches that hopped and flew
through the branches, jays gossiping loudly as crows and blackbirds fight their
age-old duels against the deep blue skies, buzzards riding thermals toward the
clouds, transformed in their grace from scavengers to aerodynamic wonders. A
red-tailed hawk screamed from somewhere, challenging the world, and locusts
begin to sing in the rising warmth. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My grandfather’s land is perched high on a ridge in Kite
Hollow, and across the steep narrow defile, through the towering sycamores, a
grown-up might glimpse the trailer of my uncle, Philip. In the distance, the
mountains roll down, hiding the valley surrounding the tiny, distant town of
Stanley rising abruptly into the twisting mountain folds that are home to the
Skyline Drive, once the hunting trails of the Seneca and other northern tribes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Trash is taken to the boulder field on a regular basis,
often burned, leaving the stench of charred plastic and paper, the reek of the
hog lot and the faint undertone of rotting food hanging over this beautiful
vista in a miasmic cloud. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The stench is the smell of Progress; at one time, ‘trash’
consisted mostly of cracked cups, broken plates and jars and broken wooden
furniture that would burn. Food was not thrown away in a family that had known
the hunger of the Depression; leftovers became new meals, and what few scraps were
created went to the hogs, the legion of cats, and Poochie. Waste is not a
plague among people who reuse jelly jars as glasses, whose food is grown or
shot within sight of home, who catch their fish from rivers and streams within
walking distance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Society has moved away from simple containers to a world of petrochemicals
and plastic, creating barren forests and toxic streams that require constant
stocking, mountains of trash which will last forever. When one considers the
vast quantities of household and industrial waste which are transported into
these places and buried by contractors who profit from pollution, the small
transgressions of an impoverished generation seem miniscule by comparison.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">When even the burned debris piles up in ‘the dump’, someone
with a machine is called in to push the berm of melted glass and unburnable
debris further down the hill, although this has not been done in some time.
Local legend holds that there is a bulldozer operator still on his machine
somewhere in one of the numerous unstable talus fields that dot the steep
mountains of the Blue Ridge, taken down by overconfidence and stupidity, buried
alive. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">As a child, I recall being briefly convinced that the talus
field in the story was the one behind Granddaddy’s hog lot and that the ritual
burning was to cover up the smell. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It was hard for me to understand the reasons behind the
dump, hard to understand my father’s embarrassment for the place and life in
which he had grown up, for the necessity that created the short arc between the
hillside garden and smoke house filled with hams and bacon to the trash-strewn
mountainside</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Down the hill, out of the fall line of both the unstable
boulder field and the spreading delta of trash, well out of sight of the family
homeplace, live my great uncles, Shirley and Dick. Once, long ago in the era of
great promises known as the New Deal, this generation of Grays had joined the
masons who every day climbed down into the Potomac, trusting in great coffer
dams to hold back the mighty waters of the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay as
they mixed mud and laid the millions of bricks that formed the foundations and
soaring columns of the Memorial Bridge, an architectural triumph of function
and beauty that became a landmark in Washington, D. C.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It is often the fate of those whose hands create great
marvels to be forgotten, too often to live in obscure poverty. Although one of
the greatest cities on earth lay less than three hours away, actually within
sight of the highest peaks of the Skyline Drive, there was a vast disparity
between what folks in the hollows of the mountain considered ‘well off’ and the
Capitol’s bloated, self-serving definitions of that condition.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Different worlds.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">At the time, I did not understand poverty, did not yet understand
history, and had no concept of how it had shaped the cultures of the Appalachian
Mountains for better and for worse, and created a mythical place called
Appalachia, “a place about which more is known that is not true than any other
place in the world”, and a population that is still the most unrecognized
minority in America. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Although there had been many storms and oceans of passage in
a life so short, for the most part, the world was still a bright parade of days
and dreams; I knew only that these were my relatives and this was where he
meant when my father said “Home”. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I could not understand why going there made him so happy and
being there, so sad.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My grandmother is revealed as the door opens with a rusty
squeal of hinges and the musical twang of the spring; she waves away a passing
June bug and calls out to us. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Y’all come eat!” </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Hilda is a short, round woman, with red cheeks and a wide
smile of bad teeth, thick strong arms and hands, bright eyes and a wicked laugh
that can turn nasty or sink to a loving chuckle at a moment’s notice. Whether
company comes at break of day or middle of the night, Hilda is always ready
with a pot of coffee and a plate of food, and no one is turned away from her
table hungry. Her grey-streaked hair is pulled back and she mops sweat from her
neck with a damp cloth as she talks softly to the milling cats, promising them
treats as Poochie waddles past, into the cooler kitchen, in search of scraps. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My grandfather is a great, stooping bear of a man with a
face that I see more every day as I look into the mirror, although mine carries
none of the incredible weariness that comes from being born and raised, then
starting a family of your own, looking for work in the grinding poverty and
lack of opportunity in the wake of the Depression. Perhaps it is because of
those years that he is always ready to smile, and his eyes, netted in folds and
creases, twinkle as his mouth fights against a grin. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Granddaddy is not a saint, by any means; he talks rough and
he smokes Pall Malls and he has a past with parts he’d rather not talk about,
like anyone who has lived through hard times. But he is one of the deepest
loves of my childhood, a figure and a force that has shaped all our lives for
generations. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Standing, looking back, I believe that whatever harm folks
think he might have done in the world, he surely did a lot of good, as well,
building monuments, working like a titan for every dime he earned. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now he snatches me up, freeing me from my father’s firm grip
and his rough stubble of beard scratches at me as he hugs me close, smiling and
laughing gently as I giggle and squirm, his lips against my face, the smell of
his aftershave and tobacco a cachet that is love. His rough workman’s hands
tousle my hair and he puts me down, says something to my father about ‘growing
like a weed’, and turns to reach for my sister, who stretches eager arms and
laughs as he swings her around into another hug and kiss, then hands her back
to my mother, whom he calls ‘pretty as a spring day’. She blushes and smiles, a
shy Madonna revealed, moves toward the house.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Come on, Gilbert!” Hilda calls. “Don’t let it get cold!”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Well,” Granddaddy’s voice is the rasp of a lifetime smoker.
“I reckon we’d best git t’the kitchen, a-fore Hilda takes a switch to us.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Road kill?” my dad asks, despite having spent the previous
day among the folks cutting up butchered hogs, grinding sausage and pressing
out lard.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Gil!” My mother’s voice is scandalized despite having heard
this joke a hundred times.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Reckon we can rustle some up in you’ve a hankerin’.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Well, as long as it has Hilda’s tomato gravy on it, I guess
we can eat it.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Hilda’s gravy, liberally sprinkled with black pepper and the
occasional flake of wood ash, is legendary in the household, and deservedly so.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Don’t get none o’ that gravy on your head, boy.” Granddaddy
says and winks at me. “Your tongue’ll slap your brains out tryin’ to git it!”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I laugh because it is an old joke, one of the best, and
because it is so good to see my father smile. My sister laughs because everyone
else is laughing, a high, pure sound of joy.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My mother shakes her head, a grin breaking through the
disapproval.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Together, we walk down an ancient path into morning, dappled
in the shadows of the Blue Ridge.</span></div>
</div>
Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-55965626525368299582016-03-03T08:44:00.000-08:002016-03-03T08:44:57.748-08:00Things Change<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Life is funny, ya know?<br />
<br />
A week ago, my life was fairly normal; laundry, dishes, cleaning up after cats and kids, reading posts on Facebook and the internet, watching the debacle of the election cycle, trying to finish some anchor replacement at the older crags in WV and making plans to hit the road for Colorado the day after tomorrow, to begin another season as staff in Pike National Forest's 11 Mile Canyon.<br />
<br />
An hour later, I was in an ambulance with a wife who I did not know would live to see another day, holding her hand as EMTs worked on her, my heart in my throat and all plans for the future annihilated and scattered to the winds.<br />
<br />
Late that night, the doctors at RMH told us their diagnosis; not the worst, but not the best, not by a long shot.<br />
<br />
Cindy, a fourteen year stroke survivor and Multiple Sclerosis fighter, had suffered a brain aneurysm; a massive swelling in the carotid artery just inside her skull, like a loaded cannon pointed directly at the base of her brain. She was transferred to Richmond's Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center for more tests and scans, her condition analyzed by some of the leading neurosurgeons in the country.<br />
<br />
On Saturday, her pain was minimal, her condition stable, and we came back to the Shenandoah Valley.<br />
<br />
Eight years ago, I met a funny, beautiful lady with a heart of gold; taught her to climb, shared her battle with Multiple Sclerosis, supported her fight to stop using the medications that were killing her, and listened as she fought with the darkness that had been poured into her soul by demons in human form at such an early age.<br />
<br />
In turn, she accepted me for the bipolar, sardonic, irascible, irreverent fool that I am; reached down into my well of isolation and self-pity and drew out the very best of me. If I have failed to live up to that ideal, the fault is mine; Cindy has always believed in me, no matter how badly or how often I have failed.<br />
<br />
We have traveled the country from coast to coast, climbed and hiked, laughed and cried at the folly and loss of friends and family, celebrated victories and struggled to find a silver lining surrounding the storm clouds of our occasional defeats. We've learned more about friendship, hardship, love and life in the last few years than either of us suspected could be known in a lifetime.<br />
<br />
Today, Cindy and I have a slightly clearer picture of a much different future, and in the light of that knowledge, we are living each day to the fullest, loving and appreciating each other, so thankful for the family and friends who have put aside their own burdens and reached out to support us in our darkest hours of need.<br />
<br />
The Road ahead is uncertain; there are trials and storms on our horizons, without a doubt, as there are for every person living in this consensual illusion of reality that we share. But for now, we are holding each other in this safe haven, cherishing each touch, each kiss, each word, and together, we will get through whatever may come.<br />
<br />
No matter what may transpire, each of us knows the other will be waiting, there in that forest meadow at the end of the Road; waiting and calling, "Come home".<br />
<br />
You and me, kid; forever.<br />
<br />
And, for now, that is more than enough.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-30414251177178242472015-05-11T10:09:00.000-07:002015-05-11T10:09:37.407-07:00Tales from a Gypsy Campfire<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://gypsycampfiretales.blogspot.com/2015/05/funny-idea-of-spring-colorado.html" target="_blank">One last touch of Winter for Elevenmile Canyon and the Gypsies, then Spring and Springer Gulch!</a></div>
Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-55736305382987880852015-04-16T12:18:00.004-07:002015-04-16T12:18:55.177-07:00Spring, Elevenmile Style<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://gypsycampfiretales.blogspot.com/2015/04/spring-elevenmile-style.html" target="_blank">Spring, in Elevenmile Canyon, CO</a></div>
Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-65729826314126592652015-04-01T13:08:00.000-07:002015-04-01T13:08:11.778-07:00Other roads, other worlds<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
No rants, no politics, just pictures, videos and stories of friends, climbs, places we've discovered and trails we've walked.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://gypsycampfiretales.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Tales From a Gypsy Campfire</a><br />
<br />
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-5311379828852021192015-03-18T08:05:00.000-07:002015-03-24T08:08:01.819-07:00West Virginia to Colorado to Arizona: The Gypsies Spend A Week at Oak Flat<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Crossing into New Mexico via Raton Pass; miles of rock, and no one climbing.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Winter weather gilds the desert</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sunset Point, on the way south from Flagstaff to the Valley of the Sun</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Don't think we're in Kansas, any more, Toto."</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Upper and Lower Gaan Canyon, from the Northern plateau</td></tr>
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-17492974918794677782015-02-26T06:47:00.000-08:002015-03-17T17:15:10.144-07:00Designate Oak Flat a National Monument<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"><a href="https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/President_Obama_SAVE_OAK_FLAT_FROM_COPPER_MINING_WE_ASK_FOR_A_NATIONAL_MONUMENT_STATUS/?cWnggjb" target="_blank">Sign the Petition</a> to protect </span><b style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">OAK FLAT, ARIZONA </b><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">Oak Flat located 2 miles East of Superior, AZ is the 2nd largest riparian</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">area in the US and needs to be protected from the</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">devastation of copper mining proposed by Rio Tinto, a foreign mega-mining company whose headquarters are in the UK and Australia.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<b style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">FOREIGN INTEREST</b><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">All the copper extracted from Arizona will be leaving to go to Australia, Iran and China. </span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<b style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">PROTECTED LAND OF THE SAN CARLOS APACHE </b><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">The land is also a federally protected and sacred area to</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">the Apache Nation, managed by the Bureau of Land Management </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">and the San Carlos Tribe and should never have been allowed to be</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">mined on. This land grab was done through a rider in the '</span><i style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">Nationa</i><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">l</span><br />
<i style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">Defense Authorization Ac</i><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">t 'which was renewed in December 2014 by</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">Congress.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">The </span><b style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">San Carlos Apache Nation</b><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> was moved to Miami, Arizona, then to the San Carlos Apache Reservation and now again a federal protected</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">tribe is being asked to leave Oak Flat, Arizona, Sacred Home of</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">the San Carlos Apaches. The proposed mining would virtually</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">stop all access to the sacred springs and Ceremonial Grounds.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<b style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">SECOND LARGEST RIPARIAN AREA IN THE USA</b><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">This area is the second largest riparian area in the</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">country. Pristine areas and a fragile ecosystem would</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">be forever desecrated by the implosion caused from the mining extraction process and it would leach into the water.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<b style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">DEMOCRACY and The SACRED TREE OF PEACE </b><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">The </span><i style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">Confederacy of the Six Nations</i><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> which had been practiced</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">for over 800 years is the longest living democracy on earth.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">It was incorporated into our government by Thomas Jefferson</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">and Benjamin Franklin to establish a new government for the</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">liberty and happiness of all people. </span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">Isn't it time we incorporate these measure of democracy of</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">the </span><i style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">Sacred Tree</i><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> and uphold the promises made to the First</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">Nations, the Native Americans, so we can all live in harmony with</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">natural laws for the benefit of all of our relations. </span><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<b style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">REVOKE THE NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT</b><br />
<br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;" />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">The </span><i style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">'National Defense Authorization Act</i><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">' that was introduced</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">in December 2014 needs to be revoked to support the very</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">energy resources we are protecting. This is why the First Nations</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">and in this case, the San Carlos Apache have been care</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">taking this land for all people and future generations. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"><br /></span></div>
Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-58502932679113372052015-02-21T10:14:00.000-08:002015-02-21T10:14:30.186-08:00An American Battle Cry- the documentary the Access Fund isn't talking about...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Ezekial Kelly and a group of film makers are trying to change history, with their production of <a href="https://life.indiegogo.com/fundraisers/1145331/x/9956424?fb_action_ids=10205618291874264&fb_action_types=og.shares" target="_blank">An American Battle Cry</a><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Vj56SbgDCKI/UO3FEJ1WPDI/AAAAAAAAC7s/96VfBaRM8CY/s1600/IMG_0196.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Vj56SbgDCKI/UO3FEJ1WPDI/AAAAAAAAC7s/96VfBaRM8CY/s1600/IMG_0196.JPG" height="480" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Looking south, from the power station, towards Apache Leap and Oak Flat Campground</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
The filmmakers are doing this against the wishes of the President and Congress, and without any visible support, so far, from the advocates who claim to be <b>the </b>voice of climbers; "built by climbers, for climbers".<br />
<br />
Those would be the same fund-raising, enormo-casting advocates who claim to be strongly aligned with the San Carlos Apache tribes and the Arizona Mining Reform Coalition, although there is also no evidence of that support, either. One glaring example is the fact that their Campaigns page is two years out of date on the issue of Oak Flat.<br />
<br />
These are the same advocates who allowed <b>EIGHT</b> years of Resolution shenanigans to pass before appointing a full-time rep to take part in the Oak Flat fight.<br />
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(And don't get me wrong: Curt is a good man in a tight spot, undoubtedly the best representation you and I could hope for, certainly better than having the Golden Boy come down from Boulder to negotiate between press releases. But even as cool and determined and gnarly as the pebble-wrestling champion of the internet forums may be, Mister Shannon can't turn back time and erase the multitude of mistakes made by the AF and feuding locals.)<br />
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So..... don't wait on their cues, or follow their lead... we don't have another eight years.<br />
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Support the project, share the link, speak out and call the advocates on their lack of participation. Ask Brady and the Boys why we have seen not a single AF sign or spokeman in, or Af webpage article/statement on, any demonstration regarding Oak Flat.<br />
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The crag you save may be your own.<br />
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-54806734074240028412015-02-12T08:54:00.000-08:002015-02-18T14:40:55.984-08:00Desert Winter<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Running up the fun 5.3 on the Boy Scout Wall. Later, Rich would remind me that I had recommended developing the area to him in the first place.<br />
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Good idea, Mike...</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Miss PinkPants sends!<br />
After almost four months off rock, Cindy came back strong and had fun all day on the ultra-quality pocketed volcanic stone of Wind Ridge.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Two old guys, somewhere on Wind Ridge, above the Wash Trail leading to Northern Devils Canyon</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Southern Cross boulder, far rim of the canyon, seen through the gap between towers in the East Wall of the Troll Hut</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rich LeMal; Mesa hardman, enthusiastic fisherman, Sunday school teacher, and early route developer of Apache Leap and Devil's Canyon, pulling into the overhanging jugfest of <b>Resolution</b>, a 5.9+ Cindy and I left in our wake in the Troll Hut, a little climbing area perched on the western rim of Northern Devil's Canyon.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Witness Protection Program Group Photo. End of the day on the Troll Hut trail. Thanks again to Rich LeMal for coming out to meet, camp and climb with us.<br />
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See you next trip!</td></tr>
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5894446105324585972.post-15250148109886242472015-01-21T09:34:00.000-08:002015-01-21T09:34:06.080-08:00Occupy Oak Flat- A Peaceful Demonstration<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Please join us if you can.<br />
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Looking forward to seeing Tommy and Kevin, Lynn and Conrad, Chris, Steph, Alex and all the rest of the celebrities who I know will lend their fame and support to the Native tribes and climbers of the area.<br />
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Michael Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10104941065315482844noreply@blogger.com0