Godspeed

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.



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.

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.



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.

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.



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.



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. 

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.

Proud new father and wide-eyed son in Cadiz, Spain

We came back to the States, where my sister Diana was born in Chickapee, Massachusetts.


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.





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.



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.



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.


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.

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.


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.


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.


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.






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.


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.


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.

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.


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.


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.


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.

The Gypsies reunite with the Grays in Scottsville, VA, March, 2013

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.

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.

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.


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.


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.


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.


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".


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.


But I will always miss his hearty laugh and his warm hugs, his unique perspective on being southern and an American.


Thank you, Dad.


Godspeed.

With my parents, Joyce and Gil, at the Lambert Hilltop Park Volunteer Center in Cherry Grove, WV

 

Syracuse University Outing Club and SHARe/UP: Spring Break 2019 The Tradition Continues

 

 

 

That's what friends are for...

Shelda Dewitt climbing Welcome to Reed's Creek... in boots.

Andy takes a well-deserved rest at the top of Afterglow

All the usual suspects...

The arrival of the pig

Rock Climbing Women Ambassador, MS fighter, stroke survivor, Friends of Smoke Hole co-founder Cindy Gray enjoying some time with the #slaydies of SUOC

Young blood and old school; Otto Neiler, Ronin and Evan Genay

"Yes, he is licking the frosting off the knife..."

"At this point, you old folks might want to just get a book..."

Unicycle stunts are always a favorite

Gypsies

The Rock Bar Crew

A new trail around the belay for Neverending Story

"Right there, dude... Gonna send that one..."

Shelda Dewitt, half an inch shorter than Lynn Hill,
crushing the biggest roof at Reed's Creek, Catfish Strangler


Bad. Ass.
Period.

Unsung Heroes; The Early Days of Smoke Hole Climbing

Unsung Heroes

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.


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.


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.




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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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."

I haven't seen Chris in too many years.

Gonna have to do something about that, soon.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

With my wife Cindy, he remains one of the most inspiring examples of courage in the face of adversity that I know.

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. 

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.

It is important to acknowledge and remember; we stand on the shoulders of giants.

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.

Hard Bark

This is how it is.


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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


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.

I’m further from the beginning of my climbing career than the end. 

And I am determined to make an impact on the future, beyond the lines I will leave behind and the trails I have built.  

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.

He's got a lot of hard bark on him. 


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.  

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. 

But I still hope that we’re wrong. 

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.

Because I want you to know that I feel 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.

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.

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.

I know you, because I was you.

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.


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.

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 believe in you, 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. 

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.

You hear the green song while everyone else is racing down the trail, hell-bent for leather to be first.


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.

And you're doing incredible things; you 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.

So enough preamble, I guess we're gonna dance or fight, one of the two, so we might as well get it on.

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.

(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...)

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 build but routinely maintain the trail system at several crags, for years. Decades, even...

All while holding down jobs requiring at least 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.

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.


Leave no trace... unless it's on a crag located on delicate access land that no one bothers to mention.


Respect the earth, but not the climbers whose work they are stealing to make money of which we never see a dime. 

Ask the people at the crag who put up the lines. If they can't tell you, find someone who can.

Any guidebook that doesn't list first ascentionists is crap. Period.


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.

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.

Half of you don't know who Catherine Freer was, despite all your feminist pride.


The other half have no idea who Warren Harding and Henry Barber were, although you can name all Sharma's hardest routes.


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.


We've tried being friendly and sharing and being part of a bigger community, and too often, we've seen what happens.

At Franklin. At Hidden Rocks. At Muir Valley and Joe’s Boulders, Oak Creek Overlook, Paradise Forks, Jack's, the Supes.


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.

The advocates' representatives make noises and posts but do little that doesn't promote their businesses while scheduling another fundraiser or membership drive.


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.

 

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.


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.

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.

So what?  

I’ve wasted more time on lines that didn’t go and partners that didn’t show.  

For what it's worth;

Ask questions and pay attention to the answers and remember who gave them to you. I


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.


Go to Park Service meetings and read their proposed policy changes and management plans, then comment on them. 


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.

Dig into the stories you aren’t hearing or reading about.  If your dollars support the big organizations, your voice needs to one of those to direct its course. 


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. 

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. 


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.  

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.
 

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.


Crags to save, destruction to halt.

Don’t just post a new status on Facebook, sign an online petition, use a new Snapchat frame or send a check. 


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. 

They are our crags and our lands. Our heritage and legacy.

Our responsibility. 

It starts with the little things.

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 place where Access Fund members have been bringing their dogs and friends and climbing for over 20 years.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

"That place looked sketchy." I was told.

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.

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.

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.

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, condescending, self-centered, entitled, unconcerned and unaware of the people they walked right over in their quest for fun.

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.

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.

Land trades hands, property lines are redrawn and the advocates and community have no clue.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe they just don't know how to start.

Let me help you, fellas... I've done this sort of thing before.

(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?)

It's simple;

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. 

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?

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 lead by example; finding, contacting, and then respecting the rights and wishes of landowners, informing their membership of issues and decisions, ALL of the issues and decisions.

If the Coordinators don't coordinate and the Presidents don't make decisions, get rid of them and find someone who will.


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; "


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."


Sorry, but isn't that how almost all access issues regarding private land begin?

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.
It doesn't take a guide or some administrative blessing from Boulder to acquire access.


Get out, get informed, get involved.

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.

It's not brain surgery or astrophysics.  


I mean, after all, even Mike Gray can figure it out.

Okay.... 'nuff said.  I want to thank you for your time, and your love of the sport I also love so very much. 

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.