Shannon leading Loosen Up, Red River Gorge, Kentucky
An evening passtime at Miguel's
Katy leading Fast Food Christians, Red River Gorge, Kentucky
Shannon coming across the South Peak summit ridge, Seneca Rocks, West Virginia
Shannon and Katy at the House of Trad with the guru, Tom
“Shannon!” Katy hollered out from ahead on the trail. “Look.” As soon as we were standing side by side I saw what it was she was yelling about. After all of our searches, our documentaries, our interviews with farm animals, the turtle found us. Katy let out a squeal of delight and amazement as she crouched and circled the turtle. With the video footage rolling Katy picked the little box turtle up with two fingers and made like Steve Irwin when he first came in contact with a poisonous and deadly species. She blinked twice, gulped, and then looked wide eyed at me, speechless. “That was easy,” she finally managed, “all I had to do was bend over and ‘get the turtle.’” Needless to say, crossing paths with the turtle, right at our feet, an arm's reach away was a little anticlimactic. We had built up the day in our heads; we even had some new “turtle-ing” boots. Katy was supposed to spot the turtle from the car window, cruising 30mph on a back road somewhere, I was going to slam on the brakes without even looking in the rear view mirror, then Katy would bust through the car door before I even brought the car to a halt. I would grab the camera as Katy took off, tearing through a wet bog in hot pursuit, a look of pure determination on her face. When she finally reached the turtle she would be covered in smelly mud, possibly a leech or two sucking at her toes. I would trail behind her, capturing everything, trying to steady the camera as I ran towards the breaking news. The turtle would put up a fierce fight and it would take the two of us, with all our new strong muscles, to pin it down and capture the final interview necessary for the completion of our turtle documentary, to be released in theaters summer of ’08. But I guess things don’t always work out like we imagine. That day, wandering frustrated, through the hills of the Red River Gorge in Kentucky, we were looking for Purple Valley, not a turtle. We explored for three hours before coming across Louie, the name affectionately given to all the turtles of Katy’s youth, and realized our venture led us right where it was supposed to. We turned around and headed back to the car.
The rest of our stay at Red River Gorge proved true to what we had already learned about Southern climbing. The sandstone was tough, overhanging, and much of it gave us a run for our money. We found every type of climbing to challenge us there, from overhanging walls, satisfying flakes and trad routes, to awkward or exposed climbs that tested our mental strength and abilities. We set up our home base at Miguel’s Pizza. Between the bright green front porch picnic tables and the back pond filled with bellowing frogs, Miguel’s hosts a bustling climber’s village. A sign proclaims the 2$/night campground is for climbers only, perfect for two gals on a budget. We added our tent to the many already sprawled out under the deciduous trees, a slack line creating an obstacle course in the main area of the campground. The nights were quietly reminiscent of our childhoods in Nebraska; the fields alight with fireflies and the evening air comfortably warm and sticky, only with the added element of a mysterious mist.
Aside from climbing, most of our time was spent at Miguel’s with our fast growing posse of friends. Ben was our favorite “neighbor” and Yatzee competitor. Mark, who was eleven and the owner’s son, beat us in basketball, Yatzee, bike riding, extreme walking, and just about everything else we challenged him to. Dario, Mark’s older brother, allowed me to give him a new summer cut…enough said. The most generous of our new friends was an eight-year old who came up to me one evening and held out a marshmallow, “Would you like my last marshmallow?” he asked. “That is really nice of you,” I said, graciously accepting. Then he walked over to Kate, held out a half full bag of marshmallows and asked her if she wanted one too. He had glow-in-the-dark shoes and pushed me into a pile of sticky garbage bags during an intense game of basketball. And let’s not forget our newly adopted brother, Greg, who was a justifiably cocky climber, and somehow wavered on the side of endearing to the point that Katy and I wanted to take him home and make him our own. And true to our fashion of attracting strange hounds there was our favorite pooch, a German Shorthair Pointer named Snoop Dog…and last and certainly least in this case were the guys that introduced us to Kentucky Moonshine, complete in a Mason jar. If we had had to drive the next day the one-inch rule certainly would have been in effect.
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“This one’s on me.” I watched Shannon slyly slide a plastic gold pirate coin towards the bartender. The guy at the end of the bar lost his excitement as he realized the bartender was not going to accept the booty and he would therefore be responsible for paying for his own drink. I had the same realization and pulled a plastic sword from my boot and pointed it at Dave, the bartender. “Argghh. You better take it,” I said in my best pirate dialect…then erupted in laughter. I was sitting next to my friend Jeff. Shannon and I met Jeff in college and now here he was in West Virginia working as a raft guide on the New River Gorge. Jeff’s friend Amy seemed to be in shock. “They need to quit spending so much time in the car,” she said quietly to Jeff. I silently disagreed…it was too much fun. Our stint at the New River was short lived, our pirate career didn’t really pan out (no one wanted to accept our currency and our weapons were made of low grade plastic.) We stayed only a couple of days in the tent commune the raft guides called home. It was time to move on, so we built Jeff a table with scraps from the junk pile, wrote him a “Dear John” letter and headed out with the promise of a lake where we could swim and climb.
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Imagine the Caribbean Ocean, the pristine blue waters, crystal clear from surface to sea floor. Now imagine shrinking the Caribbean into a largish lake and placing it in the middle of West Virginia, surrounding it with 60 + foot slightly overhanging cliffs of sandstone. Then, give the lake a name like Summersville. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would want to visit a place like this, right? Well, unfortunately Katy and I were forced, 100% against our will, to ascend the walls around the lake, in our bathing suits, sun gently warming our backs, only to reach our desired height, and then plunge into the deep cool water below. We spent the day like this, fish with climbing shoe fins, and lizards with a strict basking regiment. But I don’t want you to become deceived; this day of ‘fun in the sun’ was by no means our choice. We would much rather have been macramé-ing hanging plant baskets or playing dodge ball with blind children. Between swimming and deep water soloing we met up with our friends Jeff and Jordan who we had left behind in the New River Gorge. They met us at a climbing area called Orange Oswald Wall, Katy and I had familiarized ourselves with the area the day prior. Katy, Jeff, and I took turns leading routes, and appropriately enough we climbed one called Jeff’s Bunny Hop. Jeff was excited to climb a route with his name in it and Katy and I were excited to get back to climbing routes with fluffy cotton animals in the title. After not enough time we packed up our belongings and headed north-east to Seneca Rocks.
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"No sense letting good meat go to waste." The words of our camp neighbors were ringing in my head as I bit into the tiny leg and tore the meat off the tiny leg bones. I am really eating road kill squirrel, I thought to myself. I looked over at Shannon, I could almost hear the vomit rising in her throat. Then I looked back to John, the proprietor behind my rodent breakfast. “Not too bad,” I told him. It was probably the best meat I’d eaten in a while…after all it didn’t come from a can or in log form….and probably no hormones, steroids or antibiotics either…just a little critter whose luck had run out as he tried to cross West Virginia Highway 33.
Shannon and I were staying in Yokum’s Indian Princess campground, just up a little gravel road from a pavilion (which we naturally assumed was for illegal dog fighting and not picnics), just across the street and over Seneca Creek from Harper’s General Store where we made phone calls from a pay phone on the porch and bought a six pack of Coors Light. The ‘town’ had two stores…one owned by the Yokums and one by the Harpers. The word on the street was there was something of a family feud between the two and this feud played out in my head in cartoon style complete with shotguns, yelling, and line drawing in the dirt. Our campsite, the two stores and two climbing shops that made up the town were nestled in the shadow of Seneca Rocks. The quartzite cliffs stood 1000 feet over the valley, like sentinel guards, protecting it and it’s few inhabitants. From this valley, I watched in the fading light each evening as the cliffs soaked up the last golden rays of the gloaming.
I sat perched high above the valley watching a vulture spiral upward on the thermals while I belayed Shannon up the last pitch of Old Ladies Route, a relaxing climb with astounding views. I was lost in the moment…a tiger swallowtail fluttered below as I fed rope out and it disappeared into the chimney. Minutes passed and soon I was not lost in the moment. I was in the chimney cursing Shannon’s name. “Hey Shannon,” I yelled. “Guess what I’m doing.” “Uh…” I could hear the shit-eating grin in her voice… “getting that little nut out?” These nut placements of Shannon’s had become somewhat of a signature move of hers and I smiled as I finally loosened it out of it’s rock home…a solid 15 minutes after I had first tried to pull it out.
Our days at Seneca were spent climbing the labyrinth of routes. I say labyrinth of routes because Seneca Rocks is not a ‘crag’…routes are not lined up, execution style to be crossed off like items on a grocery list. Rather, routes spring up all over the uncharacteristically large rock protrusion. Routes meet up with other routes. They top out on different tiers. You can climb one pitch of a route, walk along a ledge, go past two large trees and start up the second pitch of another route. Each climb brings you to a new perch, with a different vulture's-eye view of the valley. My favorite climb, Tomato, actually ended with a traverse across the narrow summit ridge of the South Peak of Seneca Rocks. Shannon put it best when she looked at me, her eyes wide like a kid with a new toy, and said “it’s like a real life choose your own adventure book.” It’s an area steeped in tradition (people were climbing in Seneca as early as 1905) and sitting on the summit is a gratifying yet humbling experience.
We had spent a day feeling out the rock and felt confident to push ourselves. I sat at the top of the first pitch of the route we had selected for the challenge. A man was rappelling off a nearby route. “Hey Kate, you on ecstasy?” he asked. This was a question I had previously regarded as one I might be asked in the artificial glow of a black light, with techno music blaring, somewhere in the depths of a city…but, from my rock perch, the answer was simple. “Yep,” I told him with a smile. Shannon and I were on Ecstasy, but not the drug reserved for raves and people who are masochistic when it comes to their brain cells, but a three pitch route with great exposure. The man inquiring about our climbing pursuit (not our drug habits) was Tom and he had leant us his guide book.
Borrowing Tom’s guidebook turned out to be the best thing we did. When we went to return it, he invited us into what a sign above the swinging saloon-style doors proclaimed was “The House of Trad.” The House of Trad was an outdoor porch overlooking Seneca Creek. A wooden mandala from Thailand hung on the wall and a plastic hula dancer stood motionless on the TV which was playing music from the Jam Bands channel of a satellite radio station. A bar swung out from the main wall and we sat with Tom and had a beer. Ben, one of the climbing guides at Tom’s ‘compound’ soon joined us, bringing his friendly smile and calm company. Like a bigger wiser bird and two little birds learning to fly, Tom soon took Shannon and I under his wing…and it was cozy. He gave us a thorough crash-course in anchor building and then fed us mouth watering barbequed chicken legs (a much more appetizing meal than squirrel.) Two days later he looked over our shoulders while we placed nuts, hexes, tri-cams and camalots in the walls of the climbing center he had designed and built. It may sound cliché, but words cannot do justice to the time we spent at Tom’s and Seneca Rocks.
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