Dear Mike,

I’m sorry, but it seems like you still don’t get it. The problem with selling off public lands is not that they might end up in the hands of the Chinese, or BlackRock, or whoever it is you happen to dislike. The problem with selling off public lands is that they will no longer be in public hands.

For a century, the lands in the Hudson Valley of New York that climbers call “the Gunks” were owned by one family. In the 1970s, as it passed from one generation to another, their holdings were split in three — Minnewaska State Park; the Mohonk Preserve, which is a non-profit conservancy; and the Mohonk Mountain House, which is still owned by the family that used to own all of it.

Minnewaska initially banned climbing, but, being publicly owned, pressure could be applied, and now two good-sized areas are open to climbing.

The Mohonk Preserve has always allowed — indeed, supported — climbing, and its two main cliffs are crowded with climbers, even on weekdays.

Some of the best climbing — and indeed, a good number of my favorite routes in the Gunks — are up at Skytop, the cliffs by the Mohonk Mountain House. In 1946, the hardest route in the United States might have been Minnie Belle, at Skytop, first climbed by Fritz Weissner and William Shockley (yes, that William Shockley). In 1967, one of the hardest routes in the U.S. was Foops, first free climbed by John Stannard. In 1974, the hardest route in the U.S. was Supercrack, first climbed by Steve Wunsch.

The Mohonk Mountain House used to welcome climbing, and, back in the day, before the resort became chic, a certain class of climber could afford to stay there. But in the 1990s, their calculus changed. Liability, they said, and that was probably a factor, even though the Access Fund, a climber advocacy group, offered to pay for a liability insurance rider for rock climbing. For a few years, climbing was restricted to certain times of the year and certain parts of the cliff. Then it was banned altogether.

Private ownership is a mixed bag.

There are private lands where climbing is not allowed at all — one of them is at the top of the hill on the road I live on. Local climbers have been asking for years to be allowed to climb there; the people saying no are my neighbors, only two houses down the road from me.

There are private lands where climbing is allowed with restrictions. Just the other day, someone in the Pittsburgh climbing gym told me proudly about their first multi-pitch climb. It’s a route called Roadside Attraction, in the Red River Gorge, in Kentucky. I’ve done the climb twice myself, and each time, underwent a cumbersome permitting process.

And there are private lands where climbing is embraced by private owners. Horseshoe Canyon Ranch, in Arkansas, has made a business out of climbing, camping, cabin rentals, and mountain biking. (I don’t mountain bike, but they have some spectacular-looking well-designed trails with twists and turns and jumps.)

And public ownership of climbing areas is no panacea. I mentioned in a recent post that the state authorities withdrew access to climbing at one of western Pennsylvania’s most popular areas, Lost Crag. The Access Fund is constantly fighting off proposals to restrict climbing in national parks and other federal lands. Minnewaska has still more cliffline we could climb on.

Still, when climbing is publicly owned, there are political cards climber advocates can play. Mike Lee is just lying when he says the people have no recourse.

On the other hand, when climbing is privately owned, there really is no recourse. And even when climbing seems safe in private hands — e.g., Horseshoe Canyon Ranch — circumstances or ownership can change. Climbing was allowed at Skytop until it wasn’t.

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The idea that public ownership of land is antithetical to the very real need for more housing is belied by the many places — from California’s Yosemite National Park to New York’s Adirondack State Park — where private homes exist inside the park boundaries. Has Mike Lee explored the many possible compromises and collaborations between wilderness interests and housing developers?

And finally, as a practical matter, I suspect Lee is lying when he implies that public ownership of large parts of Utah costs its taxpayers money. Has he done the calculation that would balance the minuses against the pluses, the most notable of which is the jobs and money that Utah’s five national parks are responsible for? The National Park Service made an estimate of that a couple of years ago:

DENVER, Colo. – The National Park Service reports that 15.7 million visitors to Utah’s 13 national parks spent $1.9 billion in the state in 2023. That spending resulted in 26,507 jobs and had a cumulative benefit to the state economy of $3 billion.

I haven’t calculated the balance sheet either, but $3 billion buys a lot of local search-and-rescue operations.

Lee’s assertion that the national parks are mismanaged is a joke and a projection. Utah has some of the most popular parks in the U.S. (Zion was #2 last year) and the real challenge is in maintaining a balance between offering wilderness experiences that can only be enjoyed by fewer people and more sedate experiences enjoyable to many more visitors. Zion and Glacier (and soon Yosemite) have mandatory or nearly-mandatory shuttle systems to limit the number of vehicles on the roads. The most popular hike in Zion, Angels Landing, has a lottery system to limit the number of people on the trail. The most popular campgrounds in the most popular parks need to be booked six months in advance and often six months minus 10 minutes is too late; they’re all gone.

The parks need more support, and more public debate to properly balance their complex and conflicting missions. What they don’t need is to be sold off into the hands of developers who will offer the general public no experiences at all.

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Even the House backed away from a similar but smaller (500,000 acres) provision after it faced bipartisan opposition led by Ryan Zinke (R-MT), currently representing Montana in Congress and a former Secretary of the Interior. “Once the land is sold, we will never get it back. God isn’t creating more land.”

The coalition opposing the measure seems powerful but tenuous to me. It includes the Wilderness Society, Montana Conservation Voters, Trout Unlimited, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Outdoor Recreation Roundtable. As the Daily Montanan reports,

“Tens of thousands of Montana hunters, anglers, and other outdoor enthusiasts have been flooding the Capitol switchboard, attending weekend rallies, and writing letters and postcards to Congress, asking that the public lands transfer amendment be killed,” said Mike Mershon, board chair and president of the Montana Wildlife Federation, in a statement.

and

“Selling our shared public lands to pay for tax cuts for the rich was and is an awful, un-American idea, and we appreciate Rep Zinke’s work to keep it out of the bill. His colleagues never should have considered it in the first place,” Lydia Weiss, senior director for government relations at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement.

The bill was also opposed by climbers’ groups, led by the Access Fund.

With the help of the Outdoor Alliance GIS Lab, the Access Fund found that 100,000 miles of trails, 3,405 river miles, and 45,000 climbing routes across 11 states are threatened, including major climbing areas in California, Arizona, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming (maps here and here).

I say “tenuous” because relations between climbing and other outdoor activities aren’t always smooth. When I lived in Pittsburgh, our favorite crag near enough to day-trip to was Lost Crag, on State Game Land 51, near Ohiopyle, about 75 minutes from the city. That is, until it and five other climbing areas were closed to climbing in early 2022. The reason? Hunters complained that climbing interfered with hunting. In its decision, the state said:

“State game lands are different from other public properties in that their primary purpose is to provide wildlife habitat and hunting and trapping opportunities for license buyers. Other recreation on game lands often is permitted, though some activities are prohibited or limited during hunting or trapping seasons.”

This is particularly disingenuous in the case of Lost Crag, which consists of a small set of freestanding cliffs with few trees — and little wildlife — in the immediate vicinity.

At least there was a process — and an appeal — available in the case of the Pennsylvania lands. (The climbing community lost on appeal.) And at least the lands were not sold off to the highest bidder and ruined as wilderness.

Neither is the case when it comes to the U.S. Senate legislation. As the Center for American Progress notes, there would be no public input, and little public notice:

The bill requires some consultation with local government, governors, and tribes, but no opportunity for public input. Currently, identifying public lands for potential disposal involves a transparent, public process, but those requirements would be erased by the bill. While lands directly identified for sale by land management agencies are supposed to be publicized, nominations by private interests are not covered by that requirement. Agencies are not even required by the bill to disclose when public lands have actually been sold or to whom; instead, the public may only find out when they show up and see “no trespassing” signs.

Moreover, some of the land will be specifically designated for housing, with “no requirements for affordability or density, and there would be no significant guardrails to prevent valued public lands from being sold for trophy homes, pricey vacation spots, exclusive golf communities, or other developments.” The remainder could be used for almost any private purpose; presumably much of it will go for mining and logging.

As Azcentral reports, in its state alone:

Over 14 million acres of public land across Arizona, including popular areas like Sabino Canyon and Mount Lemmon near Tucson, could be eligible for sale if a Republican-backed measure passes the U.S. Senate.

Mount Lemmon — and Cochise Stronghold, which is also included in the bill — are Arizona’s premier destinations for climbers.

Which brings us to Mike Lee, who, as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has spearheaded this legislation.

Wait, you ask — is this the same Mike Lee who made fun of the shootings of Minnesota lawmakers last week? The same.

Lee is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served a two-year mission in the Texas Rio Grande Valley. He went to BYU and clerked twice for Samuel Alito (at the Third Circuit and then again after Alito was elevated to the high court).

Lee’s father, Rex Lee, was Solicitor General in the Reagan administration and had been the first dean of the BYU law school that his son would graduate from. This is another tiresome example of the opposite of DEI — hiring someone because they’re the “right” race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. (Jon Stewart recently told a “what-the-f***-is-wrong-with-that-guy story” about Mike Lee here at about the 23:30 mark.)

Lee still has strong libertarian instincts. Remarkably, he “voted against the National Defense Authorization Act of 2014, which allowed the government to detain without trial anyone—including U.S. citizens—suspected of fighting with al-Qaeda.”

Of course, that was when Obama was the president detaining U.S. citizens. Has Lee defended due process lately, under a Republican president? Sorry, no. Libertarianism is fine, as long as it doesn’t interfere with MAGA loyalties.

Lee’s state, Utah, is one of only two with five national parks. National parks are immunized from the predations of Mike Lee and his strip-mining legislation. The law would sell off lands that have a different, lesser protected status — those managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Utah also has a giant share — 8.4 million acres — of wilderness lands.

The different statuses of public lands is confusing and can seem arbitrary. Consider Yellowstone National Park. To the south is Grand Teton, which also has the exalted status of being a national park. But south of Grand Teton are three national forests, including the Bridger–Teton National Forest, home of my first backpacking trip back in 1982.

Surrounding Yellowstone to its north and east is the Custer Gallatin National Forest. Does it make sense to treat these lands entirely differently? The Sierra Club notes that Custer Gallatin “is an integral part of the vast Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the most intact temperate ecosystem remaining in the northern hemisphere.”

(My first trip to Yellowstone, we camped with walk-in permits. You can’t camp in a national park without a permit, but wilderness lands are fair game. We arrived the night before and pitched a tent in a clear flat area a hundred yards across the “border” in Custer Gallatin. It turned out our spot was clear and flat because it was an animal trail, which I discovered when I got up to pee and saw, in a dim pre-dawn light, a pair of moose, heading down to a watering hole.)

While the world is busy decrying Mike Lee’s tweets, the language he buried in the Senate reconciliation bill would drive a wedge onto the borders of our national lands and pry off hundreds of millions of acres, potentially stripping their mountaintops, sending topsoil into nearby rivers, and building logging and mining roads across them so as to better denude them of their forests and blast mines deep into their hearts.

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A couple of sections of my gym were set aside yesterday for adaptive climbing. There had to be at least a dozen volunteers helping a couple of dozen, mostly young, in some cases first-time climbers, all of whom needed some kind of physical assistance. Some had cognitive issues, for some it was coordination; some had overt physical handicaps; one fellow had to be helped out of a wheelchair to climb.

I looked over to the area where people were being fitted with their climbing harnesses. There was one guy, young, but not as young as some, whose harness was hanging way lower on his body than it should. I was undecided whether to say something to one of the volunteers, or just go over and offer to fix it myself. Then I realized that he was waiting for someone else to be done before he could have his harness put on properly. In all this time looking at him, we made eye contact. He asked me something I couldn’t hear until I walked over. “Do you work here?” he asked. “No,” I answered, “but I climb here a lot.”

We exchanged names. Brandon asked me if I knew the Steelers score. I said I didn’t. He asked about how Pitt did yesterday. I had to admit I didn’t know. “I don’t follow it much,” I said. I pointed to his blue and yellow Pitt sweatshirt. “But I see you do!” It was his turn to have his harness fitted. We shook hands.

Later, I did look up the scores. Pitt had lost, but the Steelers won. I looked around for him. “Good news for the Steelers, huh?” We did a thumbs-interlocked handshake.  Later, just as my partner and I were packing up to go, I watched him climb. He had coordination as well as cognitive limitations. He didn’t get far up the wall, even assisted by a volunteer pulling on a rope system that had a 3-1 pulley. Still, everyone around him — it seemed like both his parents were there —cheered when he came down. I went over and gave him a high-five.

Donald Trump wants to eliminate the Department of Education. One of the most important things it does — maybe the most important — is administer funds appropriated by Congress to help schools help students with disabilities and ensure that those students are not discriminated against.

Vivek Ramaswamy wants to stop funding any programs whose Congressional authorization has expired. Besides money for NASA (some of which goes to SpaceX) and $120 billion in veterans’ health care, the cuts would include Head Start, which provides funds for low-income students’ early education.

Elon Musk wants to hack $2 trillion dollars from the federal budget. It’s an absurd number, but we can expect all parts of the so-called discretionary budget to see massive cuts if Congress allows it.

(It’s not clear how it would work without explicit Congressional approval. Congress has two ways to continue a program on which it spends money — it can explicitly reauthorize the program, or it can just continue to fund it.)

Presumably, some portion of my monthly dues at the climbing gym went to staffing the assistive climbing event on Sunday, even if many of the people doing the assisting were volunteers. I wasn’t asked by the gym if it was okay to spend that money that way, nor should I have been.

Voters weren’t asked if it’s okay to spend some portion of our taxes on education for those with special needs. Nor need we be. Arguably, we gave permission when we gave Trump a second term, but for the people who want to make that argument, did we also give him permission to slash veterans’ health benefits?

The fact is, we’re a rich enough country to reduce the deficit without putting programs through the shredder, if we each contributed in ways similar to decades past. For much of the 20th century, marginal tax rates were 70% or more, including a 91% rate during the administration of that noted socialist, Dwight Eisenhower.  

The fact is, we all have limitations. There are climbers who warm up on the climbs I can’t complete. There are climbers no one would call disabled, some half my age, who can’t complete routes that I can. Neither fact makes any of us less human.

One way or another, my gym will continue its adaptive climbing programs. But these are dessert for the people who benefit from it. Their main meal, when it comes to developing their best selves, is public education, and they’re likely to be starved of it in the name of freedom by people who are as selfish as they are stupid and whose idea of freedom comes down to not giving a fuck about anyone who isn’t exactly like them.   

Biden achieved most of that. To be sure, he mismanaged Covid, though not nearly as badly as Trump had, and Gaza, where his vast experience in foreign affairs was a hindrance, blinding him to the ways Netanyahu was playing him. But he wildly exceeded expectations with the IRA and CHIPS. He maneuvered a reluctant nation and a hesitant Europe through the Ukraine crisis, with almost as much boldness as was needed.

I was frankly surprised and pleased. He had maybe outgrown his serial plagiarism, his stutter, his torpedoing of Anita Hill, his racist crime bills, and his lifelong reluctance to support reproductive freedoms.

Yet, Biden is such a poor speaker — both in style and content — that I had never been able to get through an entire speech of his. (He had, to cite just one painful example, barely out-debated Sarah “I can see Russia from my kitchen window” Palin in 2008.) But I made it all the way through the State of the Union, because it was excellent. He was excellent. Still, most of the country clearly didn’t want him to run again.

In February, Ezra Klein put words to our thoughts with an electrifying podcast (“Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden”) that insisted it wasn’t too late for Biden to step aside after all. Klein acknowledged that the Biden of the State of the Union was up to the job. But would we have that version of Biden for four more years?

Then came the June debate. It turned out, we didn’t even have that version of Biden for four months. Fortunately, this time, he could feel the cold hand of the political grim reaper on his shoulder.

Again Ezra Klein called for some kind of selection process. Again I agreed with him.

But by about a week into the Harris campaign, my usual cynicism was largely replaced by hope and joy. Miraculously, the mainstream media supported her with heroic photography, shooting her from street level, upward. Miraculously, she chose my guy, Walz, instead of my governor. Miraculously, she drew huge crowds and inspired even bigger Zoom congregations — and gobs of small money.

I went all in. Voter registration, including one day at the county jail. Phone banking. Letters to fellow Pennsylvanians. Postcards to western North Carolina.

And a ton of canvassing — two or three times a week. Toward the end, I was a “captain,” helping train and send out canvassers, many of them from safely blue states like California, Illinois, and New Jersey.

And this week, I hung up my baseball cap with three Harris–Walz stickers on its brim,  and put on an imaginary non-partisan one. I was a Judge of Elections. It was a long day and the judge has the longest day of anyone.

My nephew had inconveniently scheduled his wedding for the weekend before, so my friend Fred — who would also be a poll worker on Tuesday, in a different district (who and with his wife Ellen would host an election-night watch party afterward) — had to pick up my clear plastic Judge’s tote bag for me.

My poll was at a library in Wilkinsburg, a small town on the other side of Pittsburgh’s east edge. I was there before 6 am, organizing my team to get our machines and paperwork ready to open the doors at 7 am. There was already a long line.

It was my first time at this precinct, but throughout the day, people who had voted there for years said it was more crowded than they had ever seen. In a heavily black neighborhood, it was busier than even 2008, I was told.

It was also my first time as Judge. I made mistake after mistake. None prevented any voter from voting, but they didn’t shorten the lines any. Voters were impatient, but I reminded myself that an extra five- or ten-minute wait was nothing compared to the hours-long waits voters had elsewhere, and it was more important to get everything done right.

New rules concerning mail-in balloting and provisional ballots made for new procedures, additional voter lists to look people up on, and time-consuming additional forms to fill out — most of which had to be done, or supervised and signed off on, by the Judge.

Fortunately, four of my five other team members had been poll workers before, at the same precinct. As well, mine was one of three precincts at the same location. We had one or two Constables for most of the day, and, more importantly, one of the other Judges was smart, experienced, and ready to answer my questions and resolve my confusions.

It was one of those long days where at 1:30 it seemed like it would never end, at 4:30 the afternoon rush began, at 6:30 one of the constables looked at his watch and said we’re nearly done, and at 7:30 I realized that there was some paperwork I could get started even before the closing of the polls at 8:00 pm.

It took me till about 9:10 to get everything shut down and tallied up, and my team out the door. They were done, but I had another hour or so, first getting to the local processing center (a 6–12 grade school about 15 minutes away) and then waiting on a line of fellow Judges that was two corridors long.

There, two workers broke the seals we had placed on my yellow tote full of ballots and an orange plastic bag containing two separate thumb drives and the keys and password to the voting machines. They signed the paperwork that completed the chain of custody for the ballots, paperwork, and equipment. I hadn’t screwed up anything important.

Finally, about 10:30, I arrived at Fred and Ellen’s house, where the seltzer was refreshing, the wine welcome, the results bitter, and the mood glum.

Harris had made mistakes as a first-time presidential candidate, but not as many as I made as a first-time judge. She failed to offer big, easy-to-understand ideas and themes. She failed to break with Biden on Gaza, and she was in no position to break with him on the border or inflation. Failing to break with Biden on anything at all (“Frankly, nothing comes to mind”) was probably the biggest mistake of a campaign that was otherwise remarkably free of them.  

I do think that she could have done more to explain inflation. And she got bogged down in the mechanics of what she would do about it, instead of (as her opponent was wont to do) just promising to fix it. She got people worried about reproductive rights, but she didn’t get enough women to the polls to put her over the top. She never tried to get people worried about Social Security, though today, a mere three days after the election, the headlines are focused on it.

Speaking of the headlines, the media deserves a lot more blame than Harris for this loss, and billionaire dark money even more blame than that (most especially in Senate races in Pa., Tx., Mont., and Ohio). I’ll save those thoughts for another time.

I’ll also save for another day any discussion of a shockingly evident lack of understanding of the election’s stakes, candidates, and processes, and some absolutely basic matters of civics and government that go way beyond the failings of the media and take us down a road of schools, literacy, and education finances. I saw it all summer and fall while canvassing; I saw it on NextDoor; and I saw it in my precinct on election day.

Today I want to say I did all I could, and it wasn’t enough. A lot of good people did all they could, and it wasn’t enough. Harris did all she could, and it wasn’t enough.

And to those people who are saying, don’t give up, the fight continues (Elizabeth Warren and Jon Stewart, I’m looking at yinz), I say, f*** you. Winning this election was a piece of cake compared to what it would take to save democracy now, and everything we did wasn’t enough. If you’re not feeling more than a little despair, you’re just not paying attention.

Image: ResearchGate

And so a grid could be created with IMPs talking to each other in the center and all of the disparate mainframes on the periphery, each connected to its IMP. This was what the early Arpanet looked like, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The DoD Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) contracted with a Cambridge, Mass., company, Bolt, Beranek, & Newman (BBN, still around but now owned by Raytheon) for the IMPs. Both Bolt and Beranek were MIT professors (Newman joined a bit later) and the first offices were on the MIT campus. As could be expected, MIT grad students contributed to this early work, including a young computer scientist named Willie Crowther.

I once tried to write an article on why so many rock climbers are scientists and engineers. Being a Gunks climber, I had in mind Wiessner (chemist); Shockley, Lester Germer, John Reppy, and John Stannard (physicists); John Gill and Rich Goldstone (mathematicians), and so on, but also that Frost and Jardine were both aerospace engineers. Crowther wasn’t the only computer scientist, but probably the most famous point of intersection with climbing.

In fact, it wasn’t just these famous climbers. Shockley’s co-Nobelist, John Bardeen, also climbed, and for all I know, so did the third in that Nobel trio Walter H. Brattain. All three worked at Bell Labs at the time as would, later, Neil J.A. Sloane, co-author of the climbing guidebook for New Jersey. The other co-author, Paul Nick, is a software engineer. The guy who designed the first New Jersey Rock Gym, in Wayne, N.J., whose name I can’t recall, was a mechanical engineer working as an electrical engineer, or vice versa.

Ted Selker, a specialist in human–computer interaction who designed, among other things, the first trackpoint (the pink rubber button in the middle of a laptop keyboard that was originally created for the revolutionary IBM ThinkPad), once told me that the only reason he even interviewed at IBM was because, while working for a small company in California, he was told about an HCI position at IBM’s Poughkeepie offices. “Wait, isn’t Poughkeepsie right near New Paltz?” he asked them. In other words, he took the interview because it was a free trip to the Gunks.

Anyway, while writing this article (which never got published) I had trouble contacting Willie Crowther at first, because Google kept coming back with references to a Willie Crowther who invented the first adventure game (aptly named "Adventure"). When I finally got ahold of the Internet/rock climbing Willie Crowther, I mentioned that. “Oh,” he said. “That was me too.”

Willie put up three of my favorite routes at the Gunks: Hawk (5.5), Moonlight (5.6), and Arrow (5.8). When I was first going through the grades, which for me were all onsights, I had a lot of trouble finding the second pitch of Moonlight. Wait, I thought to myself, this was done by the same guy who did Hawk, which I had done. Where would the Hawk guy go? As soon as I asked myself that, I saw the long traversing line of the pitch.

Arrow is a puzzle for anyone the first time they climb it, and maybe subsequent times too. My first time, I couldn’t figure out the crux, which is right near the end of the climb and right at a bolt, one of two on the route. There did not seem to be a way to go straight up, at least not a way that I, early in my 5.8 leading, could do. There might be a way to the right, but that looked off-route and not easy. There was also a way to the left, which seemed off-route as well, but not so hard. I finally went that way, convincing myself that if I didn’t go entirely into the lichen, I wasn’t entirely off-route.

There’s always been a question about the bolts on Arrow. First, let me describe the route. A lovely 5.6 pitch takes you to the GT ledge. There, a few tricky-but-not-hard up-and-traversing moves take you to good gear below a tricky and wildly fun 5.6ish roof.

From there, face climbing on stunningly gorgeous white rock takes you to a stance, a bolt, and a tricky 5.7ish crux-ish set of moves, from which you get some more gear and a short, easy runout to the second bolt. The stance there is a little too good, giving you an infinite amount of time to look around and be confused about which way to go (see above). Once you make the crux move (or avoid it by going left or right), you’re only a move or two from a ledge and an all-too-popular also-used-by-neighboring-climbs rap station.

Gunks climbers, of my generation at least, were told the same legend about the bolts: Willie Crowther climbed Arrow without them, but friends told him it was unsafe without at least a couple of bolts, and so he put them in on rappel. That contradicts the black Williams guidebook, which says, “FA 1960: Wilie Crowther and Gardiner Perry, after rappelling down to clean the face and place the bolts.” (The gray guidebook is less committal, saying, “The First Ascent party placed the bolts on rappel,” that is, not saying whether it was before or after the first ascent.) Swain as well says that the bolts were placed “after the first ascent.”

As it turns out, there’s a wonderful thread on Mountain Project that explains everything. After much back-and-forth, someone named Eric Engberg posted “from the ‘mouth’ (keyboard) of the horse” with Crowther’s email response:

1st time up, went around the hard move to the left

To see if it was even possible, went back and did it on top rope.  It went but was covered with lichen — a real mess

then cleaned it, bolted it, and led it.

In those days, I wanted any route I put in to be reasonably safe for my friends to lead, and this was a nice route. So yes, bolt it.

Today, most people go somewhat right of the route I found - mine was a pure mantle.  The  slightly easier route to the right was buried in lichen.

Gardiner Perry was first to spot the line.  He tried to lead it, then came back and got me to lead it for him.

So there we have it. In a way, every theory is true. Willie did climb the route without the bolts—but without making the crux move. The route was then cleaned and bolted on rappel—not before the FA, but before it was ever climbed as we do today. Gran’s guidebook, which doesn’t mention the bolts at all, does say, “The final move can be avoided by an escape to the left.”

One final note: Arrow is the only route I’ve ever heard called “The Arrow” and, to my experience, that’s the way just about every climber older than myself refers to it. Apparently, though, it was common back in the day to say, “the X,” even if the route name doesn’t have a “the.” (Some do, e.g., The High Traverse out at Millbrook.) Gran even says, in the intro section of his guidebook, “the Betty.” I asked Dick Williams (born in 1938) about it, and he said, “Hmm, I never noticed that.” Nor had Joe Bridges (born 1939). Just one more cool custom gone by the wayside.

Anyway, if you haven’t ever climbed the Arrow, it’s a must-do. And if you’re confused about the move, don’t ask yourself, What would Willie Crowther do?  

“Climbing takes skill,” he says, “whether free or with aid. The art of nailing takes many years to master. However, there is no art to pure bolting. One can learn to place a bolt in a few minutes and, with enough endurance, ascend any wall in the world.”

There’s a lot to disagree with in this short statement.

To be sure, climbing takes skill, whether free or with aid. There is, though, an art to bolting, and that’s even true using a power drill, which was not something available to bolters in Gran’s day. There is, nonetheless, an art to deciding where to bolt, to minimizing the number of bolts, to sussing out a line even if it requires a few bolts.

Or even if it requires many bolts. There is, for example, the famous case of Royal Robbins, Warren Harding, and the Wall of Early Morning Light. Here, the leading Yosemite climber of the era went to repeat the most bolted line of the era, determined to not only climb the route without the bolts but to chop them as well. But, as one account puts it, after a few pitches “it became apparent that Harding had taken greater risks and done the route in a more adventurous style than Robbins had imagined.”

In other words, three hundred bolts in three thousand feet is a lot, but not enough to keep the route from being “dangerous and challenging.” Robbins completed the route without further chopping and would subsequently compliment the line and the achievement of it.

Even nowadays, when a route might have a bolt every eight or ten feet, placing bolts on rappel and with a power drill, creating a new climb takes an eye for a beautiful line and skill in deciding where to place the bolts.

There’s an irony to Gran’s position here. Climbers nowadays would take greater issue with the aid climbing and the pitons than with the bolts. Indeed, in just a few years, climbers in the Gunks, and soon elsewhere would start eliminating pitons from their racks. Leading Gunks climbers of the late 1960s, soon to be followed by the leading lights of Yosemite and Eldorado Canyon, in part inspired by the first Earth Day and the nascent environmental movement, began to look at nailing in a new, unflattering way — as a technique that damaged the rock, altered rock climbs, and denied to future climbers the same experience that earlier ascensionists enjoyed.

In short, pitons violated the maxim, quoted by Gran himself, to “leave nothing but tracks and take nothing but memories.”

The case against aid is even easier to make, as it was inherent in Gunks climbing right from its earliest days. Both Fritz Wiessner, who never aided in his 60 years of rock climbing, and Hans Kraus, who aided only rarely, were exemplars of free climbing. And it shows. The first route in the Gunks was climbed in 1935. The first aid route wasn’t until 1946, Hardware Route at Skytop. The first aid route in the Trapps, Something Interesting, was also done in 1946. There were already at least 22 other climbs in the Trapps, and 15 others at Skytop.

Aid, where it existed, was eliminated as quickly as possible. Retribution, for example, was freed just three years after it was first climbed in 1958. (We don’t know the aid rating, as it was freed before the first guidebook. We do know there was only one point of aid, and so a reasonable guess would be 5.8 A1.)

P38 took only two years. These were not exceptions. Nosedive took five years and Doug’s Roof took 18, but Squiggles Direct and Cilley Dickin' were both freed the same year they were first climbed (1963 and 1981, respectively).

Moreover, in their desire to avoid aid, the Gunks has routes where the FA is a toprope, rather than aid. Cilley Dickin' in fact is one. Kevin Bein freed his own Creature Features (5.11b/c) a year after toproping it in 1975. And even long-standing problems have recently been freed. To name but two, Into Thin Hair, first toproped by Peter Darmi in 1988, was freed in 2004 by Eric Weigeshoff at 5.11c. Alan Kline climbed Russ Clune’s 1993 Girly Man (5.11d R) in 2017.

There’s an even greater irony here. Gran himself wrote:

“The climbing history of the Shawangunks has developed around one major point, the perfection of an ever better climbing form. Climbing has reached a very high standard through the clashing and cementing together of many strong personalities.”

Whether changes in form have always been in the direction of perfection is another question. Hangdogging, rap bolting, and toprope rehearsing have all been, at least in the Gunks, matters of controversy at one time or another. But that’s a subject for another day.

The folks at Gunks Apps (makers of, well, the Gunks app and also authors of the newest guidebook, Gunks Climbing) have an erudite and informative page on route renaming. There’s been a fair bit of renaming in recent years; our own contribution to tearing down racist monuments. Of greatest issue—or at least the hardest name to take up for the old guard—is changing the name of Shockley’s Ceiling, to “The Ceiling.” William Shockley, winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize in physics for his co-discovery of semiconductors and the transistor effect, was also a prolific writer on topics he was much expert on: race, genetics, and in particular the superiority of white people.

In their blog post, the Gunks App folks write, “Suffice it to say he was not simply another racist in his time, he was vociferously embracing Nazi ideology.” This is false, and false in an interesting way. Shockley was, in fact, embracing a long American tradition of racism and eugenics, one that predated—and even inspired—Nazi ideology.

A 2008 NIH paper on “U.S. Scientists' Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907–1939)” explains how and why “eugenics became a serious scientific movement in the 1920s.” The aim of eugenics was “the improvement of the human race.”

The eugenics movement extended far beyond a handful of scientists. No lesser light than Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was an enthusiastic supporter. She once wrote, “The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”

Isabel Wilkerson, in her monumental study, Caste (Random House, 2020), documents the ways in which the early Nazis responsible for planning the persecution of Jews and other minorities traveled to the U.S. to study American persecution under Jim Crow. (Indeed, they found U.S. miscegenation laws too strict for their purposes; instead of “one drop” of tainted blood, a German was Aryan unless they had less than 50 percent Aryan ancestry.)

Shockley needn’t — and surely didn’t — have looked thousands of miles away for racist inspiration when there was so much to draw from, so close to home.

Generic route names abound in rock climbing. There must be a thousand routes named “North Face,” for example, and how many crags have an “Afternoon Delight”? But it’s always “The North Face of the Eiger,” for example. A name understood to be “The Ceiling of the Gunks” or “The Gunks Ceiling” is way too vague—there are thousands of routes at the Gunks, and half of them have ceilings.

Ironically, much better names were available. According to Gunks Apps, “A slew of names were floated.” One of them strikes me as ideal: “Semiconductor Ceiling.” Not only is a neighboring route named “Mr. Transistor,” this retains the word “ceiling”; it distinguishes it from all other ceilings at the Gunks; it alludes to the aspect of the man that’s still worth honoring; and it removes the offensive name Shockley. Perhaps if enough of us start calling it that, the name will stick for the next iteration of the guidebook.

W80 (Williams, Red, 1980)

• Shawangunk Rock Climbs, 2nd ed., by Richard C. Williams (American Alpine Club, 1980)

W91 (Williams, Black, 1991)

• Shawangunk Rock Climbs: The Trapps, by Dick Williams (AAC Press, 1991)

• Shawangunk Rock Climbs: The Near Trapps, by Dick Williams (AAC Press, 1991)

• Shawangunk Rock Climbs: Skytop, by Dick Williams (AAC Press, 1991)

W3 (Williams, Grey, 2004, Purple, 2008)

• The Climber’s Guide to the Shawangunks: The Trapps, 2nd ed., by Dick Williams (Vulgarian Press, 2001)

• The Climber’s Guide to the Shawangunks: The Near Trapps and Millbrook, by Dick Williams (Vulgarian Press, 1991)

GC (Gunks Climbing, 2021)

• Gunks Climbing, by Andy Salo, Christian Fracchia, and Eric Ratkowski (Wolverine Publishing, 2021)

Documents

• The Eastern Trade (“For the improvement of climbing and the preservation of climbing areas”), a newsletter written, published, and distributed by John Stannard

  • Vol. 1 No. 1–4 (1973); Vol. 2 No. 1–4 (1974); Vol. 3 No. 1–4 (1975); Vol. 4 No. 1–4 (1976); Vol. 5 No. 1–4 (1977); Vol. 2 No. 1–3 (1978)

• “The Whole Art of Natural Protection,” by Doug Robinson (brochure, with an introduction by Yvon Chouinard and Tom Frost

Biographies

• Into the Unknown: The Remarkable Life of Hans Kraus, by Susan E.B. Schwartz (iUniverse: 2005)

• Climbing Free: My Life in the Vertical World, by Lynn Hill (and Greg Child; Norton, 2003)

• Second Ascent: The Story of Hugh Herr, by Alison Osius (Stackpole Books, 1991)

Websites

• Rock & Snow’s blog
  https://037200b.netsolhost.com/

• William C. Atkinson
  https://atkinsopht.wordpress.com/tag/gunks/

• Vulgarian Chronicles
  https://www.vulgarianchronicles.net/

• Gunks Campground & Climbing History
  https://americanalpineclub.org/news/2022/2/10/gunks-campground-amp-climbing-history

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Gunks History and Mohonk

• The Gunks (Shawangunk Mountains) Ridge and Valley Towns Through Time, by Ronald G. Knapp and Michael Neil O’Donnell (Fonthill Media, 2015)

• An Unforgiving Land: Hardscrabble Life in the Trapps, a Vanished Shawangunk Mountain Hamlet, by Robi Josophson and Bob Larsen (Black Dome, 2013)

• An Anecdotal History of Mohonk, by A. Keith Smiley (Mohonk Mountain House, revised and edited 1999)

• The Huckleberry Pickers: A Raucous History of the Shawangunk Mountains, by Marc B. Fried (Black Dome, 1995)

• Reflections of Mohonk, by Ruth H. Smiley (Mohonk Mountain House, 1984)

• “Mohonk Lake Mountain House, Albert K. Smiley, Proprietor” (facsimile of sales brochure, 1893)