JEDI Committee Members Reflect on Reel Rock Themes
Reel Rock is one of the most well known and visible productions in the sport of climbing; as they self describe on their website: “For two decades, Reel Rock has been sharing the biggest stories from the world of climbing, celebrating the human side behind the sport's greatest adventures and achievements.” The terms - “Biggest” and “human side” are inherently subjective and some perspectives are heard less above the noise.
Earlier this year, three members of the SLCA’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committee reflected on the themes of last year’s (Reel Rock 15) films and their own experiences. Below you will read stories of those in our climbing community who compare and contrast their experiences with the standard image of climbing in film.
The SLCA partners with Reel Rock every year to show in the community. We are excited to show Reel Rock 16 later this year, including “Big Things To Come,” a film with Wasatch climber, Alex Johnson produced by Bree Robles.
How do your own experiences compare to the images and stories you see in climbing and outdoor films?
In Black Ice, we see the way mentorship, community and support can have life changing impacts on people through the sport of climbing. What has been your own experience with mentors and community in climbing? What would it have been like without having those mentors?
Drea:
My whole climbing journey has been filled with mentorship and community. I was very fortunate to have 3 climbers as housemates when I moved to Salt Lake City in 2018. My housemates let me use their guest passes several times and I was fortunate enough to get my first harness from one of them. When I started getting more into the sport, one of them went with me to get shoes and showed me how to pick a pair. I went a while using Metolious chalk out of its original plastic bag until a sweet lady at the gym offered me her extra chalk bag. I met my now fiance after coming down from an auto-belay and being asked by him to climb together. I had my first multi-pitch climb and 5.8 lead with a friend I made at our local gym’s women's climbing group. Climbing to me has become synonymous with close relationships and community.
2019 and 2020 is when I started climbing with affinity groups like Women at The Front, Color the Wasatch (which I now help co-lead), and Salt Lake Area Queer Climbers. These spaces exude a sense of belonging in the sport of climbing that can be competitive and exclusive. The community I’ve had in climbing has quite literally been life changing for me. I imagine that without my mentors and spaces like these, I would not have kept coming back to climb as regularly as I have and would not have made the friendships and relationships I’ve made. Just as I see the community and mentorship in Black Ice has been impactful and even life changing to the mentees highlighted in the film. There is a quote that says “one of the best things climbing has given me is friendship” and I so resonate with that quote. One of the best things I’ve received from climbing is the mentorship and community.
Matt:
I consider myself extremely lucky that I learned to rock climb as a child, from my uncle who is part of the earliest generation of rock climbers. He would take me top-roping around the East Coast during our holiday visits, and while gyms were rare in that time, I was lucky enough to be able to continue climbing at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. It would have never occurred to me or my parents to try climbing without the introduction and encouragement of my uncle, as it certainly was not something my peers did or discussed nor apart of visible sports on television like the Olympics.
Flash forward to my mid-20s and more than 15 years since last climbing; I had just been through a tough break up and was looking for something to build deeper connections to my local queer community. I found out about Crux Climbing, whose mission is to “empower members of the LGBTQ community to participate in rock climbing and outdoor recreation in New York.” I went to a “Newbie Night” and immediately felt my spark for the sport re-encouraged by the supportive and meaningful community Crux built - as a now friend shared at the post climbing hang out that first night, the sport and that group of queer climbers was and is “life saving” - zero hyperbole. I would not have returned to the sport without the comfort of this community, and I credit my knowledge of climbing practices and safety through the mentors I found there.
While there are a myriad of differences in my experience than those from Memphis Rox depicted in Black Ice, including but not limited to the racial and class privileges I hold, their description of their gym and community felt deeply familiar and resonant. They, too, were both providing and experiencing the systems of support that allow folks to become life long participants in this great sport. They relied on each other for affirmation, learning, and support.
Annie:
My climbing story is full of friends. Some of these friends have also been traditional mentors, where the mentor has more skill and experience and has imparted that wisdom to me, like Conrad, Fred, and Manoah to the Black Ice team. However, traditional mentors aren’t always easy to find- so the majority of my mentorship has come from peer mentors, where we both have similar levels of experience and learn new things together.
Given the demographics of climbing and my identity as a white woman, it’s unsurprising that my traditional mentors have mostly been (cis, white) men. Hal and Stoker taught me to belay and lead on the basalt of White Rock, NM. Thomas and I scouted secret trad spots along the White River of Vermont. Dan offered me my first experiences on the classics of Little Cottonwood. I’ve deeply valued everything I’ve learned from these guys, and especially the ways they pushed me and coached me. I also appreciate these specific mentors because not every mentor-mentee relationship has worked - in seeking to find mentors I’ve also found mansplainers and relationship-seekers along the way.
Because traditional mentorship has not always been available, I’ve relied on peer mentorship to aid my climbing growth. Women and non-binary people compose my peer mentorship network, and I’m deeply motivated by these relationships. With these pals, I’ve done some of the climbs of which I’m most proud - because we lead ourselves. We dared to get into situations and we found the resolve to get out. No one told us we should do a route - we chose the route and we figured out and supported one another through.
We see both traditional mentorship and peer mentorship in Black Ice - in their group, we have layers of leadership and community. This is not a story of two people, with one teaching and one learning. This is a story of a group supporting each other in an adventure that is very removed from their day-to-day life.
In Deep Roots, we trace the legacy of Ron Kauk’s first ascent of Magic Line to his son Lonnie’s attempt to repeat it, and their shared but different connections to Yosemite as both a climbing hub and ancestral home. In First Ascent/Last Ascent, we see a group assuming that the legacy of their climbs’ is both a first ascent AND last (or only) ascent, given their perception of the place they are climbing (Mongolia). When thinking about your own climbing experience - when do you notice times where you’ve been more focused on building or deepening connections with your community and/or the ancestral histories of the land? When has it been more about competition or conquest over a route or place? How would you compare and contrast those experiences? What are the benefits/risks of each?
Matt:
While reflecting on this question, my mind immediately went to an event called Homoclimbtastic, the world’s largest queer-friendly climbing convention often referred to simply as “HC”, which I attended a number of times between 2014-2019. Held in the New River Gorge, I treated this event just as much as an opportunity to make friends and learn about other queer climber’s experience as I did an opportunity to send and project climbs in a legendary, beautiful climbing area. It was a moment to challenge assumptions about what I knew about Fayetteville and West Virginia (spoiler alert: very little before my first HC), and what it meant to host such a large gathering of queer people in a relatively, small, secluded, Southern state. While the drive to and from Fayetteville could be stressful and filled with uncomfortable stares, the town itself was more than welcoming - in fact, the annual drag show that marked the finale of the weekend was typically attended by dozens of locals. Though we were not there to conquer the rock perhaps in the same way Hazel Findlay and Maddie Cope appeared to be, we were in other ways conquering our community’s and the local community’s perceptions of each other.
In retrospect, it strikes me that at no point in HC did I also reckon with the legacy of that place before it’s more recent history (think: coal production and its physical and spiritual legacies on the land and people); this meant I never considered, before reflecting through this writing exercise, who the ancestral caretakers of those lands were and when/how they had been displaced. One difference I’ve noticed in my time in Utah is how much more visible and proximal questions of Indigeneity are to our climbing areas, such as the bolting over of petroglyphs near Moab, or passing by the fenced petroglyphs in Maple Canyon’s left fork. I am struck by Lonnie’s story and how rare it is to hear about folks with both ancestral or familiar connections to the land as well as climbing experience or goals. Another recent example was recently mentioned in the Salt Lake Tribune, highlighting “climbers Aaron Mike and Len Necefer, who are both Navajo (Diné), often share their perspectives on climbing with the climbing community and the outdoor retailer industry.” Ultimately what these stories leave me wanting to do is to learn more about the places I climb: who might have first seen these walls? If they climbed them, how did they do it and how is that similar or different to how I climb today? In this way I seek to connect myself not just to a route but the history of the land that existed and continues to exist despite bolts and first ascents.
Drea:
Though I’ve sport climbed for years now, bouldering has always scared me. I remember the first time I went bouldering outside. It was with the Color the Wasatch group, a group creating a space for climbers of color in the Wasatch. There were other beginner boulderers in the group, so I didn’t feel as intimidated. I was so frightened by bouldering; my intention was more to go outside and spend time with friends than to do a certain amount of climbs or perform to any type of expectation. The two, maybe three problems I finished meant so much more to me because I was there with people I felt comfortable and safe with and I did more than I ever thought I could. My intention was to build connections with people and the place. It made all the difference. Most recently, I climbed in Kanab where we happened to run into a geologist that gave us a short tour of some nearby pictographs and hearths. Knowing the area I was recreating had a deep history made the climb and view so much more enjoyable, much as I imagine it did for Lonnie in Deep Roots. Having a connection to a space on a deeper level connects you not only to the land and the sport, but also to the many humans and animals that have enjoyed that space before you.
I’ve definitely had moments where I’ve been in competition with my own climbing or with others. When I first started climbing, I remember seeing the many talented athletes around me and feeling so inadequate after struggling my way up a “beginner” route and feeling pumped after it. There would be days getting back into climbing after a hiatus that I would find myself so frustrated at not being able to finish a certain amount of routes or projects, leaving the gym feeling defeated. I’ve realized this mainly happens to me in gym settings. When I climb outside, my competitive side feels much more at ease and the pressure to perform lessens. I’ve never felt the need to conquer a place or a route outside because the connection to nature, to me, surpasses any desire for competition. As well as my concern for safety while being outdoors! It feels that the risk of trying to conquer a place or a route, as done in First Ascent/Last Ascent, is that we lose the sense of connection and reverence for the area we’re on. After watching Deep Roots and my experience at the climb in Kanab, I am inspired to keep following that connection to the mountain and the nature around it, and deeply learn about the people that first looked after the land I recreate on. I want to climb the land while showing the reverence its due and deepening the connection with it and my community. My hope is that the days where we try to conquer a place or routes become less and our connections with the areas become abundant.
Annie:
To me, First Ascent / Last Ascent was a glaring example of the colonial attitudes sometimes present in climbing. For example, Hazel and Maddie spun a story of traveling to ‘the end of the Earth’ for a grand adventure, ignoring the fact that Mongolia is the center of most Mongolian people’s lives. Later in the film, I felt angry about Hazel and Maddie’s smirking apologies to the locals after being caught climbing in a spiritually important area. To me, their body language suggested that they didn’t think they should have to apologize at all. This exploitative mode of climbing does not seek to build connections or show respect to locals, or learn historical contexts of specific areas.
I personally don’t have strong send or summit motivations (friends will tell you I’m always happy to stop shy of the summit), since I climb for how it makes me feel (smooth, awkward, techy), what I observe (rocks, birds, plants, springs), and with whom I’m enjoying the experience. For example, the highlight climb of last summer was a party climb up the ultra-classic moderate ‘Irene’s Arete’ in the Tetons. Our six-person squad waited at the base with short haul pioneer and former Jenny Lake Ranger Renny Jackson and his daughter, among others. We felt exhilarated by our brush with climbing history and by being surrounded by friends above, below and at our sides throughout the seven memorable pitches. At one point Jess and I shared snacks and relived the prior pitch’s best moves from the belay ledge while Miguel quested off above and Cheryl made the finishing moves on the prior pitch to gain the ledge. It was truly a day for the books. Nothing about that day felt exploitative or competitive, and is also why it felt so joyful.
However, I do have shades of the colonizer attitudes on display in First Ascent in my own climbing practice. The most obvious to me is that I haven’t often sought to self-educate on current and historical Indigenous histories of climbing areas where I recreate. Our group’s glorious day in the Tetons is a perfect example of this missed opportunity. We connected with Park Service and climbing community history, but failed to do the same with the history and present experience of Indigenous people in the Tetons and Garnet Canyon. Although I can’t hope to have as deep an experience as Lonnie - climbing his fathers ascents in his ancestral homeland is pretty much the epitome of rooted climbing - I know that learning Indigenous histories, and understanding current connections to landscapes would foster historically informed respect and understanding from climbers towards Indigenous tribes and tribal interests in our present day.
