River explorations from ten years ago.
I had just landed in Fayetteville, guiding for Hard Rock and still figuring out who I was as a climber. Then I found this crew. People drawn to the more adventurous side of climbing, the unknown line, the next boulder tucked somewhere out there.
Summer days and nights. Driving down dusty roads as the evening light began to wane. Headlamps coming on as the alpenglow was cast over the river. Climbing until our hands were raw and our bodies gave in. No agendas. Just movement, laughter, and that feeling of being exactly where you’re meant to be.
It was the first time climbing felt like community.
A stunning preservation of texture of the Lepidodendron, viewed within the New River Gorge National Park. The Lepidodendron was a scale-covered tree that flourished during the Carboniferous Period (300-360 million years ago). These trees evolved a thick scale-covered bark that helped the tree transport water along its trunk system as well as protect the tree from potential predation. At that time in the evolutionary scale, bark was a relatively new feature that facilitated the growth of very big, yet primitive trees. These trees had simplistic structures, growing quite tall, averaging 100 feet in height, but having hardly any branches compared to trees we see today. It’s incredible to be able to see preserved features of at that time, what was a newly evolved primitive tree thriving in the thick mucky swamps that existed long before the uplift of the Appalachian Mountains.
Winter tends to be full of cloudy, sunless days but those days are often when the forests and rivers reveal other artifacts and textures full of depth and beauty.
In 2019, when a landslide near Big Bar British Columbia blocked the river, the Fraser Sockeye Salmon run nearly collapsed. This spurred one of the largest river-rescue operations in Canadian history. I was bartending at a local rafting resort that summer when I got the emergency call, dropped everything, and was on a plane two days later. Story shared in my bio.
