He “Stole” Our FA. We Got Over It.
"The Roach was nonplussed about snagging the route. He didn’t apologize, nor did he brag, and he obviously had designs on other new lines. We considered chopping the bolts."
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It was a bolt. Couldn’t miss the glint of the hanger. The bolt hadn’t been there the week before, it had appeared like ghosts appear, but this one stayed.
Who had placed the bolt was a mystery. We, the locals, all handful of us, knew every inch of the rock, who climbed what, who wanted to climb what, but no one knew anything about the bolt.
If the bolt had been on some scruffy slab all the way around on the backside with the long approach through tall grass full of diamondback rattlers, no one would have cared. But this bolt was on a prized line, the King Line, and we’d hoped to bag it ourselves when we could do it “in good style,” which was really just a way to put off the work and risk—you had to climb ground up back then, making any new route an exercise in terror management.
On closer inspection we found that the route had more than one… which meant that an interloper had snaked one of our prized lines.
It didn’t take long to find the bandit bolter because he showed up at the crag the very next weekend. He had a tight military cut, talked in a snappy staccato that took a moment to translate. There was a decisiveness, a special sharpness about him. When he moved he didn’t push the atmosphere aside, he cut through it. His car had New Hampshire plates. A Yankee!
“The Roach” was a sergeant in the Army at Ft. Sill, about 45 minutes southeast of Quartz Mountain in southwestern Oklahoma, and he had a habit of slipping into areas and snapping up prize lines. One of us, I forget who but think it was Jimmy “The Rat” Ratzlaff, coined that nickname. The Roach’s real name will have to remain anonymous—even now 45 years later he never wants to be mentioned in any article, guidebook, website, or anywhere at all. “Can’t risk my security clearance,” he told me about 10 years ago. “Leave my name out of it.”
The Roach was nonplussed about snagging the route. He didn’t apologize, nor did he brag, and he obviously had designs on other new lines. The Roach was fresh from visiting Stone Mountain, North Carolina, where he’d scooped up the FA of a bold, striking line; he had done the same at Looking Glass and would soon be embroiled in a dispute down in Texas where he would cruise the FA of the locals’ crown jewel of projects. And now this route poacher was at our crag.
The Roach was the most economical person I would ever meet. He’d found a pair of big, round Jackie-O style ladies’ glasses, and these he wore. He’d also found his pants and shirt on the Interstate shoulder, billowing on barbed wire like empty scarecrows. The Roach wouldn’t pay for store-bought bolt hangers, so made his own from thick aluminum L stock. On one side of the “L” he drilled a 1/4-inch hole to fit the 1/4-inch bolts that were standard back then, and on the other arm of the “L” he drilled a slightly larger hole for clipping, a hole just large enough to accept a certain type of carabiner, a blind-gate Eiger oval, with a small nose. If you didn’t have that certain special carabiner, you weren’t clipping the bolt. That small hole was a lock opened only with inside secret knowledge. “Oh, you didn’t have the carabiner,” ha ha.
Those large, bright aluminum hangers were impossible to miss, especially when they tacked their way up “our project.” And there they were bold and bright on the golden granite.
We considered chopping the bolts. We didn’t like them, and didn’t like how they looked, or that was a good excuse.
There was a precedent for erasing routes. In 1971, less than a decade earlier at this point in time for us, Royal Robbins had gotten twisted up by the hundreds of bolts Warren Harding had placed on the Dawn Wall on El Cap, and he set out to chop the route. Robbins cut the heads off bolts on the first two pitches, then, impressed by the severity of the climbing (and by the difficulty of chopping bolts), he put the chisel away and let the rest of the route remain to become Tommy Caldwell’s project.
Though Robbins and Harding were both Yosemite locals with strings of first ascents, they differed philosophically. Robbins considered himself a purist, climbing the rock on its own terms, whatever those were. Harding, who had pioneered the Nose, the first ever route on El Cap, was a “do whatever it takes to get the job done,” guy, and if the job required drilling, that was just fine.
Bolt chopping stories abound and new ones make the news even today. Just a couple of years ago the Pikes Peak bolt war outside Colorado Springs pitted local against local, with one camp placing bolts and fixing gear in a staunchly traditional area, with the other camp removing the gear—even bolts and pro placed on lead—to preserve the area’s wilder flavor.
Robbins and Harding and the chopping on Pikes Peak illustrate how even locals can’t agree on whose rules rule the crag. Locals’ disputes are often generational, ego driven and can boil down to who got there first—just exactly what qualifies you as a local?—but warring locals can usually find common ground in that they have rights to the stone over any outsider.
Recently, in Pine Creek in California’s Eastern Sierra, a visiting climber was accused by the locals of stealing a new route on a crag they said they had discovered. To clear the air, the climber, according to his Instagram post, met the locals at the crag and showed them the line. The locals noted that the new line was different from the one they had imagined, but they removed the bolt hangers anyway. “We want this crag for us and our friends,” they purportedly said. “You aren’t local and you are not welcome to bolt here.”
Having our route stolen by the Roach was troubling for us, and our first reaction was to put him in his place. But was it really our right to chop his route? Who really owns the rock? Who has the right to develop it and dictate style? At Quartz Mountain, farmer Ted had legal title to the rock, and a hundred years earlier the Kiowa, Apache, Comanche, and Arapaho would have said it was theirs.
Just as surfers stake out waves, local climbers are the de facto bosses of “their” rock, imposing a pecking order, setting the style for the crag, imbuing it with a tone, as we see with the Pine Creek episode. Visitors in this scenario are usually welcome as long as they respect the order, or respect it for the most part, which can mean that you can climb here, but you can’t put up routes. The smaller the pond, the more the locals exert themselves.
That locals are possessive, selfish even, isn’t entirely bad. When bolts corrode, when lowering carabiners groove out, it’s up to the locals with a sense of ownership to replace the hardware. The local climbers are also the ones who build and maintain the trails, have clean-up days, and smooth relationships with park and other land managers. Locals also usually write the guidebooks. Giving a nod to the locals for the work and care and sometimes financial resources they pump into a crag is often all the thanks they ever get, and this acknowledgement, minimal as it is, can be what keeps them going.
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At our granite outcrop in Oklahoma we knew we’d just been beaten fair and square. We didn’t have any special claim to the rock. We could have stayed sour, but the air leaked out of our angry balloon. We tied in and repeated the route. The rock was flint hard and flawless, the route took a brilliant position up a narrow buttress and connected discontinuous features that were obvious only after being connected. It had taken a real eye to suss it. Turned out the Roach really knew what he was doing. In fact, he climbed at a technical level beyond us. He was the kick in the pants we needed to get busy on the rock ourselves, and we could and did learn from him.
The Roach went on to put up more routes at our area, all quality even with those ugly hangers. Nights we’d all gather around the big mesquite fire in the “Turkey Track” cave, named by Farmer Ted because he thought the peace sign some hippie had painted in there was a sign for turkey track. We’d shuffle around the fire to stay out of the smoke, and everyone but the Roach, who didn’t drink, would drink a few Brown Derby’s and try to work the cryptogam on the inside of the bottle cap. We’d drink, stare into the flames, and relive the day’s adventures, our hands becoming shadow puppets on the cave walls. People had likely been doing much the same in that cave for thousands of years, and now it was our turn.
The coming spring most of us, including the Roach, went to Yosemite, where I took my first and second trips up El Cap with him. Later, we climbed in the desert southwest, did a wall in Mexico, and then the Roach was transferred to another base and I moved to Colorado. I still see him sometimes and it’s always like it’s always been. He pulls up, shows you the “new” wardrobe he’s found, then rushes off to get to somewhere else, someplace with potential. Your crag perhaps.
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