The Best 5.8 Multipitch I’ve Ever Done

Twenty feet out from gear. Correction, make that 20 feet above the ground. My hands noodled around inside the slit of an “eyebrow” for anything positive. Finding a slot to gobble up a cam and keep me off the deck would have been even better, but I would have had better luck getting pro inside a fishbowl.

My feet were slipping, and every few seconds I had to paddle them back into place. I chuffed the rubber soles against the rock to warm them, make them stickier—an old trick—but that only made them even slippier.

5.5, I thought. People ride bikes down 5.5, how can this be 5.5? 

I looked up at the wall slabbing out and then bending upward where it got steeper. The dark rock and the way it layered with grey reminded me of a hornet’s nest. As far as I could see I couldn’t make out any feature that jived with the route description. Has this route even been climbed?

I lurched to another eyebrow, both hands slapping into it, sliding almost all the way out until latching on a dimple. Whew.

“You sure this is the route?” Michael Levy asked. He was paying rope through a Grigri, but unless he had the magic powers of snake charmer, the belay was only wishful thinking.

“Maybe we should try another way?”

Shakily, I reversed to the ground.

We consulted the Mountain Project route description. 

From the end of the approach trail, head a little to the left and look for the pale right-angling ramp on the second pitch, it read.

 “I don’t see a ramp, do you?”

“How far is ‘a little?’”

***

You’d create less of a fuss by proclaiming one particular religion superior to all others than you would by saying that one climb is The Best. But The Nose on Looking Glass Rock arguably is the best of its grade and length in the country. Certainly, it is the finest multi-pitch 5.8 I’ve ever done (despite my inauspicious start).

The four-pitch line on Looking Glass Rock in western North Carolina is a masterpiece of route finding, knitting together a confusion of “eyebrows”—horizontal pockets that flair in all directions and often aren’t good in any. The Nose, like the longer route in The Valley for which it was named after, is the rock’s king line with obvious appeal despite the route itself not being especially obvious.

The first ascent was in 1966, by Steve Longnecker, Bob Watts and Robert John Gillespie, natives to the area at the time. Fifty seven years ago no one had yet set foot on the moon. Cell phones, email, social media, and everything else that has us all in the same box were the imaginary stuff of Star Trek.  

Flexible, flat-soled kletterschues were available back then for about $9, but Longnecker had heard that Vibram’s deep lug soles gripped better on rock. “We couldn’t imagine climbing in thin-soled shoes,” says Longnecker, “doing so seemed stupid.”

So, shod in high-top Lowa hiking boots, and with fiberglass motorcycle helmets perched atop their heads, the trio started up what promised to be the first technical rock climb on Looking Glass, a route that today sees hundreds of ascents a year and has a line of ticket holders at the base on any fair-weather day.

***

The granite monolith of “The Glass” rises like a bread loaf—or a pirate looking glass if you’ve been drinking—some 500 feet from the Appalachian jungle of rhododendron, oak, mountain laurel, locust, and spruce, in western North Carolina’s Transylvania county, one of this country’s wettest regions boasting enough annual rain to fill a swimming pool six feet deep. The closest town is Bevard, 12 miles southeast, known for its population of white squirrels, said to be the byproducts of escaped circus rodents. Forty miles north at the crossroads of I-26 and I-40 sits Asheville, where Longnecker lives, in the shadow of Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, taller even than Mount Katahdin in Maine and Mount Washington in New Hampshire. 

When my wife Lisa and I moved to western North Carolina two years ago, I was first surprised that there were mountains, then was surprised by their scale. Not as big as the peaks we left behind in Colorado, but the mountains of North Carolina are still sizeable and the living among them are actually steeper. Biking, hiking or driving you seem to always be going up or down and the mountain roads are so crazy they could have been laid out by one of those space spiders that spins an erratic web in zero gravity. Another difference: while the Rockies are wide open such that you can get 50-mile vistas, in the Appalachia the hills are so tight you might as well be rolled up in a jute rug. 

Longnecker and team had previously made several excursions on Looking Glass’s vertical to overhanging north side but, “We weren’t good enough. Didn’t know what we were doing,” he says, “we made it up as we went along.”

Thwarted by the steep rock, they pushed along the base to its slabby west face. “Looking for the easiest way to get from the ground to the top.” 

It’s a little over two miles line-of-sight from the Blue Ridge Parkway, a 469 mile stretch of blacktop that rollercoasters along the backbone of the Appalachians, to Looking Glass Rock. With binoculars, Longnecker, Watts and Gillespie got on a Parkway vantage point and scoped Looking Glass, looking for a way up the wall. 

When it rained, “We’d watch to see where the rain flowed, and anytime you saw a break we knew that was an overhang,” says Longnecker. “The rain on The Nose went down all the way from the top unbroken, so we knew it didn’t have any overhangs.”

Finally, they buzzed the formation in a small airplane and that settled it—The Nose definitely offered the least resistance of any line they could see.

On December 17, “a stupid time to start, the shortest day of the year was just a few days away,” and with snow on the ground, they started up. 

***

Michael Levy and I had heard that even today The Nose can be challenging. Last winter we, both former editors at Rock and Ice, and, later, Climbing, figured that we’d see for ourselves. Over generous pours of wine the evening before we entertained ourselves with how we’d dispatch The Nose, and then knock off several other lines before our Thermos of coffee had time to go cold.

Levy was down from New York City, where he was in a masters in journalism program at NYU, and was currently on assignment for Outside, researching a feature he’d write about the free soloist Austin Howell, who had died in a fall in Lineville Gorge about 100 miles north of Looking Glass.  

We got off to a messy start right out of the car. First we walked a hundred yards down a beaten-in trail to have it peeter out at a muddy crossing where footprints said we weren’t the only suckers. Another trail also went nowhere. In an ah-hah moment we located the log steps that mark the start of the real trail just a few feet right of the car. It seems the greenery—this part of the state is a temperate rainforest—hides everything. The tangle can be such that you can’t get a geographical fix on anything. In fact, you can’t see Looking Glass at all until you are standing at its base, and then it comes as a shock emerging from the woods like that, as unexpected as finding a gold coin in your backyard. 

Levy and I chugged up the trail anxious to beat the crowds we had imagined would inconvenience us if we weren’t first to tie in. 

At the base of the dark rock a stiff wind swept the face and the ground, frozen solid, wore a cloak of ice unnoticeable until you stepped on it.

If we had been vexed by the start of the trail, we were stymied by the start of The Nose.

Lacking any bolts or fixed gear as landmarks, and with any chalk washed off by frequent storms, The Nose could really start anywhere. The rock, the eyebrow features and the angles all look about the same. Finding the correct line on that wall … well you’d have better luck tracking a cloud in the sky.

I cinched down my shoes and headed up where the eyebrows seemed the most promising, meaning the largest and most frequent. 

That false start led to another, but we took solace in knowing that we weren’t the first—and won’t be the last—climbers to muddle around on the first pitch, or what we thought was the first pitch of The Nose.

“The guidebook says 5.5,” Longnecker had said during an interview for this article. “Some guys from Alabama, some place where there’s a lot of slots for your hands and feet, they started up that pitch and they said, ‘You can’t climb this, this is not 5.5!’ They’d come all the way from Alabama, made it maybe 30 feet and that was enough for them!”

Michael and I piled the rope and rack on the ground and scrambled over to the North Side to inspect what must be the Astroman of the Southeast, The Glass Menagerie. While the west side of Looking Glass, where you find The Nose, is a slab, the North Face is intimidatingly overhung. The Glass Menagerie is seven vertiginous pitches that top out at 5.13. If The Nose is one of our best 5.8s, then The Glass Menagerie is one of the best 5.13s, at least by the looks of it. 

Back at the base of The Nose, the rock now basked in the mid-morning sun. Prime conditions, although we were still the only humans on all of Looking Glass.

***

A weave of vines hung low from the tree canopy, thumping the top of my pickup cab like wooden knuckles as I jounced up wet ruts to Steve Longnecker’s house. Though his white clapboard home is just minutes from Asheville’s groovy downtown—summer nights you can see a musician balancing on a wobbleboard with a monkey dancing on his head—the place felt rural, smothered in trees. At a chokepoint on the driveway a makeshift guardrail of two-by-fours warned of a drop off. A dampness lingered and, autumn now, most leaves were down on the hillside painting it a deep auburn. 

“I don’t get many visitors,” said Longnecker, striding over after hearing me pull up. “Don’t like anyone here unless I know. Glad you called, gave me a chance to run the sweeper.”

Outside were two wire boxes about six feet high that looked a lot like shark cages. 

“Parrot cages,” said Longnecker. 

Inside one was Joplin, a red-tailed hawk; the other housed an Eastern screech owl, Gizzie, both here on a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Special Educational Permit.

We walked downhill along two iron pipe handrails that had been installed when Longnecker injured his knee. Longnecker, thin like a climber and with wireframes that slide down his nose, moved carefully over the slick ground. The 84-year old has been here since 1976, an affirmed bachelor—“I met a few girls that were interesting, but they were taken”—who saw Asheville, a former industrial center bisected by the French Broad River, rise, fall and then rise fairly recently as an arts, music and brew center that some people dub AsheBoulder.

I’d heard that Longnecker slept adjacent to deadly snakes and I can confirm that. About an ape index away from the old sofa he crashes on in the living room were three copperheads and a timber rattlesnake. 

“People tell me I should get rid of the snakes, too dangerous.”

Longnecker lifted the screen lid off one cage with Big Kenny (the rattler) and two of the copperheads.

“I have to be careful here,” said Longnecker. “This could be unpleasant for me if I screw up.”

The three snakes twined together, one body, three heads. A real Medusa. 

Longnecker’s house was a miasma of animal things, animals, exercise equipment including bicycles, magazines, books on animals and climbing and one titled “How Doctors Think,” and a desktop computer.

Prior to COVID Longnecker, an environmental educator, hauled the snakes around in a pillowcase, introducing them to school children, instructing them about the natural world. When he had birds, he’d take those, too. Before that he was an elementary school science teacher beginning in 1961. Throughout he worked at outdoor camps, where he was introduced to climbing. 

During a stint at Camp Mondamin in Western North Carolina in 1964 Longnecker connected with The Two Bobs, Robert Gillespie and Bob Watts, and Bill “Wally” Wallace who taught rappelling.

“We learned how to go down the side of a cliff but had no idea how to climb, belay, put in protection, or find routes,” wrote Longnecker in First Ascent of the Nose.

Eventually, Longnecker found a climbing school in the Tetons where he learned climbing’s fundamentals. Back in North Carolina he and the Bobs practiced holding falls on hip belays. I held a fall on a hip belay once and still have the rope-burn scar across my lower back. Holding falls that way for practice? No thanks.

Before he became a climber, Longnecker was invited on a hike to Rattlesnake Rock, “because I was a snake person. …Wasn’t a climber at that time, I didn’t care a thing about climbing, I was afraid to climb up in a tree.”

The search netting only a garter snake, but Longnecker did get his first look at Looking Glass. He was 19.

Four years later Longnecker ventured to the base of Looking Glass with The Bobs and began their efforts to climb to the top.

When I arrived Longnecker had Honey, a one-year old shelter dog with the speckled markings of an English Pointer, secured in a dog carrier. Now, Longnecker unfastened the cage door. Honey sprang about as if loosed from a bow, paws sliding down my nylon jacket.

“No, no, Honey, down,” said Longnecker. “Tell her No, she shouldn’t jump on you like that.”

Once Honey had supplicated, Longnecker broke a gingersnap in two and put a half on each front paw. Honey didn’t move.

“Ok,” said Longnecker, and Honey chomped down the cookies. 

Before the visit was over Longnecker would share a half dozen gingersnaps from a plastic tub, carrots dipped in peanut butter and a chew toy slathered with peanut butter, with Honey. 

“Tea?”

Why yes, I prefer tea, I said. 

Longnecker boiled water in a blacked aluminum camp pot. He rustled around in the cupboard with doors shingled in curled photos, yellowed newspaper clippings, and postcards and produced a cup for me. He took his tea in a mug with a big chunk broken out of the rim like a missing tooth. We sweetened the tea with a dark local honey so viscous we had to use a spoon to dig it out.

The room was silent as we sipped.

“Gingersnaps?” he asked, offering a plastic tub of them.

Our conversation turned back to The Nose. Did he think back then that the climb would be as popular as it is? 

He laughed. “As far as we knew, we were the only human beings out climbing,” he said. And as far as he knew, no other climbers outside their group of three had heard of the ascent at the time, unless they read the local paper which had carried the headline, “9 Grueling hours,” for a report about the ascent, an achievement that no doubt went right over the heads of every reader.

***

On my third go at The Nose, I took a line a bit left where the holds seemed a lighter color, worn down I imagined by all the supposed traffic the route gets.

The climbing there did feel easier, the warmed rock was grippier. I chugged past 20 feet, fiddled in a small offset, and punched upward.

I grew up climbing slabs and learned that smearing requires a faith of a religious magnitude. If you can believe in a God then you can believe your feet will stick to non holds, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive when your last gear feels like a memory. 

I was surprised, pleasantly, that the first pitch, while necky compared to sport climbs, has reasonable pro. The corners of some eyebrows pinch down just enough to take solid offset cams. Also surprisingly, since from the ground the eyebrows look like they will swallow large cams, the gear is small, typically under an inch. Climbers familiar with the subtleties of the eyebrows might find holds and gear at will. Neophytes will essentially be driving with eyes closed.

I arrived at the belay about 100 feet up, a stance and two bolts. 

Another thing about slabs: when you follow a pitch you wonder why the leader had fussed about so much. What took so long? Michael followed the first pitch, snatching cams from the eyebrows, taking just moments, and arrived keen for P2, the crux according to online sources.

The hardest set of moves on the route is right off the belay that begins the second pitch. This bit of 5.8 is protected by a fixed pin hammered into a slit of an eyebrow. This bit of iron—“not my piton,” said Longnecker, “I’m too cheap to leave anything,” is the leader’s only fixed gear in four pitches. The fixed pin was noted in the route beta, affirming that we were on route, as until then we hadn’t been certain.

The crux is a long reach to a sloping side pull and a high step that feels like you’re trying to put your foot in your own pants’ pocket.

Michael sorted out the moves and took off along an angling ramp.  

Longnecker first climbed this stretch in those stiff mountain boots, and the ramp was one of the trickier bits on the route, saying that tiptoeing along it in those boots, his hands palming the rock, was as precarious as carrying a big sheet of window glass.

“That was pretty scary,” he says, “that part means a lot to me.”

When it was my turn I unclipped from the overhead pin, traversed onto a lesser angled but more holdless bit of stone, and ran up it, trusting everything to rubber on rock and momentum, a technique best reserved for toprope. 

***

The winter day was waning when Longnecker arrived at the third pitch in 1966. He led off, and was stuck on another high step only to be told from below that “We don’t have all night to do this.” 

He hammered in a pin, hooked a pinky through the eye and pulled up, the route’s only point of aid and eliminated when Longnecker returned and reclimbed the route about a year later. After that, he and friends returned and climbed The Nose numerous times, then added the harder line Peregrine (5.9) to the right. 

Levy led that third pitch, easier feeling than the second, but it’s probably about the same—after 300 feet of eyebrows you warm up to the peculiar brand of movement.

At the end of the pitch, Levy flopped down onto an expansive ledge, “The Parking Lot,” so named because it is large enough for cars. From here you can walk off left and up, but the route proper goes up a final pitch with a vexing number of eyebrows. It looks intimidating, but you can’t go wrong here. The gear is plentiful and unlike lower on the wall, most of the eyebrows have a flat spot somewhere inside.

Longnecker and The Bobs topped out late day and raced down from the summit on the three mile Looking Glass Trail back down to Headwaters Road where a friend with a VW waited to drive them back to their car. The car was too cramped for the four of them and gear, so they stashed the rope and rack in the bushes.

To their dismay, when they returned for the gear, it was gone. Stolen. “Someone must have been watching us from the bushes,” says Longnecker. “We went to the police, forest service, sheriff. We had pretty much all the rock climbing gear that existed in North Carolina, and it was stolen. The guys who took it had no idea what it was.”

Somehow, the purloined gear did eventually resurface. You can see it for yourself, along with the  Goldline rope they used at the Carolina Climbing Museum in Black Dome on Tunnel Road in Asheville. 

***

The afternoon was bright when Levy and I topped out The Nose. The humidity that had magnified the cold had even abated and we were comfortable in just short sleeves. A couple of miles out we could discern the cut of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Somewhere along there was the spot where Longnecker and The Bobs had first glassed this rock. Since then, thousands of hands and boots have caressed its holds, an unimaginable scenario in 1966 when you could count all the climbers within a six-hour radius on both hands. 

We kicked off our shoes, straightened the rope for the rappels, readied ourselves for the descent. 

We had left the house with ambitious plans, but now time had gotten too short to consider more routes. We would have to content ourselves with just this one. Good thing it was one of the best.

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