It sucks to be a climber in Kansas. Actually it sucks to be a climber at a lot of places. Louisiana, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, and Delaware for starters. How about New York City? Lots of good climbers live among the teeming masses there. Rat Rock, a rat-hole of a crag in Central Park, is where they go on summer afternoons to put hands to living rock when they’re tired of grabbing plastic. Or how about Carderock in Maryland just north of Washington DC? Three words describe it: Slimy, slippery, slick.

But we all love our local cliffs, our home crags. These are often the places where we learned to climb; where we first touched rock; where we first saw real rock climbers in smooth-soled 5.10 shoes dance across a long traverse, their white hands gleaming with Endo chalk and sweat glinting on bare biceps. There’s nothing really wrong with any of these places. It’s just that it sucks to be a climber there. But when it’s all you got, it’s all you got. You make the best of it and dream of rock beyond your gritty smoggy horizon. 

The other day I went up to North Table Mountain perched above the town of Golden west of Denver. Table is the closest thing to a chossy home crag that we have in Colorado. But it’s really not that bad of a cliff. If you pick and choose, you can climb some darn good routes. But the place is popular, especially with the after-work crowd. And it boasts a real city ambience. Cars noisily zip along US 6, en route to Central City’s gambling tables; seemingly endless freight trains steam up and down tracks from Coors Brewery; and, yep, the massive concrete Coors industrial complex spreads along Clear Creek in the valley below the cliff. Some days the pungent scent of brewing beer permeates the air. Beyond Coors is downtown Golden with the famous Foss Drugstore and, of course, the American Alpine Club offices are nearby in the old brick Golden high school. In the hazy eastern distance rise the skyscraping towers of downtown Denver and beyond that runs the flat Kansas horizon.  

My buddy Mike Heinrichs, a hospital administrator, called me the night before. “Hey Stew. I have to go to Denver to a lecture that Dick Lamm, the ex-governor, is giving on health care in Denver tomorrow evening. I’m taking the day off. Do you want to drive up and we’ll go climbing?” I did and we went. We trudged up the steep trail in the morning sunlight to the cliff base. A few parties were climbing at the Brown Cloud sector so we headed west to Industrial Buttress. No one was out there. We flaked the rope out and climbed a few routes; pulling down on rounded holds; sticking hands and fingers in occasional jam cracks; grabbing big edges and crimping little flakes. It was fun. And everyone else below us, those buzzing along the highway or out there in the vast teeming metropolis were working. It was a Thursday morning. They were working. We were playing. It doesn’t get any better than that.