The bright-white cliffs stretched north and south of our aerie. The crags were endless! This ridge of immaculate stone went on for miles. I’d found it. This was my place, my cathedral, my home. I knew right then that I would live here.
– Russ Clune, author of The Lifer, on discovering the Shawangunk Ridge as a young aspiring rock-climber in the mid-1970s
We don’t choose where we’re born, but if we’re lucky, we find a place that feels like home — where each day unveils a new discovery, a second chance, a sunset that eases the soul back into its body. For Russ Clune, a young college student at the University of Vermont (UVM) who joined an outdoor club, the Shawangunk Ridge and those vertical cracks in the conglomerate cliffs called to him in a way that nothing else had and, arguably, more than anything else ever would.
Young Clune grew up in a [Westchester] suburb of New York City, Mamaroneck: a place where the closest thing to the natural world was a manicured golf course or some overly landscaped neighborhood parks. He felt out of place and craved to be in the woods, in the wild, closer to the rocks and mountains and cliff faces that he dreamed about from reading magazines or books about rugged mountaineers.
It was that love of the outdoors that led him to UVM, where he immediately signed up for the outdoor club that was slated to go rock climbing during his second weekend of freshman year. Finding the line to climb and learning how to belay with a rope, using pieces of equipment to fasten into the creases of the rock for support in case of a fall, were all things that fascinated him. Once he jumped into a car with the outdoor club leader and another classmate to test their budding rock-climbing skills in a place known to climbers and outdoors people as the Gunks, in New Paltz, he was hooked for life.
Clune happened upon climbing during a time of incredible change in the sport. In the mid-to-late 1970s, rock climbing was still a niche sport, populated by vagabonds, dirtbags and rebels who all felt more at home in a bivy sack on a ledge of a cliff than they did in conventional dwellings. It was a culture that lived on the margins — and sometimes beyond the margins — as they spent days, months and years trying to find ways to move up cliffs using tiny handholds, nubs, cracks and fissures to leverage themselves upwards, against all reason and certainly in contrast with the laws of gravity.
At that time there were three major places for climbing in the US: the Shawangunks in the East, Boulder, Colorado and Yosemite in the West, the climbing Mecca. But in Clune’s opinion, the Gunks had the hardest collection of free climbs out of all three. “Climbs are not measured by how long they are, but how difficult they are,” said Clune in an interview with Hudson Valley One.
Not only were the Gunks a center for challenging climbing, featuring overhangs and gymnastic pitches, but its climber community also were leaders in the purist revolution at the time, with an open disdain for bolts, pitons and other accoutrements that could be hammered into the rocks to help people climb them and avoid having to solve the rock’s innate puzzles and trickery. There was a charge by pioneering Gunks climbers at the time to clean up all of the assisted climbs, returning the routes back to their original form.
“Free climbing means that you climb from the bottom to the top of a route using just your body and the natural features of the rock to ascend,” said Clune. “Protection and ropes are there to keep you alive if you fall, but they’re not used to assist your climb.” The hammering of hard steel bolts and pitons also created scars in the rocks that the purists found disturbing. These became replaced by softer, gentler aluminum wedges of varying sizes that fit into the natural constrictions of the cliff faces without altering them.
Chiseled bodies of stoic climbers were setting new routes in the Gunks that were so physically demanding that there was no metric system of difficulty to assign to them. One of these was dubbed Supercrack, first blazed by Steve Wunsch in 1974, which required scaling a mammoth overhanging fissure just beneath the Skytop Tower at Mohonk Mountain House. “At the time it was regarded as one of the hardest single-pitch climbs in the world,” said Clune. It was given a difficulty rating of 5.12+, just outreaching Gravity’s Rainbow in Lost City (off Clove Valley Road) a new route climbed by John Bragg at the height of his climbing powers that had earned a 5.12 rating.
Clune was mesmerized by the sheer force and talent of the climbers at the Gunks and did his best to hone his skills before he headed out West with friends. Having done some mountaineering in Peru, and then again with some buddies in Colorado and in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, Clune began to realize that, despite the beauty of the big mountains and those moments of satisfaction at the hard-earned summits, what he really loved was simply climbing rocks. That was his passion.
“At that time, it was more common for rock climbing to be a stepping stone towards big mountain climbing and summiting,” he said. “You would get the skills you needed to rock climb and then ice climb, and then get up to altitude and attempt to summit some big climbs. While all of that was beautiful, after a while I found it to be dull. I just wanted to get back to climbing rocks.”
Early on, he realized that rock climbing in and of itself was what he loved. He wanted to find the lines in the rock, to learn to manipulate his body like a gymnast and scale overhangs, swing from one hold to another, feel the adrenaline of the drop below him and the sky above him and nothing but the soft cartilage of the rocks’ joints to keep him from falling.
This more singular focus led him to ascend the proverbial ladder of climbing success — even being chosen to participate in the first-ever world climbing competition in Italy and venturing to compete behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia. Then he went over to Japan, where he wrote articles on the climbing culture that existed there. He visited various far-flung regions of the world where there were rock outcroppings and people, like him, who were mesmerized by how they might find ways to get to the top of them.
He teamed up with legendary climbers like Lynn Hill, who was the first to make a free-climbing ascent of The Nose in Yosemite in 1993, and Jeff “Bones” Gruenberg. The three of them carved their names into Gunks lore by free-climbing the first 5.13: a gnarly pitch called Vandals, beneath Sky Top. At the time it was the only 5.13 in the world. Clune would also go on to free-solo (climbing without any ropes or protection) Supercrack — a bold and audacious climb that has not been repeated to this day.
All of these adventures and characters and shaggy-haired daredevils populate Clune’s memoir, The Lifer. It’s an alternative coming-of-age story that exists at the base of cliffs, dangling from overhangs, wedged between limestone, sandstone and quartz conglomerate, and the wily, weird and wondrous people who inhabit these crevices and share the same passion for climbing that Clune does.
The Lifer is not only an extraordinary tale of adventure, precipice-teasing antics and hair-raising mishaps, but it’s also a story about the significance of the Gunks in climbing’s storied history. “It’s a super-important place, historically,” said Clune. “At one time it had the hardest climbs in the US, if not the entire world. The level of difficulty the Gunks have is something that kept me here, and kept me and other climbers coming back. Those cliffs never stopped fascinating us.” Clune’s memoir traces the rapid changes that took place during the heart of his climbing years, from free-climbing to free-soloing to bouldering and sport climbing, rock climbing competitions to artificial rock walls and climbing gyms, as well as the ascension of female climbers like Hill.
“We called her the Can-Do Girl,” said Clune about Hill, with whom he is still very close today. “She is an absolute legend — an icon in the world of climbing — and there areno feats of athleticism, in my opinion, that can match some of her accomplishments in the sport. She was so far ahead of the curve, pre-Title 9, so off-the-charts in terms of what she could do, that there came a point where none of us could keep up with her.”
Clune’s love of the rock, his ability to befriend almost anyone, to tell a good story and to make a great pitch to his climbing partners as to why they should consider some insanely difficult climb, all helped him land a job with Chouinard Equipment. The company is owned and operated by Yvon Chouinard, the climber and environmentalist who also founded Patagonia. “That was basically a company started by Chouinard where he was learning to be a blacksmith to create pieces that climbers needed,” said Clune. When that folded and Chouinard focused solely on Patagonia, Clune went on to join an employee-led group that created Black Diamond Equipment, the premier climbing gear company in the world.
He admits that he got incredibly lucky and “had a job that afforded me more time to climb than to actually work,” he said with a laugh. “But I was working with clients like Rock and Snow in New Paltz and others that loved to climb. So, part of my job was to go climbing with them. You couldn’t really sell climbing equipment if you didn’t know what you were talking about.”
Clune’s recollection of climbing from the 1970s to today is a fascinating read for anyone, but particularly for those who have a passion for adventure, the outdoors, the history of climbing and that desire to go to the edge. It’s also a literary piece of Shawangunk history — one that predated the Internet and YouTube videos and easy access to information on where to climb, how to climb, what equipment to use. Clune and his fellow travelers were always thirsty for more knowledge, new routes and harder climbs. The names, places and routes described in this book are ones that are etched permanently into the memory that the rocks hold. Turning the pages of The Lifer, one can almost smell that sweet taste of wet moss and cool promise of piney shade standing just to the side of a two-pitch climb on the Undercliff Carriage Road in the midday heat of a late-August day.
Locally, the book can be found at Rock and Snow, Inquiring Minds in New Paltz and Blue Heron Books.
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