Big City Bouldering

Downhill from the tall, sprawling, spaceship-like Columbia University hospital complex, across Riverside Drive, and under a forsaken maze of ramps that connect the George Washington Bridge to the Henry Hudson Parkway lay our unlikely climbing destination for that July Sunday. The boulder Sam and I were attempting to reach lay on a patch of grass that is technically on the public land of Upper Manhattan’s Fort Washington Park, although one would never guess it given its car-dominated surroundings. It was not an insignificant piece of rock—perhaps close to 100 feet long and 25 feet high at its highest point. Yet it had most certainly never been documented as holding any boulder problems, and had almost certainly never been scaled before. The biggest, most important boulder to ever see a first ascent? Clearly not; but we take what we can get in the City.

That particular piece of stone, lying almost under a highway overpass directly off the side of a busy street, would go on to become Well-Being Rock, its name a more politically correct compliment to Fort Washington Park’s only other previously documented climbing, Loony Bin Boulder. That July, meanwhile, was the second summer I had been going out with Sam, putting in the work to add new boulders and problems to the online NYC Bouldering GunksApp guidebook that he had gained co-authorship of. And that day in particular proved to be one of the most fruitful climbing days that we have had together outside, giving me some of my proudest first ascents to date in the powerful dyno of “Bloomingdale Insane Asylum” V2 and the super-technical, compression-heavy “Potter’s Field” V3, with Sam there to take down the quality features of “Nellie Bly” V4. At the end of that day, my only hope for the rock was that people would actually make the trek out to it once it was in the guidebook, that we would only be the first, and not the last, city climbers to appreciate one of the most unconventional climbing spots in a city full of unlikely boulders.

Well-Being Rock lies only a few miles from the manicured lawns of Central Park, the only outdoor bouldering in New York City that many climbers even here have heard of, and the only place that most climbers anywhere else have ever had even the smallest chance of knowing about. Perhaps all the FAs that I have gained in more unlikely places around the boroughs have jaded me, just a touch, to the true grandeur of Central Park bouldering, to the magic of better known spots like Rat Rock that lie directly under the shadows of some of New York’s tallest buildings. But given how much more known those boulders are, how much nicer that park is kept up than many of the climbing spots I’ve been to with Sam, and the enormous wealth surrounding Central Park that facilitates that upkeep, I have to say that the true magic in city bouldering that I have found lies in the places that are spiritually disconnected from what many others think of New York City bouldering as.

This magic has never been lost on me, as long as I’ve been going out there with Sam. Many of the climbing spots that we’ve been to can feel surprisingly isolated in different ways, either isolated by man-made elements like Well-Being Rock or isolated by vast stands of nature, like many of the boulders in the sprawling forests of Van Cortlandt Park. Yet, whether in the shadow of an overpass or the shadow of an old-growth oak tree, every boulder we climb is essentially equally accessible to the greater world, the truth that these rocks still inhabit the largest city in the country not being easily forgotten. For how isolated Well-Being Rock felt to actually reach, for how deserved my fears that no one would bother to check it out after us felt to me, even that spot is barely a half-mile walk from a major transit hub. If we had forgotten to bring anything with us that day, food or water or a brush for cleaning the rock, anything we’d need to purchase for a successful day of climbing was within easy reach. In truth, I have never really known what it is like to feel the fear of forgetting something you’d need for a climbing day. The unique accessibility is there to us, certainly, and that is something I fully appreciate about this city’s boulders. But even that, the thing that was never lost on me about bouldering in New York, is only a piece of the true magic that I later came to understand about it; what can be done with that inherent accessibility is what I’ve come to see as the more important part of it.

I don’t know how many subway cars I have hauled my crash pads into, how many strangers I have jostled for space with on my way to the crag. I don’t know how many housing projects I have bouldered in the shadow of, how many people have wondered what I was doing with their neighborhood boulder, a feature of the landscape that they pass by every single day. I greatly wonder, thinking back on it, how many people who have never climbed a day in their life have passed by me on a boulder problem and wondered to themselves, “could I do that?” I have seen the sport of climbing, especially in New York, commercialize to a degree that I never imagined possible even in my childhood, when I saw the beginning of that transformation. In today’s form, climbing is prohibitively expensive for many people to afford to do regularly, and only getting more so as it continues to commercialize and endlessly broaden its appeal. While it is undoubtedly a good thing for more people to be introduced to the sport, commercialization inevitably leaves behind many others as well. I wonder further how many people have seen me climb, or seen anyone, and dismissed it as not for them only because they assume they’d never have the opportunity to do it.

New York City is perhaps quite far from a climber’s paradise, I can’t deny that and I can’t deny that it probably never will receive the recognition of the world’s great climbing destinations. But what the crags here posses above all, in all the unlikeliness of their locations and that they’d even exist in the middle or such urban development, is this uniqueness in their accessibility, something that could never be replicated or topped by any other climbing locale. Many of the same barriers to entry still exist here, of course, but the bar one needs to jump over to begin climbing outdoors is so much incredibly lower here than it is at likely any other place on the planet. Theoretically at least, anyone, regardless of ability, race, gender, nationality, ethnicity or income level, has the same access to these rocks as any of their neighbors do, simply by virtue of the rocks existing amidst the great diversity of the boroughs. The boulders themselves can seem to be just another part of the fabric of urban life, just another New Yorker to pass by on the street or in the park, their own characters in this great dance of city living.

I’ve loved the additions that I’ve made with Sam to the NYC Bouldering guidebook simply because I am a climber, and I love climbing. But through them all, I’ve come to realize the bigger picture of what those additions can offer to those who read them. My days of big city bouldering development have been so meaningful to me because of who I am adding the problems for; not just a small climbing community, but, hopefully, any city dweller who might see the opportunity to climb right in their neighborhood, on their street or in their local park, and who might then see it as a sport that they too can do themselves, where they otherwise may never have. The opportunity here to make outdoor climbing accessible to anyone is simply unlike anywhere else on earth. I can only hope that one day this full accessibility will be realized, that many individuals from unlikely climbing backgrounds will put their hands on these unlikely climbing problems, some that I have had the honor of helping to document, and feel the beauty and the magic of the sport of bouldering, ascending from the city ground up towards the city sky.