Zac Robinson, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Matt Driscoll, 17 February 2010

Transcript (33 pages) of an interview by Matt Driscoll with Zac Robinson, on 17 February 2010. Part of the Outdoor Recreation Oral History Project, Everett Cooley Collection tape no. U-2070

Zac Robinson (b. 1983) was born in 1983 in Fort Worth, Texas. Zac discusses his introduction to climbing as a student at Texas A&M and his subsequent development as a climber in Colorado and Utah. Zac initially moved to Salt Lake City in 2006 to ski at Alta and Snowbird and has lived here ever since. His first experiences in Utah include climbing at Indian Creek, where he honed his skills as a traditional climber. Zac worked at the Front climbing gym during his first year in Utah and immediately became involved in the climbing community through his acquaintances there. He discusses the effects and impact of guidebooks on the climbing culture and the adventuring aspect of climbing. Through his affiliation with No Star Tuesday, a group of Salt Lake climbers who climb no-starred routes from the Ruckman's guidebook, and the SLCA (Salt Lake Climbers Alliance), Zac has been deeply involved in assembling and mobilizing Salt Lake's climbing community.Outdoor Recreation Oral History Project. Interviewer: Matt Driscoll

ZAC ROBINSON Salt Lake City, Utah An Interview By Matt Driscoll 17 February 2010 EVERETT L. COOLEY COLLECTION Outdoor Recreation Oral History Project U-2070 American West Center and Marriott Library Special Collections Department University of Utah THIS IS AN INTERVIEW WITH ZAC ROBINSON ON FEBRUARY 17, 2010. THE INTERVIEWER IS MATT DRISCOLL. THIS IS THE OUTDOOR RECREATION ORAL HISTORY PROJECT. TAPE No. U-2070. MD: Today is February 17. I’'m Matt Driscoll and I’'m talking to Zac Robinson. Zac, could you tell me a little bit about your background, when and where you were born. ZR: Sure. I was born in Fort Worth, Texas, October 19, 1983. I was born and raised there, grew up, moved into the house that I grew up in at six months of age, and my parents are still there. I grew up in Fort Worth. It ended up I decided to stay in Texas for college and went down to Texas A&M down in Station College, Texas. Texas, it’s kind of funny. I never saw myself...I kind of always liked the outdoors. Somehow I knew 1 liked climbing before I got into it and then went to college and that’s where I started climbing on the indoor wall there. Once I finished up school in Texas I packed up my bags and hit the road for the summer in and around Colorado, packing and paddling and climbing the whole summer. I showed up in Utah in September of 2006 and within a month I was living in Salt Lake and I’ve been living here ever since; unless I was on a trip somewhere I’ve been in Salt Lake. MD: You said that you knew that you liked climbing before you even did it. What do you mean by that? ZR: TIdon’treally know. I was in Boy Scouts and a few other outdoors things. I did a bunch of backpacking trips and other outdoor things. I suppose I had been to some indoor climbing gyms in Dallas, but I took a rock climbing kinese class at Texas A&M my spring semester, freshman year, and before I'd even been on the wall—I had been on the wall fall semester—but before the class even started I bought a pair of rock shoes and a harness. It wasn’t required, but I knew I'd probably be there most of the time. That kind Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 of played out. I was definitely the freshman kid who was there seven or eight days in a row at some points, which was really great, just for plateauing and getting some experience in, [ guess. MD: So when you first got into it, you got into it pretty hard, then? ZR: Yes. I was definitely there every single day for a few hours at the climbing gym. It kind of became a second home. I pestered around there for a year and a half before they finally gave me a job. I think I had an application in for nine months or fifteen months or something before it finally came through. So, yes, I was around there for a while. Then I worked there at the climbing gym at Texas A&M and then at the outdoor center for the last two years of my undergrad. MD: What’s the outdoor center? ZR: We rented out canoes, backpacking gear, backpack seating bags. Anything people would need. We had ultimate Frisbee set ups, volleyball nets, horseshoe set ups, anything you’d need to go camping, stuff like that. MD: What was the climbing culture like there at Texas? ZR: Ithinkit’s funny because there’s a lot of very motivated, very psyched people, a lot of people who do the same thing as me. So every year there were four to ten different people who just found climbing and would just be there all the time. Yet, compared to Utah and as far as actual road trips or actually climbing outside or even just pure strength and skill, it just completely lacks compared to any mountainous states I’ve been to. I think that’s just for the sole reason that the nearest outdoor climbing to us is two and a half hours away. If that place was here in Salt Lake, I would probably still not go there and drive the extra five minutes to Little Cottonwood or somewhere because thirty foot, Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 forty foot limestone cliffs in Texas along the riverbed, it’s just not the most inspiring climbing around. There we were psyched every time we’d get a weekend because we’d head down to Reimer’s Ranch in Texas. Every time we wanted to head down to Reimer’s for the weekend, there was always a group going. You could usually find some people to go. MD: Where about was that in Texas? ZR: Reimer’s Ranch was just west of Austin. So on the outskirts of Austin. Not too far out of the city. But it was pretty much the closest climbing around to College Station where I was at. There were a few smaller bouldering areas. You could drive another hour and a half or two hours, past Reimer’s, west of Austin to Fredericksburg, or near Fredericksburg, to Enchanted Rock. I only went there twice, which if I lived in Texas that’s the climbing place I’d be at now; it’s more in line with my style apparently. It was more trad climbing and more granite, just a little bit of a neater place. I only went there two to three times the whole time I was there. MD: So you left Texas after college. Did you leave and head north into the Rockies with the hope of climbing more, skiing more? What drove you northwards? ZR: Iknew I was going to Colorado. I think every outdoorsy Texan has the image of Colorado as some sort of Mecca: “I'm going to go to Colorado for the summer!” I still hear friends. I feel Utah’s kind of got a leg up on that now. So, I was going to Colorado. I was going there to paddle. We lived in Buena Vista, Colorado, which was essentially my home ground in summer of "06. I was just paddling, climbing there. I ran in with a group of the local climbers there and they were mostly thirty to fifty year old men. They were great to climb Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 with. They were way more experienced. I just started trad climbing and they knew the ropes and they would show me what was good, what was bad. We went to a few of the really neat kind of spots in Colorado. We did a couple of 14-ers there. We started climbing the Black Canyon then, that summer, started sport climbing in Colorado. When I was in Texas I was so excited. All my friends were excited and impressed to see somebody do a 5.11 sport route. Then you go to Colorado and people are, at Rifle, Colorado, in particular, it’s a sport climbing haven for the country and people are climbing 5.11 to warm up. There are no 5.10s really in the canyon. Then they continued to warm up on 5.12, then they get on their 5.13 project, which to me was unfathomable. I never climbed a 5.12 and hardly climbed any 5.11s. To see people warming up on things that I could just not even do was just incredible. It made me realize that the world of climbing at Texas A&M was definitely just a drop in the bucket. That really kind of inspired me and got me climbing there with stronger people. Within a week or two I was climbing stronger than I had ever climbed before, so it was just really neat. Whatever peer groups are around, you seem to rise to that level. Expectations just change as soon as you’re around them. MD: Were there any people in particular that played a part in your development when you moved to Colorado? Or was it just a hodge podge of different people? ZR: It was pretty much a hodge podge of people. There are a couple of the older guys I keep in touch with. A guy named Lee Jenkins lives down there and he comes through Salt Lake once or twice a year for various reasons. He’s half employed, half unemployed, depending on the year. Or maybe at his age, half-employed, half retired, I think. So I see him from time to time. There are a few people in Rifle I climbed with, but I probably Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 don’t even remember their names. I just hung out with them for a couple of weeks. I was really inspired to see that people are strong elsewhere and people are competent elsewhere. It’s something to work on. I showed up in Utah and went to Indian Creek, tried to learn how to crack climb. MD: Was that your first visit to Utah, Indian Creek? ZR: Idrove into Utah, drove through Moab and my first night I parked just outside of Kane Creek, outside of Moab, and camped there. Second day I went to Arches. Third day, I think that night I drove down to Indian Creek and tried to find some people to climb with. It was early season. There was no one in the canyon. It was still pretty hot. Ran into a few folks from Arizona, which was really neat because a year and a half laterI was much, much better of a climber and ran into them at a different wall. I know they were really impressed. I was falling off the top ropes on the easy routes they were doing, and now I was leading routes at or above their level, just within a year. I spent lots of time out there. MD: So you had never been to Utah before then? ZR: Never been to Utah. I knew I was going to come out to Salt Lake, just because every ski movie I'd seen had Alta and Snowbird in it, so I knew it was probably a good place to land and I could also have possibilities of not working on the mountain. I wasn’t too stoked to be a liftie, hanging out in the cold. So it sounded good to maybe have a city where I could still get some good skiing in. So that’s why I picked Salt Lake. I got a pass at Alta. Skied forty or so days my first year and haven’t skied that much since. MD: What did you, I mean besides the skiing, obviously, you said you saw Snowbird and Alta kind of drawing you to Salt Lake. Where did Utah stand in your knowledge of Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 the climbing world and the climbing culture? Did you see that as an opportunity to get to do better stuff, different stuff than you were doing in Colorado? ZR: 1 guess as far as Utah versus Colorado with the skiing or the climbing, I had heard of Indian Creek. At this point I had just started trad climbing at the beginning of the summer and I was there in September, so it had only been three, maybe four months that I'd been placing trad gear. Crack climbing was still a foreign means of moving to me, but I knew that was a world class place. Colorado’s got a few good places, such as Eldo. Rifle is definitely world class sport climbing and Colorado has a lot of good places, but they’re not quite as concentrated as you can get in Utah, I think. They tend to be, Eldo’s near Boulder. And Denver’s just not quite as close to climbing as people like to think. Boulder is great, but I don’t know if I could live there. So, yes, coming to Utah I discovered that Indian Creek and the Moab area had tons to offer. I'd heard stories of Zion and seen pictures of Zion National Park. Up here near Salt Lake, all of a sudden, get here at the end of the summer and people are offering to go to Maple. We could go to Little Cottonwood, we could go to Big Cottonwood, we could go to American Fork. I was just not used to having that many options with an after-work or a day trip range and that really, really appealed to me. I guess it was just kind of the change, especially coming from Texas, to having world class climbing. Climbing that’s worth visiting from Europe a day trip away or a weekend trip away is just something that I think really, really appeals to me about Utah and Salt Lake in particular. It really is very good and really accessible. MD: So you’ve been here three years, now, is that right? Zac Robinson ZR: 17 February 2010 Yes, I've been here three years. I got here of September of ’06, so about three and a half years, then. MD: So what are some of the things that you’ve done the last couple of years that have kept you here? ZR: Well, I guess my first year I was kind of planning to work somewhere around a ski resort and kind of ran out of money a little earlier in the fall than I had planned and got a job at the Front Climbing Club. That was the best place I could think of to work as a new person in a new town. It was my job to talk to climbers. Because they were going to the climbing gym, as they walked in the door I asked them what their name was. It was my job. Then to make small talk with them, make sure things were going all right. Everybody I know in Salt Lake is from the Front, essentially. Most of my good friends I’ve met through there. So that was a great job because I knew of lots of opportunities to climb, lots of climbing partners and just a wealth of connections there. After working there—I kind of skied most of the time through that winter working there. When April rolled around I went ahead and quit and moved down to Indian Creek for about a month and just lived there. I got to meet some of the other climbers that kind of typically are in and around Utah but not necessarily living in Salt Lake, not necessarily living anywhere. It was really neat for me to spend time with them and to actually dedicate a solid month. I think that’s when I developed into a full crack climber; when I got good at that was that month there. Before I quit at the Front and right before I went to Indian Creek, I had gotten a hold of Andrew Burr. He left a roommate wanted notice at the front. So I moved in with him just before I went to the Creek. [When I] came back, I was living in his basement. Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 He’s a photographer here in and around town, mostly a climbing photographer, likes to shoot a lot of local stuff and also do a lot of traveling. I lived in his basement. We’d wake up in the morning, I’d roll upstairs and make breakfast and it was just assumed that he and I would go climbing that day unless he was out of town. We’d go climbing. We had a whole new group of connections as far as climbers so he knew people who were typically off mid-week because he was always looking for climbers to take pictures of. So we started climbing and exploring the canyons a bit more, just doing routes that were a little more off the beaten path, that weren’t the same routes that everybody always typically does. So I lived with him for about a year and a half. That was a great experience because every climbing trip I went on was documented. Essentially, every day I went climbing was documented, whether it was in Utah, or we took some trips to Wyoming and Montana. Actually when I was living with him I went to Jordan. I was teaching at a tutoring place downtown, Higher Ground Learning, and I got sent to Jordan for three weeks to do SAT prep classes. I was able to take an extra week off work afterward, so Andy and my good friend, Kristine, came out and met me in Jordan. We climbed there for about ten days. So it was really neat having all these cool trips and all these good experiences, essentially that were completely documented, photographed. MD: ZR: What was the climbing like in Jordan? It was really similar to Red Rocks. It was neat because it was a large flat expanse of sand and then almost like City of Rocks, how these little pimples of granite in City of Rocks just pop out, except in Jordan they pop out of the ground and there are these big Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 mounds, nearly 800 to 1,200 feet tall of sandstone. Sometimes it looked like a dripping candle, the sandstone’s just melting down, and all these weird threads to tie rope around and really, really weird formations. Nothing is continuous and clean looking as the Moab area, maybe more like Red Rocks, large in cut holes, just weird, just facial features and weird features on the face rather than having to find [unclear 16:42] cracks. It was neat. It was adventuresome. When you get somebody to drive your forty-five minutes out on a four-wheel drive road in the middle of the desert, they drop you off and you say, “Pick us up in eight hours,” you’re hoping they come back (laughs). You’re hoping they don’t get a flat tire and get stranded themselves on anything on the way out. It was an interesting trip. It was a pretty neat time. I’ve tended to grow a little more fond of sticking close to home more recently. MD: Have you climbed anywhere else internationally? ZR: Internationally, no. That’s been my one big trip. I guess that first summer I was living with Andy I took some time off. I went to Boulder and climbed some there. I went to Squamish with him that summer. The next summer I was there, I took off from Utah again and I think I went to Boulder. Spent some time in Vedauwoo. Andy was there on that trip. Spent some time down in Moab. There were a couple of places. I spent a lot of time in Little Cottonwood that summer. This last summer I spent a month in [unclear~17:54] and then took off to Yosemite for a week with my good friend, Kevin. Then headed up toward Squamish and spent some time up in Squamish, thinking about climbing. Not even thinking about climbing; thinking I should climb, but mostly just hanging out, enjoying the time off. MD: What did you do while you were in Yosemite? Zac Robinson ZR: 17 February 2010 When I got there and Kevin had been there for about three weeks with his girlfriend, so he was ready to go do something a little more intense. So I drove in one morning and he was ready to pack everything up and go do El Cap. I told him to give me a day or two just to get there. Turned out it was raining that first day so we just got everything packed because there was nothing else to do. Then we started making our way down the valley from Tuolumne Meadows where we were camped. We did south [unclear ~18:45] up El Cap. It was my first big wall and the first time to sleep on a rock. I take that back. There was one fun experience in Zion where we slept on the second pitch, top of the second pitch of a route. MD: Were you forced to bivouac up there? ZR: No (laughs). My friend, Kristine, it was my first to A Climb there in Zion. We went to do the Moonlight Buttress and we actually got stuck behind a party. We got a slow start that morning and they were bivving where we planned to bivvy and so we bivvied on top of the second pitch. There was a good ledge there. That was a fun trip as well. It was our first time. We had no clue what we were doing and we were having fun with it too. We packed a full hot and ready pizza from Little Caesar’s in our haul bag, box and everything. So we’ve got pictures of us pulling that out of the haul bag at night. So we were just kind of screwing around and having a good time with it. The next day we got stuck behind them a little bit more and they were definitely going slow and it turns out it was one of their first times to A climb as well. We ended up bailing. Went back a couple of months later with another friend. It was her first time to A climb and we ended up doing it in a day. But it was kind of fun just learning with people who are also learning rather than being a deadweight to somebody else, I guess. 10 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 I guess when I was in Yosemite I had some experience, but still not really a ton. Kevin had done a few different routes up Yosemite. It was actually his second time up the south A wall. It was really nice. He kind of knew his way around and I was able to catch up and actually learn from somebody rather than figure it out on my own, which is way more efficient. So that was a good time and after that we were exhausted. It was 4" of July weekend and there were no campsites available so we left. Then he ended up leaving shortly after that. He was going to stick around for another couple of weeks, but we ended up going back home early. That was my big wall experience, I guess. We spent time on the wall, it was fun and relaxed and not hectic, not pressure at all, which was great. MD: That’s what I’ve heard about Yosemite. During the summertime when it’s crowded as could be when you’re up there climbing on the wall you feel like you’re away from it. ZR: Yes. We actually caught a heat spell there. I think it was one of the hottest weeks that summer and all the climbers just kind of left that week. So there was one other group on the wall, which was really nice. I can’t imagine. I want to go back this year with my good friend Rob—he’s never done a big wall—and maybe go do the nose or something else that’s easy if you’ve got enough technical prowess to not get stuck or anything. But I want to go mid-July, when it’s going to be hot and there’s going to be no one there. Your haul bag’s going to be heavy anyway; just throw in another twenty pounds of water and just take your time. I can’t imagine doing the route and having people below me and above me the entire way up. I think it would really detract from the whole experience. I think it would be really nice just to kind of have a more secluded experience on the rock. 11 17 February 2010 Zac Robinson MD: I guess in some sense now you’ve been spoiled by having your first trip like it was. ZR: Totally. It was really nice. We rarely heard anyone else even yelling on the way up. It was pretty cool. MD: So you’re a trad climber? ZR: Ever since that first summer I left Texas, I’ve gotten the trad bug and just really, really focused on that. MD: What about it, do you think? ZR: Tdon’t know. I've tried to peg that down. I think it usually comes down to just the aesthetics. A place like Indian Creek you don’t wonder where the route goes. Some places like American Fork or Rifle, if you can’t follow the chalk line, you have no clue which way it goes. It’s just a bunch of blocky limestone. Indian Creek, you look there and it’s just a beautiful straight line all the way up the wall until you get to a ledge. Some of the stuff in Yosemite that we did, it’s neat to look at the wall and even from the meadow you can see the features on El Cap that link together for 3,000 feet. You can see some of the cracks and some of the corner systems that will get you up there without having to, to just kind of pull on bolts or anything the entire way. There are no blank sections. There are features you have to follow. I guess even in Little Cottonwood, I think it’s really aesthetic to get somewhere and look up at a face and to outline the way you want to go up. Whether it’s been done or not before—which odds are in Little Cottonwood it has, especially if you can point it out from across the way—I think it’s so fun to sit on the south side of the canyon and look over at the north side and just pick out lines and pick out buttresses that you’ve done. I think that’s the big thing is trad climbing 12 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 typically has a line. You’re following a crack or a feature or something so you can get gear in. There’s typically something about the climb that just kind of tells you where to go and leads you in a certain direction, I guess. I think that’s what I take it down to. I know it’s not because I’'m a thrill seeker and I don’t like the gear. I think even now I’'m so spoiled on the cracks, I'll get on something way above my head and it’s not that bad, because I can place gear every twelve inches if I want. Whereas, sport climbing, now you have to go four to six to ten feet sometimes. So I know it’s not that I’'m looking for a thrill for the trad gear or anything; it’s mostly just because it gives me something to look for, it gives me something obvious to spot. MD: Natural routes or something like that? ZR: Yes, natural looking routes that are obvious from quite a ways away. You don’t have to find that secret handle. There’s still some of those there, but you see a line and you say, “I want to go up that way.” It just kind of leads you to get not only to the top, but get to the top via a certain route that you can spot from a couple of hundred feet away. It’s really, really aesthetic, I think. MD: Maybe this is related; maybe it isn’t. But guidebooks, what do you think about the place of guidebooks? I guess I ask that question now because you talk about natural routes and being able to sort of visualize the route and know that’s the way you want to go0. Meanwhile, guidebooks kind of draw it all out for you. Obviously it’s good to sort of be able to locate where the climbs are, but what are your feelings about guidebooks that sort of map out a specific route? ZR: TI'm definitely of a newer breed where all the guidebooks I own I think were published before I started climbing. Even the new versions of most guidebooks were 1= Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 published before I'd been to a lot of these places, before I even looked at rock climbing. So I've grown up with guidebooks and I definitely appreciate that. It just feels like a given that when I go to a climbing area there’s a guidebook. I almost went to the Needles in California this summer and I'm thinking about going back there again this next summer. There’s not a guidebook to the area. I'm sure there’s maybe like a hand drawn guidebook in a couple of ranger stations somewhere and I'm sure there’s information available. I just think, for me, that’s a novelty. I can’t imagine climbing not only when there were [26:53] to be had everywhere, but when you didn’t even know if something had been done. You’d get to the top and maybe there’s a lone bolt with Steve Homm’s initials plugged into the top. It’s like, oh, wow, I guess Steve got here a week ago. So it’s really interesting for me, I think. I like to have the adventure. There’s some things I’ll spot on the internet where people will outline every single handhold where the approach is super specific and to the point where I don’t like to see tassels of yarn or stuff tied on trees every twenty feet to get you somewhere. That kind of upsets me. I feel like if you get lost, chalk it up to a fun day and try and figure it out next time. MD: On a climb there’s a certain amount of art involved, right, in this sort of elective movement as opposed to the pre-written movement. ZR: Right. I typically, I find myself I like to onsite routes, whether I can or not is a different issue. But I like that first experience and I’'m not really good at working things out. 'l go back to a route that’s near my limit—I almost got it the first time—then I’ll also have no clue what to do the second time and I still fall all over it before I find that hold that I found the first time, I just didn’t even remember it was there. I just don’t really put forth much effort to remembering where stuff is. Sometimes I really like to go out 14 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 and just try to do it for the first time. It’s like an [unclear ~28:30] on sight every time I go up. At some point if it gets frustrating enough, I'll try to remember where certain gear goes or how to do a certain move. Eventually I remember that. But, yes, I tend to go for, I feel like it’s almost always a first try for me, even routes that I’ve done several times and I'm still trying to figure them out. It’s more of once I grab the hold I remember it was there, rather than I remember the hold’s there and I reach around for it. Yes, some routes or some things that get put up on the internet where it’s very move by move, or even specific descents, I think, don’t need to have quite as much, don’t need to be quite as specified as they are. Like the descent; you’re going down. Do it safely, don’t push yourself too much, wrap on a tree if you need to, but, yeah, you can probably find your way down. It’s downhill. It should be easier than going up. So I think with guidebooks, it’s an interesting thing and I do like the trend that I feel like has happened a lot. The first one I really noticed was the David Bloom guide to Indian Creek where, one, it was full color, there were beautiful pictures, but he had essays from [unclear ~29:50] and essays about the area and essays about how people who have climbed there felt about this place, because everyone has deep connections. MD: As opposed to just like the first ascent onto the climb and then a description of the holds. ZR: Yes. MD: An actual sort of spoken history of that person’s experience there. ZR: He had a few more updates in the second book. Then Scott Carson had another article in there. I spent just like another week or two reading the Zion Free Climbs book that Bryan Bird, maybe, came out with just this last year. And it’s got essays from 15 17 February 2010 Zac Robinson everybody, Mike Anderson in particular. Mike Anderson’s done a lot of new routes in Zion and it’s got essays by Mike about routes that he’s done, routes that he’s repeated and the stories that he’s heard on the first ascent. An essay from Brian Smoot about him and Les Ellison doing Cracking the Cosmic A or something like that. Gosh, I don’t even know all the stuff, but you go back and look at those essays that kind of tie into a place. MD: It kind of pumps you up to do it too, I guess? ZR: Yes. There are routes in Little Cottonwood that I won’t touch because maybe they were at my limit at one time; they’re probably above my limit now. I know that whoever did them, like when Smoot did them back in ’78, he did this and this, and I’'m like, “well, all right, I want to give it my best. I’'m not even going to go up there just yet because, wow, that thing was proud a long time ago and it’s still proud,” but it was more so back in *78 when it happened. So I think the history that comes out of guidebooks and going through and reading them...the No Star Tuesday Club, have you heard about that? MD: No. ZR: Really? So when I was living with Andy Burr, we used to get out climbing a lot. Shingo [Cawa? 31:55] would get out with us a lot as well. It all started on one Tuesday, I believe, I think it was a Tuesday—TI hope so; it goes better with the name of the club— but Andy and I decided to go do this one route, Mission to Moscow, we’d seen in a book. It was described as an 11-A in the middle of nowhere in Little Cottonwood; there’s no other routes around it. I believe—oh, I don’t want to get it wrong—I think it was a Hank Armantrout route and someone else. I hope it wasn’t Bill Robbins; it could have been Bill Robbins. One of those two guys. Yeah, we decided to go up there and it was described as a big [unclear ~32:37] that you can see from the road. And we had scoped that a few 16 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 times and decided that’s the day we were going to go. We -called Shingo up, sent him a text message and said, “Bring pants.” It was the middle of July and it was just a note that you know that we’re going to be thrashing; you know we’re just going to be crawling through scrub oak on the way up there, just like in rough rock, and not a five-star climb. We get up there and ate it up eventually after a few sketchy tries, a lot of loose rock on it. Got the anchors, they were kind of crap, backed them up. Then we just started cleaning it out, brushing it off, kicking off all the loose rock that was precarious at that point and cleaned it out. We spent a couple of hours doing that and got up there and red pointed it. It was a blast. It was the kind of route that you look at and say, “I don’t think people have done this in maybe like fifteen years.” It’s by itself, it’s an off [unclear ~33:35], which people don’t like and I don’t think it’s been done in a while. We looked across at another route across the way and went over and did that. We didn’t even know what it was called. It looked like a hand crack to fist crack to us. We got there and it was full on [unclear ~]33:48] squeeze chimney and did that thing. That was Beth Ann’s Crack. So we did those two that day and it was a full day, morning till night, and it was a great time just checking out new stuff. It almost felt like we were doing a first ascent just because they were routes we’d never heard of, never even looked at. They’re on a page in the book that covers five routes over, like, a couple of acres land in Little, not a concentrated area. Never even looked at that page before. So we decided we were going to start a club called No Star Tuesdays, and go out on Tuesday’s and climb zero star routes just to check them out. Routes that we’ve walked past several, several times on the way to other routes, but never even looked at. So we 17 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 printed off some t-shirts. For the first year we were the yellow shirts. We got out and I think the first meeting was in the Green-A Gulley. We went up there and did routes like St. Alphonso’s Pancake Breakfast, This is Almost the Place, Stormy Resurrection gets one star. [ don’t know why. It’s one of my favorites there. Goodrow’s Nightmare is one that we did. It’s like a [five-eightoff width 35:00?] A lot of these were just really, really fun. MD: So they didn’t have stars because people didn’t go there? ZR: They get no stars because we decided that the Ruckman’s, who wrote the guidebook here, didn’t like wide cracks. So anything that’s a little wide, they tend to not rate very highly. Maybe they get no stars just because they’re not quite as aesthetic. The Green Adjective is a three-star route that probably gets done at least five times every nice weekend, I would say at least five times every nice weekend. Forty feet to the right of it is This is Almost the Place, which I thought was a really fun, hard crack climb that people, I had never even looked at until we were looking through the book for no star routes. So it just really kind of highlighted areas that I’d been to plenty of times; that there were still lots of routes there than had been done, lots of which I found very worthy that we had never even looked at. So that’s been really fun, because then you sit at home poring over the book, looking for the routes that you’ve skipped over every other time that you’ve looked at the book. Looking for the routes that had descriptions that had “gritty” or “loose rock” or something there that tends to scare people away and we go check them out. It’s really interesting. It opens the canyon up so, so much. So we just based it completely off Ruckman’s guide because that was a popular one around, that’s the one you buy, so it’s 18 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 completely off of their recommendations: we do the routes that are typically not recommended. So it kind of took off. I think it helped a lot that Andy was there taking pictures, so it looked good. We did postings up online, started a little webpage just to kind of document what we did. Yeah, just put postings up online, that kind of made it sound like fun, made it look like we had a really good time. MD: Do you guys still operate a webpage? ZR: Yes,it’s still up. MD: What’s the name of the webpage? ZR: Depending on how active I am, it’s either NoStarTuesdays.com or there’s like a Google sites page. I know NoStarTues.Googlepages.com will reroute to it right now. But, yeah, I would just go through Andy’s pictures, select the ones that were pretty cool looking, do a fun description that made the route sound appealing or exciting or something and then post it up. We kind of got a little buzz. People started looking forward to the next meeting. The next year we had brand new shirts. So the green shirts are all the second year people, so you can tell them apart. We only print so many shirts a year. So we try and...it’s fun. Every rule we make up is all in good fun. We made up rules like you have to come to two meetings or do this many things before you get a shirt, just to get people a little more psyched, a little more dedicated. It’s something that tends to die out whenever I start to work on Tuesdays because I’m not there to tell people we’re having a meeting, I’m not there to kind of get people psyched. And if I’'m not there, it’s really hard for me to do a write up because I have no idea what the routes are. So I really wish, I think our goal for next year—we’ll definitely kick it off again this next spring—is just to have more continuity, I guess, and more 19 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 members where everyone will, say, go out and do it in the name of No Star Tuesdays—it can be any day of the week—but just go out and do it and write about it and essentially just get people excited about something. So, yes, just to have it where it’s not quite so dependent on me or Shingo or Andy to go and be a part of it. MD: And you’re right, too, I can see where it kind of explodes the guidebook. It doesn’t say that it’s not a good source, but that it’s not necessarily giving credit to everything in the book that maybe ought to be getting some credit. ZR: And there are some routes that are truly horrible that we’ve been on. I don’t know Greta or Stuart Ruckman, but it’s really fun just to kind of poke fun at them and just say like, “oh, yeah, the Ruckmans hate wide stuff,” or “the Ruckmans do this,” or “the Ruckman’s didn’t like this route.” It’s just to kind of poke fun at them; it’s definitely not in bad taste at all. It’s fun having the book and I know we’ve played games before where we go through the book and name a description and somebody has to name the route. It’s actually really scary how good we are sometimes (laughs). I know Andy Burr kicked off one of his slideshows last year, he’d taken pictures of various pages and blacked out the route name and just has a description there and was throwing beers into the crowd for whoever got the right answer. I felt bad because I knew quite a bit of them. After I got my one beer, I kind of kept quiet. But it’s really neat to go through and see all the little Ruckman-isms that describe the routes. Some of them make them sound exciting, some of them are hilarious, some almost stand in awe of whatever route it is. Esther X is like “bold elegance on a sea of white granite.” I'm just like, wow, that sounds great (laughs). So it’s just kind of neat the 20 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 effect that guidebook has on a culture, I think it’s really interesting. It can really make you appreciate the history behind it and you can keep all that stuff in your mind as you go out and climb. MD: It’s great to have word of mouth besides that, too. That sort of preserves that intimacy of the culture itself and a sense of community to have the word of mouth being passed from person to person in a group like this that you’re talking about, No Star Tuesdays, and to have this official book out there and to put those in dialogue with each other. Then you really have a picture of the opportunities that are available around here. ZR: Right. It was really interesting. We had our kickoff meeting for this spring. We went to Crescent Crack, which I’'m sure if you talk to any local climber who’s climbed in Little Cottonwood, they can name six to ten routes on the Crescent Crack buttress, most of which they’ve done several times. You ask them what Paraplegic Ward is, they’re like, “I’ve never heard of that.” You ask them what several other routes are and they’re the ones that you walk past, like ten feet, to start another route. So it was really neat to go up there. It was really odd because that day there was no one on Crescent Crack or Mexican Crack or any of the other three-star, five-star classics, the routes that you should do if you were in town for the weekend. There was no one on those, because everyone was like, “No, I’ve got to do no stars.” We’ve got a rule, too. The number of stars that you accumulate has to be less than the number of pitches that you do. So if you do one no-star route, you can do one-star routes the rest of the day and you’ll end up with five pitches and four stars. You can do three-star routes, if you’re good about it, you can do a couple of no-star routes, you can do a three-star route and get away with it. But it’s just to encourage an actual scorecard to 21 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 make sure you’re checking off enough stuff. Some areas only have a few no-star routes, then it’s one-star routes the rest of the way. But, yeah, it’s been really fun. MD: That’s funny to add the score system like that. It makes me think about what your thoughts are on to what extent climbing is a sport or isn’t a sport. Do you think climbing’s a sport? ZR: Oh, gosh. I consider climbing a very athletic event. I don’t even know what I consider a sport. MD: Yeah, we’ve got to come up with your definition of a sport, first, before you can answer it. ZR: Yes. And it varies for me. I’ve found lately climbing is more recreation. I'll go climbing, almost like [unclear ~43:04], I'll go climbing for a day and won’t climb, or climb one pitch. Then sometimes I’m really into it and I'm really trying hard and really working towards something and really focused and trying to bring it all together physically to get it done. Some days it’s just a mental diversion from anything else. It’s nice to get out and look around. So I think climbing can go either way. There’s no denying that it’s super athletic; there’s no denying that sometimes it’s super, super mental and it takes more mental strength to get up a certain route than it does physical prowess, I guess. But, yes, it’s the kind of thing where I don’t really know what a sport is, in my opinion. I think grading climbing and competing in climbing definitely has its place indoors, and indoors it’s fairly easy to judge, I would say, or to create something like that. But outdoors, especially this last year for me, I’ve been more into being relaxed, more into just climbing. As soon as I try to climb something hard, if I start to lose motivation, 22 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 I’ve gotten to the point where I will just stop because if it becomes work, if it becomes stressful, then I don’t enjoy it. MD: Well, are you competitive? Do you consider yourself competitive as a climber—I don’t mean necessarily competitive with other people, although I could mean that as well, but competitive with yourself? I can see how that might sort of incorporate a level of stress, right? ZR: Ithink at times I have been, and that’s probably why over the last year or two I keep telling everyone I’ve quit climbing. No one believes me when I say I quit climbing, because they ask what I did last weekend and I say, “I went climbing a little bit.” But it got to the point where I really just wasn’t having fun. I would go climbing one weekend and just be miserable and end up walking around checking out a canyon somewhere. I'd say, “I quit climbing.” Then Thursday would roll around and I was done with work for the weekend and all my friends were going back down to the Swell, so, “I’ll just go the Swell this weekend, do a little climbing.” So, yeah, it took me like two months to quit before I actually didn’t go climbing. Even now I'm still pretty, I would say I’'m much more mellow than a lot of my friends. Also in Salt Lake it’s a weird experience because all of my friends are climbers. So whenever I quit climbing I think, Oh, I'll stay in town and hang out with some friends, because usually when I’'m climbing, I'm with five or so people, but not like my whole group of friends, people I haven’t seen. So I'll stay in town and hang out with them. Well, turns out they go out of town every weekend as well, so I don’t see them anyway. I think that’s been one thing that’s kind of, this last year I’ve been much more focused on avoiding stress and if I feel it coming, I'm perfectly fine 23 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 with not doing anything or whatever it takes that day just to not kind of be stressed out and make sure that I’m enjoying it. MD: The other side, besides this potential competitiveness to get so involved, is like the meditation of the act itself, and sort of being outside and being focused all on your moodiness; touching little pieces of a wall out in beautiful places that’s supposed to be sort of an escape from all this stress. So that’s why I think it’s interesting to put the competition alongside this sort of meditative aspect of the recreation. ZR: 1wouldn’t say I'm very meditative. I'm not in a Zen state. I’'m not anything like that. It’s kind of nice, like I like to get out and I’ve never been like, “oh, I love the outside,” but it’s good to get my heart rate up every once in a while and I only do that going climbing. MD: I guess that’s what I mean by meditative, is that you’re just thinking about your moodness. You’re not thinking about all the other things that are bothering you, right? ZR: Yes, exactly. It sounds like a good way to get out. Even if I get phone service up in Little Cottonwood, like yesterday, it’s not hard to ignore calls from business related calls, I suppose, because it’s like, “Oh, sorry. I was up in Little Cottonwood. I didn’t have my phone,” something like that. So it’s just kind of nice to make sure you get away every now and then. The other thing is lately I realize that I'm kind of good at climbing. I’m not exceptional, I'm not a superstar, but I’ve got a certain level of technique that it doesn’t matter how out of shape I am, I can still do certain moves. I can still get up certain routes, gracefully or not, I still know how to climb. So I can be completely out of shape, the end of the winter, and still get up things and that, for me, is really motivating because it’s neat 24 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 to see something like, “wow, I'm good at this, I'm pretty good at this. I could be way better.” So that kind of introduces the competitiveness. As soon as I get focused on how much better I should be, then I start to get a little more stressed, I would say. But it’s really neat to say, “I'm good at this, I enjoy this and I’'m good at it.” It’s not too much work for me sometimes. So that’s kind of the highlight that brings me back every year is, “man, I am good at this, I do have fun doing this. All right, I’ll give it a try again.” We’ll see. I'm actually contemplating my summer plans right now. Right now I’'m leaning towards kind of just being homeleés in Salt Lake City, like going on a road trip to Salt Lake City. Because I'm a tutor, I’ve got the summers off and so I'm looking to spend time in Salt Lake City as though I had traveled here and just plan on climbing every morning in the canyons, plan on looking for things, plan on spending time up in certain places just to check things out. To make sure that I’'m just around all the time I think sounds really desirable, rather than being on the road. Then I’ll probably take a few trips, but I don’t want to be on the road all summer, like I have been the last couple of years. Yeah, I’'m really looking forward to that. That’s only enjoyable, I guess, if I'm actually climbing (laughs). So I'll have to get back into climbing. MD: Being homeless in Salt Lake. ZR: I may be wishing I had something to do. So it comes down to I want to go climbing so I can hang out with my friends. I want to start climbing again so I’ll have something to do all summer, although I have been looking into buying a good camera system so I can go on climbing trips and not actually climb, just kind of jug a rope next to them. Still share that experience, still watch my friends climb and watch people climb 25 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 and still there in that environment, but not necessarily climbing. I think that would be really enjoyable for me at this point. MD: Let’s digress for just a second. Maybe we can finish this discussion. You were talking about community around No Stars Tuesday and I just wanted to ask you a few questions about your involvement with the SLCA. I understand that you are currently on the board and you’re the active secretary, right? ZR: MD: That’s right. Can you tell me a little bit about what the SLCA has been up to in the past year since you’ve been active? ZR: In the past year since I’ve been active, we’ve really, I think the SLCA has lots of goals for the future that we’re looking at and wondering what is feasible for us to take on. There is a whole slue of climbing related goals, whether it’s education—access in Salt Lake City has not typically been too much of an issue. That’s as far as I know; I'm fairly new to the area. I don’t know a lot of issues that may or may not have happened in the past. But it seems like with the Envision Utah working on a new land management plan for the canyons, it seems like there could be some changes to land access for climbers, skiers, hikers, all sorts of people, all sorts of user groups. So it’s something that I think we should take a bigger role in the next coming year, probably. I know some of the things that we’re working on is...I feel like one of the reasons I’ve been brought into the SLCA along with a few others is just to help revitalize the board. A lot of them have been working really hard and doing a lot of things for the board the last ten years and it’s either time for them to get out or time for them to just assume a new role and not have the same tasks every year, have a new light to look at things. So 26 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 just to get some new voices in there and help kind of revitalize the organization, I think. We’ve also got a new advisory board that was formed from, I think, some past board members and then a board of directors and then also just people who have very strong presence in the local community, whether they’ve been climbing in Salt Lake for twenty, thirty plus years or they’re in the industry or all combinations of that. So looking to them just also helps provide the board with a little more direction as far as how we want to grow the next couple of years. In October we unveiled a paid membership program for the SLCA, trying to actually build a member base and kind of give us the option to get a stronger program. Maybe be able to raise more funds in the future I think is something that we’re looking towards. I know there’s thoughts of a part-time paid position on the board, just someone that can help keep us focused and that at least twenty hours of work are getting done every week. It’s all volunteer. Some weeks it’s, who knows how many hours by everyone on the board, like hundreds of hours. Some weeks it’s probably zero. That’s what happens with volunteers. So it would be neat to have a part-time paid position just to ensure there’s a little more steadiness to the work, somebody who’s constantly doing SLCA stuff. I guess we also unveiled what we’re calling the liaison program. So we’ve got liaisons to different climbing areas. The goal with that is if something comes up in Little Cottonwood, if you’re up climbing a route and you see a big loose block, you notice bolts that are bad or you see spray paint on a route in Little Cottonwood, right now in the SLCA, Clay Watson is the man to go to. He is the SLCA liaison to Little Cottonwood routes. There are liaisons for bouldering in Little Cottonwood, American Fork, Maple 24 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 Canyon, Big Cottonwood, just any of the crags that are in and around Salt Lake that we kind of have, I guess, our presence in and I guess that the majority of our climbers and members would climb, [this] gives them somebody to talk to to address whatever issues they see. I think that would be really good. I think that’s what SLCA needs to work on is making themselves available to the public and making sure that if there is an issue, if there is something that comes up that the public actually has somewhere to go. [brief interruption]. Yeah, just making sure that the public knows where to go if an issue comes up that they can tell somebody about it and somebody’s willing to get it done, because I know in the past, and even my first year or two here, I didn’t know anything about SLCA. I didn’t know what they did or what they had going on besides the crack clean up day and maybe a fundraiser every now and then. So we’re just kind of giving ourselves more of a presence and also getting people aware of the work that we’re doing. Because I think just doing that would encourage people to give us more work and give us more directions from a public opinion, which I think would really help is to have a little more public support or a little more...there’s certain people out there who will drop everything and come help us out for a certain project. But even then, it would be nice to have people just ask for a project. People ask, got behind it and said, “We could really use, this one trail is really bad...” but that would give us so much motivation to get out and do it. So I think it’s making ourselves available and making sure people know that whatever comes up there’s someone to talk to about that that will help get things done. It could help us a lot. 28 Zac Robinson MD: 17 February 2010 Do you feel like other places that have the climb...well, not many other places have the climbing access that a city like Salt Lake has so nearby, do you feel like there’s sort of a uniqueness about the group? ZR: I guess I've been climbing for, gosh, seven years now, maybe about seven years, which is becoming a long time. I was going to say I haven’t been climbing long, but, geez, seven years. But I would say my experience has been somewhat small, I guess. I was in Texas four of those years. Climbers in Texas are not a user group, they’re not knowledgeable about anything, so some of the things that I’ve heard as far as other climbing organizations is, a lot of things in the Southeast, they’re continually buying land because there’s land access issues. Some of the things in the Northeast are clean up issues and this and that. I feel like Salt Lake’s really spoiled because not only do we have a lot of climbing nearby, but we’ve had a lot of climbing nearby for a long time. It’s all developed, it’s been around for a while and it’s been in that state for a while. Not only amongst climbers but even most of the community and landowners and land managers, it’s kind of a status quo thing. That could change in the future and I think that’s a good reason for the SLCA to be around. But it doesn’t...even if preserving access is our top priority and one of the top values we have for the community is one that’s rarely, I believe, exercised, and very rarely viewed by anyone else in the community. As far as other organizations, of course, the ones you hear about are the ones you read about in Climbing magazine who just purchased, just raised $1.2 million to buy so and so many acres to preserve access for years to come and people have raised this and that. So it’s either organizations like that or organizations such as Friends of Indian Creek, who’ve kind of taken on this international visiting spot. [brief interruption] 29 17 February 2010 Zac Robinson MD: So there’s still, you think, a need for the public to become familiar with what the SLCA’s doing and that’s the primary direction you think the organization needs to go in? ZR: 1think that’s definitely something we should address. I think that the climbing community in Salt Lake is huge. I don’t know how many members the Front has. Momentum probably has just as large an amount; it’s crazy crowded. Rockreation I'm sure has members. There’s people at the Westminster Climbing gym. I went there for the first time about a month ago and it’s fun! It was really, really good. There was good climbing. There’s like forty-six foot tall walls and no one there. But they have a staff. Their staff presumably knows about climbing and gets out and climbs. I'm sure they have the exact same kind of freshman that I was who’s there seven days a week. I’ve recently this last year kind of made some friends at the U of U’s Outdoor Program and there are people there who are climbing and they’re always out. It’s just amazing. There are people I don’t know who are exploring Lone Peak and exploring here and here, plus the untold numbers of just young sport climbers who are just coming to the sport. Salt Lake has all these thousands and thousands of climbers. The SLCA does not \ have thousands and thousands of people involved in it currently. So I think we have a huge opportunity just with the numbers of people here in order to grow and to be a more vocal organization. That comes from us having a large constituency and also more people using us to direct their opinions. Just trying to get climber’s opinions coordinated. Climbers are the most easiest-to-get-up-crowd, the easiest to organize people, especially the more dedicated climbers. Any of our crag events, crack clean ups or...[brief interruption] anyway, any of our crack cleanups, I feel I know a healthy amount of the climbing community, especially the involved climbing community, from 30 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 working at the Front, from living and climbing with Andy, just from being in the canyons all the time. We do the clean ups and at least twenty-five, sometimes fifty percent of the people I don’t know. MD: Iknow. I showed up at one in the fall and I had no familiarity with the community until this past year, like in the fall I just started meeting a few folks. And, yeah, I think it’s events like that that could eventually draw in more people, maybe younger folks, maybe folks who just moved into town, to get the public knowledge out there about what you guys do and what you can do, the more you can do. ZR: Well, it seems like at least a quarter of the people there are like, “oh, yeah, I just saw this on a poster.” “I just moved here” or “I’ve lived here for two years and I’ ve never heard of the SLCA, but I’ve come out for this.” They have no connection. They don’t have a friend who tried to rope them into it. I tried to rope all my friends into it; I'm bringing in as many people as I can. I'm just baffled that there are people that have no...the climbing community is so small. You can meet people all over that you’ve met and climbed with in Yosemite, saw them in Indian Creek, they moved to Salt Lake, they dated your old girlfriend, anything. Yeah, you go to these events and there are people who don’t have that connection, lots of people who show up and help out. I'm always amazed at how many aren’t part of the community that are trying to be, or are reaching out, or that we could possibly reach. I think there’s a big market there. Something else I was thinking about with the...well, recently my good friend Shingo and I started having movie nights. So we had one at my house in December and we showed just a couple of old climbing films, like classic films from the ‘60s, where it’s not full of techno, it’s not the coolest artist thing. It’s just you see somebody hopping 1 Zac Robinson 17 February 2010 around on a ledge up on El Cap and they’re sleeping in mail sacks, big burlap sacks, hopping around on a ledge, getting into the sacks to go to sleep. Everybody’s like, “Hey, dude, you’re not clipped in.” He just dives for the anchor and clips in. It’s a ledge that’s about nine inches wide or something ridiculous. Just like classic films like that. The first one at my house, we probably had twenty or thirty people there. We decided to hold the next one at the Front and showed a couple of movies there. I looked around there and the first movie there were probably eighty to a hundred people there, which I spread the word a good amount, but I didn’t know a lot of the people there. They just heard about it from someone, which is amazing to me. So hopefully we’re going to continue those on a regular basis, probably through the SLCA and then just trying to bring people together for events. One of the filmmakers, we were showing one of his movies, he’s got a good friend in Salt Lake. That person called him, was like, “Oh, I heard they’re showing your movie. Are you in town? I heard you’re doing a screening.” He was a little curious of why there was a free public performance that was unlicensed. But we were able to talk with him and smooth things out. I talked him into coming out to Salt Lake in another month. He’s doing a screening of another film and he’s partners with the SLCA now (laughs). We’ll turn that into a good thing. But that’s how small the thing is. It’s not hard to generate a hundred people at an event if it’s something they’re interested in and something they’re willing to help out with. So Salt Lake’s got so many people, young people, people who put up routes thirty years ago are still putting up routes in Salt Lake, which is a really neat experience to see that. 32 Zac Robinson MD: 17 February 2010 Great. Good luck with your future work with the organization and hopefully some of those plans start to pan out. Nice talking to you. ZR: No problem. END OF INTERVIEW 38 5 2 & E oA (‘»'V fl<| = N 0 “":7:-!' il il - -”' i L8 . a = ' e S |I AL o I N I A I\ =