Sitting atop a 30-foot boulder in the woods outside New Paltz, 18-year-old Adam Shahar is musing about what life will look like if he gets into his first-choice school, the University of Utah. “I know how to ski, but I gotta learn how to rip, you know?” he says. “And I gotta learn how to DJ.” The first goal makes sense. Shahar, a New Jersey native with a helmet of dark-brown hair, is an elite climber, and elite climbers often ski to stay in shape during the offseason. But DJ-ing? “Everyone’s DJ-ing there,” he says. Not that he knows much about life in Utah: Despite winning the bouldering competition at the U.S. Nationals earlier this year, he is not yet afforded the liberties of road trips out west. “It’s tough being in high school,” he says.
On this early December day, Shahar is playing hooky. (Don’t worry, his mom knows.) He is joined by his friend Austin Hoyt, a wiry student at SUNY New Paltz who has devoted himself to climbing; his Subaru Outback is kitted out with a cot and a cooking station for long trips out west. Hoyt has taken the afternoon off studying for finals to walk his friend through a new route he created in an obscure area on the backside of the Shawangunk Ridge packed with steep climbs, many of them first completed by the young pair. Like a lot of young climbers, their focus is on bouldering: short, hard routes — “problems” in climbing jargon — that range from about 10 to 30 feet. The standard scale for bouldering ranges from V0 to V17, giving climbers an expectation of how hard the problems are before they get off the ground; zeros are a cakewalk, only pros climb above V15. The climb Shahar was practicing on a rope that day was first completed by Hoyt in November, which he graded at V13, making this one of the more difficult tall problems in the northeastern U.S.
The Shawangunk Ridge, known to anyone with a pair of rock shoes as “the Gunks,” is a long band of quartz conglomerate rising from the Wallkill Valley about two hours north of New York City. Thanks to the high quality of rock there and the challenging movements it demands of those on the wall, it has long been one of the most famous climbing destinations in the country. But thanks to athletes like Hoyt and Shahar — and other kids who have grown up in climbing gyms and learned from those who have come before them — the Gunks are seeing a major resurgence, with people tackling new boulder problems and climbing routes that were out of reach for prior generations. The area has been reestablished as a premier crag in the top tiers of competitive outdoor climbing, a reputation it had lost decades ago.
The Gunks’s proximity to New York City has always been a huge selling point, and in the early days of American rock climbing, many advances there were made by weekend warriors famous in other fields. One of the early pioneers, Hans Kraus, was JFK’s doctor, treating the debilitating back pain he tried to hide from the nation; a route Kraus co-led called High Exposure is still considered one of the best climbs in the world today. Another climber, William Shockley, was a Bell Labs physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering semiconductor work. (Despite this résumé, his name has been removed from his classic Gunks roof climb owing to his other passion, eugenics.)
In the 1970s, Gunks regulars took things to a new level with the discipline now known as trad climbing. Climbers had abandoned the pitons they hammered into the rocks for lightweight gear, allowing them to climb faster and harder with protection that could be placed and removed from cracks without damaging the rock. “In the mid-1970s, it was a leading area in the world with the hardest selection of climbs anywhere,” says Russ Clune, a Gunks local legend and a founding employee at the equipment company Black Diamond. Pros traveling from Europe to the American West made it a must-stop destination on the way; Lynn Hill, maybe the most famous climber of the era, packed up and moved to New Paltz to invent challenging routes between classes at the SUNY campus.
But the momentum slowed somewhere in the mid-’80s with the advent of sport climbing. To ascend up steep walls without crack systems, French climbers had begun bolting lines into cliffs that had no way of being protected by trad-climbing gear, allowing for crazier routes than ever before. As Clune recalls, this practice caused an immediate controversy at the Gunks. “There were staunch traditionalists who were against it, so somebody would put up a bolt here and there, then somebody would go and chop the bolt,” says Clune. Frustrated by the skirmishes above, the private Mohonk Preserve — on which most of the Gunks sits — stepped in to settle the conflict. “They said, ‘Well, this is a nature preserve, forget it,’” says Clune. After that, Clune considered the Gunks to be “sealed in amber to a degree” — until a new generation, skilled enough to carve out previously unexplored routes, showed up.
In recent years, the explosion of indoor climbing gyms has meant that more and more kids are climbing earlier and earlier, building ridiculously strong tendons in their fingers before they learn to drive. In 2009, there was only one full-time climbing gym in New York City; now there are around ten with more to come. On these gym mats, kids are training, rain or shine, on equipment designed for climbing — to the envy of older generations. “We did pull-ups,” Clune says of his training regimen. “That’s pretty much it.”
Young New York City climbers are pushing the sport despite their urban upbringing. Chelsea native Ashima Shiraishi, 22, has been famous for nearly a decade now for her feats upstate and in Central Park, and for becoming the first-ever woman to tackle a V15 boulder. William Moss, an 18-year-old from the Upper East Side, may take the title for the most impressive feat.
Late last year, Moss made his way to the most striking section of the ridge, a feature known as the Twilight Zone buttress, named after the route Russ Clune first climbed without aid back in 1993. It’s a beautiful piece of rock, suitable for the kind of balletic climbing that lands you on the cover of Smithsonian. Moss, who was inspired to begin trad climbing at the age of 14 after seeing a short film of Clune and learning of his place in Gunks lore, wanted to take the most direct and difficult route up the buttress, a climb first attempted in the ’90s but never completed.
“This thing definitely felt a little real,” says Moss. That may be an understatement. Without much opportunity to put in gear that would lessen his fall, Moss was facing a 50-foot ride unless he could navigate the roof at the top. A five-story fall is technically safe if you can stomach it, but in this case, Moss also risked a pendulum swing back to the very hard rock he was connected to. “I even wore a helmet because if I fell, there was definitely some potential to hit my head,” he says. “The helmet would do something, but I don’t know if it would save everything.”
No shirt needed, though. After two massive falls off the roof, Moss realized he had to navigate the roof feet first, going fully horizontal so he could get to the top. Listening to OutKast’s “So Fresh, So Clean” on a Bluetooth speaker down with his belayer on the ledge below, he mantled over the roof to establish what he graded as one of the two hardest trad climbs in the world. “On top of that,” says Clune, “it’s scary as shit.”
Hoyt concurs. Though he has stuck to bouldering so far, he has promised himself to learn trad climbing next year to take on the humbling overhangs of the Shawangunk Ridge proper. But though he is willing to tackle heady 30-foot boulder problems, he doesn’t want to join a Moss expedition just yet. “I was going to learn from Will, but I think he’s too scary for me,” Hoyt says.
