Central New Hampshire Climbing History - by Jay Knower
Until recently, central New Hampshire has seen little and sporadic route development, so in many ways, the climbing history in the area is currently being written. That said, a few intrepid rock explorers have headed into the hills over the years.
Russell Crag was mentioned as a climbing destination in the 1963 Holderness School Yearbook, and some of the first recorded ascents here occurred in the 1970s. Tim Gotwols, along with Brian Brodeur, Mark Iber, and Doug Philipon, did some scrambling and exploring on the Russell Crag hillside in the late 1970s, most notably completing an aid climb up Iberian Crack on Russell’s Main Cliff. Interestingly, around this same time, Iber and Brodeu made the first ascent of Plymouth State’s Clock Tower, putting the pumpkin way up there for Halloween, a ritual that has been clandestinely repeated almost every year since.
In the early 1980s another group started scouring the hills. In 1982, Ted Hammond, Bradley White, Gary Kinson, and Sam Smith climbed a buttress to the right of the main wall at Gorilla Head at 5.7. Called Brad’s Buttress, this climb requires a 4-mile approach, complete with a heinous bushwhack and talus scramble, just to reach the base. Not described in this book, if you want to repeat their masochism, locate Gorilla Head off the Greeley Ponds trail, and climb a buttress that may or may not be the line, thereby repeating their experience of wild adventure, or getting insufferably lost. It’s really a 50/50 proposition.
About this time, Tom Bowker emerged on the scene. His first lead was Standard Route, completed with Bradley White, at Dickie Ledge in 1980. Bowker went on to be one of the most prolific explorers of the era. An early developer of Rumney, Bowker is known for putting up, with Jay Lena, the first sport climb in New Hampshire: Peer Pressure (5.10d) at Rumney in 1987. Quick to remind you that he put it up by hand-drilling the bolts on lead, when Bowker would bolt, he would do so grudgingly, and always with a hand drill.
Drilling by hand is not easy. These days, in the age of lighter and lighter battery-powered hammer drills that can power a hole into granite in mere seconds, hand drilling seems like an arcane pursuit. But Bowker turned hand drilling into, if not an enjoyable practice, a meditative one. The ability to undertake mindless Sisyphean drudgery, all in the name of opening routes, was a perfect skill to bring to the hills.
In fact, Bowker was drawn to the quiet of the area as a counterpoint to the more civilized Rumney. By the mid 90s, development had exploded at Rumney, and Bowker was looking for a way out. He said that “Rumney was getting developed so fast, I couldn’t just go up there and feed the rat.” So he started wandering the hills, looking for new rock. Bowker said, “I spent a lot of days in the woods, carrying climbing gear that I never used.”
Nowhere is Bowker’s knack, or maybe perseverance, for finding new routes evident than at Journey to a Lost World. How Bowker found this crack is beyond us. You can’t see it from any vantage point, and even if you walk up the stream at the base, you can’t see the crack until you’re past it. But Bowker and Lena sniffed it out, and put up what may have been the first 5.10 in the region. Today, the first pitch remains one of the best cracks yet found. And the second pitch up a slab, past a single bolt for protection (of course hand-drilled on lead, but this time by Jay Lena), may be one of the boldest pieces of climbing done in the hills.
Bowker went on to focus his development at Dickie Ledge, where he authored many bold slab and crack routes. Dickie had its own scene back in the 90s with Bowker, Lena, Glen Cilley, and Bradley White picking the plums up the pristine and soaring granite. However, no history, or frankly, no story, of Central New Hampshire climbing is complete without a discussion of Bradley White.
Iconoclastic, unique, adventurous, bold, and colorful, White seems to have scoured every square inch of the region. Stumble upon a random cliff, and chances are, Bradley White has been there, and done FA’s there, probably solo, and has uploaded them to Mountain Project. Part Henry David Thoreau, part William S. Burroughs, White’s descriptions are more likely to describe the blueberry bushes he clawed through mid route than move-by-move beta. White may be the only person we know who has started at Waterville Valley and trekked to Lincoln, as the crow flies, a feat that undoubtedly required soul-sucking bushwhacking, hair-raising cliff scrambles, and a very keen sense of direction.
By the 1990s and the early 2000s, a new band of explorers were tromping through the hills, but the sense of quiet and undisturbed solitude remained. As such, there is little concrete record of ascents, just random pitons sticking out of potentially climbed cracks, or bolts on chalkless faces, and stories told thirdhand of routes that may or may not have been done. Jim Shimberg is perhaps the primary reason for this development, as he climbed extensively in the area. That’s not saying much, though, as Shim has literally climbed everywhere over the span of his 42-year climbing career.
Shim never thought to record anything, and said that he “didn’t think anyone would go out there in a million years. It’s funny how things change. The stuff we did was total obscurity”. Examples of Shim’s handiwork can be seen on the Livermore Crag at Russell and on Goodrich Rock, in the form of bolts and a piton, respectively. Did he send them? According to Shim, he can’t remember if he did or how hard they were.
Around this time, Brady Libby, Tim Deroehn, Matt Keefe, Pat McElaney, Erik Mushial, Justin Hayes and others blew through and climbed a bunch of routes. As with those before them, their interest in the area was focused on the day-to-day experience, rather than a desire to catalog and record routes. Each climber’s recollection is foggy (gee, we wonder why!) so it’s entirely possible that any of the problems or routes in this book were first climbed by this crew. Bobby Hardage, from the Dartmouth area, was also known to search out obscure boulder problems, and climbed extensively at the Davis Boulders during this time.
In the early 2010s Jay Knower, like Bowker before him, needed a break from the Rumney scene and began searching for boulders in the hills. This sparked a mini-bouldering renaissance led by Matt Wallace, Ladd Raine, Tim Armstrong , Mike Manganiello, Emmanuel Hudon, and Mike Robinson. The best ascents of the era are Knower’s Big Short (V5) and We Who Wander (V7), Mangianllo’s Short Sale (V7), and Robinson’s terrifying Deadly Pillars (V1 X). But they all pale in comparison to the king line of the area–Dave Wetmore’s White House. Completed in 2013, this marked the first time that true standard-setting difficulty came to the region and it’s widely recognized that, at V11, this problem is among the best hard test pieces in New Hampshire. A harder, and taller, project of Wetmore’s lies just uphill, pointing the direction to even more futuristic ascents.
Unbeknownst to the bouldering crew, at about this time, Nick Benedix and Mike Zarnowski, also inspired by Bowker, began finding classic cracks in the area, and often sending them ground-up with no rehearsal. Their first ascents are extensive, but look no farther than the Balcony at Russell to see both their bold handiwork, and their early forays into rap-bolting. Zarnowski’s discovery of Glacial Park may be the single best find completed in this area, showing that cliffs sporting pristine rock and classic lines still exist, undiscovered and just out of sight.
In 2015, Raine and Knower, through inspiration or delusion (it’s hard to tell which), bushwhacked up to a cliff on the western flank of Mt Kancamagus, and dubbed what they found to be Riflemea. Unbeknownst to them, however, Brady Libby and others had previously ice climbed there and referred to it as Monkey Village. Whatever the cliff’s name, Raine and Knower, along with Andy Casler, began bolting and cleaning, and unearthed some backcountry alpine sport classics. Raine’s aesthetic and difficult arete, Nailed It (5.12c), may be one of the best sport climbs around.
Lee Hansche had been climbing around New Hampshire for decades, and it was only a matter of time before his prodigious psyche and focus directed itself toward Dickie Ledge. Hansche authored many routes on the granite flanks, but the one that stands out, both in terms of difficulty and beauty, is The Horcrux (5.13d). This overhanging dihedral had been a well-known “last great problem” for decades before Hansche’s historic first ascent in 2015. At this writing, the The Horcrux is the hardest route yet completed in the area.
Things sat relatively dormant for a while, until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With many of the main climbing areas closed, and social distancing de rigueur, central New Hampshire seemed like a workable out-of-the-way option. Hansche and Knower teamed up to start developing the crags above the Yellowjacket Boulders. Hansche made the first lead of Gypsy Cafe (5.11+), a splitter offwidth that had previously rebuffed all lead efforts, including those of Robinson and Knower.
In 2020, Kevin Donovan made the second ascent of all hard routes at Dickie Ledge in a day, which included The Horcrux and four other 5.12s. He also onsighted the entire Ocean cliff on the same day. This may have been the best single day of granite climbing in New Hampshire history.
Also in 2020, bored and restless due to the lockdown, Knower took a couple days of research and scoping, and finally managed to crawl his way through a quarter mile of the thickest krummholz known to man, and gained access to Osceola Crag. This spot produced classic moderates both sport and trad, all in a picturesque location near the top of the mountain. But the true explosion of route development, the likes of which has not been seen since Rumney’s golden days, was yet to come.
On a random day when Hansche and Knower were toiling away at the Yellowjacket cliffs, Mike Zarnowski showed up and regaled the duo with tales of numerous unclimbed walls. Bored again, Knower agreed to a tour, and quickly realized that Zarnowski was right–an entire Rumney’s worth of unclimbed rock sat just off Tripoli Road. Such began a period of intense development, previously unseen in the area, as Zarnowski, Knower, Hansche, Sam Johansson, Greg Pouliot, Kayte Knower, and Torie Kidd, and others began putting up new routes.
In a short span, over 200 routes were put up, all with user-friendly bolting and modern hardware. Good news travels fast, and soon climbers from the area became aware of the “scruffy Rumney” open for climbing. With an influx of users, the Town of Woodstock, who owns and manages the land, became aware, and thus precipitated an access journey that changed the focus of the area—away from development and toward stewardship and sustainable use.
Climbers began communicating with the Town via the Woodstock Conservation Commission and a warrant article was submitted at the town meeting posing the question of whether the bolts should stay or be removed. Climbers won the vote, assuring that Russell Crag (now also known as Merriam Woods) should be able to survive as a climbing area. Climbers are currently working with the Town to craft a management plan for Merriam Woods to ensure that the area is protected and maintained.
Seeing an opportunity, the newly-formed Central New Hampshire Climbers Association identified a 5-acre plot of land on Tripoli Road sitting between Merriam Woods and the White Mountain National Forest, and representing the only privately-held land in that area. With the help of the Access Fund, the climbers purchased the land and are currently fundraising to add a parking lot, which should ease congestion along Tripoli Road.
Conveniently, this land is a jumping-off point for the new cliffs currently being developed—Storybrooke, Y-Crag, and Schist Creek offer quality routes from 5.4 to 5.12+, and point to seemingly unending development possibilities in the region. While new routing has stopped at Merriam Woods, the surrounding WMNF land holds seemingly unending potential.
Maybe that’s the main story of the area. The hills give up their cliffs sparingly, as long hikes and thick forest remain constant challenges. But there are always a select few who look at the crowds at Rumney (or increasingly, Merriam) and say “forget this”, and head into the woods in search of the next amazing cliff. To these climbers, we say: have fun, use good bolts... and text us the directions.