Matt Gu is Drifter’s altitude editor.

So back in November 2022, I went on a bigass road trip — I started in Boston, stopped off in Nashville — to Red River Gorge, this climbing area over in Kentucky. I said let me just chuck every single hour of PTO that I’ve accumulated up to this point into it. It was early enough in a new job that I could fuck off from work and they wouldn’t get too mad at me. They had my cellphone number if they really needed me, but they never called once. On the road trip, Nashville was fun and all, but it’s a city, it’s a lot of people around. I slept in a Walmart parking lot overnight, somewhere outside of Pigeon Forge. That’s the eastern bit of Tennessee.

I get to Red River Gorge. It’s this huge cluster of semi-privately owned, publicly owned, or access-fund owned land. There are literally more routes than you can climb in a lifetime. It’s fantastic sandstone geology, fantastically climbable. You get all these great overhangs, all these great cliffs. It’s fantastic holds, but so ridiculously tiring.

At least for the first day, I knew that my friend John Nguyen and his friend Tammy were over there. John had this absolute dead look in his eye, he was really messed up by something earlier that day. His belay partner had dropped him about 40 feet. He got ten feet above the ground before the rope caught him. He didn’t do a whole lot of climbing for the rest of his stay at Red River Gorge, which was all of one more day. I had pre-planned climbing partners that first day, but after that I was just wandering around going like, “Hey, you guys climbing anywhere tomorrow?”

I'm not some shut-in free soloist — I’m not built like that — but I didn’t actually find any climbing partners beforehand. I just rolled up to Miguel’s, this pizza place that’s owned by this Portuguese guy who came to Kentucky about 30 years ago. Over time, through social gravity, it ended up expanding into a place where you can go camp in the field, you can park your car and sleep in the parking lot, they have a gear store, and of course they’ve got their pizza shop. They’ve got bathrooms, they’ve got shower stalls, they’ve got Wi-Fi, puzzles, and board games. You end up meeting people from all over. You glom on to groups, people glom on to you. Plans get made really easily. Usually, you just check, do we all have enough climbing gear between all of us to make our way up a wall and get back down afterwards? Yeah? Let’s do it.

My climbing partners for most of the time were this guy Ryan, a forest ranger between assignments, and this dude James, a med student in Louisville. We were all around a similar level so we could all chuck ourselves at some route and have varying levels of fun with it. None of us are professional, none of us are getting sponsorsed, we’re just running this all on five bucks a night of camping and 10 bucks of pizza a day. We’re not fantastically strong climbers, but we did have a lot of fun.

None of us are super hardcore so we’re not getting up at 6 a.m., saying we need every single hour of daylight. We got up at the comfortable hour of 9:30 a.m., rolled over to Miguel’s, and grabbed a breakfast burrito. You get around Red River Gorge mostly by driving. You can get around with pretty much any old car as long as you have at least several inches of clearance. I was seeing people bringing Corollas down this gravel hill that you really shouldn’t have been able to do without a four-by-four. But that Corolla was down there and that Corolla got back up the next day, so I assume that it survived. We were in a little Kia Soul. You just can’t drive like an idiot. If you floor it on gravel, you dig a pit and then everybody hates you. You just low gear it and go really slowly.

We swung by Funk Rock City. It’s a 20 minute drive, not too crazy. We park and it’s about a half mile hike to get to the actual rocks. We definitely got a little bit lost and had to cross the river probably two more times than we actually needed to, but we were all wearing sandals and it was fine. It’s super pretty. Occasionally, you’ll see oil derricks, because there’s a lot of sedimentary rock and, as a result, there’s a lot of oil shale.

We warmed up on some easier slab. We were saying, “It’ll be good for getting the balance back in for today.” We get 40 feet up there and we’re struggling. It’s not going great. This one really fun lady, Mary Giehl, swings by. She’s on the older side of 50. She says, “Oh, are you guys trying this?” We’ve thrown in the towel on this one: “Feel free to go for it.” She waltzes right up. We watched her walk up this thing. We’re big burly boys who like big, thuggish, brutish overhang climbing and have terrible balance, versus Mary who actually has good balance and technique. She just glided right up.

She had some fantastic pants on, purple-pinkish, super colorful. I said, “Your pants are fantastic.” She says, “Oh, hold on.” And then she goes into a little velcro pocket on her pants, pulls out a business card, and says, “I made them myself.” She does fabric arts installations, but apparently she also does costumes for her nephew who’s a luchador wrestler and she makes fantastic climbing pants. They had a bunch of accent cloth for the patterns on the pockets that had a similar swirl to those Lorenz attractors where you have one point tracing out a chaos spiral, but combined with isolines, like a topographic map.

The route that we were going to Funk Rock City to try is called Prime Directive. You don’t really see it until you come around the crag. Then it’s this really prominent arete, which is that outward facing corner of rock, with a funky roof up top, going a hundred feet up, right out of the ground. You walk right up to it and start clipping in. We all drew straws. I was the first one to attempt it. This is on day three of continuous outdoor climbing for me. I was a bit banged up, a little shredded. You gotta go slow, you gotta go patient, because there are good places to stick your feet and walk yourself up. You just can’t sprint up it. I was mostly good on that part.

Once you get up about 80 feet, it kicks back into this basically flat roof. It looks fun. There’s some good, chunky holds where you can swing out into nothing and do some roof climbing. If you follow the roof, it’s a complete red herring. You’re gonna get stuck and you’re gonna fall and swing back smack into the side of the wall. So me, the fool, I looked at the roof and I said, “Beautiful, let’s do it.” I get five feet away from the wall and realize, shit, I have no fucking clue where I’m going. I look back and see the bolt line. I do not have enough energy to get back in. I fall. 

Thankfully, you fall on a little bit of a vertical face and you skid a little bit, but it’s not that bad. I get back up onto the slabby section. And then I can’t fucking find the handhold. I can’t find the footholds. I’m greasing off every single time. My palms are getting sweaty. I’m like okay, fine, let me admit defeat and tap in one of the other, slightly stronger climbers around me. 

We threw James at it and he actually does the exact same thing as me. He wandered over to the roof for a little bit, trying to figure out how to get over. It turns out you don’t actually need to touch the roof at all. You need to go to the far right side and just go up this face. It’s a kind of goofy geometry. James goes on the horizontal hanging section. He dangled there for a little while, out in the air. But then he hauled himself way back and actually managed to get over the lip and squish his way up to the top. We finished the route. Ryan tried it again on lead — we pulled the rope through, but we left the draws in. I don’t think he managed to get it in one go. He did slip and then hang and rest for a little bit, but he finished it.

We were gassed. It would have been four or five. We rolled back to Miguel’s, and we’re all like, “We need a fucking shower.” But grime can wait, calories cannot. Everybody says, “Oh, the pizza’s mid,” but the pizza’s fine. I’m starving after a day of throwing myself up a rock wall, I don’t really care what I’m shoving in my face. As long as it’s edible and has carbs in it, I’ll take it. The showers there are coin op. It’s  two bucks a shower for five minutes. That’s where they get you slightly. You get good at showering fast and thorough over five minutes. The last day, I really splurged. I spent a whole $4 and got ten minutes of shower. So we hit up the coin op showers, come back, reapply all the bug spray, and then we hung around the bonfire for an hour, shooting the shit. 

This is well after sunset. Everybody loves to try to convince other folks to check out the sick climb that they just did. We were a little bit on that wave. Admittedly, because there was a Walmart and a Kroger rather nearby, we did have a fair amount of alcohol going around, so I don’t remember a ton of the night. I’m not gonna lie. Between James, Ryan, and I, we definitely went through at least a handle of whiskey. Then we started running out of firewood. There was firewood around, but all of us were exhausted, sore all over, and we didn't really want to haul more over. I just crawled over to my tent and passed out.

Enjoying Drifter? Subscribe to receive a new story every week. Want to hang out with other drifters and see how the newsletter is made? Join our Slack. Have a story to tell? Drop us an email.

Masthead

Editor-in-chief — Andrew Fedorov

Rails Editor — Connor McFarland

Altitude Editor — Matt Gu