A People's History of Houston Climbing

I want to start this off by saying I love Houston.  I love the city, I love the people, I love the food, I love the art, I love the music, I love the beer, I love the scenery, I love the climbing, I love everything (except for the traffic and warm weather but I do love Houston’s Fall, there’s nothing quite like it.)  I wasn’t born here.  Like many people I moved here.  Unlike most I moved here at an early age and grew up appreciating what Houston is about over many years, through different versions of my own self.  Just the other day I was eating spicy Szechuan with my girlfriend Sarita and my good bud Joe in Bellaire and had to make a Tsing Tao run at the super market in the strip center.  I decided to walk there and as I was entering the store a young Chinese man stopped me and handed me his phone.  He said, “Can you please tell this person where I am?  He can’t understand me.  I’m trying to get a ride.”  It took a second for his request to register but I took his phone and spoke to the man on the other line.  From the sounds of his accent this driver was most likely Nigerian and was saying he couldn’t understand the man requesting a ride.  I found the whole situation humorous as I could understand both men perfectly yet they were struggling to communicate.  I figured this would be my good deed for the day and gave the driver the address and handed the phone back to the Chinese guy.  He thanked me and I ran inside to find the beer.  As I left the store I was happy to see the driver and the passenger laughing, buckling their seat belts and driving away to who knows where in this great city of ours.  And that’s exactly what made me think, man I love Houston.  Where else in the states would something like that happen?  We’re a hub for so much culture, so much diversity, forever fluid and never stale, that is Houston.  I could go on but let’s get on with it. 

I also love history.  Knowing what has occurred and been built in the past for us to exist at this moment, this very moment of me writing this and you reading this.  We are only able to do what we do on a day to day basis because of what has happened before our time.  History gets lost especially when the people who have it in their heads and memories leave or pass on and it never gets recorded.  That is why it is so precious.  It can also be dangerous.  Some historians use written history to benefit future generations, some historians use written history as propaganda or for malevolent purposes.  In the words of Rage Against The Machine and George Orwell, “Who controls the past now, controls the future.  Who controls the present now, controls the past.”  This love for history I think stems from my parents.  My dad studied history in college and was always reading and continues to read history books and watch history shows.   My mother is a seeker of truths and passionately pursues what she feels is right in the world.  Together they instilled certain values in me that drive me today.  I am forever in search of the truth.

And of course I love climbing.  I live it, I breathe it, it consumes me.  I didn’t become a climber until later on in my life but the more I think about it the more I think I’ve climbed all of my life.  As a kid I used to climb the plastic playground sets, traverse around, climbing laps, campusing the monkey bars, bat hanging on tree branches.  My dad used to take me hiking around Pinnacle Mountain in Arkansas where my family lived before moving to Houston. It’s in my blood.  I was born in Chile, in the northern part of Patagonia, and I have a feeling my ancestors were climbers.   

I’ve decided to undertake this project because I came to a realization that not many people including myself know the full history of the Houston climbing scene.  And naturally I decided to seek the truth.  I’ve had the idea for a couple of years to compile the history of Houston climbing but had yet to commence.  People were forgetting the past or just didn’t know and it irked me.  I also wanted people to know that there are climbers from our community that have moved on to work in the industry at large and are doing great things.  How cool is it that we have our own, from flatlandia, from the swamp that is Houston, guiding climbing trips in North Carolina, or leading wilderness rehabilitation programs, or working for companies like ClimbTech and Black Diamond, or building climbing walls, molding climbing holds or bolting routes and establishing new climbing areas?  And to be brutally honest, what really got to my core and stirred this whole thing up, was the death of a friend no one in the climbing community knew about, even though he climbed at the gyms and the crags we all frequented.  We can say we have a community yet we didn’t know that one of our own had passed?  That perhaps we could have helped his surviving family?  That we could have grown stronger from the loss?  More on that later.  And then there’s the people within our community who put down our scene.  There have been many people over the years who have worked hard, for close to nothing, to keep the torch lit, to keep the fire alive, and to ensure future generations of Houstonians would have a place to climb.  The climbing industry is not easy.  Many of us are underpaid, underappreciated, but that doesn’t matter to those that are truly passionate.  We want to spread the love of climbing.  I want the haters to know that without the climbers from the past, there would be no Houston climbing.  The present, the future, the past, it’s all connected.

Some people don’t care, some people embrace it, some people want nothing to do with it but I feel by getting our history and knowledge out into our world, even to those who don’t climb or don’t know they’re climbers yet, we will continue to build our community and know although we climb at different gyms or associate with different groups or camps, we’re all in this together and achieving the same goal.  We all love climbing, we all love our fellow climber and we all want to progress.  We all want to forget our worries and woes and embrace a community that welcomes us, pushes us, and allows us to tap into that essence that runs through all of our veins.  We all want bliss.

I’ve been in the scene for almost a decade now and had pieced together my own version of Houston’s climbing history in my head.  From helping build the walls for the current Texas Rock Gym, working various positions at Texas Rock Gym to co-creating Lost Soles Climbing and gaining an avid interest in helping our community grow, I've gained knowledge that many have not.  I came into the timeline when a lot of the older generations were moving on or out and a new generation was being formed.  As the new generations came in, there was a disconnect with the past and a lot of people even today don’t know the struggles, the accomplishments, the smiles and the cries of the giants from before.  We stand on the shoulders of those before us that paved the way for what we now know as Houston climbing.  It was like I was seeing one version of the Matrix transition into the next.  I became friends with the old and the new and having seen many more versions of our climbing Matrix cycle through, I thought I knew it.  But it wasn’t until I talked to the forefathers of Houston climbing, the gym owners, the managers, the climbers from the beginning, that I had a true understanding of what we now know as the Houston climbing scene.  From talking to all of these people so far I’ve been getting a sense of something being created, some awesome energy that I was sort of getting a hold of but once it started I could just barely hold onto the reins.  I’m doing my best to document this journey and reel it in and I hope I can do all of this justice and put whatever this is that’s being created into something more than a written history.

This is built from my own knowledge as well as from various interviews I am compiling.   I will be releasing all of the gathered information and interviews in written posts and podcasts every couple of weeks and as I am able to collect the knowledge.  My plan is to start off with interviews of the gym and business owners and pertinent people from the present, and rewind to the beginning of the Houston climbing scene and work our way back to the now and the future.  This is a living thing, as is all history, and I hope by getting this out more people will contribute to the conversation. I hope you guys, I mean, I hope y’all, get as excited as I am and we grow stronger together.  Feel the psyche, get stoked, and I’ll see you on the walls!  Oh, and get outside!

- Max Deisch