The historical development of Gunks climbing— concentrated early on at the prominently exposed cliffs of Millbrook Mountain and Mohonk’s Sky Top, and then increasingly here upon the Trapps and Near Trapps cliffs as the sport matured— is a story laden with intrigue and inner drama. To suggest, as we have above, that the rhythm here is more inspiring than SoHo was in the heyday of the modern art scene is not simply an embellishment, it was an historical fact for a handful of individuals that were present during key periods of the sport’s development. We tend to consider works of art to be recorded artifacts from periods of great spontaneity and inspiration, or sometimes conceptual insights— that have the power to invoke a perceptual or conceptual experience of similar intensity within us. But we often lose the richer dialogue that was originally undertaken by the artist during a gathering momentum that was not simply poured out into the work as a culminating fruition or cathartic expression, but was instead, an ongoing and living dialogue with the work itself.
Climbing was, and still is, like art and music, a dialogue that is at once the active push outward of one’s will while at the same time a deep and ongoing receptivity to what has already been applied. For the artist, every stroke applies itself in relation to the whole, and suggests, thereby, what requires modulation moving forward. Reaching the top is not a culminating experience that is cut off from the journey. Like music, even the silent spaces that anticipate the next movement and build up emotional tension prior to their release are an integral part of the general movement.
In this form of art, however, the entire body is the extended brush or supple ear of the artist. It is the body that compresses and stacks impulses that have been freed up for coherent organization in the overall movement sequence, because the body has already incorporated the spontaneous capacity for execution of the elemental units. These are the exquisite notes of the sport. The notes stack and compress in the manner that music builds up emotional tension precisely because the rock does not yield or unveil its solutions easily. Repeated failure and protected falls introduce themselves as the climber’s first and frequent companion, but they also foster a polished will for select individuals. They are the direct feedback in the creative dialogue. We who were not present during the formative years of that bold dialogue cannot apprehend the pressures that squeezed forth today’s routes and tales from those bold and adventurous souls who completed the first journeys upon the rock. The first decades brought open-ended journeys that were blanketed with a palpable horizon of adventure and danger. Death was only a miscalculation away. A handfull of pioneers penetrated the unknown horizons of human potentiality as courage lead every climb. Over time, as elsewhere in the world, the adventure slowly transitioned toward the development of a full-fledged sport. In the process, a shift of emphasis occurred from pure adventure to technical performance— as is also the case for every sport. The discipline has now matured and developed airtight techniques, maneuvers, gear, and ‘algorithmic’ sequences to mechanically conquer a given route, but in so doing, it has been suggested that it is now increasingly vulnerable to the removal of context that rating systems inevitably foster. The sport has transformed.
UNDERCLIFF
As we continue our journey upon Undercliff Carriageway, our eastward trajectory rounds to a generally northeast path in the direction of Sky Top ridge at Mohonk, following the contour of the long Trapps cliff base. Throughout the turn to the north, the huge walls begin to retreat behind a talus field of debris that has recently ended its massive landslide just in time for the carriageway to sweep along, open and inviting. Opportunistic saplings at one time found refuge amongst the cracks in the ceremoniously dropped boulders, and have since grown to gnarly-wooded maturity amongst a like-minded forest of hardy species. There, they often appear as guardians giving up their back sides to the massive crunch pressing in from behind so that we may walk freely upon the flat open surface of the carriageway. It is quite striking how it feels as though many of these small trees have miraculously halted the rapidly spinning edges of cubical boulders thrashing down the radical slope with great abandonment and thunderous protest. They were, after all, abandoned. But now, the quiet presence of the settled boulders does little to assist our understanding of the sublime power exhibited by mile-high glaciers dismembering large sections of previously fractured rock from the main body of the ridge. Much of the tree growth is successional, not only to the barren landscape of the immediate post-glacial period— a mere 10,000 years ago— but also to the colonial ethic of industry that was imposed on the region to subsequently strip it bare. Nature thrives in the gap nonetheless. Even without this later influence from the axe, natural processes repeatedly stripped clean this bold landscape, only to weave vegetative growth amongst the crisp forms that are occasionally and selectively exposed.
As we move on, the sheared conglomerate body of the ridge rises even higher and more vertical, forming a white walled backstop that can be glimpsed through the piles of talus debris, with their intervening garments made of hardy trees and shrubs. In a couple of select places, large steps that were constructed out of fallen blocks raise stairs directly off the carriageway, like a secret entrance to a monolith. By virtue of their blended nature, we forget that these steps have been painstakingly arranged and maintained for the sport’s ever renewed population of enthusiasts. The number of individual climbing routes throughout the Gunks is said to number well over 1,000— a great portion of which lie upon the body of The Trapps. From the carriageway, gaps through the boulders and vegetation reveal vertically striated walls of glistening rock. Vertical joints displace stacked pillars with intervening crevices between the polished, striated walls. Gunks climbing had eventually refined the transition from mountain climbing as part of a more general skillset for mountaineering into the technical sport of rock climbing and bouldering— each of which honed in on the intense style of negotiating a magnificent diversity of climbing maneuvers. As the carriageway migrates to create a little distance from the cliffs, the ridge rises and steps back in the form a single mountainous presence upon which the climbers appear smaller— thus taking us back to the early days when expedition was still the measure of the activity.
