EXPLORERAdirondack �30

None of us had been there. It could bethat no one’s climbed this rolling piece ofrock in years. Jeremy got out his binocu-lars. Jim pulled out a Nikon with an expen-sive zoom lens. They both pointed theiroptics toward the slab.

“How’s the route look?” Lawyer askedHaas.

“Dry.”“It looks like a long [expletive deleted]

way,” Lawyer said, referring to the cliff’s dis-tance from the road—all bushwhack, no trail.

Haas peered some more. “The route onthe left has a creaky flake on it,” he said.“It’s pretty easy to see. The route on theright has that dodgy headwall.”

Lawyer nodded. They would find out forthemselves soon enough. Shoulderingbackpacks filled with heavy climbing gear,they forded a thigh-deep stream and begana 45-minute trudge up through the woodsto the base of the cliff.

For many people, this would be the startof a day of rock-climbing fun. For Haasand Lawyer, it was another day on the job.Lawyer, 42, a retired software engineerfrom Syracuse, and Haas, 34, a high-schoolscience teacher living in Glens Falls, havespent most of their free time over the lastyear researching pretty much every known(legal) rock-climbing route in the Adiron-dacks. Their goal: the region’s first newrock guidebook in well over a decade.

What may seem trivial to non-climbersis a huge deal to those who enjoy dancingup vertical stone. The book is expected topublicize dozens, perhaps hundreds, ofnew routes. It’s also going to present a newlook at many older routes, perhaps bring-ing some forgotten and overgrown climbsback into favor.

The book will succeed Climbing in theAdirondacks, first published 25 years agoby Don Mellor, the dean of Adirondackrock and ice climbers. Mellor, who lives inLake Placid, is now in his mid-50s andrecovering from a hip-replacement opera-tion. He happily passed the torch. “I am100% pleased to be out from under it,” hesaid of his guidebook. “It was kind of fun,

but I’m glad not to be responsible forwhether or not the description’s right.”

Lawyer and Haas’s book, AdirondackRock, is scheduled to come out next year.At an estimated $40, it will be expensivefor a rock guidebook. And it likely will bea lot bigger than Mellor’s and provide moredetail about routes.

Mellor’s book contains black-and-whitephotographs of cliffs with vertical linesshowing routes with whimsical names,such as “Fear of Flying” or “Drop, Fly orDie.” Descriptions of the routes can be aslong as several paragraphs or as simple as“Climb the crack to its top and exit right.”

Haas and Lawyer will give precise direc-tions to reach obscure climbs, includingGPS readings and maps for bushwhacking.For the popular cliffs, they plan to illustrateroutes with climbing topos, a rarity in East-ern guidebooks. The maps depict the fea-tures of a cliff, such as cracks, overhangs,ledges and the location of bolts.

“I find it annoying when I spend the timeand energy to get to a cliff, and I can’t findmy route,” Lawyer said.

Both authors are serious climbers. Haas,originally from Ithaca, spent much of his20s living and climbing in Colorado. Hecame back East to get a graduate degree ineducation at Cornell University. For the lastsix years, he’s been teaching at SaratogaSprings High School and working as a part-time climbing guide in the Adirondacks. Inthe winter, he climbs ice and skis the back-country, despite having damaged all his fin-gers from frostbite on New Hampshire’sMount Washington several years ago.

Lawyer grew up near Syracuse and aftercollege started Summit Software Co. withsome partners. A Web site describes thecompany as “a global supplier of applica-tion customization software products.”Whatever that means. Haas still doesn’tunderstand what it is that Lawyer’s compa-ny does. Suffice it to say that the companyhas been so successful that Lawyer retiredsix years ago.

Lawyer has since built a cabin in NewRussia called “The Hut,” though the heat-

ed floors, ornate woodwork, central stonefireplace and two-story wall of windowsfacing the mountains make the name seema little tongue-in-cheek. And he’s traveledaround the world, climbing in Asia andAfrica as well as all over the United States.His wife, Lucie, sometimes accompanieshim on local trips, but she usually stays bythe car to work on her watercolors.

“You know how some people are climbersand some people are not?” she said. “Well,I’m in the ‘not’ category.”

Lawyer has written his own computercodes to create programs to help organizeroute data. When he and Haas began theirresearch, Mellor gave them a bevy of oldarticles and journals written by Adirondackclimbers. On his own, Lawyer dug deeperand found, through a University of Syra-cuse loan, a rare article by legendary 1930sand 1940s climber Fritz Weissner. The manwho pioneered climbing in the Shawan-gunks near New Paltz had been surprising-ly unenthusiastic about the climbing poten-

BY ALAN WECHSLEREXPLORER CORRESPONDENT

Imet Jim Lawyer and Jeremy Hass at a pull-off on Route 86 inWilmington Notch, not far from Whiteface Mountain. It was asunny summer morning, though rain was forecast for later.

Above us was a sleek streak of rock on a wooded slope. That wasSunrise Mountain Slab, our destination.

Partnersin climb

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sJeremy Haas climbs an expert route on Potash Mountain in the southern

Adirondacks, belayed by Jeremy Morgan.

� Jim Lawyer and Jeremy Haas aim high while rewritingthe book on rock climbing in the Adirondacks.

September/October 2007 31

tial of the Adirondacks.Some detective work was involved. For

the Labor Day Wall, a small cliff in Wilm-ington Notch, two parties reported the firstascent. Haas tracked down the climbers—one an elderly man living in England—andfigured out who really earned the honor.

In another case, they discovered that aphotograph in Mellor’s book had an arrowpointing to the wrong mountain to reach ararely visited backcountry slab. Not thatthey have anything bad to say about theDean. “He was one person, without thetechnology we have today,” Haas said.

To create the topos, they sat below cliffsfor days. They mounted transparency paperover photographs and used spotting scopesto accurately trace every route. Thosesketches were scanned into a computer,again using a program written by Lawyer,and converted to a more professional-look-ing topo for publication.

Lawyer and Haas once spent three weekssitting on the road in front of Poke-O-Moonshine Mountain, one the Adiron-dacks’ major climbing cliffs, to depict thevarious corners, overhangs, cracks, dihe-drals and other features. Poke-O alone willtake up 75 pages of what might be a 2-vol-ume opus.

But much of the work entailed climbingroutes and keeping track of the details on adigital voice recorder that Lawyer carries

in his pocket. The first place they visited, inMarch 2006, was Good Luck Cliffs in thesouthern Adirondacks. From there, theywent from crag to crag on virtually everyweekend in the summer and well into fall,rain or shine. In winter, they scouted newroutes. Often they went alone to be moreefficient. Sometimes they found their wayout by headlamp.

All cliffs had to be visited, no matter howobscure. At a place near the hamlet of Azureis a cliff a half-mile long and 300 feet high.The area, known as Deer Pass, takes twohours to get to (including one hour on amountain bike). Despite the cliff’s size, ithas only three known climbs on it. Thepotential is enormous. In some cases, the

authors spent months trying to persuadeclimbers to reveal their secret cliffs.

For Mellor and perhaps some other old-school climbers, there’s a bit of worry thatthe guidebook will have too much infor-mation. Perhaps the wilderness will seem alittle less wild if every route is explained inminute detail. He recalled when, in hisyounger days, he climbed the 3,000-foot-high Salathe Wall on El Capitan in YosemiteValley. The route took six days, and theentire route description was a couple ofparagraphs long.

“As guidebooks get better, the user getsmore demanding. He doesn’t want to be ledastray,” Mellor said. “The point is, we did-n’t expect the guidebook to do all the think-ing. If we got lost we were just too stupid.”

Haas and Lawyer see it differently. Theysee the guidebook as a way to get climbersaway from the popular classics and ontonew routes in unknown areas. The bookcould help reduce crowds at popular cliffs,they say, and keep lesser-known climbsclean of fast-growing lichen and moss.

To reach Sunrise Mountain Slab, we fol-lowed a drainage and ascended moss-cov-ered cliffs. Lawyer and Haas took a momentto note the GPS readings. Then out camethe optics, and they scanned the cliff forroutes. They spotted some rusty bolts in therock and checked out what was once said tobe a climbing route, now covered in thickmoss.

“Jesus,” Lawyer said. “Look how furrythat is.”

Then he roped up and began to climb,commenting on how slippery the rock wasand how a flake sounded hollow. Reachingfor a heavy brush on a carabiner, he cleaned

the lichen and moss as he moved higher. Theroute was fairly easy: 5.6 on a scale that goesfrom 5.1 (easy) to 5.15 (only a few rockSupermen in the world can do it). The routewas mostly slab, with few handholds andfootholds. On slab, climbers rely on the stick-iness of their soft-soled shoes, feeling for tinyindentations in the rock. What holds therewere often crumbled in Lawyer’s hands. Buthe soon climbed past the nasty parts.

“This actually isn’t so bad,” Lawyer said,now 50 feet up and nearly out of sight. Afew minutes later: “There’s a third bolt!”

Mellor’s guidebook reported only one.“This is why we have to go to every route,”

Haas said as he payed out rope from below.“We use Don’s book as a guide, but we haveto go out and do the detective work.”

After all three of us climbed the cliff, we satat the top. Lawyer had his digital recorder out,but they discussed the route in minute detailbefore committing on descriptions. FinallyLawyer narrated into the microphone: “Theroute began at the left side of the low point ofthe slab, just right of a black streak. Climb upto some flakes, step right to a bolt.”

“Go to a horizontal at 30 feet,” Haasadded.

“Over that to a flexi-flake, then pure fric-tion, then straight up and trend right,”Lawyer said.

They continued talking. Off in the dis-tance, a rainstorm appeared over the HighPeaks, heading our way. We had time torappel down before the rain hit, but thatwas hardly the end of our day. After lunchwe were off again, this time exploringobscure climbs below the Three BrothersTrail in the Johns Brook Valley. It waspouring rain. �Jeremy Haas and Jim Lawyer on Sunrise Mountain Slabs.

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Jeremy Haas’s knuckles remainswollen from frostbite damage.

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An example of a climbing map created for Adirondack Rock.