Bouldering in the Middle of Nowhere

    Learning to rock climb is a tricky task when you live several hours from the nearest crag. This fact is obvious to anyone who uses logic, and yet, I've been bitten by the rock climbing bug anyway. This summer it has been my constant mission to find anything, literally anything, to climb on. In a flurry of increasingly obsessive internet searches, I discovered that there is, in fact, a place to climb closer to home. In the town of Great Falls, Google told me, there are some seldom-visited rocks next to the local river where I could go bouldering. Since then, I have been making the slightly-more-acceptably-long trek to Great Falls to practice my skills. I am lucky to have found what I expected, namely rocks. More unexpectedly, though, I also discovered a new town and it got me thinking...what follows is the fever dream that resulted.

    Most boulderfields are found in pretty deserted places; the deserts of Indian Creek or the alpine slopes of the Rockies. But Great Falls is deserted in a different way; it's a small town that went south before I was born, with a boarded-up main street and downtown roads that quickly fade into endless cow pastures. It's the kind of remote place that you go to by accident when you need gas or your car breaks down. Not glamorously remote like Denali or Glacier National Park, where people travel for days just to be there. Great Falls is remote because people traveled for days just to get away from it. To get away from lost jobs and failing schools. To get away from oppressive heat and sun-scorched fields. In short, Great Falls is in the Middle of Nowhere.  

    Of course, Great Falls isn't actually Nowhere because Nowhere doesn't exist. That's physically impossible. A place can't cease to be a place and somehow only exist in the quasi-reality of Nowhere. Everywhere is Somewhere, whether you're scaling spires in the middle of the Utah desert or wrestling pebbles in Great Falls South Carolina, you're always Somewhere. 

    As I adjust my crash pad under a boulder and start to work out the route, I think about the people who live in this town who's rocks I'm borrowing. Great Falls lost a lot of its population when the cotton mill closed, a sentence that could be used to describe half the towns in the state. The emptiness is palpable when you drive down the main street with only derelict buildings and a single pedestrian. And yet, people do still live here. For them, Great Falls is their Somewhere. I reach for a knobbly hold above my head and wonder why someone would stay in Great Falls. For family? Lack of means? Or because it's simply too hard to leave home? 

    A mom and three kids pass by heading to the river. The kids bounce and yell happily as they splash into the water. The mom gives me a weird look, probably wondering why I'm hanging halfway up a rock. Maybe people live here because they like it? It's hard to imagine enjoying living in a place whose roads literally shimmer with heat in the summer. That family seemed happy though, and who am I to argue with that? I match my feet and contort my hand to try and grasp a weird verticle ledge. The mom shoots me one last confused glance before passing by as if to say "why would you willingly climb such an inhospitable rock when you can literally walk around it?" I can't help chuckling at the irony; neither of us would willingly be in the other's shoes, and yet we both seem to be somehow thriving in our own situations. 

    If there's one thing I have learned from bouldering, it's to never take anything at face value. Things that seem impossible sometimes aren't, and things that seem easy are often surprisingly hard. It's amazing how, when you stare at a rock face long enough, a route to the top begins to appear. Footholds and handholds emerge out of the previously impervious granite as if they are shedding an invisibility cloak, and suddenly you can imagine yourself flowing up them to the top. It's equally amazing how you can look at a boulder seemingly rife with ledges and corners, and utterly struggle to get off the ground. The crazy part is that, even when I struggle on the easiest problems, I still feel insanely satisfied and happy at the end of the day. Sometimes it feels like my bouldering efforts are going nowhere, but I'm just happy to be somewhere.