Real Rock 19
“Just look at this scene,” Barack Obama said, pointing to the rushing Yosemite Falls behind him, as he gave a speech to support the 100th anniversary of the National Parks in mid-June of 2016. “You can’t capture this on an iPad or a flat screen or even an oil painting. You got to come here and experience it yourself.”
The day before, I’d been climbing on El Capitan, dangling high on Golden Gate, seeing if it was possible. Then suddenly, I shook the president’s hand and felt his words, of the importance of the areas that we spend our time in. These places were more than mere backdrops. These outdoor spaces were what we needed to see ourselves.
“I don’t like climbing outside,” Kai Lightner said below Midnight Lightning (V8) after the president spoke. The sixteen-year-old comp climber scoped the iconic Yosemite boulder problems of Camp 4 with his mom, Nina Williams, and I with little interest. We’d attended the same speech but I doubted that he’d heard it. Tall and scrawny with a body that he hadn’t grown into, Kai seemed awkward in Yosemite. He’d need something or someone to help him change his perspective on the outdoors and his relationship with climbing. It moved in that direction nearly a decade later.
During the March 1st Reel Rock 19 premiere of Death of Villains. Kai fought through the moves at the top of his 5.15 project in Hurricane Utah, aiming for the first ascent. “He’s gonna punt,” I whispered to Emmy-winning filmmaker Pete Mortimer in the front row of CU Boulder’s Macky Auditorium packed 1900 seat theatre. Mortimer laughed a little. “It wouldn’t be a Reel Rock Movie if he sent,” I said as we watched Kai’s first serious effort on the climb.
After rigging on numerous Reel Rock films, having a small part in Reel Rock 14’s High Road, pitching a comedy series to them, and being a long-time climbing media contributor, I’ve become familiar with the film festival’s structure. For nearly two decades, their narratives have followed a similar theme: successful climber dreams big, face hardship, has personal revelation, and sends. Picture the hero’s journey with a set of quickdraws. They’ve developed an audience that expects this style of climbing porn. Big climbing names like Alex Honnold, Tommy Caldwell, and Chris Sharma bring in the crowds, they introduce a few fresh faces, and they add some hijinks for laughs while the stars send their project on their last try, on the last day of their trip. Their model has proven to be successful with their screenings from small climbing gyms to being featured on streaming services. Though seen by thousands, after 18 Reel Rock tours, the films have started to feel stale. Mortimer and the rest of the production crew have tried to diversify with stories on the war in Ukraine, Palestinian climbers, and Black ice climbers but the majority of the films feature privileged white people climbing hard. Reel Rock 19 promised different stories.
To some degree, Death of Villians follows the traditional Reel Rock story arc. Kai’s shown as a young phenomenon climber pushing his limits, winning competitions, gaining sponsors, and sending the classic Margalef, Spain testpiece Era Vella (9a/5.14d). But facing an eating disorder and puberty, he begins to fail. As his body catches up to him, he faces the possibility of never being able to climb hard again. Death of Villians features two notable differences from the usual Reel Rock fair. First, Kai brings a unique perspective as a young black man with an interesting dynamic with his mom, who acts as a coach, business partner, and friend. He’s far from the average white climber dude and the film provides some sense of his cultural difference. Secondly, and a more interesting part of the film, Kai’s begins a relationship with climbing pariah Joe Kinder.
In 2014, I broke a hold while clipping a bolt on Purple Haze (5.12c) at the Wailing Wall in the Utah Hills. I flipped upside down and would have cracked my skull open except Joe Kinder caught me. I lowered to the ground, Joe calmed me down, and I dispatched the route, grateful for a lifesaving catch. Over the years, we climbed at the Promised Land in Red Rocks, hiking up in a snowstorm. We fought on projects together in the Clear Light Cave of Mount Potosi, bouldered on the granite of Yosemite, spun holds in the Bay Area gyms, and kneebarred up routes in Rifle, Colorado. He bolted lines, he cleaned crags, and he worked tirelessly, contributing to local crags, a bee building a honeycomb. Joe can be an exceptionally supportive climbing partner, offering solid beta, and supplying endless stoke.
Joe can also make surprisingly poor decisions. In 2016, we traveled to Summersville Lake for a deep-water soloing competition. After the comp, Joe and a few of the bro climbers drank too much, threw sliced ham at me while I slept, and covered the floor outside of my room with cereal. Annoying sophomoric humor. On social media, Joe was worse. A nerdy kid with glasses sat at the top of @Jetskyjoyrider, Joe’s Finsta account where he posted memes of other climbers, poking fun at them. Some were funny and a few were dumb. The account’s aim was clearly comedic but the jokes were bad. A wise Russian Internet troll once said, “It’s acceptable to be mean if you’re funnier than you are mean.” Joe’s memes crossed over that line. Many people suffer from an online disinhibition effect. If you can’t see the impact of your words on someone else, if you can’t see their face, do they even affect someone? I’d like to believe that Joe was naïve about his cruelty.
Seeing an offensive meme, I screenshot it and shared it with a friend, who passed it on. The meme went to the person in it and within a few hours, the meme went from a bad joke into a dumpster fire. With a strong call to action in the midst of a cancel culture movement, an internet mob declared Joe a bully. Joe’s lifelong career as a sponsored climber incinerated.
“You’re responsible for my career ending,” Joe told me on the phone a few days later. I didn’t know what to say. I had contributed. But more than that, Joe had been an asshole. Joe, the people who lambasted him, and everyone involved had a bad experience. It was a situation where no one won. Uninvited from his wedding, Joe and my silence lasted nearly five years. In the depths of a dark breakup, Joe found me in Rifle. He reached out, offering empathy and friendship. Joe’s cancellation had changed him. In time, he’d taken accountability for his actions. His kindness seemed amplified. Focusing on his own climbing and less about what others were doing around him helped him. The return of his friendship meant support when I needed it. We’d both evolved.
For the past few years, many in the climbing community had stayed the same, they saw Joe as a one-dimensional character. Bully. Bad boy. Outcast. As Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book Talking to Strangers, “We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced, complex, and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.” People often fail to see the numerous facets of people, that someone can make horrible decisions but also be a good man.
At the Hurricave, Joe approached Kai. After all, Joe had developed most of the routes there, establishing Life of Villain, which his boutique clothing company is named after, and Kai’s initial project. He’d invested endless hours bolting, cleaning, and building landings and trails for the Utah cave. Though hesitant and filled with preconceived judgments of who Joe was, Kai began spending time with Joe, getting beta from him and then climbing on one of Joe’s projects, the appropriately named Death of Villains. After seeing his regular contributions to the crag, Kai revaluated Joe. Through Reel Rock’s Death of Villains, we see not only Kai’s struggle and development of climbing but a portrait of Joe. In a tightly edited piece, Reel Rock shows more depth in their filmmaking than they have in the past nearly two decades. Kai reflected on this, commenting on the controversy surrounding Joe’s inclusion in the film.
“I understand that Joe’s positive contributions to the climbing community do not erase any harm he has caused,” Kai Lightner wrote in a February 18th Instagram post, attempting to address the drama surrounding Joe’s appearance in the new Reel Rock. “At the same time, I deeply fear a world where we are permanently held to the standard of the worst mistakes we’ve made. A world where negativity bias gives no one the incentive to strive to be a better person, to do better in the future because we are already irrevocably marked with a scarlet letter.” It’s a kind sentiment and one that would be ideal to live by but forgiveness can be difficult and some scarlet letters can be harder to forget than others.
In the summer of 2004, Thomasina Pidgeon dug into her van at The Next Best Spot, the camping area in Squamish, and let me borrow her Rubik’s Cube. The twenty-eight-year-old Canadian crusher had intimidated me but I really wanted to whittle my time down to sub-minute and she was the only one with a cube in the bandit campground. I returned it with peeled stickers, offering to buy her a new one but she didn’t mind the use.
When I returned a few summers later, I biked up to seven months pregnant Thomo at the bus stop between the grocery store and the library. She kicked at the flowers growing from the concrete sidewalk. Unsure about the status of her maternity benefits, she transferred her frustration into launching dandelions into the air. “I tried to call him,” she said. “The answering machine was in French. It takes so much courage just to call.”
I’d seen Didier lauded in Reel Rock’s First Ascent, an early twenty-year-old Swiss climber smoking a cigarette after sending From Switzerland with Love (5.13b/c) and then hobbling away after his failure on the first ascent of Cobra Crack, saying “The glory is not for me…” Though he’d gained notoriety as a crack climber, he’d become infamous as Thomo’s baby daddy, a man who had left his pregnant girlfriend to join a Franciscan monastery.
“Why do men stick their dicks in you and leave?” she asked me as another yellow flower flew from the tip of her shoe. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, or how to act so I stood next to Thomo and listened. When the bus came, Thomo hugged me. As she rode the bus to her Vancouver midwife, I rode my bike to the library.
The Cobra and the Heart, Reel Rock 19’s third film features the story of Thomo, Didier, and their daughter Cedar. Set against the background of Didier’s ascent of the Cobra Crack (5.14 b/c), it tells of love lost and returned.
In mid-August, Thomo and I trespassed into Squamish Estuary to examine the 30,000-litre oil spill that devastated the Howe Sound. Angered about the devastation, Thomo wanted photos of the environmental disaster. A few days later, I set up a few topropes and belayed Thomo as she scampered up a 10d layback in the Smoke Bluffs, making it look surprisingly easy. As Siemay Lee took photos from the ground and urged caution to the very pregnant Thomasina, I saw a bit of happiness return to my friend. Balancing climbing and being a single mother would be challenging for her but Thomo’s nothing if not determined.
That Halloween, Thomasina gave birth to her daughter, Cedar. As soon as she could, Thomo returned to the bouldering circuit. We bowled together in Hueco, we shopped in a thrift store in Tahoe, we saw each other in Leavenworth, and hung out in Bishop. Thomo struggled with living on the road in her tiny van with her daughter but she made it work. Other climbers would often watch Cedar. In Squamish, Tim Doyle would often take Cedar which allowed Thomo to make the first female ascent of The Egg (V11). Then while Thomasina tried Thriller (V10) in Camp 4, I threw sticks into the puddles in the trail, kicking the sticks as I tried to pick them up, making the adorable girl scream with laughter. Cedar seemed to thrive in the outdoors and went from scrambling up the boulders around Camp 4, screaming “king of the mountain!” at two years old to sending La Belette (V11) in Bishop and The Kind Traverse (V11) in Rocky Mountain National Park at 11 years old. Thomasina with her dedication, loyalty, and slow-burning kindness and Cedar with her cuteness, psyche, and happiness endeared themselves to the traveling climbing community. But Cedar wanted stability, and to go to school with kids her age so the pair moved to Squamish and Thomo started the Squamish Athletic Club.
“Thomasina’s dating someone,” my friend texted me three years ago. I was psyched to hear the news, happy that my friend had found a partner. It’d been 15 years of her and Cedar alone. It seemed like a hard life and Thomo deserved love again. Then my friend added, “It’s Didier.” I felt skeptical. Didier had renounced his religious background. He’d returned to Squamish and worked on his relationship with both the Pidegon women. I hadn’t met him but I wondered how Thomo had forgiven him.
Their love story became one of legend and Josh and Brett Loweel returned to Squamish and filmed Didier’s return, his renewed relationship with Thomo, and his subsequent ascent of the Cobra Crack, which brought the film full circle. Maybe in the sequel, Cedar will find new beta for the mono undercling crux that vexed Didier, though the young World Cup climber dislikes trad climbing. It seemed almost perfect and a bit unreal.
Two days after the premiere, Thomo, Cedar, Didier and I walked Pearl Street in Boulder, stopping for tacos. As we strolled, Didier spoke of the theology book he’d written. Thomo showed her affection for Didier at the crosswalks when they held hands, the way they smiled at lunch, and the how they looked at each other when I took a family photo. When I first met Didier, I had seen the scarlet letter, judging him for his mistakes. Thomo’ deep care for him, made me reevaluate. Perhaps, he was a good man who’d made a mistake, a flawed individual like everyone. This examination of human complexity made the Cobra and the Heart a compelling story. Unfortunately, the film had been mired in controversy that had little to do with the film.
At the same time that Thomasina travelled with the young Cedling, California boulderer Charlie Barrett also ran the circuit, leaving California for Hueco, Leavenworth, and Squamish when his probation allowed him to. Charlie suffered from serious mental health issues including bipolar disorders that he self-medicated with alcohol, which resulted in a few arrests. In 2016, I profiled him for Climbing Magazine, highlighting both his accomplishments and his instability. I thought that maybe with an opportunity, Charlie could be reformed. He needed help. He once called me late at night threatening to jump off the 40-foot Grandpa Peabody in the Buttermilks. I didn’t know what to do so I Googled, “What to do if you’re friend’s suicidal?” The internet told me to contact the authorities, that I wasn’t capable of handling difficult mental health issues myself. By the time the police arrived, Charlie had driven away drunk. One of the last times I saw him, he came to Boulder after a breakup with his girlfriend. Wasted, he said he needed help. So I dropped him off at the hospital so he could detox. I don’t know if he went in but it was what I could do. Charlie lost dozens of friends over the years because he’d ask them for help, needing to get pulled out from a metaphorical burning building. Then when he was dragged out, he’d brush himself off, and run back into the fire. After I left Charlie at the hospital to detox, I stopped talking to him. I couldn’t help him anymore and being his friend was pulling me back into the fire. Charlie needed help but he didn’t want to help himself.
Perhaps because of his issues or maybe as a defense because of them, Charlie could be extremely charming. It’s what made people want to help him. We’d watch weird cat videos in his truck. He could quote Mitch Hedberg at length. In the Buttermilks, we told everyone that we were the 13th and 14th members of the People Enlightening No-one group and looking for our next member. Charlie and I convinced Jarod Diamond, a boulderer from So Cal who’d just been nominated for the Adult Film Award’s best upcoming actor to join our club, showing him our numbers on our hands. Jarod wanted his number written between his shoulders so Charlie and I drew PEN15 on the back of the porn star. We laughed about the sophomoric joke for days.
Charlie’s goofy, affable nature made him fun to be around. Running in the same circuit, he quickly became friends with Thomasina. His child-like persona also made him good with Cedar. The pair climbed across the US together. Charlie kept it sober and funny around the Pidgeons. But underneath Charlie’s goodness hid a much darker side. After all, people can be good and bad and Charlie could be horrible.
In 2018, #Safe Outside began collecting data on sexual assault in the climbing community. As a result, a federal case formed against Charlie Barrett resulting in his 2022 arrest. It was a tense matter because Charlie was well known in the climbing community. It’s hard to believe that someone can do something so horrible. Not only that but difficulties with evidence, with victims coming forward, with their accounts being listened to and believed, and then society’s view on sex makes prosecuting sex crimes hard. It’s an uncomfortable and difficult topic. While some climbers heard testimonies from the victims and rumors in the community, others heard Charlie’s fervent dismissals. Ultimately the strength of the federal court case against Charlie damned him, resulting in his 2024 life imprisonment.
Thomasina and a few other climbers wrote letters supporting Charlie. She spoke of her time with him, which had been good, and asked for clemency. She and the other climbers had far different experiences than his victims. After all, the closer you stood to Charlie, the less of a monster he appeared to be.
With a public defender, Charlie refuted the charges, claiming he lacked adequate representation, attacking the credibility of the victims, and running back in the burning building. While I disagreed with supporting him, I could see why Thomo did. She hadn’t seen all of Charlie and he told his narrative with such conviction and that it was easy to believe. Thomo’s letter angered some in the climbing community, blaming her for perpetuating sexual assault.
“I was blindsided, I was wrong, and I am sorry,” Thomo wrote in her mid-January apology, acknowledging that she’d been manipulated by Charlie who had convinced her of his narrative. Charlie had taken advantage of Thomo, manipulating her, and making her another victim. A loud group wanted Thomo to be held accountable for her letter, believing that an apology marked the beginning of the repairs and that she needed to do more. Many called for boycotts of the Reel Rock 19 film, saying that in showing a person who’d written a letter for a convicted rapist, Reel Rock condoned sexual assault. Later in January, Reel Rock released an official statement about Thomo’s support of Charlie Barrett. “This film in particular addresses themes of human fallibility, forgiveness, and trying to do better, all of which seem especially relevant in light of this ongoing conversation.”
To some, Reel Rock’s response felt tone-deaf, another example of climbing culture celebrating strong climbers despite their obvious flaws. The outcry on the internet became vocal, in part to an online inhibition effect, people attacking without seeing the person they’re talking to.. There’s no shortage of reasons to dislike Reel Rock but I wondered where the empathy was. When did people stop seeing each other? The anger felt misaligned. There needs to be change. So many had failed Charlie. His upbringing and friends had failed him. The criminal justice system failed to rehabilitate him. And notably, Charlie failed to help himself. He’ll stay in prison unless he finds some shoelaces and prematurely ends his life sentence, an unfortunate possibility.
For people to move on, there needs to be some forgiveness for the events, to let it go. It’s a difficult task but if it’s kept, it’s a burden that could cripple those who carry it. Often in our admiration of others, we lose sight of their complexity. Everyone has a certain amount of duality and flaws to their characters. In recognizing that, there needs to be an acknowledgment of what’s acceptable, what’s correctable, and what’s intolerable. All of this is far easier said than done though.
The climbing areas we love tend to be microcosms, magnifiers for strong personalities. Real rock, the crags and areas climbers live and spend so much time at, amplify the traits of the community’s characters, showing off both their greatness and exacerbating their flaws. It’s important to keep perspective of it all, to realize the complexity of others. At the premiere, Thomo wore her “Love Again” shirt, showing her rekindled relationship with Didier but also wearing it to denote the controversy. After the showing, Reel Rock Josh Lowell handed her the microphone and she spoke before the crowd, “We need to see each other as humans and forgive each other and love each other and see who the real enemy is and fight that.”
