The Snaz

Be a friend. Be a fan.

Raise a Glass to the Teton Rock Gym

Teton Rock Gym Jackson Hole goodbye Teton Rock Gym Jackson Hole goodbye Teton Rock Gym Jackson Hole goodbye
Teton Rock Gym Jackson Hole goodbye Teton Rock Gym Jackson Hole goodbye Teton Rock Gym Jackson Hole goodbye
Teton Rock Gym Jackson Hole goodbye Teton Rock Gym Jackson Hole goodbye Teton Rock Gym Jackson Hole goodbye

These photos are from a bouldering contest that took place in the Teton Rock Gym in December, 2003. Wow — seems like only yesterday. The rock gym closed in the summer of 2007 and is only now getting a proper commemoration. On Thursday, February 12 at 5:30 p.m. at the Snake River Brewery, there is going to be a party/wake for the TRG.

Please allow me to deliver the first toast: the Teton Rock Gym was far more than the sum of its gray walls, the chalk-smeared holds, the trippy murals by Taylor Spence, and the shifting dunes of gravel on the floor. It was, for local climbers, a focal point, community center, and living room, looked after by its founder Brents Hawks, Scott Jones, and the enigmatic Mot Gatehouse. I always loved when Mot would wander around the place in his dusty hoodie, cackling at some incomprehensible joke, then casually, unroped, walk whatever route was currently stymieing you: the sarcastic, sending gnome.

The whole place was caked in chalk residue and nearly windowless, which made the lighting dim and the air dank, but there was also an authenticity you sensed walking in. Particularly during the winter, locals packed the place. If you were a newbie, it could be intimidating, even off-putting. But it also felt like a genuine crag: the routes were hard, the ratings were stiff, the rules were lax, the walls were pocked with limestone-like “panel features,” and you tied into the rope like a climber.

Hawks, Scott Cole, and Greg Brazelton built the gym in 1991. It opened in the spring of 1992 “on a total shoestring budget,” Hawks recalls.

“It never made any money,” says Hawks, a Casper native and former Exum guide. “We basically kept it going as a community service. The whole idea was for it to have a mellow feel, like you have when you’re hanging out at the crags.”

“A lot of the who’s who of the climbing world passed through the place,” adds Hawks, “because all the big boys eventually came through Jackson. The first few years, we hosted comps with the best guys in the country.”

The best guys, in my opinion, were there nightly. It seemed like there was always a hero or two in the back corner, roping up before launching up and across the intimidating horizontal roof: Renny Jackson, Kim Schmitz, Hans Johnstone, Alex Lowe. For somebody like me who’d just arrived in Jackson, and whose dorm room had been carpeted by splayed issues of Powder Magazine, it made quite an impression to find Doug Coombs in the gym, braying with laughter as he belayed Mark Newcomb up some heinous crimpy route, asking me — a stranger, a gaper — if I’d tried it yet. It was like Mean Joe Greene asking the kid with the coke if he had any tips for the Steeler defense. It made me want to hang out there every night.

It had that effect on a lot of people. Jackson Hole Mountain Guides veteran Paul Horton once mentioned that the Teton Rock Gym ought to be credited for giving Jackson Hole an actual climbing community. Before Brents built the rock gym, said Horton, local climbers — the Exum guides, JHMG, the climbing rangers, townies, visitors, dirtbags — kept to their own. Climbing, after all, is solitary — you do it in ones and twos, and the whole point (it sometimes seems) is the eschewing of other humans — but the gym gave us all an excuse to give into our herding instinct. Many an expedition, both local and farflung, were hatched at the TRG; many a courtship, too. As Scott Cole says, “It was the best pickup spot in town.”

(This is not, by the way, any sort of denunciation of the Enclosure, Jackson’s current rock gym, which is a place I appreciate greatly for its own community and the excellent climbing. It’s just more sterile than the TRG, both in a bad and a good way.)

For me, the TRG, just as much as the Tetons and the AAC Climber’s Ranch, made real the claim that Jackson Hole was an American climbing Mecca. The icons were there in living flesh, and also on the walls. Pinned over the gnarly water fountain was the large poster of Coombs midway through a gnarly ski line (Doug’s scrawled inscription: “Sharpen Your Senses at the Teton Rock Gym!”); there was the picture upstairs of Kim Schmitz on an early ascent of Half Dome’s Tis-sa-sack; there were various photos, shot by Garth Dowling, of rock stars like Todd Skinner pulling on TRG’s plastic holds. And eventually, there was the altar in the corner, to the fallen among Wyoming’s mountaineering heroes and adherents: Alex Lowe, Coombs, Skinner, Jim Ratz, Heather Paul, Mike Dollarhide, and others, its own inscription a famous quote from Lowe: “The best climber in the world is the one having the most fun.”

If you had fun at the TRG, come join your fellow rock stars at the Brew Pub tomorrow night. Let’s give the Teton Rock Gym the send off it deserves.

  • February 11th, 2009
  • Posted in Uncategorized
  • Home

11 Responses to “Raise a Glass to the Teton Rock Gym”