Spare These Stones: Climbing Culture In The South

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The American South is often overlooked in outdoor conversations but it holds some of the richest stories in climbing, culture, and community.

Today Doug Schnitzspahn opens the container with photographer, filmmaker, and writer Andrew Kornylak, whose new book Spare These Stones: A Journey Through Southern Climbing Culture (Mountaineers Books) captures the hidden corners and unsung heroes of the Southern climbing world.

Doug and Andrew explore:

• Why the South is one of the most underrated outdoor regions in America.

• The transition from secret stashes and handshake access to organized land trusts and sustainable stewardship.

• How climbing culture in the South reflects modesty, humility, and a deep respect for community.

• Stories of iconic characters, legendary crags, and grassroots conservation victories.

• Why the lessons learned in the South matter for climbers, paddlers, hikers, and outdoor lovers everywhere.

Spare These Stones isn’t just a climbing book, it’s a love letter to Southern landscapes, music, people, and culture.

Order Spare These Stones at andrewkornylak.com or wherever books are sold.

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Episode Transcript:

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:00:01.040 - 00:00:04.000

All too often we ignore one of the most beautiful regions of the country.

Andrew Kornylak

00:00:04.320 - 00:00:09.360

The culture is such that there's a lot you don't talk about in polite company.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:00:09.600 - 00:00:13.480

We rode at night on trails so rocky I'm still not sure how we went up them.

Andrew Kornylak

00:00:13.480 - 00:00:19.760

You gotta stay here a while and dig deeper to kind of get into reality a little bit here.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:00:19.760 - 00:00:26.600

You can't hide stuff forever. People are going to get there, unfortunately, so it becomes a question of can we properly manage it.

Andrew Kornylak

00:00:26.600 - 00:00:31.120

There's so much that's hidden and around each corner that, yeah, everyone can have their little spot.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:00:33.020 - 00:08:12.620

Hey everyone, I want to thank you for listening to Open Container today and ask that you please subscribe to the show by clicking Follow on the podcast app you're using right now. Following the podcast is the best way to ensure that we will continue to crack open the container every single week. Thank you.

Welcome to Open Container. I'm Doug Schnitzbahn. I'm a journalist, writer and overall lover of the outdoors.

I fought wildfires, reported on national politics, published magazines, and I have seen ghosts on Civil War battlefields.

On this podcast, we're going to have an open conversation about culture, conservation policy, business issues that matter the most to the outdoor community. Let's get some. This is a love. Letter to the open spaces, the wild places and the people who love the outdoors.

In the south, we talk so often about the big mountains of the Rockies. And the Cascades, even the Presidentials in New Hampshire. We dream of the Boundary Waters Canoe.

Area, Alaska and Hawaii's volcanoes. But all too often we ignore one of the most beautiful regions of the country and one of the most dedicated outdoor communities.

The south is stunning with its whitewater, its bugs, its ancient cliff faces. It's home to kayakers, thru hikers, bass anglers and ultra runners.

It's filled with rhododendron forests and perhaps a whisper of an ivory billed woodpecker.

When I was young, I'll never forget small adventures with my mother and father in the clear creeks and deep reaches of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There's redfish in the bayous of Louisiana, swamps and old growth trees to canoe around in the congaree.

There's striped bass along the beaches swept by the Atlantic and the Outer Banks.

There's Civil War battlefields like Bull Run, the first place I went camping with Boy Scouts, where we found history and hiking together, Kennesaw Mountain, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness and Shiloh, where Union and Confederate armies learned the war would be long and brutal, pulling the country apart. You can still walk those battlefields today. Silent, beautiful, heavy with memory.

There's the critically threatened emptiness of the Everglades, alligators, the rolling hills and woods of Shenandoah National Park. When I think of the south and the outdoors, the first thing that comes to mind is the dedicated whitewater community.

I think of Eric Jackson, who designed so many great kayaks for Wavesport before founding Jackson Kayak. His passion grew the sport and made sure kids could learn to paddle and surf waves.

His daughter, Emily Jackson, became a two time freestyle world champion and according to her Jackson kayak bio, she also survived being a Jackson.

There's the Nantahala Outdoor center, which has taught so many people to paddle and stepped up during Hurricane Helene with fundraising and community support providing disaster relief. There's a gritty mountain bike community here, too.

On one trip to North Carolina with a crew from Hooked on the Outdoors magazine, we rode at night on TR so rocky I'm still not sure how we went up them and survived the ride down. I'll never forget one trail simply called First Blood. The name was appropriate, but it was fun. It was real. That's real outdoor ethos.

Atlanta hosted the Olympics, where whitewater events became a main attraction, spurring love for the sport across the region. For the 25 years I've worked professionally in the outdoor industry, I've worked with Southerners.

My first job at Hooked on the Outdoors magazine was working for Jeff Espy and Jason Menninger, two guys from the bass fishing circuit who saw the need for a national magazine that still spoke to people locally that talked about the simple pleasures of getting outside near your home. When I visited the big office, we fished for bass on Lake Lanier and hiked the low reaches of the Appalachian Trail.

People like Abe Hayes and Tim McManus, bikers, surfers I loved working with, had a deep passion for having fun outdoors. We built something there.

Soon after, when Hook closed down, I started working with Blake Damaso, owner of Blue Ridge Outdoors magazine, with the motto get outside and Play Together. We created Elevation Outdoors here in Colorado, but Blue Ridge was always the inspiration.

It spoke to the local community in the south, people who simply love the outdoors and weave it into the fabric of their lives. Blue Ridge's editor when I started, Will Harlan, lived off grid and won the Copper Canyon Ultramarathon in Mexico.

He now works in conservation as an executive director of Forest Keeper. He also wrote a beautiful book about Carol Rucktechl, who worked to preserve Cumberland Island.

Jed Ferris, the current Blue Ridge outdoors editor, loves festivals and music as much as he does a good hike. I love that because it captures the identity of the outdoors in the South.

Hearing or playing music while camping, enjoying the fresh air, that's what it's about.

My friend Dana Howe does incredible work with the Grassroots Outdoor alliance, representing independent retailers across the country from her home in Kentucky, but also amplifying powerful voices in the south like Chuck Millsafts of Great Outdoor Provision Company.

That's a shop that also stepped up after Hurricane Helene devastated one of its stores, creating donation drop off and pickup centers providing warm clothing. Staying rooted in the community.

There's Mountain High Outfitters in Alabama and Tennessee, Massey's in New Orleans, Packrat Outdoor center in Fayetteville, Arkansas. And of course, when we talk about the south, we have to talk about the Appalachian Trail.

Starting in Georgia and working its way up through towns where people support thru hikers and welcome them in. Especially in Damascus, Virginia, where Trail Days celebrates what we all walking in the dirt just for the joy of it.

There's climbing and iconic spots like Red River Gorge and New River Gorge and places where local communities have come together like Sand Rock, Alabama or even Nickajack Lake in Tennessee.

Here's the thing, the south doesn't have the big wide open spaces of the west, but the people who love the outdoors here are building something just as meaningful. They're creating models we can follow to resolve conflicts between private landowners and those who want to preserve and protect public lands.

My guest today has been entrenched in the outdoor community in the south as a participant and as a voice for the past two decades.

Based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Andrew Cornelak is a photographer and writer whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Rock and Ice, Red Bull and Garden and Gun. As a director and cinematographer, Cornelak has had a hand in commercials, music videos and award winning documentaries.

His new book, Spare these Stones A Journey Through Southern Climbing Culture, is a captivating visual and narrative exploration of the evolution of climbing in the Southern United States during the transformative decades of the 1990s and 2000s. It's published by Mountaineers Books and was just released yesterday. So let's open the container with Andrew Cornel.

It's such a beautiful book and one of the things I loved about it is in the intro you call the South a place of corners. What does that mean? Why do you say that?

Andrew Kornylak

00:08:12.700 - 00:10:04.760

Geographically, it describes the south pretty well, right? I mean, I've lived in the south for many years, but also lived out west and traveled all around.

And as you know, out west in the US and even in the Midwest, sometimes you've got these vast spaces and you can see for 50 miles and mountains in the distance and things like that. Especially in the climbing world, you know, the. The kind of geography you find yourself in in different parts of the country is.

Is very different from the south, where your view shed might be a mile or less, you know, maybe a few hundred meters. It's just so overgrown and. And literally you'll be driving around the south and turn a corner and you'll see a junkyard, right?

And then you turn another corner and there's this beautiful cliff line and everything is just. It just feels very hidden and overgrown. And I think also metaphorically speaking, I think it kind of describes the culture a little bit.

People are very understated here. You know, they speak slowly, they don't brag a lot. You got to stay here a while and dig deeper to kind of get into reality a little bit here.

Everything's not just right out in the open for you. You've got to spend some time and do your diligence, really, to understand what's going on under the surface.

And so I think that the Corners is kind of a metaphorical way of saying that, describing the culture a little bit too. And I talk about that, I think, in the intro.

And I think this book is just as much about the climbing and the climbing culture as it is about the geography. It's really a study of geography and how culture is intertwined with that geography.

And I think the geography of the south is what makes it so special and so unique and so interesting.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:10:05.000 - 00:10:22.180

Yeah, and so many people kind of think they know the south and they really don't. I mean, it's such a rich place, and those of us that live out in the mountain west, like, have such an idea of it.

But whenever I go down south, the richness of culture, of place, of everything, and how the stereotypes other people have. Don'T fit is really what hits you.

Andrew Kornylak

00:10:22.340 - 00:11:24.890

I think that's part of the Corners. There's a sense that there's a lot hidden under the covers, under the surface. You know, that's obvious from history.

But also I think the culture, like I said, the culture is such that there's a lot you don't talk about in polite company. And I think it's the same in the climbing culture.

There's this tradition almost of who can be the most understated dark horse climber, you know, around here. It's a tradition. It's like an ethic of not spraying about your ascents or talking about who's the best.

You learn that over time, but you got to put your time in. I think that it's the same thing with the culture here writ large. You really have to spend a lot of time.

I mean, we've spent, gosh, it's been, well, almost 30 years off and on, that I've spent down here.

You know, someone who grew up in the Midwest and lived out West a lot, I'm always still uncovering things and learning and just feel like I finally wrapping my head around things about the culture here. So.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:11:28.810 - 00:11:46.820

It used to be such a big part of climbing culture, I think, where you do something badass and wouldn't tell anyone about it, like telling someone about it would be the bad thing. And now living in kind of Instagram heavy culture, it's kind of the opposite. Right?

Where everyone wants to show off what they're doing is that kind of. That modesty is still alive in Southern climbing culture?

Andrew Kornylak

00:11:47.060 - 00:13:03.870

I think it is. I think that's certainly the tradition here.

And I'm not going to say that that doesn't exist in other sort of climbing subcultures, but that was the first thing that really struck me, was that you quickly learn that you're not out there bragging about your ascents or how good you are. It's about being understated. And that's sort of what's honored here, or at least was back in, when I started climbing here in the mid-90s.

Um, and I think there's still that thread of that tradition here.

And like I show in the book, and like I talk about in the book, the culture, the climbing scene here has seen tremendous change in the last 20, 30 years. Uh, that's sort of what the book is about, really, that arc of change.

And yet there's still a lot of places in the south where you can sort of feel like not much has changed, which is a nice thing. And that makes it sort of very multidimensional.

And I think actually, you know, that that is kind of the way things happen around here, even outside of climbing. Culture changes, things change. But there are a lot of corners of the south where, you know, it's like a time capsule and that.

That adds a lot of dimension. I think there's. Even through sweeping change, there's a lot that's preserved and a lot of tradition that's honored still. So.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:13:04.270 - 00:13:16.360

And there's a lot of that freedom.

That people that both of us, I think, are originally drawn to climbing or just being in the wild. And one great Thing I think you said in the book is that anyone can revel in their own secret area, part of southern climbing.

Andrew Kornylak

00:13:16.360 - 00:14:42.600

Oh yeah. And because things are so hidden and there'll be a boulder field and not a mile away, another completely undiscovered cliff line or something.

And it just feels like there's so much here and there's so much that's hidden and around each corner that, yeah, everyone can have their little spot, their little place where they're putting up first ascents or just discovering rock for the first time. Give it a few years, everything's going to grow over again, everything will get mossy again and it'll feel like it's.

You're discovering it for the first time. Anyway.

In all the years I've climbed here, I always felt like there were all these pockets everywhere and even if you really hit the ground running and try to get to every spot, you always feel like there's still more to discover. And it's like I said, only a mile away, a couple miles away from where you're already climbing.

Oh, I've never even been there, much less barely even heard of these places. It makes it somewhat accessible, right? Like you don't have to have the keys to the kingdom to go climbing here.

You just go out and wander the woods for a little bit and you're going to find some rock to climb.

So if you kind of know what you're doing or go with some people who know what they're doing, you can really just go out and have adventures and find first ascents if that's your bag.

Or climb stuff that's been climbed on for 30 years, you know, well established climbs and still feel like you're just having this adventure out in the middle of nowhere.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:14:42.600 - 00:14:47.880

And is the scene pretty open? You know, can anyone just kind of show up and find some people to get out and climb with, or is it protective?

Andrew Kornylak

00:14:47.960 - 00:18:06.520

When I started climbing here in the 90s, it was definitely still kind of, I would say it was emerging from a very kind of word of mouth, secret stash type of scene.

And certainly if you read the book, there's this tremendous arc of change from then to how it is today, which is just really wide open and all the emphasis is on access and land ownership and stewardship and preservation, which is awesome.

The fact that there's a lot of hidden places around each corner kind of contributes to this feeling that I've got my little secret crag over here and no one's going to know about it. I'm going to bring My friends to it. And it's going to be our little secret stash, which is kind of naturally how it. It grew, right.

As climbing became more and more popular, people were apt to kind of keep their area secret and keep the crowds away and things like that.

But I think that just like everywhere else in the country, as climbing grew, the climbing encountered pressures from without and from within that threatened to shut down the climbing wholesale. Things like encroachment of development, certainly changing attitudes towards climbing.

If you got one or two people going out to your backyard crag, that's fine, but all of a sudden your, your backyard crag is now in the magazines and you've got 30, 40, 50 people going out there, parking, you know, down the street. And if you're a landowner, you're apt to just shut it down. Right.

All those pressures sort of drove the climbing community to change their attitudes, I think, about, well, is it more important to keep everything secret or are we going to gain more in the end by trying to organize ourselves and figure out how to make this sustainable in the long run at the risk of losing some secrecy and some exclusivity? And I think the climbers here, by and large decided that that was worth it.

I think as a result, you probably had one of the strongest, most active climbing communities in the Carolinas and in the Southeast, in the whole country, as far as really being in the vanguard of figuring out how to preserve climbing, how to increase access, how to make it sustainable in the long run. Right. How to organize.

Certainly land ownership is really different here than out west, where, you know, most of climbing happens on public lands, national parks, blm, things like that. Most of the climbing in the south is happening on, or was at that time happening on private land, or at least accessible via private land.

And so the conversations, the negotiations to get to a crag were about going up to a guy's front porch with a six pack of beer and talking to him one on one to try and get access. Right. It wasn't about submitting paperwork to a federal agency. Right. It was about building personal relationships with private landowners.

So, and I think that was really the remarkable environment in which the community grew and became so active and so successful in making climbing sustainable.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:18:06.520 - 00:18:23.160

Here with the book, I think you go through the history of. Of climbing in the region and you get into the stories of people and you get into the story of actual. Rock in it too. There's so much good stuff in here. What was the initial impetus for you. To create this book and get it out there?

Andrew Kornylak

00:18:23.160 - 00:18:31.520

With Mountaineers doing photo stories. And I've written a little bit for magazines over the years and certainly done documentary film and things like that. So.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:18:31.520 - 00:18:33.040

Amazing documentary films. Yeah.

Andrew Kornylak

00:18:33.400 - 00:23:21.170

And what I had been doing over those years is just gathering stories, right?

If you do a piece for Climbing magazine, even if it's just a few photos, you're kind of building a story and then you pop a few photos from that story into a magazine and then it's. You put on the shelf and move on, right? Every single one of those little pieces for a magazine is a little story.

Every single sort video about a climb or a long documentary about a scene or a crag or something like that is like amazing story telling, you know, material. And I think there was a sense over the years doing all that work that man, I've got a lot of great stories and.

And of course as a photographer, I'm thinking of visual stories, right. But I. I have all these visual stories I want to tell more about than just that one photo that was in the gallery in Rockin Ice or something.

I guess it was really just bugging me for years and years and years like that sort of buzzing in the back of your head like, you gotta tell these stories, you know, you gotta get this. You gotta get all this stuff organized and get it out of your head.

I think that was sort of the main impetus was that it was busting outta my head and I had to get it out on paper in a book form. I approached a lot of publishers and I considered a lot of different ways to do this self publishing or sort of hybrid models.

But I really wanted to work with a publisher who was, number one, knowledgeable about the scene and the content, you know, the subject matter, but also a publisher who I could rely on to do all the things that I am not an expert at, which is book publishing is not my bag. I'm a photographer, I can tell stories, I can write, I can shoot some video. But I don't know the first thing about publishing books.

And I really wanted to work with an established publisher for that reason, as opposed to say, self publishing. Now, it took about a year or almost two years to really find that the land with Mountaineers books.

And through that time, as I was getting serious about putting these stories together, I think that was good to have that time to really bake the book.

Every time I pitched it, I would kind of regroup and bake the pitch a little bit better, maybe add a little bit more storytelling, maybe go back and print out all the photos again. And Move them around again and make another dummy book or something. Make a new PDF and then send that out. Send that out.

So I actually, that pitching process was very important for really baking it in. So by the time it got to Mountaineers Books, luckily they were already familiar with my work.

A lot of the people on staff there are climbers and knew my work and also even had climbed in the south before. I felt like it was going to be in good hands.

But the main thing, the main hurdle really was that I approached them with this book, thinking, this is a photo book. And I pitched it as a photo book.

I had maybe two or three thousand words of writing as just sort of basically filler or breaks in between the photos, Right. Just to break up the book visually.

But they came back and they said, you know, we love your photography, we know your work, obviously, but really we love the stories and we love these little glimpses into this bigger stories that you're telling, and we love your writing and we'd love you to write more. And I think we can do this book, but you got to write a little bit more. And I'm thinking, well, how much more?

And like, well, we're thinking more like 30,000 words, right? Then it became a very different project, and of course it was for the better. I really didn't know if I could write more.

But once I had that challenge, I guess then I sat down and really looked at all the little essays and thought, yeah, I could expand this, or I could this leads to this other essay, or I could build on this and combine these things.

And sure enough, after a few months, I was well beyond 30,000 words and really had to kind of start dialing it back because once the floodgates open, there are many, many, many more stories, right?

Because I had in the past, what I had was a great storehouse of films, finished films, but also interviews, just random recordings, audio recordings, which were great primary sources for storytelling.

You know, since these people are still around, I could kind of reach out to them, do a little fact checking, expand, get a new perspective on an old story. And that's what I did.

And I'm really glad that all that stuff was well organized enough that I could kind of mine that and build stories from that source material.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:23:21.650 - 00:23:44.820

Yeah, I think it's great that you've combined a whole career. That's the thing. Like, when we're young, we're like, I want to write a book, I want to write a book, right?

But when it turns out is really a book, you know, a book as beautiful as this, too, is a combination of an accumulation of all this time and all this year and seeing time pass and all of that goes into it. And I love that you brought your film mind, your photography mind into the writing as well.

Andrew Kornylak

00:23:45.060 - 00:24:16.660

One big thing I learned from this was I would never have been able to do this book 10, 20 years ago. In fact, I. If anything, I feel like I could have used a little bit more time.

When you really start developing these stories, they're just every single one of them. There's just so much more to follow up on if you wanted to. So at some point, you just gotta stop and call it good.

But I could never have done this book, though. Many times in the past I've thought about doing a book like, oh, I have a lot of photos. I should do a photo book. No, it's good. I waited.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:24:17.700 - 00:24:20.900

Where does the title Spare these Stones? Where does that come from for me.

Andrew Kornylak

00:24:20.900 - 00:26:07.460

A lot of times when I'm doing a story, I'm obviously apt to approach it visually. As I was going through all my photos, a few photos would always stand out to me as somehow important.

One of those photos was a photograph of a friend of mine, Greg Cotkampt, standing in front of this graffiti in a little cave in a place called Sandrock in Alabama. Sandrock is one of my favorite crags, but it's just constantly beset with garbage and spray paint and four wheelers and just. It's a mess.

But it is one of my favorite climbing areas. And it kind of, to me represents everything about climbing in the South. Some of the stuff you gotta put up with.

But then it's just such a unique geological formation that it just draws you back time after time. And it's got everything. Great bouldering, great sport, climbing, trad art stuff. Just a really cool setting with a cool vibe.

But anyway, this graffiti that I photographed him in front of read, blessed be he that spare these stones. Which is. I didn't really think about it much at the time, but now, looking back at the photograph with a book in mind, I realized that that was a.

It was a misquote from Shakespeare's epitaph on his grave site, which was a warning to would be vandals on his grave site. And it reads, a good friend, for Jesus sake, forbear to dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones.

And cursed be he that moves my bones. It just felt like understanding, why did someone spray paint that of all right. Yeah, that's amazing on the rock.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:26:07.460 - 00:26:08.660

Who was that. Who did that?

Andrew Kornylak

00:26:08.660 - 00:27:07.560

Right. Who was that? How did they manage to bungle that quote, first of all. But also, why would you spray paint that on rock?

You know, that just seems so counterintuitive.

But it, to me, just was the perfect representation of the contradictions of the south and climbing in the south and Southern culture and climbing culture here.

And also, I think it kind of touched on another big theme of the book which was emerging as I was putting it together, which was this theme of access, preservation, conservation of climbing areas for the long term.

And it really spoke to why the south needs that constantly, why we organize, why the community is constantly getting together to do cleanups and spray paint removal and try to figure out how to preserve this rock for climbing for future generations. So. So it just felt right to take the title from this misquote, spray painted on the Rock.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:27:11.160 - 00:27:28.920

Another thing I think you do really well in the book is you really integrate the people who are obviously, you know, so integral to the scene. So many local legends, Big Wall Pete and all these other characters.

Could you talk a little bit about some of the people you really wanted to include in there and whose stories. You wanted to tell?

Andrew Kornylak

00:27:29.420 - 00:31:38.770

You know, one nice thing about being a photographer is that I don't really have the best memory for names and places, but to have all these photographs, they remind me. Oh, yeah, that was when John Sherman came and visited the south and climbed at horse bends 40 or something like that.

There are just so many names of climbers, you know, that stand out to me about the South. You know, I think about guys like Adam Henry, who's an Alabama climber. Most people would call him a legend, but in true Southern style, he wouldn't.

He would never refer to himself as anything, any kind of big deal. And this is a guy who I think is legendary.

Obviously, he climbs really hard and has put up a lot of groundbreaking boulders and climbs and has developed, you know, had his hand in developing a lot of the climbing around here.

But I think mostly people know him for his sort of force of character and his outspokenness about the things that need to be said in the community for us to make the right decisions about access and about preservation and things like that.

Whether that is, you know, back in the day, sort of resisting the proliferation of guidebooks to more recently, being an advocate for preservation and access and things like that. And sometimes those things are diametrically opposed.

And I think of so many of the climbers I met, like Adam back in the 90s, sort of exemplified the type of climber who was establishing most of the hard climbing sort of at the top of the, of the pecking order in terms of, you know, who was in charge of these secret areas, who was in charge of the information and keeping it secret from everyone else.

A lot of those guys ended up being the very people who led the charge for access and preservation, even at the cost of, you know, secrecy and having those crags for themselves. And I think that that really speaks to their character and to me. Why they are amazing individuals.

Not just as technical climbers but also just as sort of like thoughtful, community oriented folks that really had a bigger vision for climbing in the south than just, oh, this is my crag, I'm keep it secret. You know, no one write any guidebooks. We're just going to keep this under wraps.

Joey Henson is another guy I write about in, in the book, certainly legendary climber of all time in, in North Carolina and again I would say one of the secret keepers of, of North Carolina climbing in many ways.

He helped start the Watauga Land Trust, which is now a very, still a very active land trust in the Boone area and was one of the sort of people who helped found the Foundeers bouldering competition which became part of the Triple Crown bouldering series, which was sort of one of the biggest engines for raising money to help purchase land for access and grow the community and things like that. And he lives on a barn in the middle of the woods at the foot of a old growth mountain top. You know, he's just surrounded by boulder fields.

People have been climbing on those boulders for years and years and it's been mainly word of mouth kind of secret.

You know, recently he has sold that, a lot of that land to the Carolina Climbers Coalition and allows people to just park on his property and go up and self tour the boulders.

And I remember him telling me that he's like, for so many years I kind of kept these places secret and but if I, if I were going to champion the cause of access and preservation and community land ownership, then I felt like I had to walk the talk. I had to open my own place up to strangers coming in and parking and dealing with maybe some issues, but letting them climb on my land.

And I thought that was just cool. You know, he was walking along.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:31:39.250 - 00:32:04.280

It's a kind of bitter pill to have to swallow, right that I mean, I think for us who kind of started cutting our teeth in the outdoors in the, as you said, like early mid-90s, there were a lot more secrets out then there were a lot fewer People out there. There was a lot fewer ways to get there. You can't hide stuff forever. People are going to get there, unfortunately.

So it becomes a question of can we properly manage it? Can we get people to come here the right way? You can't hide it forever. Sadly.

Andrew Kornylak

00:32:04.760 - 00:33:48.730

I think the reality is, especially in a place like the south, if you're climbing somewhere back in the 90s, chances are you were either trespassing or climbing in an area that wasn't where you weren't allowed to be. So there was a method to the secrecy. There was some thought behind it. It wasn't just like, well, I want this place to be mine.

It was that if this place is open or in a guidebook or on a list somewhere, the hordes are going to come and get it. Really shut down. A lot of access was had by just person to person relationships and those relationships were fragile.

That was kind of long term thinking. A lot of places had been closed.

Even though people were climbing there, they had been kept closed for a long time until such time as, okay, now is the right time to talk to these landowners or talk to this agency and really make a push for legitimate access.

So many places in the south have followed that trajectory from quote, unquote, secret area where just a few people in the know were either sneaking in or going in by the blessing of a landowner.

And then years and years and years go by, people are slowly doing the work in the background to figure out how to get access in a legitimate way for everybody, not just for them. That happens. People raise some money, maybe there's some, some money involved, maybe there's a land purchase involved.

But I'd say the majority of the climbing in the south followed that trajectory. Even back in the day when people were keeping things secret, there was some forethought about, well, let's keep this secret until such time.

Maybe it's going to be in 20 years, but.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:33:48.890 - 00:33:54.170

And as you said, the secrets are still out there. There's still stuff that's covered up in boss or weird or someone hasn't tried yet.

Andrew Kornylak

00:33:54.410 - 00:34:12.650

Absolutely. And that's. That always surprises me that when I go out with people and they show me some new areas, like what is this place?

Well, I don't know, it doesn't even have a name, much less a guidebook or anything. And still some stuff is accessible and some stuff is not. But there's plenty, always plenty.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:34:16.330 - 00:34:47.430

Another thing that's amazing about this book is that the photograph, of course you're a photographer primarily and that it's not just climbing photography. You know, your grandmother could pick up this book and love it because there's just so much beautiful. It's really a love letter to the south as well.

I mean, there's one photo I was thinking of Rios Cove in Tennessee that's nothing but the tops of trees and the way the lights on it. There's a lot of hands. And even though hands are so important in climbing, there's a lot of hands just on their own.

One of my favorites was a shot of just a climber's hand holding some pine seedlings.

Andrew Kornylak

00:34:48.020 - 00:35:01.780

Actually, that's, actually that was edamame. But it still felt symbolic, you know, it still felt right. Is that a climbing area? But it felt like it, it made sense.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:35:02.020 - 00:35:20.640

I think what I love about it is how the, the softness of the edamame is kind of contrasted to a climber's hand, which is already going to be rough or whatever. There's such a beauty to that. How important was it to you though, to get more than just climbing in here?

And how, how is that also part of climbing itself? Right, just the routes, isn't it?

Andrew Kornylak

00:35:20.880 - 00:37:47.780

It's almost a book of geography where climbing is the entry point.

I found over the years that a lot of the photography and films that I did were a lot about geography and how culture is shaped by geography and vice versa, our relationship to geography. And so I kind of followed that approach for this book.

If I look through this book and look at some of these photos, like I have this photo of just two boulders looking at other.

So much of the magic of some of these geological formations is just the rock itself, even if it's covered in graffiti or, you know, there's trash at the bottom or a chained up dog nearby. There's something really magical about the places that one encounters when climbing.

Climbers are very close to their geography, very close to the dirt and the rock and the ground and they're, you know, literally interacting with it physically. So much of the climbing experience to me is about the setting, the physical setting of it that is just sort of inescapable.

I mean, and I think over the years I've probably focused more on that than on the physical, gymnastic aspect of technical climbing. I mean, I certainly am into that. I celebrate that.

But I think over the 30 years of shooting photos in the south, the majority of my photos are either settings or rocks or trees or hands, some detail of the, of the experience that's not just the end result. And that really is what I'm interested in. Is what's below the surface of climbing, the act of climbing.

Because, you know, the act of climbing also happens in climbing gyms. Don't get me wrong, I love the climbing gym. I spend the majority of my time in the climbing gym and it's super fun and there's great community there.

But there's a reason that the experience of climbing in a gym is simply less profound and deep as the experience of climbing even on little urban boulder fields outside. It's because there is something about that interaction with the physical geography and geology of the earth that kind of takes it to the next level.

And so I don't see how you could photograph climbing without focusing on those, those aspects of it.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:37:51.300 - 00:38:06.660

I mean, climate itself is a performance art, right too, in a way.

And it needs to be insight within, you know, understanding the geology of the rock, understanding the puzzle of how you can climb the rock, understand the place you are breathing in, all that's part of climbing, right?

Andrew Kornylak

00:38:06.660 - 00:38:36.920

What makes this climbing so amazing in the south is the quality of the rock is amazing. It is unlike anywhere else outside of maybe Sainte and Bleu. The quality of the sandstone here is just fantastic.

Obviously there's also granite and quartzite and limestone. But in general, the concentration of high quality rock is second to none here in the South. And that is something that makes it special.

So the book has to showcase that.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:38:37.080 - 00:39:03.680

You know, you've talked a lot about how the south has created this really great pattern that's used. Been used in other places for access on. On the way that private landowners and. Climbers can get along, how places can. Evolve in that way.

How do you see climbing in the south evolving as there's more people, as there's more private land? You know, what can we learn from. From what climbers have done so far in preserving land for everyone?

Andrew Kornylak

00:39:04.160 - 00:42:49.150

Back in those early days of figuring out how to create access and sustainable access to climbing, I think we learned a lot about different ways to do that. And I think the rest of the country probably learned a lot of lessons about how to do that.

When we started really focusing on access in the South, I don't think anyone realized how successful the strategy of simply purchasing private land, putting it into a trust that the community owned, was going to be for climbing access. First of all, it seemed too expensive, it seemed too difficult to keep track of all this land ownership.

And most importantly, it didn't seem like private landowners would really be into that. Why would someone sell you their land to climb on? For no other reason than to climb on It.

Well, as it turns out, a lot of the climbable geography in the south is pretty useless to the average landowner. If you're a farmer, it's rocky. You can't plan anything there. It's not a place that's easy to access.

It's just a cliff band that you happen to have on your land.

Unfortunately, even though you've got tomato fields at the top and you've got beans planted at the bottom, you got this big cliff in the middle that you can't do anything with.

Well, so if some community group comes and says, hey, we'll pay you a fair market value just to access this cliff and we will own this right of way and some land at the bottom, but you can still farm, you can still access your land. And what's more, we'll keep it clean, we'll keep the four wheelers out. No one's going to be partying here at night.

And we will sign a bunch of waivers to their credit. Like, landowners saw that as a win win. It was a win win for both the landowners and the climbing community.

Once we had a few successes under our belt, little bouldering areas, little crag here and there where the process was, okay, get this landowner to sell us access or a little bit of land, and then we will get a loan to pay the landowner, and then we'll have some amount of time, a couple years or something to pay off that note to the bank. And so the next couple years we'll just do events, competitions, fundraisers, and raise money from the community to pay that note off.

And I think once we add a few of those successes under our belt, the momentum just started and it was like, wow, it worked at Boat Rock. It worked at, you know, Steel, Alabama or wherever. It can work at this crag. It could work at this crag. Let's try this. Let's try this.

All of a sudden, you just look at your Rolodex of hundreds of crags and bouldering areas, and so it could work anywhere. You just look through your Rolodex of climbs and all of a sudden the world is wide open. Might as well try.

Let's go talk to this landowner, see if they'll do it. Right now you had like a blue, a blueprint.

And I think other climbing organizations around the country, some of them were trying the same things and we all learned from each other. They saw the successes we had in the Carolinas and in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and replicated that.

Those were huge lessons for the climbing community, sort of writ large and Obviously, again, because everything is private land here, it's very successful here. It can't necessarily work at Yosemite or Bishop or something like that, but I think there was just like more tools in the, in the box.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:42:49.150 - 00:42:56.430

Yeah, no, it's a great model. I mean it's an amazing model for. Local access anywhere, I think even in small places out west.

Andrew Kornylak

00:42:56.990 - 00:43:26.250

And I'll say that the mountain biking community and some other like paddling, mountain biking community got on board with that too. There was a lot of crossover to other sports outdoor communities. That one also even hiking. Hiking and. Yeah, absolutely.

And a lot of these climbing areas, they are multi use. They're Boulder, they're mountain biking, they're hiking. Some of them even you can ride horses and things like that.

So it's a win for the outdoor community at large, not just climbers.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:43:30.250 - 00:43:50.070

It's been so great to talk. We could talk for another hour. I think we didn't even hit on a lot of things. I wanted to talk to you about.

With about media outlets, outdoor retailer show and all that. But I'm glad we focused on the book. The book's out this week. It's beautiful.

Let people know how they can get it and how they can see more of your work or get in contact. With you if they'd like to.

Andrew Kornylak

00:43:50.070 - 00:44:29.890

The book is available for pre order on at Mountaineers Books but also Amazon. If you go to my website, which is just andrew cornellac.com, you go to books, you can pre order a signed copy, which you can't get anywhere else.

But these books will be available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble and things like that, but also physical bookstores. Your local outdoor retailer should be carrying. It should be everywhere.

So it's available for pre order online at Amazon and Mountaineers Books and all those other places. But if you go to my website, andrewcornillac.com, go to books, you can pre order a signed copy.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:44:30.690 - 00:44:36.850

Finally, Andrew, the last question we ask everyone on the podcast is simply what gives you hope?

Andrew Kornylak

00:44:37.650 - 00:45:27.810

I'd be honest, it has been a tough couple years in so many ways, but I think actually working on this book gave me a lot of hope. I know I'm the author and this is my baby, so it's special to me.

But there was something that gave me a lot of sort of positive vibes and hope every time I came back to this book. It felt like a counterweight to everything that was happening in the world.

And maybe that's because there's some nostalgic beauty to it, but I also think that it just reminded me of how deep and rich these communities are and how thankful I am to be part of this community, this climbing community in the south and just the outdoors in general. I think just community gives me a lot of hope.

Doug Schnitzspahn

00:45:27.810 - 00:46:31.200

Andrew, it was so good to talk to you today. So good to see you. I always love working with you and I'm a huge fan of your work.

Take care. Thanks for imbibing open container production of Rock Fight llc.

Please take a second to follow our show and whatever podcast app you're listening to us on and send your emails and feedback to myrockfightmail.com learn more about Andrew Cornerlak and order the book Spare these Stones which came out yesterday from Matt near's books@AndrewCornillak.com I encourage you to pick up Spare these Stones. It's a beautiful book and a must have for coffee tables and conversation everywhere.

And I also highly recommend you read Will Harlan's fantastic Untamed, the Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island. It's the story of Carol Richel and her true grassroots activism in her efforts to save the island's delicate and precious ecosystem.

Our producers today were David Carsadvisor, Colin True Art direction provided by Sarah Gensert. I'm Doug Schnitzbahn. Get some thanks for listening.