Boone-area climber Joey Henson seeks to embrace the primitive way of living–without hurry and with a kind of patience that allows for a deliberate enjoyment of place. | Photos by Compelling Story
Joey Henson isn’t the easiest person to nail down or sum up in one particular way. Of course the way I learned of him was through his conservation work up on Howard’s Knob through the Blue Ridge Conservancy, the Boone-area organization he helped establish in the early 1990s.
And his climbing achievements in Linville Gorge and elsewhere in the High Country feel like tall tales. Joey Henson the climber symbolizes and embodies the Boone climbing culture, a culture whose key figures I’ve been reading about since my climbing days in high school.
Even in his 50s he still climbs stronger than people 30 years younger. Perhaps his lifelong work as a stone mason and carpenter–combined with how hard he still trains and climbs–contributes to his youthful strength even in middle age.
The other day he mentioned to me “I had the strongest climbing day of my life a couple of weeks ago.”
By the way, if you ever get a chance to make it to his house–the one he built by hand from found materials of old barns and other structures–you’ll see the climbing wall, the bachar ladder, the hang boards, and the pull up bars positioned nearly everywhere. There’s a rumor he even has a pull up bar in his shower, (which I’ve not yet been able to verify).
And if people haven’t learned about Joey through the aforementioned exploits, they usually have seen his maps, which he draws by hand from memory after scouring the woods for boulders to climb.
What I was most interested in understanding about him though was how a guy like Joey engages with the world around him in a way that sustains his herculean outdoor and artist efforts for so many years.
And part of it is the die hard attachment to a primitive ideal.
In pursuit of the primitive near Boone
For instance, when Joey hikes to the ridge above his house he sometimes looks out and imagines a million buffalo all flowing like a dusty stream over the mountain. He likes to think of what it might have felt like to be an ancient hunter following that herd through the trees and fields. For years he’s been intoxicated with thoughts of primitive people and how they must have lived in the hills he calls home.
After a good steady rain he’ll sometimes go searching around where he thinks the ancient hunters might have camped–such as in a cleft in the rock or in another natural windbreak. He’s been right many times before, and this is how he’s discovered so many ancient weapons and tools–both fragments and whole pieces thousands of years old–buried beneath a layer of rain-sodden soil.
“There’s a sort of magic out there that you can tap into that leaves you feeling revitalized,” he says. “When you walk into the woods, even just 50 feet from the road, and you start looking for the beauty in it, and you start focusing on the beauty of it, there’s almost an energy you get from it.”
It reminds me of that John Muir quote about the “good tidings” the mountains give you. The trees and forests of course do the same thing.
Joey refers to it, somewhat jokingly, as “La La Land.”
“It’s a sort of a rebellion against modern society and all this materialistic work ethic and all the money focus,” he says. “I get into that magic where all that fades away, and you’re just there with the woods, pretending it’s 10,000 years ago.”
The search for artifacts has become a search for connection to an ancient people and landscape and a reminder of how Joey would like to live every day–engaging with the world and landscape the way he imagines ancient people did in the region for thousands of years before we arrived here.
No he’s probably not going to give up his green bumper sticker-freckled Tacoma or his mobile phone or the electricity that lights the barn/home he built by hand. He embraces this hypocrisy for the sake of certain “necessary” conveniences for living practically in modern society.
“Cell phone technology was a hard one for me. For a long time I didn’t want people bringing there cell phones to the house. I think it’s weakening our intuition, and I’ve read that it decreases the rapport between people if a phone is even in sight.
“But now, of course, I have a cell phone because it’s a major convenience.”
As much as possible though he wants to embrace the primitive way of living–without hurry, without expectation, without exploitation, and with a kind of patience that allows for a slow enjoyment and fascination with the place itself. Whatever place that may be.
The Pioneer of Boone Bouldering
He began to pursue these ideals while developing the work he’s best known for in the High Country (and elsewhere)–pioneering the boulder problems around Boone, North Carolina. Back then, in the early 90s, he was climbing in Boone, Hueco Tanks, and in California. He also made trips to Colorado, Maine, Washington, and to British Columbia to climb at Squamish.
“Through that migratory lifestyle and being around campfires and living in caves we realized just how little we needed to sustain ourselves. We minimalized everything and trained really hard.”
Bouldering, of course, is climbing rocks you can fall from without dying or getting mangled (in theory).
Joey is the primary reason Stone Crusade by John Sherman made a stop in Boone and why that now-out-of-print classic popularized the boulders up on Howard’s Knob.
Joey has a twinge of guilt when he talks about this chapter of his climbing career. Of course back then he wanted to raise awareness about climbing in the High Country, and awareness is one avenue for ensuring access to climbing areas and protecting those areas from being developed and destroyed.
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The Blue Ridge Conservancy was formed and gained so much momentum because Joey, Jefferey Scott, and others wanted to protect the boulders and forests from being destroyed up on Howard’s Knob.
But there’s a risk to those same areas when too many people show up. Howard’s Knob, in fact, has been closed to climbers now for more than 20 years (though the Blue Ridge Conservancy and the Carolina Climbers Coalition continue to pursue reopening it).
This is why Joey and other climbing pioneers in Boone have worked hard to prevent guidebooks from broadcasting and removing the mystery of the area’s bouldering treasures.
It is, no doubt, a delicate balance.
The Paradox of Joey Henson’s Hand-Drawn Maps
You might then wonder why Joey Henson, embracer of pioneer spirit and the primitive, would go to the trouble of making maps of High Country boulder fields in Linville Gorge, Howard’s Knob, and the Buckeye Boulders near his house.
First, Joey would like to emphasize that the maps he draws are not helpful for taking away the guesswork of finding the bouldering areas they depict. They are certainly a thing of beauty but may not be all that reliable for navigation.
Second, it is this “embracing the primitive” that has driven Joey toward the crucible of maps. Those maps come at a price.
And I don’t mean the price he charges for you to own a print of his hand-drawn masterpieces to hang in your living room. They come at the price of suffering that all good art requires of the artist.
Let me get Buddhist for a second about this point. Or maybe it’s a Wendell Berry thing, such as in his book The Art of the Commonplace. Or maybe a little of both. The suffering, first of all, of living in the world, then of seeing the world, observing the world, and understanding the world after a lot of thinking about it–and then there’s the painstaking and sometimes painful task of communicating that world back to us. That is the “suffering” required of good art.
Of course Joey doesn’t see it as suffering. “I never thought of it that way,” he says. And perhaps I’m being ever so slightly dramatic in describing the artistic process as suffering. Let’s call it commitment, but I’m pretty sure there were some blood, sweat, and tears involved in development of his maps.
Drawing Out the Magic of Linville Gorge
For about seven years, Joey made weekly (sometimes more than once weekly) trips to Linville Gorge–the wilderness he has mapped most extensively. The painstaking work of mapping the Gorge, though, didn’t feel like pain. The days of camping, climbing and exploring the area seemed more like the exploits of a wild child who never really grew out of it.
“After days of exploring, camping and climbing by the river, we often would finish up the trip by racing up the trail with heavy camping gear and bouldering pads on our backs,” he says. “Towards the top of the trail someone would almost always start sprinting the final hundreds of yards up to the cars! We would push it hard, and most times we would arrive at the parking lot feeling like throwing up yet exhilarated. We would be utterly and completely physically thrashed, even before the mile and a half hike (sprint) with the thousand vertical feet up and out.
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“The Mexican restaurant on the way back to Boone never tasted so good. Then, after a couple of rest days–which often involved training and/or hard construction work–we would dive right back in and do it all again.”
