This New Crag Was Called the “Next Rumney.” But There Was One Giant Issue

This story, originally titled “Out of the Woods” appeared in our 2024 print edition of Ascent. You can buy a copy of the magazine here.

On Labor Day weekend, 2022, Jay and Kayte Knower pulled up to one of the Forest Service gates on Tripoli Road, a few twists and turns from the village of Woodstock, New Hampshire, population 1,453. The weather was warm and sunny. Fall—the halcyon season for New England rock climbers—waited just around the corner. On that holiday weekend, Rumney, the most well-known and user-friendly crag in New England, was bound to be overflowing with climbers. But the Knowers were headed farther north, to Russell Crag, a new area they had been developing for the past few years.

Arriving at the small pullout beneath a seasonal gate, Jay registered a moment of disbelief. Around 50 vehicles—including a small bus from a local university—were jammed along the road. As the couple hiked past the Forest Garden, an area with moderate 5.7 and 5.8 slabs, Kayte registered “mobs of people.”

The Knowers had developed Russell in part to staunch the flow of climbers vying for Rumney’s bolted terrain. They, along with a handful of other locals, including their friend and Rumney local Lee Hansche, had scrubbed, bolted, and climbed 80 new routes at Russell from 5.3 to 5.13. In an area like New England, known for its heady traditional climbing, the addition of another sport crag close to metropolitan areas like Boston and Montreal was significant. A Mountain Project page touted Russell as “the next Main Cliff,” referencing Rumney’s biggest attraction. There was talk of a guidebook. That July, a few months before Labor Day, Jay Knower and Hansche released a podcast called First Ascent; the first episode was partially about Russell. “It’s really the crown jewel of the area. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say it’s another Rumney,” Knower enthused during the show.

The Labor Day crowds might have been manageable. Jay Knower remembers being happy with how dispersed they were, a testament to the variety of climbs and the crag’s ability to handle traffic. But there was a bigger problem. Unbeknownst to the Knowers, Hansche, or anyone else who’d helped in the recent development, the land they’d been hard at work on was smack dab in the middle of a 120-acre conservation easement called Merriam Woods, deeded to the Woodstock Conservation Commission (WCC) in 1980. A member of the WCC’s property abutted the plot. It’d been impossible not to notice the scores of psyched climbers, and he was irate. An entire crag had been scrubbed, bolted, and published online without permission from the town. The climbers were in trouble. So was the crag.

The sleepy hamlet of Woodstock, New Hampshire, feels more like the setting of a Richard Russo novel than a climbing destination. Cabins and dirt roads are filled with ramshackle summer homes passed down through the generations; the downtown is so small you’re liable to drive past it before noticing. Just to the north is Cannon Cliff, the adventurous and often dangerous trad area that looms over Interstate 93. The town of Lincoln, a popular tourist spot for skiers and foliage hunters, lies just to the east. Plymouth and neighboring Rumney, home to the eponymous climbing area, are a few exits south. When the summer crowds abate for the season, Woodstock’s year-round residents relish their quiet, surrounded by the thick woods of the White Mountain National Forest, the rambling Pemigewasset River, and not a whole lot else.

In 1980, a couple named Ida and Mylon Merriam gifted the 120-acre parcel to the town of Woodstock as an “open space devoted to general conservation purposes and the protection of forest and/or agricultural resources.” Ida had been a trailblazing economist who had a pivotal role in developing American Social Security. Mylon had worked as a cartographer for the Army Map Service, a job that took him on expeditions all over the world and won him thrilling National Geographic assignments in the postwar boom. The Merriams spent most of their time in Washington, D.C. Their old, typewritten deed is faded, but its parameters are clear: The plot would be managed by the WCC and remain open for the public to enjoy. It would never be built upon or sold.

Merriam Woods, as it came to be called, contains several small cliffs and walking paths, and hunters, climbers, hikers, and bird watchers have sporadically visited the place since the 1960s. It’s unclear whether any climbers visiting the crags before 1980 got permission to climb there, but the climbing presence was light and unlikely to attract attention. Russell Crag, as climbers began calling it, was visited by a few locals in the years after the Merriams donated the land, but by the 1990s most had turned their attention to Rumney.

In March 2020, the Forest Service shut down many recreation sites in New Hampshire—Rumney among them—to staunch the increasing flow of out-of-state recreators during the COVID-19 pandemic. Woodstock struggled to cope with this influx of people, many of whom were tourists experiencing the outdoors for the first time. Gil Rand, one of Woodstock’s town selectmen, remembers the sudden proliferation of loud music, barbecues, and illegal picnics overwhelming the town. Human waste soiled the town’s riverbanks and free camping areas just up the road from Russell Crag. As Woodstock town employees struggled to rein in the visiting crowds, a select crew of climbers also began searching for overlooked cliffs in the wider I-93 area in response to Rumney’s closing. Jay and Kayte Knower, who operate an academic tutoring company out of nearby Plymouth, were among them.

That summer, a friend named Mike Zarnowski called Jay Knower and mentioned Russell, where he had been quietly putting routes in over the years. “I’m like, sure, I’ll look at your little backyard cliff,” Jay tells me. He hadn’t expected much. But as he walked through the dense New England scrub on that first visit, rows upon rows of steep, featured rock emerged from the lichen and vegetation above him. Though the cliffs were short (the tallest was about 100 feet), they promised cryptic cruxes on the same schist as their geological neighbors to the south. “Oh my God,” Jay recalls thinking. “This is another Rumney.”

There were no signs designating the land as a conservation easement nor any designation on Forest Service maps online. It was clear from the ancient bolts, corroded pins, and weather-faded slings scattered infrequently across the cliffs that climbers had been taking advantage of the area for years. Believing they had researched the place as thoroughly as possible, those first ascensionists next reached out to the Audubon Society about peregrine nesting habits. Together, they worked to identify and band peregrine falcons and established cliff closures during nesting season. By 2021, the developers had also spoken to the Rumney Climbers’ Association (RCA), which agreed to extend its reach into Waterville Valley. No one spoke with any representative of the town of Woodstock.

“We really tried to anticipate what the town would want,” Kayte Knower says, while pointing out that it was difficult to interact with agencies during the pandemic. Swinging by a town office, she argued—especially one as overwhelmed as Woodstock—carried more gravitas than normal.

“We started developing,” Jay Knower explains, “and, just as things invariably do, they escalated. Before we knew it, we had hundreds of routes there. We were just psyched climbers putting up routes in a place where we thought we were totally fine, given the history.” In the initial episode of the First Ascent podcast, Jay Knower celebrated the fact that, in lockdown, “climbing [felt] counterculture again. I kind of wanted to go climbing because everybody was telling me not to.”

Rumney reopened in July 2020, and climbers once again traveled in droves to New Hampshire. The feverish development continued at Russell Crag. It had its own Mountain Project page by spring 2021. A trickle of climbers drove past Rumney to check out the new addition. College students from Plymouth State screwed and nailed signs to trees to denote trails to cliffs. Climbers’ cars, which once blended in with those of local walkers and hikers, began to dominate the small parking pull-out. All this came to a head on Labor Day. The upset neighbor, a man named Mark Sellingham, became the first member of the WCC to be aware of the scope and scale of climbing at Merriam Woods, and he reported it to the town immediately.

In mid-September, Jay Knower and a climber and developer named Greg Pouliot were out climbing at Russell when an email hit Knower’s inbox: a cease-and-desist letter from the WCC. The letter was the first time Knower had even heard the name Merriam Woods. On September 26, the WCC’s lawyer sent a harsh letter to Peter Jackson, a local climber and former head of the RCA, indicating they would take legal action and were considering chopping every bolt at the crag. The WCC then scheduled a public meeting on October 18.

Ladd Raine and Chris Smith, the current heads of the RCA, showed up to defend the cliff, as did Mike Morin, then the Northeast regional director for Access Fund. Morin was no stranger to the Norman Rockwell-style town-hall ethos that colors New England access debates. With his mane of dirty blond hair, Morin looks more Malibu, California, than the cloistered logging community of Millinocket, Maine, where he is originally from. Fearing their presence would escalate the residents’ anger, nearly all of the main route developers at Russell Crag/Merriam Woods—Jay Knower, Lee Hansche, Mike Zarnowski, and Greg Pouliot—chose not to attend the October meeting. They sent Kayte Knower as a representative.

The conservation commission had done its homework. When Kayte Knower argued that the climbers were not trying to promote the area, a selectman asked why the area was published on Mountain Project.

“I was taken by the level of hostility,” Kayte Knower recalls of that initial meeting. “Everyone was very upset.”

Morin tried to pump the brakes. He wanted to slow the conversation down before the cliff was hastily closed and the bolts were chopped for good. According to a few people who were present, Sellingham grew increasingly angry as the meeting progressed. “The development of Merriam Woods has gone too far—and it needs to stop,” he said.

At 4:45 p.m., less than an hour after the meeting had begun, Selectman Gil Rand made a motion to adjourn. The climbers agreed to spread the word that the cliff would be voluntarily closed while a solution was reached.

Modern climbers can’t identify with the sport’s rebellious past if they also want to manage these resources for the future.

By the time the meeting minutes went public on the town’s website a few weeks later, the events leading up to the closure read like a perfect storm of screwups—concurrent forces swirling around each other like sinister weather patterns colliding in the North Atlantic. How could the developers have failed to do land-ownership research that seemed, in hindsight, so cursory? Was the WCC’s harsh response justified? And was New England’s newest climbing resource gone forever?

Take climbing’s erupting popularity. Add the growing allure of developing user-friendly crags. Mix with the inevitable attention that new cliffs are bound to engender. Stir with the strains of a town loaded to the breaking point by a pandemic, and you have an untenable situation. Two things soon became clear: first, that the closure of Merriam Woods was a response to an age-old but outdated way of developing and maintaining crags guerilla-style; second, that modern climbers can’t identify with the sport’s rebellious past if they also want to manage these resources for the future.

“We have this mythology that surrounds climbing,” Morin says of the notion that climbers should be countercultural in staking their claim to cliffs found in the woods. “But we’re too big to continue with that trajectory. We’ll create a reputation that climbers aren’t responsible users.”

Over the fall, Morin often found himself driving over the Kancamagus Highway, the long, twisting scenic road separating North Conway from Woodstock, to attend WCC meetings to save the cliff. He pushed for Woodstock to draft a management plan and repeatedly stressed that no one take any drastic action.

Although a few selectmen still argued that chopping the bolts was the best way to preserve Merriam Woods, others made real efforts to extend olive branches to climbers, who were now working hard to soothe the wounds they’d caused in the town. Gil Rand toured the cliff with a local climber to see the extent of development. “The climbing community came in and said, ‘Oops, we screwed up,’” said Rand. “We were more than pleased with their efforts to scale back and go online and pump the brakes.” The hasty campaign to get climbers to halt activity at Merriam Woods worked; climbers respected the temporary closure.

Sellingham wanted to let the town decide whether they should chop the bolts, and he proposed making the decision in classic Yankee fashion: Residents of Woodstock could cast an informal vote to remove or keep the hardware. The WCC would take this public opinion into account when making its decision. But by December, Kayte Knower’s own campaign to save the crag had kicked into overdrive. She asked hundreds of users to send postcards to the WCC expressing how much Merriam Woods meant to them. An organization called “Friends of Merriam Woods” created an Instagram account and a website. The channels were designed to educate the public—town residents and climbers alike—about how best to protect the resource and assuage fears that climbing activity would ruin the Merriams’ vision for the easement.

In spring 2023, the WCC drafted a warrant article “to see whether the town wishes to allow climbing safety bolts installed without the prior authorization of the town of Merriam Woods Conservation Land (a/k/a Russell Crags) to remain in place or be cut off.” On the evening of March 10, as the dark winter receded, residents filtered into the town’s historic meeting house, a classic New England structure with a small steeple and white clapboard siding, to determine the crag’s fate. The place was packed with people of all stripes—climbers, firefighters, dog walkers. In the end, the town voted to keep the bolts.

The Mountain Project page was amended to reflect the more restrained reality of climbing at Russell, including referring to the crag as Merriam Woods to honor the town of Woodstock and the Merriams. No new routes would go in on the land, and the WCC’s board began drafting a management plan to deal with the influx of climbers.

By the time I swing by Merriam Woods to get a few pitches in on a balmy day in December 2023, there’s snow in the ground, and a few cars are lined up at the gate at Tripoli Road. We amble through boulders and past a few stunted, short climbs. Asserting that Merriam Woods is another Rumney might be a stretch. Still, the zealous work that’s gone into the place is evident and impressive. Developing routes in the verdant tangle of New England woods is a lot more elbow grease than glory.

Halfway through the day, Mike Zarnowski sprints up and introduces himself while we work through a few routes at the main cliff. The climbs are mostly short, but some offer great movement on sunny rock with interesting, positive holds. If nothing else, Merriam Woods will be a viable, user-friendly resource to diminish and disperse crowds. Zarnowski tells me an estimated $30,000 worth of hardware has been drilled into the place, a clear sign of how much the cadre of route developers truly love their little crag.

Ultimately, the perfect storm in Merriam Woods diminished to a squall, then blew over—thanks to the hard work of impassioned climbers and diligent townspeople. But Merriam Woods is perhaps best told as a cautionary tale; the crag might easily have ceased to exist. “We were probably naive,” Jay Knower reflects. “There was no nefarious intent at all, but I’ve come to realize that developing doesn’t end when you’ve put your bolts in. You need to be aware of the community at large, the trails, the access, the local climbing organization, and the social, political, and cultural dynamics related to the routes you’re developing.”

The prolonged battle to keep Merriam Woods equipped was one of the reasons Morin left Access Fund in the spring of 2023. He’d had too many panicked cliff developers reaching out, seen too many irate locals, and acted as a calm middle ground for too many years. He was tired of swooping into town meetings after climbers shot first and asked questions later.

“Merriam Woods was the moment I thought, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’” he said. “What am I, defense?”

When Morin left, Access Fund did not fill his position. The Northeast no longer has a local asset to call on as a liaison between towns and climbers. It’s not likely that the personal touch Morin brought to the table—his calm demeanor while diffusing tense situations with landowners—can be replicated from afar.

As we hike back toward the parking lot, trucks downshifting on Route 93 below, a local man walks his dogs past the Forest Service gate.

“Were you climbing up there?” he chirps.

“We were,” I admit, a little sheepish.

“Well, great,” he offers, before chasing his dogs toward the little square of nature that the Merriams set aside for preservation 40 years ago. “I hope you guys had fun.”

To read more from Ascent, visit our table of contents here.

Lee Hansche died in a route-setting accident on May 21, 2024. Read Josh Laskin’s obituary of Lee here.

The post This New Crag Was Called the “Next Rumney.” But There Was One Giant Issue appeared first on Climbing.