Shakespeare Left a Warning. 400 Years Later, Southern Climbers Made It Their Own.

At the turn of the 20th century, there was a story circulating around the small town of Sand Rock, Alabama, that a prospector hid a cache of gold at the top of a sandstone pinnacle—one easily seen from the village below, but damned hard to get to.

Two brothers got it in their heads to get that gold, and they went for the hills. After an arduous bushwhack, the boys managed the 70-foot climb to its summit, but what they found there remains a mystery. One perished trying to get back down; the other, stranded at the top, died of starvation.

It’s a tall tale for sure, a good one to warn kids off of reckless adventure. Some stories persist, mutated and bit-shifted over time, not because they are true, but because they are useful.

The Standard Route on Deadman’s Pinnacle, as it’s now known today, goes at 5.6, a fun free solo at what’s now become a popular and beat-out area for cragging, rappelling, and four-wheeling.

It’s said that before he died, William Shakespeare wrote a warning to would-be vandals to be used as his epitaph, which was later carved onto his tomb:

Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbeare,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones. 

It’s likely, though not proven, that the poet actually wrote the famous curse, but wasn’t very useful in the end; when archeologists finally scanned the tomb, they found his skull was missing.

It seemed fitting to turn a corner at Sand Rock one day and encounter a line from Shakespeare’s apocryphal final work, misquoted in dripping black spray paint: “Blessed be he that spare these stones.” At the time, local climbers had been hard at work all year there, cleaning up graffiti. This was a fresh one, a new work. I posed my friend Greg Kottkamp in front of it and made my own picture. Within a week, the graffiti was gone, but the struggle continued.

Years later, this photograph was the inspiration for my book about Southern climbing, Spare These Stones. Most of the stories are true, and I think all of them serve a purpose: to tell you all about “God’s own stone” and how a community came together to preserve it for the common good, all while keeping tradition fiercely alive. To me, that is nothing short of a miracle.

I’ve often heard that the book is a “love letter” to the South, but like Shakespeare’s epitaph, I hope the book will also serve as a warning. It could easily have been different here but for just the right people, action, and timing. Only vigilance will keep that miracle alive. Don’t sleep on the grave robbers.

The following is an excerpt from Spare These Stones: A Journey Through Southern Climbing Culture, published in 2025 by Mountaineers Books:

Litz Problems

In 2008, climber and national park ranger Rob Turan asked me to collaborate with him on a story about Tennessee climber James Litz. He would write it, I would shoot it, and we’d split the fee. “Well, Rob,” I said, “you can write about him, but how do I photograph a ghost?”

Rob—who passed away in 2024—was a walking guidebook for Middle Tennessee and a great writer. He had been a ranger at the Obed Wild and Scenic River as well as at other major climbing areas like Chattanooga’s Sunset Park and Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. Unlike the mysterious James Litz, Rob was an open book, his enthusiasm always on display in person and in writing. He loved bridging the gap between the state and the vagabond climbing world, and in doing so he would steer young climbers right while also convincing state and national parks to embrace climbing as a legitimate activity. He did it so well because he was the real deal in both worlds.

“I did love being the climbing ranger at Sunset,” he told me. “People who didn’t know me saw my name tag and would say, ‘Hey, you’re the guy who put up Spawn at Obed. Best route ever! Can I shake your hand?’ ”

Then, as now, James was quietly establishing some of the hardest climbs in the country, operating on the periphery of the scene, both geographically and in terms of skill—his lines are rarely repeated, but instead simply tried, looked at, or merely talked about. James’s routes are too remote, the holds are too small, and the moves are too hard; just another “unrepeated Litz problem.” These were scattered all around the South. Legend has it few had ever met or talked to the guy. His climbs spoke for themselves.

But Rob knew him well. Fifteen years before, Rob was the climbing-obsessed ranger at the Obed Wild and Scenic River, a spectacular gorge in middle Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau. Bob Cormany, Craig Stannard, and others had explored the area’s boulders and walls many years before the Obed’s designation in the national park system in ’76, and Rob had found himself the benevolent keeper of the climbs, keeping tabs on new ascents and acting as ambassador to traveling climbers looking for a challenge. In 1996, a scrawny 125-pound James walked into the park office and introduced himself. Rob had already heard of him—he was the kid who just climbed Whatsherface, which at 5.13 was the hardest route in the park at the time. James needed a challenge, so Rob took him to one of his favorite testing grounds, the nearby Lilly Boulders.

That day James climbed Rob’s personal unclimbed project, The Turansformer Traverse, which he graded V9, and suddenly the possibilities of the Lilly Boulders were wide open.

Over the next few years, mostly exploring the boulders on his own, James left a legacy of extreme climbs at both Obed and Lilly Boulders. Despite its status as a national park, this was a very rural area, and access to the climbs in those days was only possible by the generosity of the locals. Dogs roamed the area freely, often in packs of fifty or more at a time by James’s estimation, and interactions with them and their owners occasionally went south quickly. James was in high school then.

“I had a hard time dragging anyone over there,” he told me. Once he started college, bouldering was a better choice for solo trips on a flexible schedule. At Lilly he pushed the standards into V10 territory with Litz Blitz, Mean Squeeze, and Johnson City. Every few years, as other climbers caught up and repeated his climbs, James would return to up the ante. As a result, today Lilly has a remarkably high concentration of extreme boulder problems, culminating in Litz testpieces like Testify (V12), Tilted World (V13), and Chinese Arithmetic (V13). He did the same at other Southern boulder fields and beyond.

I had just been investigating one of James’s higher-profile first ascents, a boulder problem in a far corner of Idaho at Castle Rocks State Park. I spent a week there with my friend Josh Fowler filming scenes for our first climbing film, A Fine Line, centered on attempts to repeat this Litz problem. The problem starts on the extreme lower right of Castle Rocks’ Taco Cave, follows a spiraling arc of Twix bar–sized grips, climbs horizontally to the leftmost lip of the cave, and exits on a powerful twenty-foot V10 face climb called Out of Africa. James had called that particular geometry Warpath. At V14, it was one of the hardest unrepeated boulder problems in the country. A video of the climb appeared online, but other than that, James didn’t have much to say about it. The climb was the statement—it was up to others to decipher it.

Despite the collective efforts of pro climbers Dave Graham, Jimmy Webb, and Daniel Woods, no one could do Warpath in its entirety on camera, and we left with only fragments of footage: a few frustrating attempts, standing around in the cold like penguins, and exploring strange granite formations in a blizzard. Daniel repeated Warpath off-camera, so the best I could do was film a reenactment of this now-repeated Litz problem. It was a fiction, a ghost story.

The conundrum of our film led us out of Idaho, then to Colorado, and inevitably right back to the South. Later I tried the single-move Litz problem God Module at Horse Pens 40 for myself. Finally, Rob called me and connected us. I was fortunate to photograph James at his old stomping grounds, the Lilly Boulders, as well as in Dayton, Tennessee. Rob’s article in Urban Climber offered a great glimpse of the legend. Far from elusive, James was gracious with his time and full of great stories. Before he disappeared again, he left me with a final thought: “Privacy is more important than fame.”

Spare These Stones: A Journey Through Southern Climbing Culture is available for purchase now.

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