Dearest Luke,
I have been meaning to write to you for some time, but I have Zine 23 fresh on my mind and some spare time, so here it goes.
I don’t even know where to begin with this. My name is Tavish, and I’m a twenty-three-year-old climber from Seattle. I managed to end up in a climbing gym when I was five, and by middle school, it was pretty clear to me that I didn’t fit the mold of competitive sports or other “normal” extracurriculars and that climbing and being outdoors were where I felt at home.
Most people find climbing later than I did, and they like to curse my relative strength because of it, but I often wonder where I might have ended up and how bad things might be for me if I hadn’t found climbing when I was young.
Letter published in Volume 24 of The Climbing Zine, now available
Banner photo of the author on Humble Pie, Indian Creek, Utah, by Matthew Tangeman
It sounds like maybe I might have been similar to you, my genetics certainly have not predisposed me to great mental health, and in the difficult times, it has always been the escape and purpose and camaraderie and beauty of dancing up rocks and mountains and connecting with the natural world that has kept me going.
Though deep down, I think that, no matter what, I would have found it eventually. My ADHD-wracked brain wasn’t destined to last long in college or settle for a “normal” job, but I have worked in climbing gyms, built climbing walls, worked as a climbing guide, spent plenty of time living out of a car and climbing, generally not making very much money and questioning life often and hard. The constant has always been and always will be climbing.
The author on El Nino, El Capitan, Yosemite. Photo: Tavish Hansen Collection
I don’t remember when I first heard about you or read your writing; it more floated into my periphery as things do with the constant barrage of media we are subjected to today. But I do distinctly remember the first time I sat down with a zine and read it cover to cover and, not long after, picking up a copy of American Climber and reading that cover to cover in a day as well.
You and I may be from different generations and may have lived some different lives at times, but when I read American Climber, I felt a deeper connection to your story and so many of your experiences than anything else I have ever read, by a long shot. I felt understood.
Your stories and the stories that you help other people tell are just so real and so relatable. To me, and I’m sure anyone else that can pay attention to good, real storytelling, they sit so far above today’s endless stream of bullshit clickbait media that does little more than give us brief flashes of dopamine and cause us endless distraction from caring for ourselves and those around us. Every story you write and every story you include in the zine is packed with so much emotion and real meaning.
With every new zine I get my hands on, I get a reminder of what humanity is and how beautifully it comes out through the lens of climbing. In recent years, I have felt like climbing media and the way many people approach climbing has shifted a lot in a way that is hard to pinpoint but one that seems centered on achievement and the process of working toward goals and improvement and showing off to the world.
It is hard to really put to words what I feel is being lost to that, but when I read The Climbing Zine and your books, I know that climbing for the sake of raw, present experience and purpose and shared hardship and adventure and beauty is still alive and well out there in the world. I need the stories of deep passions pursued and hardships endured and lessons learned and experiences felt with the heart and life lived!
I need that much more than I need stories of generally well-put-together people working toward goals and achieving them and then spraying about it. Your stories are keeping the heartfelt spirit of climbing alive.
I am a fairly reserved, quiet person by nature, and on top of that, somewhat to the credit of how men are socially conditioned to act, my emotions don’t show outwardly on a day-to-day basis. Your openness around your emotions and mental health is so refreshing in a culture where men aren’t supposed to feel or show anything.
Even though I rarely cry, even when I desperately want to, I have also always been, as you put it about yourself, an incredibly sensitive and sentimental person. I’m guiding a trip on Mount Rainier right now and writing this after reading all of Volume 23 in my tent with the isolated calm of our rest day. Six out of the nine stories had tears streaming down my cheeks for every different reason.
You and those other talented writers brave enough to share their real stories really got me feeling everything there is to feel this time. And man it feels good. At a really difficult and ungrounded-feeling time in my life, every one of those stories reminded me why climbing is so important and powerful and how much we all have to learn from and share with one another. Over the course of a few hours, those stories have so solidly grounded me back to my roots, why I love the simple act of climbing up things outside and sharing it with all the other amazing people that love it too and feeling good about that love and the winding life path it has led me along.
Really, I cannot thank you enough for that and everything you do. It sure doesn’t sound like you have had the most straightforward or certain life path over the years, but I hope you know that the work you have done is so meaningful and can really change lives. Please, never stop writing!
All the best,
Tavish Hansen
