The Dirtbags Aren’t Dead, They’re Just In Mexico by Luke Mehall (full story)

Don’t you put any more stress on yourself It’s one day at a time

—Mac Miller, “Circles”

Part of me always thought I’d die young.

I had this feeling even before I was a climber, long before I took the risks with our lives that we climbers take.

It was probably related to the depression I inherited through genetics. Or maybe it was the state of the world that I was born into. A combination of both, I assume. At forty-five years old, now I’m just unpacking it. Mostly in therapy, but if the vibes are right, in conversation.

Given that I’m forty-five, I’m too old to die young. I still can’t believe I’m this age, but as Greg Brown once wrote, “My friends are getting older, so I must be too.”

This piece is an excerpt from Volume 25, now available. Banner photo of Felipe Garcia by Ivan Ioza

I think part of me thought I’d live the dirtbag dream forever. Live to climb; climb to live; fade into the sunset. We hopeful romantics often get too caught up in the romance of life, thinking that life is a story. When in reality, while life has beauty and romance, it is also very humbling and sobering.

My fate, as far as I can see it, is to be a leader, storyteller, and curator for our climbing community. It wasn’t something I purposely set out to do, but as a publisher, writer, and route developer, it naturally happened. And I’m comfortable with the role. I can’t imagine my life without it.

“The Dirtbag Dream Is Not Enough” was the title of an interview I once did with the Clipping Chains podcast, an underrated show that covers the intersection of finance and climbing. I think I said the line during my interview, and it sums up exactly how I feel about this stage of life. While ten years ago the climbing community was debating whether the dirtbag was dead, and I passionately engaged in that debate; now I simply steer my life in a direction knowing that simply living to climb is not enough.

So now I climb to live.

This last season I just sent my hardest sport route. I won’t bother noting here what climb that was, or even the grade, because I don’t think that part matters.

What matters for me is that I’ve found an area of climbing where I can still excel. While this world is full of half-wit comedians who get up onstage and complain about how life is running them over once they hit forty, we climbers are a different kind; the optimism embedded in our sport changes us, moves us in a whole other direction than where the mainstream is going.

My hardest sport-climbing send took place in El Potrero Chico, Mexico, a place that has captured my heart and spirit over these last couple years. I’ve been climbing in Potrero for two decades, but only recently did I start spending entire seasons there.

Before Potrero stole my heart, it was the land of Indian Creek in Bears Ears National Monument that had consumed my passion for climbing. Way out in the hinterlands, away from the crowds, I shared countless first ascents with the greatest of friends. Sometimes the climbing life is so powerful that even words fail to describe the feeling. You really only know it in the moment, and then the moments settle into your psyche, a safe place to return to and experience nostalgia.

In that era, Indian Creek felt like home, and I never wanted it to end. Days were spent with cell phones in airplane mode and plentiful camaraderie, time spent on new routes, and more than enough space for jokes and stories. None of my friends really had kids yet, and we lived for this experience. By the time we were packing up to head back after a long weekend, we were planning another long weekend.

This era ended right around when COVID came along. It would have ended one way or another—the dirtbag dream is not enough—but the pandemic put a sharp end to it. The beautiful upside was friends starting families, new chapters, new loves—a natural progression for people who wanted more.

I wanted more too. In this time period, writing and podcasting slowly evolved into my life’s work, and I was able to get out of the restaurant business and into full-time work for what I can only describe as my dream job. So, in addition to pursing all my dirtbag dreams of climbing on long weekends, during the week I explored my mind and helped others craft their stories.

I kept going out to The Creek throughout the early pandemic years— when they let us in —but as many things became, the experiences were more solitary, just me and a friend or two. My dear friend Dave Marcinowski stuck with me through thick and thin as we battled what became my final hard Creek crack-climbing project: The Queen, a climb that I put up and then took four years to do. (Dave did it in less time than me but stuck with me for my attempts.)

The ending of The Queen experience also coincided with the finality of my obsession with The Creek. I’d taken crack climbing to my highest level, but I knew it was time to move on after that.

For yours truly, nothing highlights the passage of time, and the reality that everything must end, like climbing experiences. That’s part of why they are so beautiful. The outcomes are never guaranteed. You often need a partner that has to offer camaraderie and balance.

If you’re lucky, climbing eras in one’s life are like crescendos: one builds up and offers more to the next, all while dealing with the crashes and the lows that life and climbing inevitably offer.

I never wanted that Creek era to end, but it did, and it ended so sweetly, giving me my longest project, my hardest pitch, with the best of friends; we left it all on the wall, gave the dream everything we had.

The era was over, but the dream was not; the climbing dream never ends; it’s just passed on to others. As a crew, we’d developed around a hundred new routes in the Cave Wall zone, and now they are there for others to enjoy, a place of refuge where if you’re lucky you can ride off into the sunset, if only for the evening. Just be sure to have your headlamp for the long walk down.

I wasn’t sure what was going to be the next climbing chapter in the book of life, but I definitely didn’t think it would be El Potrero Chico. However, one day Two Tent Timmy, my original climbing partner and best friend, texted me and asked if I wanted to do a trip there in early December. My policy with Tim is to always say yes when he invites me somewhere.

I thought I was done with Potrero. It’s not too hard to climb through the multipitch classics in a trip or two. Plus, in the Monterrey zone, my interest had gravitated more toward places like El Salto and the Cumbia Cave.

As the text chain spread out and invited more close friends, Mark Grundon was also on board. In 2007, Mark, Tim, and I drove down to Potrero together for a winter trip, and it rained nearly every day. It was both Mark and Tim’s first time there, and though the climbing conditions were less than ideal, it really planted a seed for Mark.

In the following years, Mark started guiding down there and later met his wife Norma around a climber campfire party. He’s also become a prolific first ascensionist and a well-respected contributor to the community. Mark and Norma have a daughter named Isabella; she’s been hanging out near the crags of Mexico since her birth.

Tim hadn’t been back to Potrero since that original trip, and here we were, fifteen years later, reunited for adventure in the Monterrey airport. We took an Uber to Norma’s parents’ house in Monterrey where Mark had his minivan parked.

After obligatory tamales at a neighborhood spot, we were all packed up in the van and headed to Potrero. Driving in Monterrey is pure craziness, especially before you learn the unwritten rules of driving there, and fortunately Mark knows how to navigate the madness. He’s like my modern-day Neal Cassady.

It’s always very symbolic to the experience of climbing in that area: one minute you’re in the craziest traffic you’ve ever seen, and the next the cliffs of Potrero are in sight, and calm and relief wash over you; the tacos and tamales are so close you can taste them. But we weren’t there yet.

We were driving over a bridge, in a good mood because we were friends united in Mexico, and then all of a sudden we heard a loud thud; we’d driven into the biggest pothole in Monterrey, and shit, the tire had popped. And because we were on a bridge, we couldn’t just pull over.

So there we were going sixty miles an hour with three tires, the fourth riding on the rim. Mark kept his cool, with his years of Mexico driving experience, and managed to keep the van rolling straight, until we got off the bridge and could pull over into a parking lot.

Sure enough, the tire was trashed, and thus we got out the spare to replace it. Surely this would be the crux of the day, I thought, but when we went to put the spare tire on, it didn’t fit. So there we were in the middle of a busy intersection in Monterey, the second biggest city in Mexico, and we were stuck.

As often happens in Mexico, strangers offered help; one guy even offered up his spare tire from his car, but that, too, didn’t fit. Mark called the guy who sold him the tires, and he even drove down but didn’t have another tire that would fit. So it was decided the van would have to be towed, which meant we needed to find a way to get to Potrero, still well over an hour’s drive away.

We ordered an Uber, and when it showed up, the driver didn’t want to go all the way out to Potrero, and so he bailed. That happened multiple times, and we started to think we’d have to find our way to a hotel for the night, but the last Uber arrived and told us it was no problemo, and so we went.

The high vibes of Mexico were in the car that night, as the driver queued up some cumbia music and kept up cheerful conversation in Spanglish.

Finally we hit Hidalgo, the small town outside of Potrero, and the intensity of the evening faded into tranquility. Our Uber driver dropped us off at Rancho Sendero well past midnight. After we dropped our bags off in our room, we sat outside; a warm breeze blew through the palm trees, making a comforting sound. Under the night sky, sitting in green grass with a big palm tree overhead, swaying in a light breeze, I had a feeling of deep peace and being home again.

I’ve always tried to pay attention to the omens and vibes at the start of a trip. Often they’ll indicate where the experience will go, what kind of trip it will be. And what did it mean that the wheels nearly fell off within hours of arriving? And Mark keeping his cool, even as the wheels were falling off?

This trip ended up being the exact contrast to our rainy week fifteen years prior. The weather was that perfect splitter blue-skies paradise that you want in a Potrero experience. And since it was early December, the crowds hadn’t arrived just yet.

I’d just turned forty-four, and as a big fan of birthday challenges, I wanted to do something. My last true birthday challenge was thirty-nine pitches in a day in Indian Creek, and after that, I had a few busts—December birthdays are hard for challenges. For this trip, I knew I needed to restructure my plan. So I just simply decided to do forty-four pitches for the trip. The beauty of the birthday challenge is that it’s very individual, and essentially there are no rules.

The forty-four pitches on this trip unfolded beautifully. In addition to the multipitch adventures, when you will often pass a palm tree amongst the cactuses, the single-pitch climbing in Potrero is exquisite. What a simple and beautiful life it is there—food and drink in your downtime and endless limestone for the vertical.

The most important part of this trip though, for me, was remembering who I was. In the aftermath of a big break up, and all the isolation of COVID, I had lost a lot of the community I felt before that and definitely felt like I was on my own.

As a writer, I need a lot of alone time, but I need that to be balanced out with the right amount of time in a healthy relationship and with my friends. With nearly all my friends back home in Durango living the lives that new parents live, I felt more isolated than I ever had in my adult life, and without a romantic partner of my own, that only increased the feeling of isolation.

And I don’t think it really registered with me how I was feeling until I felt this wave of happiness and contentment in Potrero—friends always around and always something to do with new people to meet. Plus, many people already knew me as “The Zine Guy” and wanted to connect just for that reason alone, a true blessing that people feel this connection with me as a storyteller in the community.

Dating back home felt forced and awkward. I’d dabbled in attempting online dating briefly, but it felt so awkward; for all my hours of scrolling and swiping, I never even went on a single date. I got more dates from DMs on Instagram, but still none of those dates led to a meaningful connection.

Potrero has a romantic component to it, countless couples have met there, and I found the natural way people meet there—in person, face-to-face, connecting over climbing—felt much more comforting than any sort of digital connection. Potrero was a different world than when I first fell in love with it; there was just enough of the modern world there, with just enough of the real-life nostalgic past.

That ten-day trip proved that Einstein was right—time is relative. Each day provided an opportunity to live in the moment and memories to last a lifetime. I climbed the classic Pangea, a gently overhanging series of huecos, pockets, and edges on orange rock as my forty-fourth pitch, the day before I left.

The morning I was supposed to leave, it was cloudy and gray, the blue-skies streak had broken, but still that day felt inviting. I took a run on the only road leading outside of Potrero, into the lush green hills, and said a prayer of gratitude for the place. A new confidence swelled up in my heart as I gazed back at the vegetated limestone walls.

This trip had transformed my thinking and welcomed me back home. Soon enough I’d be in a taxi, headed back into the madness of Monterey, the world of airports and mundane transactions. But a seed was planted. Within an hour of being back home, I bought another ticket, to return in six weeks. Potrero had called me back, and I was more than willing to listen to her song.

In the moments after buying that planet ticket to return, I felt a sense of anxiety about what I’d done. It was hard to identify why, but I’d been feeling anxiety and depression more in these post-COVID years than I had in a long time. Perhaps this was just more of that.

Instead of listening to the discouraging voices of anxiety and depression, I leaned into the peace and comfort of the experience I’d just had. I wanted more of that. I felt truly alive and satisfied again.

The couple months that passed in between were snowy-winter times, and my seasonal affective disorder seemed to dictate how I felt. Luckily these feelings wouldn’t kick in until later in the day, after work and play were done, and I was alone in my apartment.

These days were hard, but they showed me a lesson: that I didn’t want to live an isolated life. I didn’t want to be the old, crusty, lonely climber. I wanted a family unit, in some way. And I realized I wanted to move closer to the climbing community; and even though I had moments of panic and anxiety, I took faith that Potrero could provide me with what was missing in Durango.

I also took solace in music. Sometimes in life, one particular album can change your life or be there for you. This winter it was Circles by Mac Miller, which was especially important to me.

The album was released posthumously. Mac had a taste for hard drugs, and he ended up taking something that was cut with fentanyl, which led to an overdose that killed him at only twenty-six years old.

Listening to this album, over and over, Mac’s final gift to the world, kept me company during dark days. And I was confident, as Mac sang on the album, “Love turns into life”—I had the love; I just had to find my way back to the life I wanted to live.

During those days between, I stockpiled all the bolts and hardware I could. I was going to give back to Potrero in the form of replacing old bolts and maybe even adding a new route of my own. With two seventy-five-pound duffel bags, I wasn’t traveling light, but in my mind I was traveling right.

A day of planes, trains, and automobiles led me from snowy Colorado to splitter Potrero. I arrived at my place to a plate of tamales from the family I was renting a casita from, a small gesture that meant a lot. After enjoying the tamales, I hiked into the canyon and said hello to the walls and the spirits.

I could feel a warm embrace, I always try to listen to what these magnificent places of nature are trying to tell me, and everything indicated that Potrero was happy to have me there.

To me this situation is the greatest reward for everything I’ve invested in climbing and our community: the chance to feel at home in another country, in another land where people don’t even speak the same language. That evening I went over to La Posada and ran into some friends, my anxiety easing off; stripping down the layers, yes, I was in a place I could call home, if only temporarily.

After my impulsive plane-ticket purchase, I’d convinced two friends to come meet me and share a rope. Shaun would come from Gunnison, Colorado, and Keith from Ecuador, both great partners in different ways. I always joke that Shaun is “the guy behind the guy at The Zine.” He’s been my business mentor for many years and is the most generous guy I know with his time.

Keith is a college buddy and teacher, who moved to Ecuador to see what it would be like to teach there. Now, a decade later, he’s still there. Always calm and collected, Keith has climbed all over with me, from first ascents in the desert to the multipitch lines here in Mexico. Both Shaun and Keith spoke really good Spanish, something I wanted to improve upon myself.

These two provided me with a foundation to feel comfortable and confident, and we spent our days enjoying the good life of Potrero. One day while at the crag, we overheard a fellow climber talking about a dangerous anchor: one of the bolts had come loose and somebody removed it, leaving only one bolt. It was on a classic line, Cabeza de Chivo, a techy 12a on that glorious Virgin Canyon bullet-gray-colored rock.

I decided this would be the perfect bolt-replacement project for me—fixing an anchor on a classic route. Plus I’d get the opportunity to try the line.

I almost went into it with the attitude of going bolt to bolt, just going through the motions to get the route up there. But then Shaun and I had a quick conversation that readjusted my attitude. Shaun views every situation with having the possibility for the best possible outcome—in it to win it—and that optimism rubbed off on me.

Onsight climbing is the best, so metaphorical, you only get this one chance, forever for this life. Dance and fight through the hard sections, and rest when you can to recover, then fight more.

How many things in this modern life truly allow us to be completely in the moment?

The old, spaced-out bolts added to the feeling of concentration, and at the top, delicate holds demanded every bit of attention I had. I let out a scream to focus my mind more—screaming doesn’t usually correlate with sending for me, but this day it did. I grabbed the tiny holds and pressed the feet in just the right ways and found myself at the anchor, spirits high.

I lived in the high for some sweet moments and then got to the task of fixing the anchor. My drill batteries were at the end of their life, and thus it took much longer than I’d anticipated, with much more cursing as well.

But I got it fixed and lowered off. As I was lowering, I took a closer look at the bolts on the route and noted that those, too, could use a replacement.

When my amigos left, I got to work on replacing the bolts on Cabeza de Chivo. The bolts were clearly placed from the ground up, a proud style and necessary in the early development days of Potrero, but a style that often doesn’t lend for the best experience for subsequent ascents.

I moved the bolts around to better clipping stances, putting trust in my skill and instinct that it would make for a better climbing experience for future climbers. At that same time, I left the final crux as it was, exciting and airy but safe enough to take whippers on.

Shortly after that day, I was hanging out in the area, working on a new route that would become On Mole, and a Mexican guy came up to me. “Hey, did you retro-bolt this route?” he asked, firm but friendly.

I replied that I did, and he said, “I originally bolted this route; did you use the original bolt holes?”

Though he had a friendly tone, I felt insecure and afraid he was about to get mad at me.

“Well…” I stumbled over my words nervously, “I moved them around a bit for better clipping stances.”

“Why can’t I see the original holes; what did you use to fill them up with?” he asked.

A wave of relief washed over me. He wasn’t mad at all; he was just curious what sort of patch I’d used to camouflage the old holes.

I explained to him about the patch I was using that I got from the American Safe Climbing Association (ASCA), the same organization where I also got all the hardware. He formally introduced himself as Arturo Martinez, and he explained that several editions of guidebooks had always incorrectly stated that Paco Medina, a legendary Mexican climber, had established the route when, in fact, he’d put up the line.

We talked and exchanged pleasantries; he told me he also did a lot of bolt replacement at La Huasteca, another epic climbing area close to Monterrey.

We took a selfie together and exchanged numbers. The whole experience left me feeling warm and fuzzy inside. I’ve heard of so many climbers getting into arguments over moving bolts around, and here we were able to bond, together, over a common good.

“We’re all on the same team,” Arturo told me, as we parted that day in Virgin Canyon.

It was only the beginning of this season, yet it set a tone for all my climbing experiences in Potrero, a place that is now my home away from home when I’m escaping the cold of Colorado.

The dirtbag dream is not enough, but yet so many things in my life are derived from climbing. On so many levels, I am grateful that I’ve reached my forties, there have certainly been some challenges, but they have been some of the favorite years of my life.

When I ponder deeper, the dirtbag dream is not enough as you get older, because people move on and your core community is no longer bouncing from climbing area to climbing area.

But, if one can reimagine and rediscover and direct energy into something bigger than themselves, there is still so much magic, service, and love to be found in this climbing life.

Luke Mehall is the publisher of The Climbing Zine, and this winter in Potrero, he plans on finishing up American Climber 2, a follow-up to his 2016 memoir.

This piece is published in Volume 25. Subscribe / get a copy to read the full piece.