On the Road Again
Dirtbagging, according to climbers, is to dedicate your life in pursuit of climbing by whatever means possible.
One climber used the idea of a voluptuary minimalist to describe dirtbags. It's a paradox. Someone voluptuary is devoted to luxury and pleasure, while a minimalist chooses to live simply with as little as possible. Climbing is a luxurious and frivolous activity, but dirtbags choose to live minimally in order to pursue it. The primary focus, however, is on the climbing, not the frugality. I had the opportunity to talk with two people who have tried dirtbagging and vanlife and ask them about their experience.
I met my friend Ethan, a fellow student at the University of Texas at Austin, climbing at the Barton Creek Greenbelt in Austin earlier this semester. Ethan struck me as a guy truly in love with climbing. He happily took turns in the blazing sun with my friend Will and I on a route we had been working on for months, never once frustrated or annoyed by its difficulty. This past month Ethan has been living out of his car and climbing in Las Vegas.
His main climbing partner, Robbie, planned to thru-hike the Pacific Coast Trail, and their spring break trip was just supposed to be, “one last good trip before 6 months of not having my climbing buddy.” While on the trip, Ethan’s buddy realized that the thru-hike was a no-go with park closures, and the two of them decided to hold it down in Vegas.
Ethan dirtbagging in Las Vegas. Photo Credit: Ethan
“Dirtbagging just came along with the extended trip,” Ethan said.“Because we initially planned for just a week-long camping/climbing trip, the budget was small and we ended up living out of our sedan. I have wanted to dirtbag before, climbing over everything else, but it always seemed hard to do. I’m glad this opportunity is working out!”
Ethan’s experience fits the climbing-first, dirtbag mentality. Our conversation quickly shifted to climbing and stayed there. Vegas boasts some of the best climbing in the country, so it was easy for me to geek out and talk about routes and areas. I asked Ethan about the "impossible moments" John Long talks about and the conversation again returned to climbing. While in Vegas, Ethan learned traditional climbing and multi-pitch and then tested those new skills at his limit with hundreds of feet of air below him. That certainly produced those “impossible moments”: the moments when you question every decision you have ever made, when fear grips every fiber of your being, the moments you can only curse and climb on.
“The most almost impossible feeling moment had to be on Prince of Darkness around pitch 3,” Ethan said.“It's protected in such a way that as long as there's a face [rock without cracks] there are bolts but in the middle section of the route where the crack was, there was only natural protection. I stopped to fiddle with a few of my cams but realized I didn't know how to place gear quickly and effectively once when the climbing got harder. I ran it out 30 or so feet till the next bolt. It felt almost safer to do that, but it sure was a test of my mental strength to say **** it and climb.”
Ethan climbing in Red Rock Canyon, Las Vegas. Photo Credit: Ethan
Stories like this litter John Long’s books and essays. The dirtbag cherishes those kinds of moments where the vertical humbles you, and you’re taught unforgettable lessons. The sleeping in the car and hobo showers at the gas stations are just small sacrifices.
“The whole trip was about how much we can really take,” Ethan said “So far this whole dirtbagging experience has enabled me to be able to climb harder than I ever have before. I find joy in the little things: like coffee in the mornings, $5 hot-n-readys at Little Caesars, and stocked clearance racks at the grocery store. At the end of the day, as boring it might be sitting in the car all day when it rains, or having to do class lectures from my car, or never truly being inside a building other than to shop, I wouldn't trade this dirtbagging experience with Robbie for the world, and I'm glad it unfolded in this unexpected and odd way.”
I also had the incredible opportunity to talk with Abbi Hearne. She graduated with her husband Callen from UT in 2015 and 2013, respectively, and lived on the road for several years. They have popular Instagram accounts and a very successful adventure wedding photography business. Despite living out of a rig, traveling the country and creating a popular Instagram account, Abbi said they never really identified with #vanlife as a movement or label.
They chose to live on the road because of the adventures it would bring. While Callen lived his last three semesters at UT camping in friends' backyards, living on the road hadn’t occurred to them individually until after they got married in 2014. They heard the call of the wild after a three-week road trip to Canada and knew they wanted to live on the road long-term. In August 2016, they sold almost everything they owned and set out with a tiny trailer pulled by a Subaru.
Wedding Photography by The Hearnes. Photo Credit: Callen Hearne
Their mindset is almost identical to Ethan’s. The Hearne's life on the road has been full of adventures, such as camping on glaciers in Canada, seeing the northern lights, Callen climbing El Capitan with pro climber Jordan Cannon and Abbi climbing Castleton tower for her 25th birthday. In many ways, the division between vanlife and dirtbagging is a false dichotomy. They share the same mission: to seek authentic adventure by whatever means necessary. It's not a matter of have or have-nots. It's a matter of spirit.
“We’ve met some of the most hard-working, driven, creative, and inspiring people on the planet,” Abbi said about the people they met on the road. “Some of them are dirtbags that eat the food people leave on their plates in the cafeteria in Yosemite and some of them are weekend warrior millionaires, but the common thread is their love of the outdoors and their by-all-means-necessary zest for truly living every single day.”
In Abbi’s mind, vanlifers and dirtbags are all one big community.
“It’s different for every person,” Abbi said.“We have friends who live in sedans and shower less than once a week, and we have friends with rigs more expensive than some houses! We certainly felt like dirtbags at times parking in driveways of friends that had ‘real jobs’, but sometimes we had the nicest rig in the circle and our other nomad friends saw us as the responsible ones. It’s all relative!”
My goal is not to sugarcoat this kind of nomadic existence, to deem it promising, or to oversimplify it. Life on the road is unmistakably hard. My little road trip in January wasn’t thought through. I didn’t have a clear adventure in my mind. I just wanted to experience whatever twists and turns the open road had to offer me--or to challenge me with. The grand, romantic experience ended in us failing to pick up our friend and sleeping in the back of my friends’ FJ in a Trinidad Walmart parking lot, stressed about the long drive home.
I remember assessing myself in the Walmart bathroom mirror and thinking maybe I wasn’t cut out for this whole dirtbagging thing. Am I really adventurous? Don’t get me wrong. So much good came out of that trip, including a much closer friendship with Carter but what was the point of it all? Shouldn’t there be more purpose in life than impulsive fun and adventure?
Carter and I driving in Colorado. Photo Credit: Carter Blackwell
My two favorite books growing up were My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George and Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. My Side of the Mountain tells the story of an elementary-aged kid, Sam Gribley, who runs away from home to live in the woods. He creates an awesome house in a tree, learns to survive off the land, and even trains a falcon. Hatchet describes a slightly different story:. Brian Roebson, a thirteen-year-old, crashes in the middle of the woods flying to visit his father in the oil fields of Northern Canada. Unlike little Sam’s free-spirited pursuit of adventure, Brian has no choice but to learn to survive and pray for rescue.
"Impossible moments", I think, exist in these same ways: sometimes they are sought after, and sometimes they find you. Abbi’s impossible moment was more of the latter.
“A big moment for me was actually when my Dad was diagnosed with brain cancer when I was in Alaska,” Abbi said. “It was the first time [Callen and I] drove to Alaska, so our ‘home’ was farther away from our home in Texas than it had ever been. The diagnosis rattled my whole family, and thankfully I was able to fly home that week,and be with my family during my dad’s surgery and some of the recovery. I remember questioning my decision to leave home and live so far away a lot during that first month of him being sick, and various times since, but he always made it clear from the beginning that he wanted me out living my life.”
“Impossible moments” make us question: “What’s the point?” “What was I thinking?” “Why?” To me, that just proves the authenticity of it all. Real adventure comes with real risk, real consequences, real fearand real desires that chase you down and haunt you like shadows. That’s what makes it real. As Jack Kerouac said, “Pain or love or danger makes you real again.” Living on the road is not the secret to finding that authenticity. I would venture to guess there are probably ingenuine people having inauthentic adventures even while living on the road.
Jillian Rickly, a professor of tourism management at Nottingham University, better defines authenticity: “authenticity comes in the rare experiences (situations) in which one recognizes one’s possibilities of self (mineness) and acts with tenacity to claim this potential (resoluteness).”
This criteria for experiencing authentic moments can be met on the biggest expeditions, the smallest road trips and even during quarantine. The true adventurer seeks out the authentic i.e: the road less traveled, the path not easily taken and the things in life that are full of risk and potential for pain. These genuine pieces of life can be found at home in meaningful relationships, in hard conversations, difficult apologies and sacrificial kindness.
Even now in a nation full of grief and outrage, authenticity reveals our limits, humbles us and forces us to lay aside our interests, and in my case, privilege, in order to weep with those who weep and to fight for those who have been oppressed. Authenticity is purity of motive, experience and result.
The Hearnes in Moab, Utah. Photo Credit: Abbi Hearne
I asked Abbi Hearne what advice she would give UT students who wanted to live an adventurous or non-traditional life, and she said go do it. “Truly, my biggest advice is to take whatever step you can right now,” Abbi said. “Go on a road trip, go camping, do whatever you need to do to start toward what you want to do eventually. We were never working toward some big unattainable goal, we were just doing the next best thing toward the life we wanted at the time!”
Happy searching!