By Rick Steelhammer
For HDMedia
Fayetteville — In May 2007, five gay men and rock-climbing enthusiasts from the Atlanta area traveled to West Virginia to explore climbing routes in the New River Gorge and its environs and to check out the town of Fayetteville as a base camp for their stay.
They liked what they found.
Under the banner of their newly formed climbing group, HomoClimbtastic, they returned to Fayetteville annually for four-day weekends of climbing, community and fun, gradually becoming the world’s largest gathering of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and gender non-conforming climbers.
Last year, as part of an effort to make the group more inclusive to elements of the LGBTQ+ community other than gay men, the group changed its name to Queerclimbtastic, which helped produce an immediate bump in membership, according to Colby Jones of Austin, Texas, the organization’s communications director.
This year’s event, which began July 16 and ran through Sunday, drew more than 200 participants from across the country, as well as Taiwan and Canada, making it the organization’s largest-ever annual gathering.
‘We fell in love with West Virginia’
“We fell in love with West Virginia, the New River Gorge and Fayetteville,” said Jones. The town and its climbing community, he said, “have been kind and welcoming, in the Appalachian tradition of live and let live. We’ve never had an issue here.”
For the past 19 years, Queerclimbtastic’s headquarters during its annual pilgrimage to the Gorge has been Cantrell Ultimate Rafting’s campgrounds just outside Fayetteville. This year, post-climbing events hosted by the organization have taken place at Fayetteville restaurants Pies and Pints, Secret Sandwich Society, Southside Junction, and at climbing outfitter Water Stone Outdoors. Non-climbing events included a whitewater rafting trip, line dancing, a drag show, a silent auction and a climbing access trail clean-up project.
Climbing experience for those taking part in the annual gathering “ranges from a couple of months to a couple of decades,” Jones said.
On Thursday morning, more than a dozen climbing routes on Tattoo Wall, a 95-foot-high cliff in the Sandstonia-Bubba City climbing area in New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, were top-roped and ready for climbers taking part in a clinic for people transitioning from gym-housed climbing walls to real-life crag-climbing in nature.
“We’re creating a space for people to get outside and do something they’ve always wanted to try,” said Jason Traylor of Atlanta, Queerclimbtastic’s programs and DEI director.
“There’s so much more focus required — you’re not just following some color-coded route to the top,” said Cincinnati-area gym climber and clinic participant Leah Stevens, who took up climbing last September. “Here, where I’m climbing my own route up, there’s nothing else I can think about. It clears out the background noise and gives you a full-body, mind-challenging experience. It can be humbling, but I think it will also build up my confidence level.”
Stevens said she found Fayetteville to be “super nice and so close to all the climbing sites” in the New River Gorge Area, which “is unbeatable, when it comes to climbing,” she said.
Ascending cliffs, rather than a gym’s climbing walls, “is more exciting and more of a mental challenge,” said Alex Blocker of Washington, D.C., who had done outdoor rock climbs in Virginia’s Great Falls of the Potomac area only a few times before taking part in this year’s Queerclimbtastic event.
Blocker said his previous time in West Virginia was limited to visits to Harpers Ferry. He said he was glad that this year’s climbing convention allowed him to “see the gorgeous interior of the state that I’d heard so much about.”
In addition to the Sandstonia-Bubba City climbing area, Queerclimbtastic climbing events took place at bouldering sites in and around the Gorge’s Burnood Day Use Area, in the lower Meadow River Canyon in the Gauley National Recreation Area and at climb sites at Summersville Lake.
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