THE WILSKILLSLETTER • SPRING, 2013 PAGE 1

Greetings! We (the current WilSkills instructors) are excited to deliver this newsletter to you, the WilSkills forefamily! The Course has seen some wonderful years since our last newsletter in 2008 and we hope to share of glimpse of that in this publication.

The health of the Course is excellent. Currently, both instructors and students display an enthusiasm for WilSkills that has not been matched before in my four years at Vanderbilt (though not for lack of trying).

At the moment we have nineteen instructors and well over sixty students attended our first lecture. After several semesters of exile in Calhoun and the bowels of Stevenson, we’ve returned home to Garland 101 for lectures. We’re still screening By Nature’s Rules for hypothermia lecture, packing out from our storeroom in the basement of Branscomb Quad, and backpacking, climbing, and paddling across the Southeast each weekend.

Unfortunately, caving is still out due to the infection of bat populations across the Appalachians by the White Nose fungus, but the science gets better each season and we remain hopeful. The last WilSkills class with experience caving graduated last year, so we will call on our alums and friends to help us retrain for caving before we return to the depths in the future.

Finally, our two vans (white and green) remain strong and our canoe fleet (now 8 boats) floats onward. By the way, if you’re feeling generous and want to send us a donation to support the never-ending task of canoe-repair (or anything else), just check out our website for instructions.

WilSkills also remains the vibrant, off-beat community I fell in love with a few weeks after I stepped onto campus four years ago. I consider some of our greatest signs of success to be the numerous stories told by students and instructors: the freshman, intimidated and reclusive before WilSkills showed him “my people;” the transfer student of three schools on her way to a fourth until she found a community of friends in WilSkills. For many of us, WilSkills serves (as I expect it has served many before) as a second

Fall, 2012 Instructor Trip. We have since added four new instructors and welcomed two back from abroad!

family. From potlucks, to deeply personal chats on trips, to late nights at the rock gym, WilSkills is what causes us all that honest slip of the tongue when we tell our families we’re headed back to campus after a break. “Yes, Mom. I’ll travel safe and give you a call when I get home.” Home.

Welcome to the Fall 2012-Spring 2013 WilSkills newsletter. Inside you’ll find a wonderful survey of the current state of the course. Check out Blake’s trip report about how seven years of WilSkills instructors went crack climbing in Moab, Utah. You’ll also see some great pictures from our trips, some poetry from Cisco Torres, and much more. We hope you enjoy it! Welcome home.

– Harrison Dreves Class of 2013 Coordinator for 2012-13 Year

From the Coordinator

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OCPituaryPeter Ingram

In an unfortunate twist of events on Sunday, January 6, 2013, an Oatmeal Cream Pie (“OCP”) lost its life in the course of duty. The delicious Little Debbie’s snack’s last moments were witnessed by Wilskills instructors Harrison Dreves, Peter Ingram, Ryan Volum, Paige Lambert, and Matthew Rabon.

The quintet was on an excursion to Stone Mountain State Park in North Carolina over MLK weekend to do some multi-pitch climbing. The bolts of the slab-climbing area were few and far between, but the

group had been having a wonderful time enjoying each other’s company, the thrilling “lunar landscape” of the slab, and the brisk but sunny weather that is ideal for climbing.

That is, until approximately 12:17 pm on that fateful Sunday when the unimaginable happened. Stopping for a rest at the top of a pitch, Peter, Harrison, and Paige decided that Ryan and Matt, who were down below, might enjoy a tasty OCP as a reward for their excellent sending. Taking advantage of the positively-sloped rock, Harrison selected an OCP from Peter’s backpack and sent it sliding down the pitch to Ryan, who was belaying Matt from above. All was going according to plan when the OCP started rolling on its side. It veered left and

seemed to be heading straight toward Ryan but, at the last moment, it veered right once more and slipped through Ryan’s outstretched fingers. Realizing the gravity of the situation, Ryan frantically called down to Matt that the OCP was in big trouble.

Matt leapt into action and was about to snatch the elusive snack when the plastic bag holding the OCP burst, scattering the OCP all over the mountain. When asked about the event later, a tearful Ryan declared that, “the OCP literally exploded into a million pieces”.

Feeling dejected and unable to see where any part of the OCP had fallen, the group held a brief memorial service in which they bemoaned the deliciousness that had been lost to the world. Two other OCP’s were present at the service in Peter and Matt’s backpacks.

After the service, the group started to rappel back down. On the second pitch down, fortune smiled on the group when Paige excitedly spotted something brown splayed across the rock. Harrison hurried over to verify and, sure enough, it appeared that perhaps one quarter of

the OCP was there, held onto the rock by its famous cream filling. In funereal respect, each member of the group took a small bite of the OCP as he or she rappelled past. Matt recalls that “it was the least we could do to honor its memory”. For the remaining day and a half of climbing the group did their best to stay strong and enjoy their time out at Stone Mountain and, motivated by consuming several more OCPs, the group managed to have a wonderful rest of the weekend.

Paige respectfully laps up the remains of her fallen comrade

Left to Right: Peter, Harrison, Matt & Paige

I Left My Heart in KentuckyJacob Lee

route, allowing us to arrive at the destination at a timely 2:30 am. We discovered that both plan A, and plan B campsites had been occupied. We lucked out and stumbled upon a lovely thicket of brambles and weeds in which to make

our stay. I slept like a baby that night, lying out under the stars, listening for the distant ring of banjos.

The next day at the crag, I lifted my eyes, ran my gaze up the length of the lovely crack that beckoned to be ascended. Nervous at first, I tied my knot and took one more breath before tackling the verticality of the wall.

I battled my breath and the rock just inches from my face, I was elbow deep in stone and of height with scores of scrapes and beads of sweat.

I reached the top of the climb,

after an arduous battle, gazed out and felt alive. With each climb that day, I got better. During the day moves started to make sense, I learned the lingo bit by bit, and I was falling off of the rock much less, but in love with the climb much more.

That night we feasted at Miguel’s. The growl in my bowels matched the hunger in my heart for more climbing adventure. We sat among the wall rats, eating our pizza and drinking our Ale 8s. I had been initiated into a brotherhood characterized by calloused hands and frayed flannel, good stories and low monies. I had caught climbing fever.

Since that day, I’ve been on three of the four climbing trips, numerous personal climbing trips, and become a WilSkills instructor (Good to meet y’all!). However much I love these people and love living in Nashville, I will forever know that a piece of my heart lies in Kentucky.

I stepped foot on campus last fall as a precocious young man, but without the knowledge of why I was here or who I was to become in my time at Vandy.

There are so many roads to choose when one arrives here: 2% or Skim Milk in your cereal, hermit or extravert, WilSkills participant or sorry loser. Luckily for me, I was drawn to the mature and responsible aura around the corps of instructors. They radiated confidence, desire, and smelled of freedom. I knew I had found a place to call home.

My first trip as a student was successful. I discovered the miraculous ability of crunchy peanut butter to actually create mass in a bowl of grits; I cuddled in a Panini of sleeping bags with six of my compatriots, and told possibly the most epic tale of any of the incoming students. Needless to say, I was hooked like a crawdad on raw wiener (an uncooked frank link, of course).

The next trip I joined was destined for none other but the world famous Red River Gorge.

An outdoor climbing virgin, I placed my trust in the tender but strong and experienced hands of the instructors. Our Kentucky excursion took an extended

The “campsite”

Student Jules Buccino

Find a tree and feel its roots like you’re

feeling the hands of a friend,

a friend who lived before and after you,

a friend who whispers into your ears,

secrets…familiar ones, that echo

through the halls of your heart.

– Cisco Torres

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Wilskills Crack: Thanksgiving, Utah-Style Blake Green

A couple years back, I was fortunate enough to spend Thanksgiving in Indian Creek outside of Moab, UT for the first time. That trip came together kind of randomly, really, and when it was all said and done we had Wilskills instructors from a handful of different years represented, both alumni and then current instructors. Despite having the worst (read: coldest) weather I’ve ever had on any trip and some days that were frankly unclimable, I still highly regarded that trip as the best I’d ever been on…until this year.

Indian Creek Thanksgiving 3.0 was an upgrade on pretty much everything that had already made any other trip to the creek amazing: perfect weather, awesome people (though this increased merely in quantity, not quality), more amazing, splitter cracks, and food…Jesus the food.

To start at the beginning would be to start with my initial email thread I’ve sent out the last couple of falls gauging interest. Initially there were close to twenty takers, so I was pretty sure we could get maybe three total people out there. However, when everything was said and done, we had about a dozen people in camp every night. Some highlights included a couple of BC’s non-Wilskills friends

that turned out to both be fantastic personality additions to our crew, as well as adding mad cooking skills and comic relief; we had instructors representing seven graduating classes from 08-’15; on this trip folks came out from Vanderbilt proper, as well as Seattle, Bend, OR, Philadelphia, New York, and Brazil. I was even super psyched that two of my compatriots from IC Thanksgiving 1.0, Noah and BC, managed to jump on board in basically the last week leading up to the trip, so we three got to reminisce about the cold days as well as intro that beautiful Wingate sandstone to others.

I guess I already mentioned the weather. Much more needn’t be said except that we actually climbed in t-shirts pretty much every day…

Which brings me to our cuisine. I feel like we were well prepared going into this trip, with plenty of good stuff planned out and seemingly a bakers dozen propane powered cooking devices and some Dutch ovens to boot, but nothing could have prepared us for Maykel. Maykel was a last minute addition of BC’s and a practicing Krav Magraw instructor/law enforcement type from Brazil. To say he

pimped out our kitchen would be an understatement. Some mornings I wasn’t even sure if we would leave camp or just food coma instead after the butter/bacon laden concoctions he created. Other nights, he would just surprise us by producing, from our haphazard ingredients, semi-traditional Brazilian fare. His contribution to our already overwhelming Thanksgiving feast was some sort of delicious chocolate sauce.

Also appearing on our holiday menu was Ham braised in a Dutch oven, stove top stuffing, grilled veggies, rolls, apple pie moonshine, sooooo many potatoes, cranberry sauce, and more stuff I’m sure my brain and traumatized stomach have forgotten.

And of course…the climbing. And the place. It really is difficult to sum up the atmosphere that is Indian Creek. Every time I’ve gone, I’ve had the pleasure of driving in at night. Waking up the first morning for the first time with no idea what you’re about to see, and then unzipping your tent to those red walls is enough to do something cliché, I’m sure.

For me, on my fourth trip this time, I ran outside early just to watch everyone else’s face as they came out and saw the place for the first time. I was honestly giddy just watching every one else’s jaws drop. The actual climbing was pretty decent… What can you say about miles and miles of lazer cut splitters that actually conveys how other-worldly unique that experience is? The stories and pictures can never do justice to pitches like Scarface, Wavy Gravy, Incredible Hand Crack, Swedin-Ringle, and countless others.

Every single day was a new kind of success for someone or everyone on our trip. Some people got their first trad leads, others just got to battle to the top clean for the first time on a 5.10 splitter, while others learned new jamming techniques or how strong finger sized cams really can be in seemingly soft sand stone.

a whole group of people immediately and sincerely grow very close as friends, despite the fact that, aside from a couple of us, almost no one on the trip knew the majority of people that they would be spending the week with at its outset.

I got to witness, in others, the kind of profound, yet austere love and affection for the Creek that I’ve been carrying around for a couple years now. Every day that takes us further from that trip just brings us one more day closer to next Thanksgiving.

Already a band of us are set to cast off, road trip out to the Utah desert and surf those beautiful, endless splitters in November. And this year, I sincerely hope you will join us.

Noah Walcutt and BC of Mountain Project fame

Former WilSkills Coordinator Marne Zahner

In the immortal words of our oft quoted slide show, “In the end, no one comes away unchanged.” And that was the most memorable part of this trip for me. I got to see so many changes, both great and minute, in the people that I tripped with this Thanksgiving.

For some people it was watching them simply grow as climbers. For others it was witnessing growth out of social apprehension. I definitely got to see

Seven generations of WilSkills instructors, representing Vanderbilt classes 2008 to 2015

WILSKILLS ALUMNI :Sad you missed out? Did you know

we’ll also be having a big Alumni

Paddling Trip from May 3–5, 2013

on the French Broad with some

climbing afterwards?

Want to join us?

Just shoot me an email at

harrison.dreves@vanderbilt.edu.

We’d love to see you there!

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New ZealandDylan Thomas

the beginning of semester, and I quickly became their most annoying member. As an abroad student, I didn’t want to take the route of spending my time only with the other American exchange students, so I dumped a lot of my time into hanging out at all the UCCC bouldering nights they held in a small climbing room at their student rec center.

Bouldering has never been my thing, to say the least, but as I spent more time with the climbing club, my strong preference for being tied in started to fade and I started having a lot of fun working problems with the other climbers. By the semester’s halfway point, I’d made

more friends who were into climbing than I ever anticipated to make, and more and more of my free time started to be filled with late-night bike rides home from the rock gym in the city centre with new climbing partners, as we filled the crisp evening air with good conversation, or just the sound of our pedals spinning.

As the New Zealand winter finally started to wane and the days grew longer, the club started heading outside, and by that point I’d made enough friends in the club to get together with some people and take some amazing trips. A favorite spot was Castle Hill, an isolated basin maybe an hour away from Christchurch completely saturated with gorgeous high-friction limestone boulders. I became really close to a group of uni students and older engineers, and we made a habit of packing someone’s car full of boulder pads on Wednesday mornings and taking the windy road up to the basin, where we’d spend the day on the boulders. I can’t claim that I became a star boulderer--in fact, I spent most of my time lying under the clear, warm sky on the best days or, on the worse days, chasing down the crash pads that the wind had turned into bulky kites. Aside from the obvious difference in location, Castle Hill Wednesdays almost felt like miniature WilSkills trips: mellow, beautiful days spent with stellar people from every kind of climbing background.

One of my favorite climbing trips, though, was a weekend trip some friends and I took to Hanging Rock, a climbing area a couple hours south of Christchurch. The trip was an official UCCC event with about 30 of us stuffing climbers and heaps of gear into as many cars as we could find and spending two days at another limestone crag along an idyllic green pasture. With a crew ranging from first-time climbers to guys onsighting 5.12, our group developed a supportive, excited environment that motivated me to push my limits on the wall. By the end of that trip I had climbed harder than I ever had, learned a ton about trad placements

When I boarded a plane for Christchurch, New Zealand, last semester, I had been climbing for a little less than a year, and I had ambitiously thrown my climbing gear in my luggage in the hopes of eventually finding a friend or two willing to take me out to a Kiwi crag during my semester abroad. I had no idea that I’d end up spending some of my favorite days of last year basking in the New Zealand sunlight on big boulders in open green fields, days that ultimately taught me more than I expected about climbing and about myself.

I stumbled upon the University of Canterbury Climbing Club at an org fair at

and anchor systems, and spent a star-riddled night around a giant bonfire in the New Zealand frontcountry hearing stories of all the places my new friends had gone climbing on the South Island.

I still think of some of the crags I heard tales about that night--big multi-pitch routes on the Sevastapol Bluffs in the Southern Alps or the towering metamorphic walls of Fiordland--and I can’t help but think about going back to New Zealand and ticking more of those areas off my climbing to-do list. But what I got out of climbing in New Zealand was way more important than getting a feel for the overwhelming beauty of the crags there. For me, it

was all about adapting to an unfamiliar situation and figuring out that my love for rock climbing is totally independent of my social group back home at Vanderbilt.

Beyond that, it was becoming comfortable with pushing myself as a climber and being confident about my own abilities. While I was abroad, I missed WilSkills and often found myself wishing I could have been there for that awesome trip to the Nantahala or the cold nights at Joyce Kilmer, but when I came home, I started to fully appreciate the real value of the adventures I had taken on my own, a world away from WilSkills.

“Fantastic trip :) I had no idea I could fit so may ridiculous first-times (no like that…) into on weekend! Jumping off bridges (with the bruises to prove it), paddling through rapids, super exciting camping food, and more! Can’t wait to keep coming back, and couldn’t have had a better first trip!”

-Lizzie (Paddling I, Fall)

“Backpacking you are great, and I’ma let you finish, but cooking is the best WilSkill of all time.”

-Sam (Backpacking I, Fall)

“Short a sleeping bag, but never short on love, adventure, or provolone cheese. I love gliding down roads and rivers with y’all, always being accompanied by you music, stories, and laughs. Until next time, dickheads.”

-Karissa of the Triple Belle (Paddling II, Fall)

“I learned how to spell kudzu (maybe.) Can’t wait for paddling 2!”

-Paige (Paddling I, Fall)

“From the viewpoint of sediment, washed from the roots of these ancient Appalachian giants, these days were less than an instant in time, but from my mortal coil, they were a timeless break from routine to happiness. Especially the random radio insults.”

-Harrison (Paddling II, Fall)

“Would you rather spend your weekend drinking Natty Lite or greywater?”

-Matthew A (Paddling III, Fall)

“What had happened was, Paddling 3 rocked my world! Jammin’ and dancin’ and paddlin’ two kickass rivers–Cartecay and Clear Creek–leaves a girl tired but happy.”

-KatKlock (Paddling III, Spring)

“Chimneys, dirty ass cracks, and some sick slabs, massage trains, girl talk, my giant burrito, lots of snuggling, the saltine challenge, making new friends and good times with old ones…WILSKILLS ROCKS!”

-Madison (Climbing II, Fall)

“Love all around, fuck yeahs all around, no hypothermia to be found. Solid work, team.”

-Caitlin (Paddling I, Spring)

“Perfect autumn weather made for some swell memories. Kate Norskog snores well.

Team WilSkills sent hard, deprived the state of all gnar. Sunshine on my face.

A dozen packed van makes for cozy traveling. In the leaves, I’ll walk.”

-Blake Green (Climbing IV, Fall)

Highlights from the 2012-2013 Trip Book…

THE WILSKILLSLETTER • SPRING, 2013 PAGE 8

WilSkills Crossword Puzzle!Sam French and Kelly Dennen

ACROSS1. Breakfast bomber

5. There ain’t no place I’d rather be

6. Instructors emeriti

7. Imperative systems first described in the 1930s by The Mountaineers

10. Famous climbing destination; home of Miguel’s Pizza

11. The best part of the Vanderbilt experience!

12. Internal or external frame

14. Where we get our corn

15. Org. responsible for the Seven Commandments

17. Asparagus or Nose Syndrome

18. Naked photo gallery

20. Sometimes we take this from the Nantahala Outdoor Center

21. 4-Down, cave, paddle, and ______

22. Wednesday ritual

DOWN1. Our backyard national park

2. Our costliest piece of equipment

3. “On _____? _____ on.”

4. _____, cave, paddle, and 21-Across

5. Dome or A-frame

8. Thai hot sauce favorite

9. Attend lectures, trips, recycling, pass the final, submit an essay, and get voted in to become one of these

13. Unbeatable lunchtime combo

16. Most important part of the outdoor diet

29. Early preservationist

You can find the solution on our website (address below)…

WilSkills310 Sarratt Student CenterVanderbilt University2301 Vanderbilt PlaceNashville, TN 37212

Dear Alumni: We hope that you have enjoyed the first edition of the reinstated WilSkillsletter! Please feel free to send any ideas, suggestions, feedback, contributions, or questions to ashley.a.walsh@vanderbilt.edu. Do you like the hard copy of WilSkillsletter or would you prefer an online only option? Let us know! You can also always email VanderbiltWilSkills@gmail.com if you would no longer like to receive information from WilSkills, or if you want to give us updated contact information. We’d love to hear from you!

For current information on the course, how to donate, and to see more pictures, check out our website! http://studentorgs.vanderbilt.edu/wilskills/?page_id=15