ENJOY

Culture

Hole and climbing at that time. He says he always associated climbing with singing, a much less decadent pasttime than what some other climbers were up to. “The Tetons were becoming the mecca for mountaineering in the United States,” Briggs says. “I thought music-making should be part of it. And so, in great desperation, I tried it at my camping spot under the new bridge at Moose. I provided a pot of half tea, half wine. Word got out, and it became popular. Too popular in fact. The park service shut it down and then opened the old CCC camp as a climber’s campground, agreeing music-making belonged in the park. The teapot eventually got replaced by Yvon [Chouinard]’s cauldron, and these gatherings became known as Teton Tea Parties.”

By 1965, as many as 150 people were gathering for Briggs’ Tea Parties, not all of them climbers. The CCC camp had become, according to Pete Sinclair, the author of We Aspired: The Last Innocent Americans, “a zoological garden displaying human specimens.” The Tea Parties attracted both climbers and people from town who were curious about what was going on out in the park.

Andy Carson, the former owner of Jackson Hole Mountain Guides, says he remembers hearing a story about a gun battle over women occurring at a Tea Party. Fortunately, he says, the participants were too drunk to shoot straight so no one was injured.

But the decadence was only one small part of dirtbagging. The real bond was climbing. These men and the occasional woman were putting up climbs at an increasingly difficult grade, and as the difficulty increased, climbers changed. “There’s something different about the new generation of climbers,” says Jane Gallie, who first came to Jackson in 1981 and has been managing the Exum office and guiding ever since. “They aren’t womanizers like they were in the old days. They are all such athletes. It doesn’t seem as if they do drugs or drink to excess the way they used to.”

Gallie grew up in Canada and was first introduced to the mountain scene in the Canadian Rockies where many of the guides were from Switzerland, which had a long, well-respected guiding tradition. The United States was slower to adopt that kind of professionalism. Glenn Exum refused to hire Yvon Chouinard as a guide because of his ratty appearance, not because he—like the majority of aspiring and actual climbing guides in the U.S. at that time— lacked any kind of accreditation from an outside governing body looking to establish basic norms for the climbing industry. Accreditation of guides didn’t start happening until 1979, when the American Guides Association was created (although the organization really didn’t become mainstream until the early 2000s).

“I feel like my generation was kind of the first of Americans who could focus on making a full-time living as a mountain guide,” says Christian Santelices, who has been guiding since 1989 and works for Exum Guides as well as his own company, Aerial Boundaries. “I like to think that I had a dirtbag climbing lifestyle,” he says. “But I worked my butt off. I never took that path of fully checking out and living in my car, and I don’t know how many people actually did.

“I really look up to Yvon Chouinard and that era of climbers. … All their stories of living in Yosemite on very little are super romantic, but they worked as well, and look at what they accomplished. They started all these iconic companies—Patagonia, The North Face, Royal Robbins—but it took a tremendous amount of work and vision to do that. So, it’s not as if they didn’t work.”

Founder and board chair of the Teton Climbers Coalition, Christian Beckwith says when he co-founded The Alpinist magazine in 2002, he witnessed a shift among climbers toward more athleticism. Climbers were suddenly training like Olympians, and those who wanted to perform at elite levels couldn’t afford to live as decadently as their predecessors had. “Another element that’s changed is we have a much more affluent culture,” he says. “Everyone these days is tooling around in $150,000 vehicles. How did that happen?”

“I think some people are still living the dirtbag lifestyle,” says Nat Patridge, co-owner of Exum Guides. “Say, for example, Alex Honnold before the movie Free Solo was made. But at the same time, I wouldn’t categorize him the way I would those guys back in Chouinard’s day. It doesn’t seem as desperate. Today’s dirtbags are focused athletes living in a van, different from the bygone era of getting scraps of pizza out of the garbage at Curry Village in Yosemite.

“That said, it is still a deviant life, even if you are living relatively comfortably in a van. You still don’t have running water, it’s still inconvenient. But I do think it’s possible to live that way if you are creative and have knowledge of public lands and an occasional place to shower.”

The Dark Side Of The Dirtbag Lifestyle

Society has romanticized the idea of the dirtbagger. It’s about self-actualization. It’s the pursuit of adventure over predictability. It’s the pure spirit of living in the moment. There are elements of truth in these ideals, but there is also the failure to recognize that it takes privilege to opt for voluntary poverty—privilege that is not accessible to many people of color.

According to a 2020 article on the impartial German—but translated in 32 languages—news site DW.com entitled “Racism Also an Issue in Sport Climbing,” Duane Raleigh, the editor and publisher of Rock and Ice magazine resigned from his post and apologized for his past behavior. “We were young and could climb and enjoy risks because we had freedoms that nonwhite America does not have,” he said. “We were part of a culture that I regret. White privilege let our ‘fraternity’ exist, and we could be inappropriate, and do just about anything without consequence.”

That inappropriate behavior and attitude was certainly dominant in dirtbagging’s heyday, and you can excuse some of it by considering the times. But no longer. Climbers in general have cleaned up their acts, but glorifying an outdated term is still common and potentially offensive.

Dirtbag also has negative connotations when applied to people of color. A badge of honor for white climbers, it’s a word that brings up associations of oppression for many Blacks. The word may be here for a while, but climbers might want to consider what they are saying when they toss it around casually from the seat of their Sprinter van. JH