BROKEN GLASS: LOSING GEAR BUT FINDING COMMUNITY

by Nick Hankins

The night we had our Mazama Advanced Rock graduation dinner at the Hawthorne Food Carts Pod, I lugged my hiking backpack, a normal backpack, a climbing rope, climbing gear, a guitar and clarinet, and bags of power tools from my car into the pod, no doubt looking like a madman. It was standard behavior for me, with my trust issues of urban life (no secret why I prefer the woods and mountains!). I’ve had too many friends stripped of photography equipment, climbing gear, and valuables of all kinds with astonishing speed when they’d left their car briefly unattended.

But being smart once is never enough. Earlier this year I lost far more gear than I dragged in that night, in a situation where alarm bells should have been clanging in my head.

We’ve all seen the piles of shattered glass in parking spots and trailheads, cautioning us about walking away from our vehicles at all, let alone for hours-long hikes or backpacks. It always feels like a gamble. Should we just leave our doors unlocked and windows rolled down? It’s so hard to have a car and not leave a few valuables and essentials in it at all times. It’s impractical to take literally every item out of it every time you walk away from your car. But we’d been targeted.

The night we walked away from our car on NW 13th, we’d climbed at the gym, then were heading to a restaurant happy hour. My housemate drove her Bronco, but I had motorcycled there, so needed to secure my gear. For some reason I resisted the overloaded madman routine and opted to stash my gear in her Bronco; we covered it with a black towel, despite it being already invisible through the dark-tinted windows.

A man who might be charitably described as a bit sketchy was leaning against the passenger door of a car next to the Bronco. He started chatting me up about my motorcycle, and about all the motorcycles he’d owned in the past. He made us nervous, but we did our best to reserve judgment. While we chatted, he watched the Bronco get loaded up with valuables. We parted with a friendly goodbye and headed toward the restaurant, me on the motorcycle, my friends on foot.

A moment later we heard a car alarm go off, and I saw my friends turn around. The man innocently yelled to them, “Oh, is that one of your vehicles? I think the alarm was set off!” It was suspicious enough that I almost drove back when they walked back to turn off the alarm on our friend’s car, parked next to the Bronco. I called them and they explained, assuming the alarm had gone off accidentally.

When we got back from the restaurant the man’s car was gone, an empty space next to the Bronco, its window smashed and stripped of our gear. Even the black towel was gone. The thief had inflicted maximum damage: breaking the window, cutting through the softtop fabric, and scratching the paint in multiple places.

Faced with someone so suspicious, we’d made a very expensive mistake: trying not to offend and pre-judge the man, we’d opted to not take our stuff with us.

That night, my friend and I filed a police report, which required us to take a detailed inventory of everything that was stolen. It was a lot. I had gear in my hiking backpack for whatever Mazama classes I was doing, plus gear for outdoor climbing the day before.

I wrote a brief description of what happened with a list of gear that was stolen and a few photos, and I posted it on various social media sites: ClimbPDX, ClimbPDX Partner Finder, Movement’s Partner Board, Facebook groups, in the Climbin’ Frens Discord Server that I manage, and in our Mazama Slack Workspace.

The local Facebook climbing communities are top-notch, and include members and moderators who regularly check online sources like Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, Craigslist, and eBay, both as certified climbing gear hoarders themselves and because they’re vigilantly on the lookout for suspicious listings. They can easily pick out the signs of stolen gear: sellers who are suspiciously ignorant about climbing, give generic descriptions (“rope”), know nothing of the gear’s history, offer a random price, or respond with odd communications. Most listings will also have comment functions turned off, so the seller cannot be “outed” directly on their posting.

I also had an enlightening talk with a pawn shop owner in the area of the breakin. He told me he lives near the climbing gym and is very familiar with the break-in problem around there. Pawn shops, he explained, both maintain privacy for those who pawn goods and maintain a detailed database of all the goods they intake. That database is accessible to the police, and the police have a dedicated team that regularly cross-references stolen goods listed in police reports against the pawn shop databases.

A likely scenario for my gear, he said, was that the thief took it straight to a drug dealer, who gave him some amount of drugs for its value. The gear would then get passed off and traded several times on the street, barter style, while still “hot” (recently stolen).

Eventually, the gear might end up in a pawn shop but that’s unlikely because it’s specialized equipment, they require ID, and the police are monitoring the database. More likely, the goods end up on online marketplaces in a month or two, but that’s not guaranteed. He suggested that most of it may just end up in the trash, or used by individuals to fortify their temporary shelters along the streets.

Getting your gear stolen sucks. Having anything stolen sucks. I spent a month monitoring four marketplace sites but never saw anything. I also drove the streets looking for the thief’s car—not the safest idea, so maybe it’s good nothing came of that either. But a few things happened that helped restore my faith in humanity.

Stolen gear as it appeared online

First, the support and many helpful messages from online climber communities was truly gratifying—thank you all! Several climbing friends helped me replace gear using various brand discounts, and some Mazama friends even donated used gear to me. One of the kindest offerings was a Mazama friend who knew that I had lost my coveted BD Magnetron lockers, which are really hard to come by. She had gifted one to a friend long ago, and her friend wasn’t climbing much, so she regifted it to me as a wonderful surprise one day.

A few months after the theft, I got a text message from a stranger who had found my McMenamins passport (a valuable discount card), which had been tucked in with my gear. He found it in a distant apartment parking lot southeast of Portland. No gear, but an interesting turn of events.

And finally: all the slings and cords I lost were long past their recommended retirement date. So it’s possible this guy actually saved my life by force-retiring my soft goods.

Don’t leave valuables in your car in or around Portland!