Caroline Thompson
Primary Outdoor Sport: Climbing
Favorite Beverage: Black Cold Brew
Sunrise or Sunset: Sunset
Non-Outdoor Hobby: Film
Go-To Crag Snack: Blue Diamond Almonds
Favorite Season: Fall
Hot Take: Abolish Profit
Book Recommendation: Detransition, Baby
Three Words to Describe Yourself: Queer, Radical, Silly-Goose
“I have no idea how I got into outdoor sports. I was never athletic growing up. I was a little musical theater kid. But, I tried climbing once in a gym and I just found that the workout was really great. I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I can do this.’ And, I fell in love with it in a gym.
Then, I was like, ‘Well, if I'm doing this in a gym, I should probably try it outside one of these days. November of 2021 was the first time I climbed outdoors. I did a guided trip to Joshua Tree, just cause I was feeling it and I wanted to treat myself to something. In my journal on the flight home, I just wrote, ‘I can feel this is about to become my entire personality.’ And here we are.”
“In climbing, the only person you're really competing against is yourself which is the thing that I really value. Whatever your accomplishment is, it doesn't mean anything unless it means something to you. And, by that same token, if it means something to you or if it's something that you want to do and something that you think is important to achieve, then it is.
That’s probably a big part of the reason why I never got into other sports growing up. I just couldn't bring myself to care about what a lot of other people were doing or just the rules of the game.
Whereas with climbing, today's victory is getting to the top of this pitch, or doing X number of pitches or honestly I've had days where today's victory is just getting to the park.
I think climbing becomes an incredibly personal thing. Whatever I'm going through in my personal life, I can really hone in on that and process it through climbing.”
“I initially got interested in getting my SPI when I was living in Columbus, Ohio. I was working with an organization that ran climbers meetups for the local queer community. We just kind of ran into this issue where I was like, ‘Well, we want to go outside, we want to be able to take people outside, but nobody within the group is really qualified to do that.’
We were an organization so there was some liability there and it's just one of those things where when you live in a place like Ohio, where there's not a local outdoor climbing scene, it's like, ‘Ok, we could google some guide services down at the Red, but we can't really vet people?’
We just kind of got in this cycle of, ‘We don't want to take people out with folks who aren't safe and we also don't want to take people out ourselves and put them in a place that's physically unsafe.’ We just kind of kept bumping up against this thing of just like, ‘God, I wish there were more queer people who were guides.’ And, I just complained about it for long enough that I was like, ’You know what, I love doing this in a gym. Why wouldn't I like doing this outside?’
So I was like, ‘Be the change.’ Right? ‘I've been complaining about this for months so I guess I should put my money where my mouth is.’”
“I loved the arts growing up, and I majored in them in college, but before I even graduated, I just knew that it was not the thing. I don't have that grind mentality of ‘I can be poor’, ‘I can be struggling’, ‘I can do this just so that I can do the art that I studied in college’, ’I want to do what I love to do.’ I was just kind of like, ‘Eh, no. Sounds hard.’
I think with climbing, it just taps into a lot of different things in my brain. It is the thing that motivated me to just change my entire life. I think for a lot of athletes, that's probably true.
I think when you find that thing that really excites you in a way that nothing else in your life ever has, I mean there are logistical obstacles, there's the obstacle of telling your mom you're moving across the country cause you like climbing so much, but all of the obstacles that I've faced have just been tasks that I've had to deal with. They haven't actually been hard because I wanted it. So it's just like, ‘Oh, well that comes with the territory.’”
“Climbing shows how much of your life and your experience you are in control of. If you're climbing something difficult for you, the only thing stopping you is your ability to pull a move.
If you're being super hard on yourself, you have the ability to just stop and be like, ‘I'm only here because I'm deciding to be here. I can stop this at any time I want.’
Objectively, it's a very silly sport. It’s kind of a goofy thing to spend a lot of your time doing. But, it gives you control over your mindset. Having that level of control is something that I feel a lot of people don't have over their lives a lot of times.”
“Growing up in suburban Ohio being a pretty privileged middle class white kid, I never really had to learn how to try hard at something.
I was that kid that slept walked through high school, got all B pluses, A minuses, was not a problem. All of my teachers saw that I did pretty darn okay without trying and just let me be. For most of my young life, all through high school, all through college, I was just gravitating towards things that I was naturally good at.
Certainly, I worked hard and cultivated those things and learned to become better at them, but climbing was the very first thing that I truly tried once, was god awful at, and wanted to get better at.
I contend nobody can be good at climbing your first time. If you've never done it before, you might be able to get through something kind of stiff for a newbie, but even if you’re physically strong, you can't be good your first time.
So, it was the first thing that I tried that I'm just like, ‘I suck at this. I am bad by all metrics, but I don't want to be bad. I want to get better at this.’ Learning that patience, which sometimes was a trial by fire, wasn’t always an easy process.
Learning, ‘I cannot climb this now, if I come back next week and I haven't done anything to get better, if I haven't practiced it, if I haven't continued to work out, if I don't get enough sleep, I'm not going to be any better off. If I want to get better at this, I need to put in the time.’ That's super rewarding.”
“As a trans person, climbing was one of the first times I really was able to appreciate my body. No matter who you are, if you grow up in this society, there's so many beauty standards. If you don’t look like that, then you should do all this stuff. You should go to the gym. Men, get big shoulders, get big biceps. Women, work your glutes, work your legs. You know what I mean?
No matter who you are, you are bombarded with what your body is supposed to look like. There's a multi-billion dollar fitness industry out there that is preying on that. If you do this exercise and your body doesn't look that way then either you're doing it wrong or you're bad or maybe you're just ugly. For me, I feel like you can compound that by twenty being a trans person.
Climbing was really the first time where I would lower off a 45 foot top rope in my local gym and I would look up at the top and just be like, ‘How did I get up there?’ It's just like, ‘This is the body that got me up there.’ For all of it's so called faults, not by me but by other people, it worked pretty darn good in that context.
In a lot of ways, my body isn't traditional. It isn't standard. It doesn't fit into whatever social norms I've been told I need to force it into, but I don't really care because I'm climbing. You know?
For a really long time, I was really dysphoric about my shoulders because they're bigger. Right? But then, I look at photographs of myself climbing and I'm just like, ‘Yeah, my shoulders are larger because I fucking climb hard.’ I'm out here developing these muscles to be very functional which I think is so freeing.”
“Climbing has given me a better relationship to my body. It's given me a better relationship to myself. It's really allowed me to make space for myself that I maybe wouldn't otherwise, just in terms of being able to admit when I’m scared or put myself in a situation that is difficult, that is scary, and push through it.
Also, just drawing boundaries. Going out with folks and they're just like, ‘Oh, do you want to send this super hard thing? Do you want to hop on it on lead? Do you want to whatever?’
Through climbing, I've learned that, yes I want to find ways to push myself, but I have also learned that I know that's going to be a bad experience and I'm not gonna get anything out of it, so no, I'm not gonna do that.
Which, if you knew me before a handful of years ago, that would be very surprising.”
“I kind of can't go out climbing without somebody mentioning how bright my pack is or that I have a super bright pink helmet or harness.
I've always just been very outspoken and I have always just been a very loud person. I think for me, it's one of those things where I don't think people recognize the amount of privilege it takes to be in an outdoor sport. There are a lot of identities that are kind of gate kept from climbing and the outdoors in general.
Part of the reason I try to command a lot of attention is because, one, it's just kind of fun, and it's because every day we all wake up and decide, ‘What am I going to wear today? or ‘How am I going to go out? How am I going to present?’
I got really sick of not seeing people in climbing that look like me, not seeing people in climbing who care about the things that I care about. I'm just like, ‘No, we're bringing this in. We are making this a part of it.’
I have found so much peace with myself through climbing that if I'm not going to see people like me climbing then I'm going to be seen enough for five other people. You know what I mean?
It's weird to say that I've been mostly fortunate because I have not been affected by hate crimes at a climbing crag before. It's fucked up that that's considered fortunate. However, it is and it is one of those things that I don't take for granted.
I kind of realized pretty early on with climbing that I can either blend in with the woodwork and I can wear the gray Patagonia quarter zip, I can wear the mustard brown and beige flat brim cap and a pair of black Goodr’s and I can skate by. I can blend in with the community around me, but then I'm never going to see the people in climbing that I want to see. Then, those people are also not going to see anybody.
So I just have kind of decided that climbing has given me so much, that newfound freedom and self-care and beautiful space that I use to process my life and get in touch with myself, I don't want to have to bury parts of myself to access it.
I don't want to just blend in. I might not wear a giant t-shirt that says, ‘Hello everyone at the crag, I'm trans’, but I do specifically wear messages and symbols for social justice and causes that I care about.”
