James Byrne
Job: Climbing Guide
Primary Outdoor Sport: Climbing
Favorite Beverage: PBR
Sunrise of Sunset: Sunrise
Non-Outdoor Hobby: Chess and Working on Cars
Favorite Subject in School: Languages
Guilty Pleasure: Mindless Sitcom Watching
Fun Fact: I really like Swing Dancing
Book Recommendation: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Three Words to Describe Yourself: Professional Belayer/Climber
“After high school, I decided to take a year off. I ended up taking a NOLS course, a semester course. I really loved that. It helped me understand a lot more about what really going out into the outdoors on a bigger scale and in a more full on way was about. I got to spend the better part of three months outdoors in New Zealand. We were sea kayaking, dealing with inclement weather. I got hypothermia. We were going up and over mountain ridges. I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is pretty sick’”
“After that NOLS course, someone I had a crush on asked if I wanted to go to the climbing gym. I was like, ‘Hell, yeah. Absolutely. I love climbing. I’m totally into that.’ Pretty much from the first day at the climbing gym I was like, ‘Yeah, this is awesome. I want to do this all the time.’
That first day, I rented shoes and got a day pass and then climbed for a couple hours with my friend . Then, I left, went and bought shoes and a chalk bag, came back, and climbed for a few more hours. I probably left with a flapper on every finger, but I was just like, ‘This is awesome. I love doing this.’
It also happened at a good time for me where I was looking for a little bit more community. People at the climbing gym were like, ‘See you tomorrow.’ ‘See you next week.’ ‘When are you coming back?’
The gym I started climbing at was really small. It was an above average garage woody, that was a climbing gym. The gym was tiny so if anyone was there you were hanging out with them. The climbing community in Hawaii was then and from everything I can tell still is super tight knit. The community came at the right time for me and that was what I was looking for.”
“A little less than a year later, I moved to San Francisco and that’s when it really stuck. During that time is when climbing became a bigger part of my life and my identity in the world.
I got robbed when I was living in San Francisco. I had basically everything I owned stolen, like actually everything. I had the clothes I was wearing, my wallet, and phone. I was moving and my car got broken into and all my shit got stolen. Once I paid the money to get my car’s window replaced, I didn’t have money for rent anymore so I ended up living in my car in San Francisco. It was not the fun, ‘I’m going to be a vagabond’ kind of living in your car. It was the, ‘Oh shit. This is kinda the only option I have right now.’
So I figured, ‘Well, if I’m going to live in my car, I might as well do more of this rock climbing thing.’ I’m sleeping in the back seat of my Prius. At 6’3”, the back seat of the Prius is not super cozy. So I was just like, ‘Well if I’m gonna live in the car, I might as well do what I want to do.’ So I would spend my weekends going out to Yosemite. I would just hang out by myself. I didn’t know how to rope climb really, I had done five rope climbs with a friend of mine once. I literally had one small Metolius pad, my rock shoes, and a chalk bag. I would just go to Yosemite and try to boulder as much as I could. It was really cool because I spend most of my time bouldering in Yosemite by myself, just being outside there.
Life felt right when I was doing that. When I was in the city and doing city stuff, life felt terrible. So I was like, ‘How do I do more of this and less of that?’”
“I would go down to Bishop every winter. Those trips I started to feel like a real rock climber, just getting to meet people through climbing. Getting to spend time in these really pretty places and live relatively simply. I had my Prius and slept on my crash pad. I had a whisperlite and I would make pasta with butter for dinner because I was spending all the money I had on gas to get there and back.”
“A big reason why I chose the career that I have chosen is that I don’t want to live to work. I want to enjoy my work and I’ve done several different things, but guiding is the only job I’ve worked where it just makes sense for my life. Even when I’m as burnt out as I get, I still get to come out here to Smith Rock or Red Rock and be in these beautiful places for work. I’d just so much rather be doing this than anything else.”
“Climbing has given me a career. It’s given me a community. It’s given me some of my best friends. Most people that I would consider my friends, I either know through climbing directly or that’s one of the primary ways that I actually interact with those people. Now, getting to share career stuff with Carson, it’s just great the few times that we’ve both been working the same days at Chockstone. It’s so awesome to get to go out rock climbing for a living and then come back to the Chockstone garage and hang out with my wife and hear about what she did during the day. It’s hard to say what climbing gives my life because climbing is most of my life and most of my community.”
“Something that I value from climbing is that there are not that many opportunities in modern life to go out and experience fear. In the modern world, it’s pretty easy to exist and never really feel mortal terror, like we aren’t being chased by wild animals. We don't have to hunt for our food. Our lives can be quite easy if we want them to be. I like that climbing gives us an opportunity to go out and experience fear on purpose and on your own terms. I enjoy the mental experience of feeling fear and putting yourself in a stressful situation on purpose and controlling that. That’s one of the big things for me, the ability to feel in control in complex and objectively dangerous places.”
“Through climbing I’ve proved to myself that I can do hard things and I can learn complex skills. I’ve practiced the skill of learning because of climbing and I have the confidence that I can improve and I can get better at it. I think that is something that translates to life more broadly. I can learn a complex skill and become highly proficient at it. Having that confidence is really great. I think especially as a young man, I didn’t have a ton of that confidence. If something seemed hard, I would just be like, ‘Ok, I guess I’ll do something else.’”
“The outdoors are a natural teacher. I like that it’s unforgiving. I think it’s great. You go out and it’s real.I appreciate the genuine consequence. I just feel like it makes everything feel so much more real because there are so many different things we could be doing where the consequence is like, ‘We lost a game. Ahh, bummer, five other dudes are better at basketball than us today.’ Those consequences are kinda contrived or fictitious in a way.
Climbing is like ‘Today I am good enough or today I didn’t measure up.’ There’s no one to blame. Either you did it or you didn’t and that’s it. It’s just you and the conditions and the terrain. Either you figure it out or you don’t. And if you don’t figure it out, the consequences are very real. It just feels so much more fulfilling to me, the fulfillment of being able to go out and control everything that’s going on and feel really good, like ‘Yeah, I kept myself safe. I made good decisions today and that was enough to grant us passage through this place and back to our car.’ It feels so much more fulfilling that winning a game or beating someone in a race.”
