Jess Moran
Primary Outdoor Sports: Climbing, Mountain Biking, & Skiing
Favorite Beverage: Black Coffee
Sunrise or Sunset: Sunset
Non-Outdoor Hobby: Painting
Favorite Season: Spring
Fun Fact: I have a birthmark shaped like a turtle
Hot Take: Everything is political and everything is spiritual
Book Recommendation: The Poisonwood Bible
Three Words to Describe You: Intense, Honest, & Playful
“I wish I got into climbing as a little kid. We always went hiking and stuff. My dad was really good about making us pick up trash whenever we went outside so we always felt responsible for and connected to nature. I loved animals and loved camping and all the things, but I kind of wasn't really doing much in the outdoors besides hiking until my early 20s”
“Long story short, I was working in a nonprofit. I got really, really depressed for all the reasons people get depressed when they're involved in activism. I felt life was supposed to be service and caring for the marginalized and if you ever backed out of caring for people then it meant that you never really believed it. So I just had a lot of this shame. I was in a really dark place and was kind of fantasizing about not being alive anymore. It just made a lot more sense and seemed a lot more freeing than what I felt like life had to be.
My dad moved me out to California to get some rest for a few months and just recover from everything. Then climbing happened. There was a climbing gym a mile from his house. I figured that it would be a fun way to make friends and pass the time. I fell in love with all the friends I was making and moving my body in this cool way. We'd go outside like every weekend and I just sort of took off from there.
Someone from my climbing gym brought me up Tahquitz in California. It's just beautiful white cliffs. It's granite. It's awesome. It was one of my first multipitches. It was so scary and I noticed as I was climbing that I was holding on really tight. I was checking all my knots and I was really trying not to fall.
It started to kind of feel like, ‘Oh, I think I want to be alive. I'm clearly trying to stay alive.’ We got to the top and while my partner did some other random things, I was coiling the rope on top of this cliff face and kind of just looking down over Idyllwild.
I don't know if you've ever felt the ‘call of the void’. You know, you could drive your car into traffic. You could jump off the cliff. I was really feeling that and recognizing that before there had been all these barriers to killing myself. I don't want to feel pain, I don't want to do something that would hurt other people. This would have been really quick. The easiest way I could possibly do it was in that moment. I could just step. Then, it would just be done and over.
I started feeling dizzy and realizing that, ‘Oh, I want to live. I don't actually want to step forward right now. I like where my life has gone in the last eight months since I left the non-profit world.
I stepped back and I was like, ‘Oh, I think I'm in it now. I'm a rock climber.’ I guess that was the moment that I was like, ‘Oh yeah, climbing is really good.’ Without sounding too hokey, it probably saved my life.”
“I grew up really religious. As I started to not really be a Christian anymore, there was a lot of grief and a lot of like, ‘Well, then why? What's the point?’
Then climbing kind of inadvertently offered this alternative. What if there is no point? What if there's no point and it's really beautiful and you're an animal and you get to experience this world and enjoy your body? Your body is just this way that you get to experience the world.
I think that there was a kind of swung into hedonism a little bit. Like, ‘Oh, I think I'm allowed to feel pleasure and joy and just play.’ It wasn't like I was trying to climb hard grades. I just wanted to relax and be in nature and get away from the sorrow that felt so inherent in my life. So I was like, ‘What if I just get to be out here enjoying things?’”
“I've always really sought family and connection. Climbing gave me this built in community. It feels so trite to talk about sometimes, but I love my friends and I love climbing with people that I love, just getting to share experiences with people,
That's why I like projecting what my friends are projecting. It was never about climbing hard back in the day. It was just being at a campfire with a bunch of my friends and making food together.
I think it was a good replacement for church. Once I left Christianity, I saw that the church community that I always wanted or the feelings I got that I thought were God were really just connection with other people and the land and everything. I attributed that to a higher power when I think the higher power was just us.
So, I love sending a hard route or working on something. I like getting in shape, but it doesn't inspire me as much as a sense of belonging with the people I go climbing with. That's what gets me going and brings me back.”
“One of my first multipitches was some 5.6 in Las Vegas. I don’t even remember the name. It was like the blind leading the blind. It was a bunch of people who had just taken an anchor building class at my climbing gym in LA. and me. I’d never once rappelled in my life and they taught me how to rig an ATC off the staircase at the Airbnb we had. It was so gumby.
None of us had layers. No one had headlamps. We were so stupid. We got up and then proceeded to take like eight hours getting down. Everyone was sharing one headlamp that died and then it started snowing. Basically it was a totally miserable experience.
I remember one moment hanging at this hanging anchor, shivering in my Converse and a sweatshirt. It was snowing and I was totally by myself in the dark because I was going to rappel last. I had a moment of like, ‘If I survive this, this will be a funny story. I know it will be funny at some point because what are the odds I actually die out here? No one dies on this.’
We got lost hiking back to our car in the desert and were just making jokes about how we survived our sketchy rappel, but we're just gonna die of thirst in the desert.”
“It feels good to climb things that are hard. It feels good to be a person who didn't grow up really athletic, who can project something and then put it down. I really, really like projecting. It's fun to take something that is impossible and work on it until it can become your warmup next year. I think it's a little self-esteem boost probably.
It's also a vehicle. Back in the day, it allowed me to live the lifestyle I wanted to live. I have journal entries from being a teenager saying, ‘I just want to live in my car and live in the woods and play in rivers and see the world.’
In climbing it was like, ‘Oh, this is cool. Everyone does this.’ So I think it was a thing that allowed me to do what I wanted.”
“I think it's particularly fun at Smith because the holds do break and the route does change. So sometimes we'll all be working on one thing and someone breaks a hold or a foot chip and you're like, ‘Fuck.’
That adds that extra pressure of ‘We gotta send. We gotta get on this before things break.’ Then kind of wrestling with it's either too hot or it's too cold. It's windy. There's always something that's just not right, if it's my skin or my muscles or the heat or the sweat. You have to just roll with it.
It's kind of fun to be at the mercy of the weather. I've never checked the weather as often as I do when I'm projecting something and that always feels kind of fun.”
“It's hard for me to reconcile the duality of it. I get to go have fun and have all this pleasure and joy in my life and sleep in my shitty Subaru and cops don't bother me. I know that's not true for my black and brown friends.
While climbing can be hard as a woman, it's not as hard for a cis woman as it is for trans people or black people. I think that while struggling with that duality my personality is pulled in so many different directions.I want to just have fun and play and I want to make the world better.
I'm trying to figure out how to be both and it's been hard. I think I've found the climbing crew now who knows how to be silly and rowdy and pleasure seeking and call their representatives. So it feels better now. It used to be a bigger struggle.”
“I've had a really privileged time with climbing and I've had the most beautiful moments, indescribably beautiful. Ten Sleep and Squamish and everywhere. Even just a couple of summers ago at Smith, everything felt so crisp and so intentional and beautiful.
The friends were rowdy. We were having poetry reading in the desert at night, skinny dipping everyday, and life felt really good. I was seeing that it could just be good, especially coming out of Covid and some hard things that had been going on.
I kept looking to my partner and being like, ‘We could live like this. We could just live like this.’ He said, ‘We are living like this. That's our reality right now.’ That has always stuck out to me as a really special moment.
I keep coming back to that whenever I'm in those perfect moments with friends or with myslef or with my garden or my dog. I’m like, ‘Oh, I am living like this.’ There is no future far off goal of one day I'll have it, I do have it. It’s just so cool to realize that everything I want I have and it can just keep being good.”
