Kevin Rose
Job: Retired
Primary Outdoor Sport: Climbing
Favorite Beverage: Strong Coffee
Non-Outdoor Hobby: Colored Pencil Drawings of Animals
Trail Snack: Snickers Bar
Favorite Subject in School: Art
Favorite Camp Game: Chess
Book Recommendation: Desert Solitaire
Hot Take: I’m glad that you now have to get permission to put bolts in at Smith Rock
Three Words to Describe Yourself: Stubborn, Driven, & Funny
“As a kid in California, I was a loner and certainly not athletic. I never was any good at team sports or anything like that and I was way too much of a rebel to want to conform to that modest level of regimentation. During my high school years, I started reading stuff like John Muir and Edward Abbey. That made me want to escape the drudgery of the valley and head for the mountains. So, on weekends and summers I started hitching into the Sierras to go backpacking, and do easy peak bagging type mountaineering.”
“After barely graduating from high school, I left California for the Olympic Peninsula to work as a timber faller since I had an “in” thru a relative. After a few years I started to mix it up by working on an Olympic National Forest fire crew during the summer, mostly, because the feds hired college kids and women which I thought would be more fun than the old crusty dudes I worked with logging. For about 8 years I did the back and forth between fire crew in the summer to either logging or carpentry in the winters and then landed a gig for Olympic National Park trail crew and worked there for 16 years. Later, I started General Contracting business. That idea was basically driven by the fact that I could control how much work I took on, make a lot of money when I was working and the rest of the time just travel around and climb.” Late in 2008 I took like a 35’ ground fall in Eldorado Canyon and that pretty much ended my career as an outdoor laborer prompting a move into of all things, cat rescue, where I spent 10 years helping my feline buddies find better lives.”
“As far as my climbing is concerned two things occurred in the late 1980’s that pushed me beyond simple mountaineering into more technical stuff. The first was going to the Tetons where it became very apparent to me that I wanted to climb harder stuff because there was beautiful stuff everywhere around you begging to be climbed. The second one was watching some gal float up Chouinard’s Crack here at Smith. She made it look so easy and smooth, it was one of the most beautiful and natural looking things I had ever seen.
“I’m still to this day primarily a crack climber because, to me those are the lines the rock has presented us with. Climbing cracks is very technique driven and I love that you can dial your technique to compensate for loss of strength as I age. I mean, here I am at 66 years old, floating this stuff that you see these young people struggling on. Climbing cracks is really about the only graceful thing that I can do and that is probably as big of driver as anything that keeps me coming back for more. We all want to be graceful, don’t we? My hope is that I am as big of an inspiration to younger climbers when they see me out there as that gal on Chouinard’s was to me all those years ago.”
“I’ve put up some pretty interesting features in the Port Angeles area that are just outright weird. All of that stuff is driven by, you want something to climb close to home just so you can do a bunch of it. That’s primarily what drives it. You go out to a sport climbing crag and there’s obviously a lot of vacancies on the wall and you start looking at things and think, ‘I could climb that.’ Everything I put up was an obvious feature. I could look at it from the ground. ‘That’s where the route goes.’”
“Since it seems like I’ve been perpetually plateaued at somewhere below 11b my entire climbing career I’ve never shied away from the awkward stuff that other people mostly avoid. Nowadays, especially with the talent pool here at Smith, it is really the only way I can stump the youngsters. They can readily do all the finger and hand cracks I can do. It is only once I start using big gear that it’s like, ‘Ok, this kids gonna fall off my route.’ Haha. And they do. It doesn’t happen very often anymore and it’s only on the wide cracks.”
“You’re only limited by what you think you can’t do. I think it’s a good reminder of that. It’s like, ‘Look, you’re doing this stuff.’ And, there’s not many people out here your age that are doing this. It’s always good to keep an open mind and never say, ‘Well, I can’t try that because I’m no good at it.’”
“I like being out here spending my time on the rocks. I feel fortunate to have arrived at this place at a time in my life where I still have the strength and the desire to pursue climbing as a way of life, not many people my age have that luxury. It is also nice that here in central Oregon there is a community of people who share my passion for climbing, it makes me feel as if I belong. Being outside and in nature has always been important to me. I get great joy seeing blue herons, otters and my little buddies the swallows. I just love being here and watching the swallows fly around me. I just like nature in all forms. Be it desert, rainforest, I like it all.”
“Don’t ever sit on the couch and say you’re done. Go out and try it and determine whether you’re done. When I moved back here, I was going on easy stuff down in the Northern Point and struggling. Now, I could probably solo all them things and down climb them too. I refused to give up and it worked.”
