Boys of the Wood

“On a scale of one to ten of climbing areas, Castlewood’s probably a 2 or a 3,” Tod says. “Devil’s Head is an 8.”

Scott started working at Thrillseekers climbing gym in South Denver in 1994 and became the general manager, finding that the long hours of running a climbing gym took away from the time he spent in Castlewood. In the beginning, he was the designated driver, and he’d pick Tom up to climb there four or five days a week, as much as they could. He called his group of friends who used to climb at Castlewood — Tom, Mike Brooks and Steve Carpenter — the “Boys of the Wood,” playing on the title of the 1991 movie “Boyz N The Hood.” As they worked to develop climbing routes, the canyon was becoming less wild and more of a park — the visitor center and the east entrance to the park opened in 1993.

“I still love the place — it’s just so much of an urban place now,” Scott says. The sprawl of the south Denver suburbs has put the park within reasonable distance for a Sunday afternoon dog-walk for many people.

But Tom and Mike are still close by, and climb at Castlewood all winter. Mike lives in Centennial, and Tom lives in nearby Castle Rock and has become the park’s unofficial climbing ambassador, having written the guidebook to the area, “A Rock Climbers Guide to Castlewood Canyon Colorado,” complete with his hand-drawn maps.

“I sell ’em for 10 bucks, and if I autograph ’em, they’re 8,” Tom says. The guidebook is 87 pages, with a stapled binding, not exactly occupying the same space on the shelf as the 416-page Falcon Guide to the legendary Eldorado Canyon. The first guide to Castlewood was a topo of the Grocery Store Wall, put together by Colorado Mountain Club members in 1987. After working to develop the area, Mike xeroxed his first guide and dropped it off at local climbing gyms to get the word out. He later wrote an article and mini-guide that appeared in Rock & Ice in 1994.

For the most part, climbing magazines and film crews have left Castlewood alone. Maybe it’s too far from Boulder (or far enough?). Maybe the cliffs aren’t tall enough, or the rock isn’t solid enough. Some folks call it “Chosswood” or “Crumblewood,” though, for the most part, the rock is reliable, Tom says.

“That’s not to say a cobble won’t break off now and then,” he says. “It keeps it interesting — the routes evolve.” The walls are pocked with spots where, say, a perfectly good cobble was half-embedded, and would have made a great hand- or foothold, shaped like a fat doorknob — but now there’s just a hole.

There’s also the population of rattlesnakes, which come slithering out for the warm weather starting in the spring. Tom’s seen dozens of rattlers in one day and has appeared on Denver TV news after nearly stepping on one. A few years ago, a friend picked up a rattlesnake on the end of a stick, which was funny until the snake turned its head toward him. The friend panicked and flung the snake off the end of the stick. Tom was inconveniently standing at the end of the snake’s flight path, and it bounced right off his shoulder.

“I was doing the snake dance,” he says, flailing his arms and running in place.

But it’s quiet in Castlewood, just the hum of the breeze flowing through the trees in the canyon bottom, and the trickle of Cherry Creek making its way north to its confluence with the South Platte in downtown Denver. And it’s warm in the winter, when the south-facing walls still catch day-long sun, and are tucked out of the cold wind that blows over the plains directly above the canyon rim.

“I’ve been there on days when it’s 35 degrees, but it’s calm and the sun is shining, and I’m climbing in shorts and a T-shirt,” Tom says. “It actually feels like it’s 70 degrees against the cliff wall.”

With more than 600 climbing routes along seven miles of cliff walls, if this canyon were in Nebraska or Iowa, it’d be an epicenter of climbing for the entire state. Its relative location in Colorado, though, makes the clientele a small, dedicated group, many of whom have been introduced to the place by Tom and Mike, and often through interactions with them on the climbing web site MountainProject.com. And back when Tom, Mike, Tod and Scott started climbing here, most of the people you know had never heard of the Internet.

“We were like kids in a candy store when we found this place,” Tom says. They were working jobs, not so much “careers.” They’d come down to Castlewood half the days of the week, throw a bunch of ropes from the top of the canyon rim, and try to find climbable lines. While wearing tights. Well, it was the ’80s. Mike had a pair with black and white zebra stripes.

“Tom never wore Lycra, but Scott and Tod and I did,” Mike says. “We used to stop by that old general store in Franktown, and those old cowboys would be like, ‘What the hell?’” But they climbed hard in those tights.

“We sandbagged everything,” Mike says, meaning they gave climbs artificially easy ratings. If you can climb 5.11 somewhere else, you might be surprised how difficult that same rating feels at Castlewood.

After the initial fervor of the early years, both Tom and Mike were drawn away. Tom settled down and got married, and though his wife, Nancy, went climbing with him a few times while they were dating, she hasn’t gone since they got married. “The old baitand- switch,” Tom jokes. For five years, he didn’t get out climbing that much, settling down in contrast to his days of hopping trains and hitchhiking from Minnesota to climb in the Tetons and other places in the West. Mike’s family came along and he got away from climbing for most of the ’90s, getting out on the rock only a handful of times every year.

The men who built Castlewood had put on a few pounds and a few years when they returned. Although he still top-ropes 5.12s — strong for a climber at any age — Tom says he can’t even get off the ground on some of the routes he put up in the late- ’80s and early-’90s.

“Over on Beta Slave [5.10c], the crux is when the last bolt is four feet below your feet,” Mike says. “I’ve done that route dozens and dozens of times – it’s my route. But I won’t get on it anymore. It’s too scary.” Careers and responsibilities have put some of the bolder days behind them.

“It’s more just the enjoyment of being outside now,” Mike says. “It keeps me feeling young, getting out there and climbing. It’s when I see a picture of myself, I feel old.”

“Your reflection isn’t 25 anymore, but you always think you are,” Tom says. “I lose a lot of strength, flexibility, got 20 more pounds on me, but I’ve got 38 years of technique.”

Mike hasn’t retired his hopes of climbing hard routes, but he sees more of his potential in Chloe, who’s been climbing since she was four years old, and maybe by the time she’s 18, with 14 years of climbing experience, she’ll be able to climb Wild America, the 5.12c route Mike bolted but couldn’t quite get up.

Tom’s got grandkids, through marriage, and although he’s taken a couple of them climbing, he thinks they’re more interested in just being teenagers right now.

“They’ve always known me doing this,” Tom says. “To them, it’s probably mainstream if Grandpa’s doing it.”

Frequent contributor Brendan Leonard lives in Denver.