A Paranoid Trip into Arizona's Uncharted Bouldering

“I'm gonna slit your throat open...”  says the deeply distorted basso on my voicemail, one week before a mag-sponsored bouldering trip to Flagstaff, Arizona. “You better think twice about bringing Climbing down here. That’s right... close your blinds... turn off your lights... but I still have you in my crosshairs.” The message ends.
I had heard about the notoriously xenophobic Flagstaff locals, so I’m not too shocked. None would return my phone calls while I dug around for info on the area, prior to my fall 2006 visit. Hell, I’d even read their nonsense on the Net. As one message-board pundit wrote:

“dear klmbng… fuk [sic] you. why don’t you write a piece about some other place that courts you [sic] kind of over hyped [sic], promotional bullshit.”  

Then the phone rings. I pick up and hear someone breathing heavily on the other end. I pause a beat, worried, and then the caller cracks up.
“Yo, dawg, it’s me,” says my friend Nelson Carayannis, a scruffy Greek kid who spent the last two years living out of his Toyota pickup. “Did I scare you?” He laughs more. “Sorry. …”

A few days later, Nelson, Jody Hansen, Eric Scully, Keith Ladzinski, and I will travel to Flagstaff to tour as many of the city’s off-the-beaten-path bouldering areas as we can in five days. We’ll learn that Flagstaff holds enough rock to accommodate all the visitors to Hueco Tanks in a single season. Even if they brought a couple crashpads, a mangy dog, a 12 pack of skunk piss, a camera crew, and a ghetto blaster, you’d still never know anyone was there. Flag locals know it, and some don’t want to talk about it.