The board-flat West Rim Trail heads south from the Gorge Bridge, dead-ending after nine miles at a BLM parking area hard off New Mexico 567. It makes for a great run, especially in winter, when the sun’s anemic and a cooling breeze glides over the west mesa. A five-minute hike from this lot takes you to the Dead Cholla Wall, that rim-top progenitor of Gorge sport climbing.

It was Ed Jaramillo and Cayce Weber who got the Gorge ball rolling, in 1989. Boating guides and ski patrollers, the pair sought sports action close to Taos for the mud seasons. Soon they and crew had installed 20 short (40-to-60-foot) climbs on good, red-brown basalt, following technical faces and arêtes with subtle moves to flat edges and blind pockets. The climbers kept Dead Cholla on the DL — only word of mouth or the Xerox’ed, stapled guide Taos Dead Bolt Society (TDBS), kept behind the counter at Taos Mountain Outfitters, got you here. The climbing scene was so small then, the guide listed the locals’ names and phone numbers. Today, the cliff boasts 37 routes, the gaps having been filled in.

Dead Cholla is a good cliff, but it’s by no means great. Still, from here the vista opens on the junction of the Rio Grande and the Rio Pueblo. Hard above the Taos Junction Bridge, the eye moves south to an unbroken, quarter-mile-long cliffline with an upside-down bowl on its right end. This is the Vista Verde Crag and the Bat Cave, which are really what modern Taos sport climbing is all about.

Taos would have next-to-zero modern sport — and for that matter, trad — climbing without the indefatigable Jay Foley. Now 44, Foley moved to Taos in winter 1992, lured by Jaramillo, whom he’d met in the Valley. (The two got rippin’ drunk on the Mountain Room beer Jaramillo had earned for stripping a new rope left by an inexperienced party on Lost Arrow Spire.) A onetime YOSAR boy, Foley began climbing at the Shawangunks, only a half-hour from the boarding school in Poughkeepsie he was shipped to after flunking out in Manhattan. Today, Foley, with his wife, Donna Longo, runs the guiding outfit Mountain Skills, based out of their tidy adobe near Arroyo Seco. The pair has a daughter, Milan, 5, just old enough to be bugging her dad to go climbing.

Foley is Taos’ resident hardman, wiry, friendly, and a talented, efficient all-around rocksmith who bears no small resemblance to Chuck Norris. Longo says Foley’s been mistaken for the actor everywhere from New Zealand, to Italy, to Colorado. Once, when the couple attended a Willie Nelson concert at Red Rocks Amphitheater, the opening act Jerry Jeff Walker announced, “We’re glad to have Chuck Norris out here in the audience.” Foley has even found himself fleeing camera-wielding fans of “Walker, Texas Ranger.”

A 5.13 climber, Foley tore through all the routes in TDBS his first full year in town. By then, the Jaramillo/Weber crew was phasing out, and the motivated Foley found himself near partnerless, dead-ended. The only way to keep climbing, it seemed, was to put up routes. Foley had had his first taste of new-routing on his, Al “Slab Dude” Swenson and Brian Warshaw’s 1991/’92, four-day first ascent of The Chief (VI 5.12-), the first route up the remote Yasoo Dome, in Yosemite’s Tenaya Canyon. Foley hadn’t been especially enraptured, but in Taos, he realized, “If I want to climb something hard and something new, I’ve got to put it up — because it ain’t here.” The gorge seemed like the place.

First up was the quality Mystery Crag, across canyon and downstream from Dead Cholla. Foley, with his partner the tomato farmer Paul Judges, secured permission from a landowner — a Vietman vet — to drive across his property. Things were going well, with the climbers slamming in anchors atop a handful of routes, before the landowner, for unknown reasons, “just turned” says Foley. The climbers had found the cliff during a flyover with Judges’ father, Harvey, manager of the Taos Airport; now the landowner, known for shooting at helicopters zipping by, had denied rim-top access.

Says Foley. “Every route we put up, I’d be, like, ‘This sucks, this is bullshit.’ It felt like work, and I just wanted to climb.” Meticulous, trad-headed, and new to the bolting game, Foley would deliberate for hours about each placement — “We were too in our own heads: should we even do it? Is it even right?” he says — sometimes vacillating so long that Long would bring a magazine to read during belay duty. In 1995, Foley and Judges plucked the prime splitter Kid in a Candy Store (5.11) and an adjacent line at the Wild and Scenic Area west of Questa, where 30-meter rope stretchers follow intimidating corners and split overhanging walls. But soon thereafter Judges drifted into “naked bouldering,” says Foley, later moving to Albuquerque, so Foley again found himself partnerless. At times, he considered leaving Taos.

From the mid-1990s onward, Foley recruited a series of partners, mostly the teenage kids of Taos’ original hippies. Some of Foley et al.’s efforts then included filling in the blanks at Wild and Scenic. But Taos through the fin de siecle lacked the route density to lure visitors. Sure, the volcanic conglomerate an hour southwest at El Rito had gone gangbusters, with its 60-odd sport climbs on steep cobbles. But that was an hour away — in another county. And sure, the locals Tim Naylor and Mike Freebourne had circa 2000 started things rolling in the Arsenal-steep Bat Cave, home to about a dozen routes. And sure, there were even a handful of completed cracks (Weber, Sheftel) left of the Bat Cave, on what’s now known as the Vista Verde Crag. But nothing had crystallized.

Then, in 2002/’03, Foley, with support from various partners, developed a chossy-looking but ultimately climbable south-facing cliff in Arroyo Hondo: the Solar Asylum, devised as a training ground for a trip to Spain. With 13 climbs, three of those 5.12, this unassuming “pile” (as Foley calls it) was to point the way toward the basalt revolution in the last three years, the one that’s appended more than 200 new climbs onto the 106 Gorge routes from Foley’s 2005 guidebook. It showed that, with diligent cleaning and an eye for a line, potential was nearly limitless.