Suffer the Lizards: Losing Our Religion to Southern Splitters 

Spring hits the South with a vengeance. If it’s not the tornadoes ripping through Tennessee tearing limb from limb, then it’s the persistence of new leaves glowing in green confusion so strong the eye is overcome by the urgency of it all. Around the corner of this season is the impending summer. With it will come the puckish heat. And those zillions of green leaves? Humidity so thick, as they say ‘round here, you can cut the air with a knife. Climbing happens in all kinds of weather. But today all is calm, cool, and good.

We’re here at the Tennessee Wall, twenty or so miles up meandering river from Chattanooga, a day after the storm has passed. Downed trees and limbs litter the side of the road. In the parking lot, the far-flung license plates attest to the crag’s growing popularity as a destination: Colorado, New Mexico, Kentucky, and some strange government plate of unknown, perhaps nefarious origin. Our own Georgia plate joins the fray soon to be joined by Chattanooga local/Colorado transplant, Luke Laeser’s Tennessee plates.

Tennessee Wall, or T-Wall as it’s affectionately known (and with a whole lotta love thrown in for good measure), is a crag that defies comparison. But here’s one anyway: the Indian Creek of the South. What the comparison lacks in imagination it more than makes up for it in, you guessed it, splitters. Both are sandstone, too, although T-Wall’s stone is bullet-hard and blockier. You could even say there’s few million years of geological inbreeding that separate it from its older Mormon second cousin twice removed, though a good geologist would wince at that description. So with age comes the furry wisdom of a coon dog, I can almost hear a moonshiner whisper…and roofs.

Actually the affectionate local name makes a lot of sense, describing a lot of the routes at T-Wall (warning: terribly bad pun ahead) to a T. Without putting too fine a point on it, one climbs the T in essence, running up the stem of the letter in a clean crack (often a dihedral) only to run up against a roof (the stiffer climbs tackle the roof head-on; the more moderate circumnavigate them) before topping out on top of the good consonant.