None of the climbing at T-wall is a giveaway. Even a 5.7 or 5.8, what little there are here, can feel a tad bit sandbagged — a Southern tradition, spicy as the BBQ sauce on a stringy flank of possum meat. Reaching a crux after cruising easier ground, one suddenly becomes humbled like Ned Beatty in Deliverance. Whether or not you “squeal like a pig” though is entirely up to you, but you still have to pull the steep to reach the chains. And unlike the sporty Red River Gorge or Foster Falls (aka Fiery Gizzard; now there’s some color) up the road, T-Wall is decidedly, proudly, resolutely trad without the need for overly fried adjectives. Just fiddle in a piece and climb. It’ll usually hold.

(Full disclosure: The War of Northern Aggression may long be over, but the Southern stereotypes for which I am guilty come from the spite of finding myself an uprooted and slightly homesick Californian. My apologies. Won’t happen again if I can help it. But you see, my affection for Southern culture, be it black, white, or a hell of a lot of color, has only increased in my short stint here. Sadly, though, this color is being drained by the vanillanizing forces of bland TV and blander still, Wal-Marts. I wish it wasn’t so.)

Luke pulls around the corner in his white 96 Toyota Corolla. Though I’ve never met him in person until now, we’ve kept up a fairly consistent email exchange for over a year. Luke is the Online Editor for which these pages owe their due. He walks over to the back of our station wagon where my wife and I are gathering our gear. Thanks to our electronic missives there’s little need for introductions. It’s more a matter of catching up and seeing if the digital version of ourselves matches our expectations. And Luke in the flesh is just as amusing and clever as he is in the words that appeared in my Gmail.

Below the hem of his shorts are a set of powerful legs that propel him up the steep, three-quarters of a mile trail toward the base of the cliff-line. Through the awakening trees we go on the well-worn trail, talking between breaths about everything under this Southern sun trying to beat its way through the thick skies.

A little more than a year ago, Luke and Nathaniel Walker climbed fifty T-Wall routes in 18 hours of continuous climbing. Being that most routes here are between 80 and 100 feet, that works out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 feet worth of climbing. Like doing the Nose of El Cap and the Northwest Face of Half Dome in a day minus the approaches, descents, and the mad rush through the Ditch. Beginning on a February day in 2007 by headlamp, the duo didn’t finish until 2 a.m. the following morning. Somewhere amongst all the go-for-broke marathon, Luke redpointed Mrs. Socrates (5.12a), a thin, finger-eating crack. “I was inspired by the 24 Hours of Horseshoe Hell in Arkansas and since all the routes at T-Wall are awesome, Nathaniel and I thought we should overdose on them one day, so we did,” Luke says, as we reach the bottom of the cliff and cross a creek, the waterfall above pouring 100-feet down.