Conversations with Climbers: Unpleasant Jobs

What is the most unpleasant job you’ve ever worked to sustain a climbing lifestyle?

Cedar Wright

I’ve done some weird stuff for money. I used to make bat houses for this crazy guy. I shoveled manure out of horse stalls. I sanded plastic climbing holds. My first job as a kid was working at Fosters Freeze. I huffed all the nitrous out of a couple cases of whipped cream, and I was subsequently fired.

Chris Weidner

Landscaping for condo complexes in winter in the Seattle area. It was always cold, wet, and depressing.

Heidi Wirtz

Killing crabs up in Northern California. Not very fun! I was sad for the crabs and worried I might lose a finger. 

Will Stanhope

I planted trees in northern B.C. when I was maybe 19. It’s a classic Canadian summer job. I came back to Squamish with this gnarly overuse injury in my wrist. I couldn’t open the door to my car when I got back.

Jesse Huey

Easily hanging Christmas Lights. It isn’t that terrible of a job, but when you do it for 45 days straight, it is absolutely awful.

Jon Glassberg

I’ve washed dishes, waited tables, done construction jobs, worked in a print house, done mindless computer work, been a route setter, literally anything I could do to make enough money to climb or save up enough to quit and climb. Other than the job I have now, all the others have been unpleasant because they took away from climb time.

Paige Claassen

Every November and December, I help my husband pack eating grapes during the grape harvest in Namibia—we work 16-hour days, six days a week. But it’s a good balance to climbing because it’s super high stress and your brain is on fire for two months, then we get to go back to climbing. 

Matt Segal

When I was spending the summers at Applebee Dome in the Bugaboos of B.C., Will Stanhope and I would have to change the poop barrels whenever they needed. That was literally a pretty “shitty” job.

Read more Conversations with Climbers.