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There’s a sentiment floating around—at least in the circles I run in these days—that
dirtbagging is dead. Parking lots are full of Sprinter vans. State-of-the-art climbing gyms are everywhere. Climbers carry their route topos on $1,000 smartphones. It’s true: There is more money in climbing now than there used to be.
A few weeks ago, though, I was reminded that the soul of dirtbagging is still alive and well.
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I needed a belay for a project. A friend rallied a random stranger he’d met in a coffee shop to come meet me at the crag. It was an incredibly windy day, with dust whipping around my van as I pulled into the parking lot. A bearded man rolled in a few minutes behind me on a small motorcycle, wearing a scruffy haul bag and a ripped-up puffy jacket. He pulled off his helmet, revealing his face, which was covered from the nose down by a scrap of baggy fabric. Without missing a beat, he launched into a story about how the high winds were throwing gravel from the roadside into his face.
“I almost had to bail, man—until I realized I could use my underwear to shield my face.” This was my belayer, apparently.
As we climbed together, we talked about his life. He’d once been a hired hand on a sailing trip through the Northwest Passage. Now, he was working as a carpenter building a home out of hempcrete, an all-natural insulation that’s resistant to mold and fire (here’s an example). He showed me pictures of his current residence: an old-fashioned trolley he’d built out and parked on national forest land.
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“A few months ago, there were like 20 of us out there,” he said. “The thing I love about this place is the community.”
I spent that evening in the trolley. It was one of the coziest, most thoughtfully handmade spaces I’d ever been in. It had a table with twisted driftwood legs, velvet handsewn curtains, an old-fashioned typewriter he used for journaling. Everything was made from scavenged materials that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill.
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Other camper-dwellers wandered in. One brought huge bags of food rescued from a dumpster: coffee, fried chicken, loaves of bread, random chip dips. They cheered as they unpacked the bounty. Someone quoted Eric Beck, saying, “At either end of the social spectrum, there lies a leisure class.” They showered in a waterfall and laughed a lot.
I couldn’t help but think they had really figured it out. They seemed to have freed themselves from the stressful trappings of our materialistic world. To me, this is dirtbagging at its essence. It reminded me of how I lived in my early 20s, and I felt lucky to revisit it for an evening.
When I think about the future for my kids, what I want most is for them to find joy and purpose in the way that’s most genuine to them. But honestly, I think a couple of years living the dirtbag life might be more valuable than most college degrees. Those who learn to be happy with very little can, with the right mindset, be free to pursue other values in life: community, creativity, simplicity and spending time outside. That’s the success I want to see for my kids, the kind that’s deeply real, if not conventional.
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