Why Arkansas is the U.S.’s Next Sport Climbing Mecca

Dawn begins to break just in time for us to heed in earnest the road signs announcing McAlester, the last town until Fort Smith offering anything approximating a reasonable breakfast. A carful of climbers and I got a Texas alpine start out of Dallas a few hours prior, crossing the Red River under the cover of night and passing a fake sunrise emanating garishly from the megawatt neon of Durant’s Choctaw casino. Like most of our ilk rip-roaring north on 77, our trajectory bends toward the sandstone cliffs of Arkansas, the de facto home for sport climbers across the South-central United States. Flatlanders across Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana, and large swaths of Texas regularly make their way to the Natural State for some of the best single-pitch climbing between the Rockies and the Appalachian foothills. For a disproportionate number of visiting climbers, the home crag has codified around one location: Horseshoe Canyon Ranch.

Its popularity isn’t exactly anomalous. Best known for 24 Hours of Horseshoe Hell, the enduro-climbing competition/un-competition described as the “Burning Man of Climbing,” HCR has much to offer the less masochistic weekend warrior. The camping is easy, the approaches practically non-existent. There’s even WiFi and showers, and you’d be hard-pressed to find another crag so densely packed with good-quality routes at a variety of grades. It’s a gateway crag, about as close to a climbing gym as you’ll find outside.

Despite Horseshoe’s dominance of the regional climber zeitgeist, the Jasper hotspot is hardly the only crag in North Central Arkansas. Far from it. The same 300 million-year-old collision of the North and South American continents that gave rise to HCR’s cliffband also gifted the rest of Newton County with miles upon miles of bulletproof sandstone, and those willing to venture outside Horseshoe’s gates will be rewarded with a nearly endless supply of five-star routes. And what can be found in the soon-to-be-released guidebook, which includes 15 new crags, is only the beginning.

Candy Mountain

Candy Mountain is one of the more popular areas in the Sam’s Throne system of crags. After sticking the landing on the easily-missed turn-off, we traipse our way through a leaky canopy toward Candy, having a real will-they-or-won’t-they relationship with our raincoats, the air still thick with the vestiges of a storm system now past. After a few minutes of general muckery, the trees break and the ground turns sheer, revealing a vast valley covered in a densely mottled blanket of Maple and Sumac, Hickory and Sweet Gum, and all manner of Oak. For a brief moment, the sun burns pure and undiffused, and the hills cast stark shadows against one another, and the yellows and crimsons and the fluorescent pinks and oranges that feel more native to the tropical fish in some far off coral reef than to Arkansas shine all the more in contrast.

We take a ladder down into the heart of the forest and follow the cliff line eastward toward Candy’s more classic lines like Gracious Grant, a 5.10d that only feels the grade if you can climb a number grade or two higher, but stopping short to explore some newer climbs.

Until a few years ago, the wall we are in front of sat untouched, shockingly so. The seventy feet of off-vertical climbing ending with an impressive roof cap—a pretty standard adornment for Arkansas sandstone—is some of the most uniquely featured rock in the area. The story goes that the wall wasn’t believed to be climbable, until a developer out of Montana, Eric Kozera, saw the potential and made it known his desire to put up a few routes. This lit something of a fire under the collective asses of the local developers, who set to work bolting what would end up becoming pretty classic lines, in particular Abba-Zaba (5.12d)—a series of slopey crimps that work around an otherwise blank arete, which Kozera ended up nabbing the FA on—and Kozzybear (5.11c) named after the Montanan as either an homage or a friendly jape, depending on who you ask.

The Tomb

The Tomb consists of a wave of ash-gray sandstone cresting 80 feet overhead, growing charcoal-black and more foreboding as it rises. It is sublime in the truest sense, awesome and terrifying. A steep and powerful choose-your-own-adventure of link-ups, The Tomb reads like a reverse-Plinko board of 5.12+s and 5.13s, with the proudest line—The Undertaker (5.13b), ending in a bouldery compression crux up a refrigerator-sized block of stone—going right up the belly of the beast.

We’re out here at the recommendation of Cole Fennel, a climber, developer, and the author of the Arkansas guidebook going on 15 years now. His is the Sisyphean task of keeping track of the ever-increasing number of routes being bolted across the state, but whatever frustration may come with the endless boulder-rolling gets “way overwhelmed by my psyche for Arkansas climbing,” he would later tell me. Fennel and Arkansas Rock Climbing Coalition Vice President Andrew Blann are already walking their way up what constitutes as a warm-up out here, The Third Day, a flawless mix of perfect knee-bars, big moves on big holds, and improbable features (do rock horns normally jut out of huecos?). The 5.11a/d (depending on which of the pair you ask) will make its debut in the newest edition of the guide, out in 2024.

Resident Evil (5.12c) is the day’s main course. Starting with a crimpy crux sequence that’s an early test of your mettle, the ever-steepening terrain demands every last ounce of power endurance, culminating in one last huck-and-pray-your-shoulder-holds dyno through the roof. But to call the route “burly” feels pejorative. The moves are big and powerful, yet there’s a grace to them, requiring equal parts elegance and precision to work in concert with the pure athleticism.

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Our asses suitably handed to us—or maybe it was my own kvetching about all this overhung climbing—Fennel mentions that there’s a newer crag just down the road that he could show us, full of vertical soon-to-be classics. After a few minutes of trekking—and a frigid river crossing—we head deeper and deeper into a wooded area until we come up to a sheer face of the same ash-gray sandstone, similar in height as The Tomb though never succumbing to its steepening darkness. The walls here instead glow with yellow-green lichen that eschews any sort of artsy turn of phrase and are best described as “backlit Mountain Dew.” Save for a few reasonably spaced bolts and glue-ins, there’s no sign that humanity has ever made it out this way. And indeed, the spiders have already reclaimed many of the routes for themselves, an indication of exactly how infrequent visitors are to the area. Fennel thinks that will change once the crag becomes public knowledge in the next edition of the guide.

The economics of venturing this far into the wilderness dictate that the climbing must be stellar to justify all the trouble it takes to get here, especially with Arkansas’s glut of easier-to-access classics. (A taste for adventure certainly helps, too.) This crag is easily worth the price of admission. It’s some of the purest vertical climbing in the state. If The Tomb is the Ozark Red River Gorge, the analogy goes, this is the New. There are techy dihedrals going at a variety of grades—Homegrown Jihad (5.11a) follows perfect movement through a corner seam that’s a surefire must-do, and Stem Cell (5.12a) is a cerebral back-and-forth of techy footwork with a surprisingly dynamic crux—and rows and rows of vertical routes pulling on bomber crimps.

The Invasion Wall in Cowell

The Invasion Wall in Cowell is one of the southernmost crags in the Newton County area and the logical entry point for those moving northward. The crag’s namesake route is a 5.12d power-endurance testpiece that works its way through underclings and honeycomb crimps, with a campus start for good measure. The Invasion, like most all routes on the wall, is deceptively overhung and rewards a ferocious style of climbing.

Too beaten for any redpoint burns on The Invasion, we girded ourselves for the last hoorah, Embrace The Martian (5.12b). It’s part of a shared start complex of routes that branch into a stick-figure hand progressing in difficulty pinky to thumb, from 5.12a to 5.13a; Embrace The Martian is the big F-U. After the off-vertical start and a no-hands rest at the third bolt, the route traverses left through jugs and heel hooks on a horizontal ledge before kicking back into a series of dynamic foot-cut cruxes separated by a thank-god rail. It’s monkey-bars-style fun, necessitating swinging and dangling and jumping.

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To be driftless is maybe the best way to understand what makes Arkansas climbing so compelling. You could, of course, get your money’s worth laser-focusing on a single hard pitch in your preferred style, but the real experiential nature can’t be defined by tick lists alone. Go to Arkansas and hit a crag, chat up a local and have them point you in the direction of another one not far off, maybe one of the crags that aren’t published yet.

Locals here are quick to tell you, “Well, it’s no insert-famous-crag,” and maybe they’re right, though not by much. But what Arkansas has over other sport climbing areas is, well, everything. The climbing here is styleless, because it is all styles. You want burly overhangs, they have it. You want cerebral and delicate, it’s there too. Perfect crimps, pockets, underclings, slopers, knee bars, heel hooks, high feet, big dynos, whatever gets you out of bed, it’s there and it’s the crux of an incredible route.

This is only the beginning, though in truth, it has been going on for a decade-plus, and climbers in the region are starting to take note. As long as there are folks floating rivers and venturing deeper into unexplored wildernesses in search of untouched rock, the list of five-star climbs will only continue to grow. There are even rumors of the state’s first 5.15 lurking just around the bend, some futuristic line that will certainly garner attention from elite American ascensionists. But peering too far into the future overlooks the present, and it burns bright. The Arkansas explosion is here, and we’re lucky enough to bask in it.

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