Why America’s “Most Gatekept” Climbing Area is Becoming More Popular

If you’ve heard anything about the climbing in Index, Washington, you’ve probably heard that it’s hard. The strongest person you know raves about it; the hardwomen you met bivying in the boulders behind Camp 4 head there as soon as Yosemite gets too hot. Alex Honnold says it’s home to the world’s hardest 5.11d, Natural Log Cabin. (And that’s not even the hardest 11d there!)

But some of Index’s strongest locals are at the forefront of efforts to make the area more accessible, too. They are establishing moderate routes, making the area easier to navigate with signs and guidebooks, and working to develop an amicable relationship between transient climbers and local residents. Stamati Anagnostou—the founder of the Index Climbers’ Coalition, a visionary route developer, and the author of one of Index’s hardest gear lines, The Quad Crack (5.14a)—is leading the way.

Anagnostou, who began climbing in Index in 2014, embodies the imperative to try hard but stay humble. When I first met him at the base of Godzilla (5.9), one of the Lower Town Wall’s most popular routes, he cut an unsuspecting figure in faded black skinny jeans and a floral button-down. We got to chatting—Anagnostou never seems to tire of meeting visitors to his home crag—and I was surprised when he grinned with recognition at my mention of Endless Skies (5.12d), a seldom-repeated sport climb located two pitches up in an overgrown corner of the Upper Walls. I asked if he’d been on the route. He said yes, but didn’t elaborate. Later, scouring the internet for beta, I’d recognize his name on the route’s Mountain Project page. He had equipped the route and competed with Michal Rynkiewicz for the first ascent.

Anagnostou doesn’t just surround himself with 5.14 crushers and longtime locals. Eager to learn about my progress on his obscure route, he invited me and a few friends to his house for dinner. He’s lived in the 150-person hamlet of Index since he ditched his shoddily built-out Ford Ranger in 2023, and the four-room clapboard bungalow he shares with his partner, Huck, is furnished cozily in greens and browns. He’s a generous dinner host, tall and rangy in the galley kitchen. He has a high-pitched staccato laugh that erupts easily and doesn’t match his slow, considered way of speaking. He’s passionate about this town: he writes for the local newspaper; he and Huck run community clean-up events; they’ve established a climbers’ collective who help organize an annual climbing festival. Whenever he isn’t climbing, it seems, he’s thinking about ways to preserve his beloved climbing area.

Locals—especially people who have spent their whole lives in Index, or whose families have lived there for generations—are often skeptical of visitors, and Anagnostou can’t blame them. It’s hard to sympathize with the tourists who vandalize the public restrooms, spray paint trees on the UTW trails, or speed down Index Avenue to beat the traffic on Highway 2. Locals are also wary of alien opportunists looking to buy up the town’s very limited housing and develop short-term rentals, driving up the cost of living and stifling the growth of a local community. Understandably, many of Index’s residents want to see a benefit from the uptick in tourism, which has exploded in part due to the publication of a climbing guidebook in 2017 and the publicity that Index climbing has received in publications like this one. So when locals have felt like visitors are offering little to the area except for the graffiti and litter they leave behind, discontent has boiled into yelling matches at town council meetings.

In Index’s early days, “developers balked at grading their routes 5.12 for fear of getting downgraded,” Anagnostou says. Anything hard got 11+, and many of those grades haven’t changed to meet contemporary standards. (The 5.12s, 13s, and 14s are graded a bit more honestly.) So if you come to Index to chase grades, you might be sorely disappointed.

This sandbagging, Anagnostou reasons, might contribute to Index climbers’ reputation for gatekeeping. Not to mention that neither the climbing style nor the environment lend themselves to successful short trips. During the drier months, May through July, it rains about every two days. You might find your project covered in fast-growing moss that takes days to scrub off. And you’ll need to get used to trusting smeary feet on the fine-grained granite. So, on the rare days when the weather is good and the walls are dry—the theory goes—perhaps the locals are a little crankier about sharing the crag than their neighbors in, say, Squamish or Smith Rock.

Even so, climbers have flocked to Index as word has gotten out about the area’s dreamy high-friction granite, and Anagnostou welcomes the area’s growing popularity with more sincerity than I’d expected. He sees growth as an engine for route development and attention from conservation groups that might help protect local climbing. “Engagement drives conservation, and there are so many people doing work to further climbing in Index [right now].” Index climbers’ reputation for gatekeeping, he says, is dated and overblown: “I don’t think we really ever experienced the thing of Index being hush-hush.” Instead, the close-knit community he found there in 2014 welcomed him quickly.

Anagnostou may very well benefit from the “strong-climber effect”—those pushing hard grades, or developing new routes (especially if they’re men, and white), are usually welcomed into established climbing communities pretty quickly, even small communities in out-of-the-way areas. What about everyone else?

I can weigh in on the ordinary Index climber’s experience here. My credentials? I’m pretty solid around 5.10 on gear, and I project bolted 12s. My footwork is underdeveloped after years of climbing in the gym and on sandstone, and I start to panic when my last piece is about knee-high. I am also a woman, who usually travels alone, which means I don’t necessarily “fit” into male-dominated climbing areas—and I certainly don’t blow everyone away with my climbing prowess. Usually, I have to make a focused effort to find community when I arrive in a new place.

In Index, I made friends almost immediately. It helps that there’s a single parking lot, the Wagon Wheel, where most traveling climbers camp. Every evening, climbers—a heartening number of them women traveling alone, like me—would emerge from campers, vans, and built-out sedans to share dinner and chat. Finding climbing partners was easy and spontaneous, whether I wanted to try hard or excavate a dirty 5.7 with a wire brush. The locals, like Anagnostou, were welcoming; the weekend visitors were respectful. Developers invited people to try their new climbs with handwritten signs posted in the parking areas and at the trailhead.

Index’s reputation for gatekeeping remains, but climbers who frequent the area don’t seem to take it very seriously. In recent years, I’ve started seeing bright yellow “Index is choss” stickers on Thules and Sprinters from Squamish to Joshua Tree. The message is tongue-and-cheek, a parody of the secretive, selfish climbers that I have yet to find in Index.

Like the other climbers I met in Index, Anagnostou has a thoroughly considered climbing philosophy. Perhaps all the thinking that happens here has to do with the moody weather (183.7 rainy days in 2024!), which drives climbers inside to consider their sport on days when they can’t actually practice it. Maybe the philosophizing comes in place of blind ambition, which is stifled by the area’s baffling grades.

His development ambitions aren’t solely connected to his personal climbing goals. In our conversations, Anagnostou challenged the norm around first ascents—that commonly accepted rule that if you equip a route, you get to do it first, no matter how long it takes. Ben Gilkison bolted the anchor on The Quad Crack. Following Anagnostou’s first ascent of the route his friend rediscovered and equipped, Anagnostou is considering opening his own routes up to other first ascentionists. “I’m not an amazing climber or anything; it’s going to take me a long time to do some of these things,” he said of the handful of routes he equipped recently, the easiest of which is likely 5.13+. “Do I want to close them off to the world for the next five years so I can have the feeling of doing it first?”

Still, a few routes are too inspiring for Anagnostou to relinquish quite yet. Right now, he has a few projects that he still hopes to climb first. He grows excited telling me about The Slug Within, a sport route with a scrunchy roof traverse on smearing feet and directional edges, and Cosmic Dancer, a technical face of charcoal granite he’s still working on. But to unlock the full potential of Index’s upper walls, he’ll need to enlist someone stronger. “Ryan [Hoover] and I accidentally bolted maybe a 5.15, a 35-degree shield for 40 feet that’s just slopers. It doesn’t look possible to me, but I bet someone could do it.” On future development prospects, he added, “There’s potential for stuff that’s the hardest in Washington, maybe the hardest on the West Coast.”

Anagnostou, Gilkison, and a handful of other influential developers are driving this shift in Index’s ethic toward bolting for safety, establishing more sport climbs, and publicizing new routes, which Anagnostou hopes will draw the emerging generation of elite climbers to the Northwest. “It’s an act of trust to let people get on your routes,” he admits, but he’s excited to draw strong climbers to Index by bolting routes beyond his own ability.

If you find yourself in Index, Anagnostou and his fellow developers hope you will bring a good deal of humility and a sense of adventure. And, maybe, a wire brush.

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