The Valley Boy

I. Base Camp

Sometime after midnight on June 6, Grant Cline finished up his shift washing dishes at the Yosemite Lodge. Much of his time was spent in the “pot room,” a steel trap of a room recessed deep within the Lodge’s Base Camp food court and surrounded by commercial sinks and Labrador retriever-sized stacks of trays. Grant turned 18 just the month before and was happy to finally have a job in the Valley. Now officially a man, he still retained his boyish good looks—sandy, overgrown hair with floppy bangs and rosy cheeks that often betrayed him. According to his mother, Grant was a bad liar.

He biked back to an Aramark employee housing area called Boystown, navigating the Valley by headlamp. Or maybe he didn’t use one. The night of June 6th had a waxing gibbous moon of about 80% illumination—more than half lit, but less than full. Sunlight and moonlight are tricky in the Valley. Its walls take up more than half the sky, and sugar pine and Douglas fir trees filter much of the light. Whether Grant used a headlamp or not is lost, but he was no stranger to navigating the night. He rarely slept, often going on climbing missions alone at one or two o’clock in the morning. “Some nights he’d come home, though,” his roommate Kelvin Pittman tells me.

All Boystown beds are thin mattresses rolled over springy twin-sized frames. Grant’s was easily found with posters of Alex Honnold, the Stonemasters, and Lynn Hill right above it. He kept his gear clipped neatly in various places and had random piles of Climbing Magazine issues. His favorite stories were the old Yosemite articles highlighting the scene in Camp 4.

Grant crawled into bed a little after 1:00 a.m. on June 6 and accidentally woke Kelvin up. “He’d been at work, and I was like, ‘How are you doing?’” Kelvin recalls. Grant read his Royal Robbins book for a while—shining his headlamp through his Nalgene to make sure he didn’t keep Kelvin up. Kelvin figured Grant was going to sleep for a couple of hours and then go climb, like usual.

“I was tired, so I didn’t ask him if he had any plans,” Kelvin says. “Then I fell back asleep. I woke up a few hours later, and he was gone.”

Grant left to do what he called “free solo recon” on Royal Arches (5.7 A0; 2,000 ft), a Yosemite multi-pitch classic that he’d scouted once before, a few nights earlier. The first time, he free soloed up to the pendulum on pitch nine in the middle of the night, and then downclimbed the route, having slept on a ledge somewhere on the way down. On June 6, Grant’s plan was to free solo higher than the pendulum, and then downclimb the route again (when climbing Royal Arches, the pendulum rope can be tucked on the far side). Nobody saw him leave that morning, and he wasn’t seen for the rest of the day.

Two days later, on the morning of June 8, Grant’s neighbor and climbing partner, Chris Guzman, knocked on Grant’s tent cabin door. They had plans to climb up to Dolt Tower on El Capitan, but Grant wasn’t answering. His bike wasn’t there, either. Chris called Grant’s phone and left voicemails and texts, but he wasn’t responding. Finally, thinking he’d mixed his schedule up, Chris biked over to Grant’s work at the Lodge. Grant’s boss told Chris that Grant had been a no-show for two days now. “But [the boss] hadn’t bothered to tell anybody,” Chris says.

Chris, extremely worried at this point, remembers Grant telling him that he was going to scout out the Arches after work on Friday. He found Kelvin in Boystown, but Kelvin didn’t know where Grant was and hadn’t seen him for a day or two. But that wasn’t so strange: Grant didn’t sleep. He was always either scrubbing dishes until 1:00 a.m. or climbing. And Kelvin and his work schedules never synced up. If Grant didn’t have the day off, Kelvin would only see him for a ten-minute period in the middle of the night, between the dish scrubbing, reading, and climbing. But when Chris told Kelvin that Grant had been no-show at work for two days, Kelvin immediately felt his stomach tighten.

“That’s not right,” he thought. “That’s not Grant.”

A little after noon, Chris called 911 and spoke with Yosemite Search and Rescue (YOSAR). Dispatch sent an active member of YOSAR out to meet him, and he conveyed all the information that he knew. As the YOSAR team started an investigation, Chris and Kelvin gathered several other friends from Boystown and ran over to the Arches, where they searched and yelled out Grant’s name. Shortly after, two National Park Service (NPS) vehicles and an ambulance showed up. A pair of climbers were rappelling the Arches, but they hadn’t seen Grant.

When it got dark, the group returned to Boystown. Then, at 9:30 p.m., Chris’s phone rang. It was YOSAR. They’d found Grant’s body at the base, about a half mile east of the first pitch of Royal Arches.

II. El Portal Market

A little over a year earlier, in May of 2024, Maison Davis, a clerk at the El Portal Market, couldn’t help but notice a boy sleeping in his car in the store parking lot. El Portal is a border town on the west gate of Yosemite, and only minutes from the Valley floor. Maison had seen the boy a few days in a row before he finally asked what he was doing.

“He said, ‘Oh, I’m just climbing.’ Maison remembers.

The clerk asked the boy if he was working in the park, and he replied that he was too young and that he’d just turned 17. “I thought that was amazing,” says Maison. “Way to follow your dreams and make it out here so young.”

Eventually, Maison got to know the boy as Grant. He even started giving him the expired products he couldn’t sell: “Things like frosting, whatever. He’d come in in the morning and say, ‘What’s expiring today?’ He’d look around the shelves and point stuff out that would be expiring soon and say, ‘Hey, I’m coming back for that on Tuesday.’ So, we’d keep him fed.”

A month before, Grant had asked his parents, Jennifer and Jeff, if he could dirtbag for the summer in Yosemite. He was only 16 years old, so his parents said no. But the Saturday after school got out, the family’s golden retriever, Boris, woke Jennifer up early by barking and pawing at the front door. Jennifer looked outside, and Grant’s car wasn’t there. She ran upstairs to his room and found that he’d packed his things and left a note on the bed telling them he loved them.

Jennifer woke Jeff and they turned their phones on. Grant hadn’t switched Find My Friends off, so they could see exactly where he was. “He was already almost in New Mexico, which is a long drive from Dallas.”

Grant didn’t answer their texts until a little after Amarillo. But he confirmed he was okay. “We didn’t scold him or anything. We just wanted to make sure he was safe,” Jeff said. “We were more worried about the legality of it with him being underage.” They didn’t approve of the trip, but they felt like it would be more harmful if they made him turn around and come home. “So, we just said go for it, dude!”

“We had a safe word,” his mom adds. “And he had to text it to us every morning by 9:00 a.m., our time.”

Sleeping at the El Portal Market was a clever cheat code, not only because Grant could avoid park fees and time limits at Camp 4, but also because the market has free WiFi.

“He was so frugal and independent,” Jeff remembers. “I offered him money, but he said, ‘No, I’m fine.’ He knew how to take care of himself.”

With free Wi-Fi, Grant was able to text his mother their safe word every morning, but he also had something else up his sleeve: he was getting a jump start on his senior year by taking high school classes online. He was planning to graduate a semester early so he could return and work in Yosemite after his 18th birthday.

“The day before he left that first time, I went up to his room and helped him adjust his bike rack,” Jeff says. “It didn’t even dawn on me that he was actually going to leave. Later, I found out that his preplanning was amazing. Financially and everything. He knew his routes and how much he had to spend. He’d been planning it for a long time.”

Grant slept in his car in various places around the Market—often, just right out front. “Crashed out with one leg sticking out the window,” Maison recalls. “It was a tiny little Corolla, and he was a tall, gangly guy. He would recline the front seat and just be out. One time I asked him if his neck hurt, and he said, ‘Nah, it’s not too bad. I only wake up once or twice a night.’ He never complained.”

Maison and his girlfriend took Grant climbing a few times on that trip. Grant had only done some sport climbs and led in the gym, so Maison took him out to Highway Star (5.10a), a crack climb at the Lower Merced area. He set up a top rope and had Grant mock lead the route with gear, since he’d never placed any protection before. Grant placed a bunch of cams until he got one stuck and couldn’t get it out. “I had to go to work and didn’t want to be late, so I split,” Maison remembers. Unwilling to leave a piece behind, Grant drove to the Mountain Shop in the Valley and bought a nut tool so he could dislodge it, which he did. He returned Maison’s piece to him at the market and gave him the nut tool, too. “I thanked him for my cam and told him to keep his nut tool, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Made me take it,” Maison tells me. “I still have it.”

Maison also took Grant to Generator Crack (5.10c), a classic Yosemite offwidth. Maison only managed to get himself halfway up before waving the white flag, but Grant gangled and chicken-winged himself all the way up. “He did a bunch of weird moves that weren’t even real moves,” Maison told me. “I think he was pretty good in the gym, but had never touched rock. And it doesn’t really translate—especially to crack climbing. But he crushed it. He was strong, talented, and creative.”

Eventually, Maison clued Grant in on the showers at Camp 4. Then Grant found the bulletin board, and as a result, climbing partners and friends in the parking lot. “Once he figured all that out,” Maison said, “we’d only see him at closing for food or waking up in the morning before he split for Camp 4 again.”

One day in May 2024, Grant struck up an unlikely friendship at Camp 4 with longtime Valley climber Bronson Hovnanian. Bronson had just come down from climbing The Nose (5.9 C2; 3,000 ft) when he ran into Grant and a bunch of climber kids from Camp 4 hanging out around the parking lot. Grant spotted Bronson and asked what he’d been up to: a NIAD, or Nose in a Day, in four and a half hours.

“[Grant and the others] were young, but so curious,” Bronson recalls. He hung around for a while and answered questions. “Grant was a really cool kid. He’s just that quintessential story about a young climber coming out here from Texas and dirtbagging.”

For weeks after their first meeting, Bronson would see Grant around and ask him how things were going. “A lot of people come through like a gap year. They dirtbag around for a season or two, and you’ll never see them again. But Grant struck me as someone who I was gonna see around for a long time.”

At summer 2024’s end, Grant drove home to Frisco even hungrier for more time in Yosemite. He returned to high school for his senior year and applied for spring 2025 Valley jobs, landing a dishwashing job at the Lodge with Aramark, Yosemite’s concessionaire. As planned, Grant graduated from high school in December, and after turning 18 in May, left again for Valley life—this time, with his parents’ approval.

On the way, Grant stopped off for a few days at Red Rocks outside Las Vegas, but it just wasn’t the Valley. His mother got a phone call on his final night there. “He was crying and said he was feeling homesick for the first time,” says Jennifer. “He just wanted to get to Yosemite, so he could make a home and meet new friends, and be with people that he was invested in.” Grant told his parents that he was going to drive through the night. Jeff stayed on the phone with him all night until he got to Yosemite to make sure he didn’t fall asleep at the wheel.

III. Frisco

From a young age, Grant’s family visited National Parks and watched Grant run off and disappear down trails. “Ever since he was little, we’d be on a hike somewhere and he would take off a mile ahead of us,” explains Jeff. “And we’d eventually find him on top of a rock. We were never the family to go to malls or movies.”

Grant discovered rock climbing inside Frisco, Texas’s Canyons Rock Climbing gym when he was 14 years old. From then on, climbing was his full focus. “He was already the kind of kid who would climb out of his window and sit on the roof at night,” his father said. “But once he found rock climbing, that was it. And then his focus was Yosemite.”

Grant started working at Canyons his freshman year of high school and used the money to buy outdoor climbing gear. He became obsessed with Yosemite movies like Valley Uprising and Free Solo, and regularly made his family watch them. “It was important to him that we tried to learn about it,” his older sister Anna recalled. “We all watched Free Solo with him a bunch of times. He would dress up as different climbers for Halloween, and he wanted to make sure we all knew who he was.”

“Alex Honnold was probably his biggest hero on the planet,” his mom told me. “He watched every one of his movies over and over again.”

IV. Boystown

In May 2025, Grant arrived in Yosemite Valley after his marathon night of driving from Red Rocks. He checked in with housing and secured a tent cabin in Boystown. There, he met his short-lived and well-loved Boystown family.

In July, only two months later, I sat in the Boystown kitchen and interviewed his friends and neighbors. They included his roommate Kelvin Pittman, climbing partner Chris Guzman, neighbor Emily Wolk, and instant crush Audrey Balint. Loud kitchen sounds—fans from the commercial refrigerators, constant microwave door slamming, etc—threatened to drown out my recorded audio.

“Everyone he met liked him, and everyone he knew loved him,” Audrey Balint tells me while drumming her fingers on Boystown’s sticky Formica kitchen table. She was showing me a journal they’d made in Grant’s honor. His friends keep it sealed in plastic Tupperware. “He was confident, and amazing. There were no vibes between us at all, and within four days of knowing me, he asked me on a date. I said, ‘No, I’m not going on a date with you. You’re 18 years old!’ He said, ‘Well, I just couldn’t live with myself if I never asked.” After that, Audrey and Grant became buds.

“He was a very good conversationalist,” says Emily Wolk. “He was curious about everything and would focus on anyone who was talking. Which was so impressive for an 18-year-old.” She then added: “He was also very sweet and safe.”

Chris Guzman told me about climbing Grant’s Crack (5.9) and the Aid Route (5.11b) on Swan Slab with Grant. They’d also spent a day in Tuolumne, climbing Little Sheeba (5.10a) on Lamb Dome, and The Dike Route (5.9 R) on Pywiack Dome. “Both of us were shitting bricks the whole time, but it was so fun,” he says.

According to Kelvin, Grant was never on his phone. “This kid just wanted to get to know people and be present,” he says. “And he wanted to learn. Any time someone started talking, he was a sponge who wanted to know everything.”

In the Boystown kitchen, Grant would make a large batch of spaghetti for the week, store it in a Tupperware container, and then forget to put oil in it. So, when he’d pull it out later, it would always be in one big, congealed square. He was always eating spaghetti in squares.

I ask the group if anyone had ever spoken to him about his free soloing. There’s a silence. It’s Audrey who speaks up first.

“I talked to him about it,” she says. “He deeply enjoyed the feeling of having his own life in his hands. Every movement, every step, every breath was a choice to keep moving. He compared it to a character in the John Green book The Fault in Our Stars who put an unlit cigarette to his lips and said, ‘I never light it. I never give it the power to kill me.’ He saw soloing as his way of going out and taking his life incredibly seriously. And being purposeful about choosing to keep living. He took it very seriously.”

Chris worried about it and had asked him to stop. He didn’t think Grant had had enough time in the Valley to realize how dangerous it really is. “Had he listened to me or spent enough time here to realize that anything can happen to any good climber, I think that would have deterred him,” he says.

“We both asked him to stop,” Audrey adds. “He wasn’t stupid.”

V. Camp 4

In May, Grant climbed After Six (5.7), a popular five-pitch route for Yosemite beginners, with a rope and partner. Then he started free soloing it regularly. Then he started free soloing it barefoot.

This wasn’t news to his friends. According to Maison from the El Portal Market, Grant would free solo—even onsight free solo—many Valley moderates, including Swan Slab Gully (5.6), After Six (5.6), Jamcrack (5.9), Braille Book (5.8), and Ranger Crack (5.8). “It’s all gnarly to me, but downclimbing Ranger Crack sounds so scary,” Maison says.

Grant was open with his parents about his free soloing. “He would get into a routine,” his mom, Jennifer, told me. “And it [free soloing] became natural to him. It made him feel so small—and part of something much bigger than him. I would beg him not to do it. Finally, he looked at me and said Mom—and he’s a horrible liar—I can lie to you, or I can tell you the truth. I told him not to lie to me, but he had to text me when he came down.”

Earlier this spring, Bronson was heading out of Camp 4 to go free solo Swan Slab Gully (5.6) with a friend of his, and Grant wanted to come along. Bronson was worried about Grant’s experience with soloing. “I said, ‘Wait, you’ve done this right? Don’t come climbing if you haven’t done this,’” Bronson remembers.

Grant told Bronson “Yes,” and that he’d free soloed it earlier that day, even. On the climb, Grant talked to Bronson about how often he’d been free soloing. “It seemed like he really liked the free soloing component of it,” says Bronson. “He wasn’t doing it because he couldn’t find partners.”

A few days later, Bronson saw Grant at Climber Coffee in Camp 4. It would be their last interaction. Bronson introduced him around. “I said, ‘Hey, this is Grant. He just graduated high school, and he moved to the Valley. How cool is that?’” While bouldering around Camp 4 later, Grant started talking about free soloing again. This time, he said he’d been free soloing a lot. “So, I had a little heart-to-heart with him,” says Bronson.

He passed down a story that Ron Kauk had told him years ago. “Kauk told me that [Jim] Bridwell told him that with free soloing, there’s so much to lose and so little to gain. And I’ve always remembered that. Bridwell told Kauk, Kauk told me, and I told Grant. It felt appropriate. Free soloing shouldn’t be glorified, and it isn’t necessary.”

Bronson also told Grant to get some micro traxion and go to the Cookie Cliff. “There’s plenty of fixed lines around the Valley.” Bronson left the Valley shortly after. A couple of weeks later, he passed through Tuolumne and heard from his friends that Grant had fallen off Royal Arches.

His first reaction was to curse and shake his head. But he later insisted that Grant wasn’t soloing with an ego. “He felt more like a lone wolf,” says Bronson. “Social for sure, but he had his own relationship with climbing. He never bragged about any of his free soloing. I’ve been in situations now, a few times, where things have gone bad and I’ve had to say to myself, whoa, that was a close call. And those moments all changed how I assessed risk moving forward. But how do you assess risk when you’re young and haven’t had any—or enough—of those moments?”

VI. “Scrambling” culture

After locating Grant’s body, YOSAR Program Manager Jesse McGahey connected with Grant’s dad, Jeff. “Jesse called Grant’s accident a mistake,” Jeff tells me, “And I understood that. And I understand his perspective to protect other climbers and the community, but I think of it as an accident and a mistake. Grant had planned this. And for whatever reason, something happened.”

When YOSAR returned Grant’s phone to his family, the climbing app Mountain Project was still open to the Royal Arches page. Grant also had a number of photos of the route and 3D maps running, including onX Maps set to the Central Royal Arches area. Also, Spotify was open. He had been listening to the “How to Train Your Dragon” soundtrack.

His approach shoes were on, indicating that he had likely fallen on what he considered scrambling terrain. About 200 to 400 feet above where his body was located, there is a third-class ledge system that quickly cuts off into 5.10+ territory, off route from the Royal Arches climb. It’s beautiful there; Royal Arch Cascade flows not far to the west and trickles down and across the Valley Loop Trail as it winds its way towards Mirror Lake. A cairn made of granitic rocks marks the first pitch of Royal Arches under a Californian black oak tree that reaches high and wide toward the wall.

YOSAR found Grant’s body using the Find My Friends App—the same app his family used when they discovered he’d run away to Yosemite the year before. It was the first time they’d used it in a rescue, and it saved them a day of searching. Without GPS technology, they would have had to search the route pitch by pitch, canvas the base, the North Dome Gully descent, and likely dispatch the Park’s only helicopter.

Jesse wasn’t able to comment on the specifics of Grant’s accident, but he connected with me about Yosemite’s free solo culture, particularly in the post-Free Solo era. “The Park has seen many free solo accidents before and after the Free Solo movie,” he told me. “Climbing unroped is the second leading cause of death for climbers in Yosemite. There’s definitely a culture of free soloing in Yosemite, and that’s been here since I got here… and probably since the seventies.”

When I think back on just about every Valley climber I know—the ones who return every season and make Yosemite climbing a large part of their lives—every one of them has soloed something at one point: even Jesse, even me.

“So many of us here have been a part of this Yosemite culture,” Jesse says. “I’ve climbed Cathedral Peak [unroped] 50 times at least, and I feel so locked in. I love that experience. But I have to reconsider soloing it now because there’s a lot to lose and little to gain. And if you’re a leader in the community or someone that people see as a model for safety, you just can’t do that. What am I saying? Do as I say and not as I do? It would feel very reckless to solo it in front of anybody right now.”

When I think of free soloing in the Valley community, I don’t think of big gnarly projects, like the ones Alex Honnold does. I think of the simple Yosemite classics that my friends do: Cathedral Peak, Matthes Crest, After Six, Nutcracker… Royal Arches. 

When you’re in Yosemite, it’s easy to get caught up in the crowd and culture of the Valley—to trust your experience, muscle memory, and heart. “I got this,” is a mantra that I’ve found myself saying in my head so many times throughout my climbing career. It’s a powerful credo to be used when out on the sharp end—when it’s time to trust your feet and gear. But it’s not just about you when you’re free soloing. You may have it, but what about the unknown variables—the rock, weather, vegetation, or animals. What about your family?

“People regularly refer to free soloing Cathedral Peak and Tenaya Peak as a scramble,” Jesse tells me. “They don’t even use the term, ‘free solo.’ ‘Oh, I did some scrambling in Tuolumne.’ What did you do? ‘NW Books, Matthes, Cathedral….’ Well, those are rock climbs. It’s just so common here for climbers to tone down the nature of their activities. To make it seem more approachable and less risky.”

If Jesse has been reevaluating free soloing lately, it makes sense. It’s his job to be the first responder when things go wrong. He recently lost a good friend and NPS employee to a free soloing accident, and Grant’s SAR impacted him. Of course it did.

“[Grant] sounded like a really cool kid. Seeing the anguish of his family, and what they’re going through, is unforgettable,” Jesse says. “I’m a parent and you’re a parent. I was just reading Harry Potter with my kids, and Dumbledore tells Harry at some point near the end that death is not about yourself, it’s about who you leave behind. [‘Do not pity the dead, Harry, pity the living.’] When you’re making that gamble, you’re gambling on your family and friends.”

Free soloing will continue. But I’m not sure that it’s fair to simply write all free soloists off as reckless. It’s their lives, after all. And if you love someone, you’re supposed to love everything about them. Those who connect to Yosemite are hardwired to enjoy the freedom of movement, purity, and rhythm that free soloing its formations allows.

There is no certainty in the Valley. And any argument for or against absolute climbing rules will swing back and forth, like the pendulum on pitch 9 of Royal Arches.

VII. A passion so deep…

When writing this piece, there was a moment when I was sitting in my garage office, hesitating to push the call button that would connect me to Grant’s family. I’ve done interviews like this before, but this time the incident was much more recent. I briefly thought about the call that YOSAR made to Grant’s parents the night they found him, and its impossible message.

I pushed the call button and his father picked up with a friendly voice and put me on speaker so his mother could join. They were open and candid and wanted to talk about Grant. His biggest dream was to be featured in Climbing Magazine. “His dream is coming true,” his mother said. “But not the way I wanted it to.”

After the news about Grant got out, a friend of theirs started a GoFundMe. “We’re not a wealthy family,” his mom said. “But we certainly don’t need the kind of money that it brought in. So we wanted to do something better with it. We got Jesse to get us the information for Friends of Yosemite Search and Rescue, and we added it to the GoFundMe page. So far, we’ve donated about $3,000, but we’ll make another donation soon.”

The Clines did use a portion of the funds to fly out to Yosemite. They hadn’t been there before, but they immediately felt Grant’s energy there. “It’s so wild and beautiful,” his mom said.

On the phone, his sister, Anna, agreed. “It was incredible,” she said. “It brought everyone a lot of peace. It was just easier to appreciate why he was there because it was so beautiful. Maybe it helped with a little bit of acceptance. Maybe it was a little easier to understand what he was doing.”

Grant’s dad admits that his family is still picking up the pieces, and that he imagines they always will be. However, they’re heading back to Yosemite in August, and plan to return again next year.

“Grant felt a big calling to Yosemite,” his mom said. “I think he’d been there before, and he’ll be back again.”

On the day Grant’s oldest sister, Sydney, learned of his passing, she turned to her journal and wrote, “I think that’s the beauty of human nature—when a passion runs so deep that logic and reason fall away, and fear can no longer touch the body or the mind.”

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