Your Guide to New York City’s Underground Bouldering Scene

In New York, nature survives by force, not grace—stretching toward the sun, splitting the sidewalk, refusing to yield. Life insists, whether in soil or cement.

Street lamps throw shade beyond the reach of branches. Gutters rush with the same insistence as the Hudson. Brakes and engines layer into a birdsong of their own.

Here, growth is reclamation. And sometimes, it’s louder than the subway.

On the northern tip of Manhattan, Fort Tryon is another kind of fracture. One moment you’re on the grid, the A train spitting riders onto 207th. The next, the city thins. Switchback trails climb past stone arches, gardens spill over old walls, and the ground rises into slabs of schist.

For decades, the city’s climbers looked elsewhere for their fix: Central Park’s polished boulders or long drives north to the Gunks and Harriman. Fort Tryon’s stone, sharp and unpolished, was overlooked, traded only in fragments of beta and scraps online. Problems at Tryon were done and redone, remembered only by those who happened to be there.

Now, with Zone Local, climbers Trevor Riley and Rachael Elliott have given them form: a new guidebook equal parts topo, design experiment, and archive. Closer to field notes than a coffee table book, it documents the persistence of climbing in New York—and the community that refused to let it vanish.

For Trevor Riley, Fort Tryon was first a matter of proximity. When he moved to Washington Heights in 2021, the park became his local crag—fifteen minutes on the bus, thirty on foot. “I’m a picky climber,” he says. “Aesthetics matter. Fort Tryon might be the most scenic park in NYC. Central Park doesn’t overlook the Hudson and the Palisades. And the boulders here don’t suffer from as many contrived variations as Central Park’s polished schist. For me, it was hard to beat.”

For Elliott, the pull was slower. A designer by trade, she first climbed in Central Park and up at Powerlinez. But Riley’s enthusiasm carried. “The park is quite arresting in its hidden beauty and how remote it feels although you are still in the city,” she says. “That atmosphere of wonder made me prefer it over Central Park’s boulders, which tend to be more crowded.”

Zone Local reflects those two vantage points: Riley’s eye for climbs that unfolded organically and Elliott’s drive to shape a book that was intentional in both design and use. “It’s a privilege to print something and have it exist in the world,” Elliott says. “We wanted it to matter.”

Making the book required discipline. Photos were the hardest part. “Even though Fort Tryon is scenic, New York doesn’t exactly scream natural beauty,” Riley says. “Getting the right climber on the right boulder in the right light was rare, but necessary: “I wanted the photos to be impressive enough that even climbers from the most incredible places would want to visit.”

Elliott faced the opposite challenge: restraint. “The most difficult part was distilling through the noise and honing in on the important design elements and concepts,” she says. “Collaboration can often be tedious, but it’s almost always worth it in the end.”

The result was a minimalist guide, scaled for use. It can be held open with one hand. It fits neatly into a bag. The cover was given a scuff-resistant coating. Practical choices, but also intentional ones. “We thought guidebooks could be both useful and pretty,” Elliott says.

If the design demanded restraint, the history demanded digging. Riley fell into rabbit holes of Mountain Project threads, defunct blogs from the early 2000s, and even long-dead sites pulled up through the Wayback Machine. Every lead pointed to another—a rumor about a first ascent, a name dropped in a comment, an old website documenting Central Park problems. From there, he started reaching out directly, asking who was still around.

Some were. Climbers who had been pulling on Manhattan schist since the 1980s sat with him and helped fill in pieces of the story. Nicolas Falacci’s early website, Beta-Boy.com, became a touchstone. Ivan Greene’s contributions, like the proud line It’s a Wonderful Life (V11), immortalized in the Reel Rock film Dosage II, surfaced again in memory. Ralph Erenzo, who co-founded the City Climbers Club of New York in 1987 and later helped open two of the earliest climbing gyms in the country, emerged as a key player.

Other stories surprised even Riley: a climbing competition in Central Park in 2011 that drew a crowd of more than 20,000, and the 2008 Dabathon, when climbers, cyclists, and daredevils linked every climbable area in the city into one circuit. During the later, climbers were even chased at one point by police on horseback. “The internet is a messy, endless place to explore,” Riley says. “Once I’d found everything I could online, I started asking locals if certain climbers I’d read about were still around. In the end, it’s insufficient and imperfect. But we hope that the loose ends in our brief overview of NYC’s climbing history lead other climbers down the path of discovery for themselves.”

New York has never been a climbing destination, and maybe that’s the point. No one books a trip to boulder between subway stops. But that doesn’t mean the rock isn’t here—or that the restless need to climb is missing. What Zone Local argues, quietly but firmly, is that local climbing matters, even in a city like this.

“People are often surprised to learn we have climbable boulders in our parks,” Elliott says. “After that, they’re surprised by the variety of grades and the difficulty. Fort Tryon has plenty of project-worthy routes that truly test you.”

Riley agrees, but pushes the thought further. “Climbers will live in Manhattan for years and never climb the classics a couple train stops away,” he says. “I love climbing upstate, but I believe we owe our local zones more love.”

That sense of obligation runs through the book. It isn’t just about wayfinding; it’s about insisting that these places—the overlooked stone in city parks—belong in the story of climbing, too.

In the end, Zone Local feels less like a product than a gesture: proof that climbing in New York has always been a practice of reclamation. The stone resists, the city resists, and still the problems remain.

For Riley and Elliott, the book is both map and memory. It points to where to put your hands and feet, but also to the larger work of building community, preserving space, and telling stories with depth. It insists that climbing in Washington Heights matters—not because it rivals the Gunks, but because it refuses to be overtaken.

Riley hopes that future guidebooks and stories go deeper, that climbers here write more than captions. Elliott hopes more people step outside and touch the rock for themselves.

Zone Local is available for purchase now at zonelocal.net.

And when asked what he’d say to anyone who doubts that bouldering belongs in Manhattan, Riley doesn’t hesitate: “Fuhgeddaboudit.”

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