Has anyone ever seen a real dirtbag?

Fair enough, it should be amended to "climbing dirtbag".

We aren't talking about mentally ill homeless people (mostly) :).

Just your average committed climber trying to fatten up his tick list on the road.

I am going to share one last (dirt baggy) story about Alf. In 1997 Alf drove an old dilapidated school bus to Davenport Canyon by the Enchanted Tower, where he parked and fixed it by disabling it. His plan was to live there on a semi permanent basis, but unfortunately the Forest Service got wind of it, and made him remove it. 

Alf being Alf, blamed our friend Sal for turning him in, which Sal denied. Alf threatened to chop all of Sal's routes, and then to shoot Sal. In response, Sal started packing whenever he went to the Tower. Some of us were genuinely concerned about a Wild West type shoot out between the two, but after few heart to heart talks and the aforementioned trail destruction incident, cooler heads prevailed. 

the schmuck wrote:

I am going to share one last (dirt baggy) story about Alf. In 1997 Alf drove an old dilapidated school bus to Davenport Canyon by the Enchanted Tower, where he parked and fixed it by disabling it. His plan was to live there on a semi permanent basis, but unfortunately the Forest Service got wind of it, and made him remove it. 

Alf being Alf, blamed our friend Sal for turning him in, which Sal denied. Alf threatened to chop all of Sal's routes, and then to shoot Sal. In response, Sal started packing whenever he went to the Tower. Some of us were genuinely concerned about a Wild West type shoot out between the two, but after few heart to heart talks and the aforementioned trail destruction incident, cooler heads prevailed. 

From chopping bolts to running over mountain bikes, there is one thing clear with Moab dirtbags...

Snitches get stitches.

the schmuck wrote:

I am going to share one last (dirt baggy) story about Alf. In 1997 Alf drove an old dilapidated school bus to Davenport Canyon by the Enchanted Tower, where he parked and fixed it by disabling it. His plan was to live there on a semi permanent basis, but unfortunately the Forest Service got wind of it, and made him remove it. 

Alf being Alf, blamed our friend Sal for turning him in, which Sal denied. Alf threatened to chop all of Sal's routes, and then to shoot Sal. In response, Sal started packing whenever he went to the Tower. Some of us were genuinely concerned about a Wild West type shoot out between the two, but after few heart to heart talks and the aforementioned trail destruction incident, cooler heads prevailed. 

this cries out for a Hollywood feature film.

 When I think of dirtbag, a legit dirtbag, I think of someone who’s getting it done on their wit and grit. Can I use your shower, can I crash on your floor?, Got anything you’re going throw out? Can I borrow? Let’s make some f#&ked up deal for something that benefits me way more than you!  I always cringe when I ran into that guy in town or out at the crag. They could get a job or go back to white bread land but choose do whatever it takes to keep that getto fab climbing 24/7 lifestyle.

Bill Kirby wrote:

 When I think of dirtbag, a legit dirtbag, I think of someone who’s getting it done on their wit and grit. Can I use your shower, can I crash on your floor?, Got anything you’re going throw out? Can I borrow? Let’s make some f#&ked up deal for something that benefits me way more than you!  I always cringe when I ran into that guy in town or out at the crag. They could get a job or go back to white bread land but choose do whatever it takes to keep that getto fab climbing 24/7 lifestyle.

Another name for that type of person is a "mooch."

jg fox wrote:

Yes but in the long run they are better for one's career.  Usually a lower paying tech job isn't going to add as much development in regards to knowledge.  I wasn't required to do it (nobody said stay until midnight or work this weekend) but the workload made me do it as I worked by myself on practically everything.  If someone experienced was doing what I was doing they would of handled it in 40 hours easily but I was fresh out of grad school and way in over my head unfortunately.

As I said, jobs that require you to work 60 hours/week typically AREN'T the higher-paying tech jobs. Higher paying jobs are often also more reasonable with workload requirements.

I don't agree that learning by being dumped in the deep end is good for your career. If you're learning by being dumped in the deep end, that means you're basically teaching yourself on a deadline. What you learn that way is how to hack together things in the quickest fashion using lowest-common-denominator tools and copy/pasted code, and even if you can avoid burnout at a job like that long enough to see your short-term thinking come back to bite you, you don't have the time energy to introspect and learn from those big picture mistakes because you only have time and energy for the immediate problem that's right in front of you. This environment doesn't result in good code and it doesn't result in good coders.

When I've been in hiring positions, this is the sort of coder that I've always tried to filter out--they look good to business people because they meet short-term deadlines, but the long-term results of unleashing such a coder on your codebase are that it becomes a nightmare. The signs are fairly obvious: pulling in immature libraries to solve problems that can be solved with a few lines of code, inability to solve simple problems without access to Stack Overflow, a preference for implicit, "magical" frameworks over explicit code, terseness over readability. The places that hire programmers like this are typically places where non-technical people are making technical hiring decisions. Put another way these exploitative jobs only effectively train you for other exploitative jobs.

The better way to learn is to go to a company that hires senior developers to do senior development and gives them time to mentor junior developers. That way you're standing on the shoulders of giants: you learn from people who have way more experience than you and show you how to write elegant, future-proof code. I suppose you could theoretically learn these things by gaining a few decades of experience at 60-hour-week jobs, but I think you'd learn it a lot faster with a job that gives you time and mentorship to learn.

Good code is never written after 5PM.

Jesus.. What did I get myself into. 

Seriously we are talking about dirtbags not nerdy coders.

Anyway back to the dirtbag stories. I had the pleasure of riding in a car with Fred Beckey, he was still driving at age 90.

 At some point I will have to tell the whole story because it was a truly wild ride, but the first thing that struck me was how committed he was to dirtbaggery. At age 90 the back seat of his rental car was full of old McDonalds  bags, american alpine journals,guidebooks and prescriptions from CVS. The man had his priorities!

David Kerkeslager wrote:

As I said, jobs that require you to work 60 hours/week typically AREN'T the higher-paying tech jobs. Higher paying jobs are often also more reasonable with workload requirements.

I don't agree that learning by being dumped in the deep end is good for your career. If you're learning by being dumped in the deep end, that means you're basically teaching yourself on a deadline. What you learn that way is how to hack together things in the quickest fashion using lowest-common-denominator tools and copy/pasted code, and even if you can avoid burnout at a job like that long enough to see your short-term thinking come back to bite you, you don't have the time energy to introspect and learn from those big picture mistakes because you only have time and energy for the immediate problem that's right in front of you. This environment doesn't result in good code and it doesn't result in good coders.

When I've been in hiring positions, this is the sort of coder that I've always tried to filter out--they look good to business people because they meet short-term deadlines, but the long-term results of unleashing such a coder on your codebase are that it becomes a nightmare. The signs are fairly obvious: pulling in immature libraries to solve problems that can be solved with a few lines of code, inability to solve simple problems without access to Stack Overflow, a preference for implicit, "magical" frameworks over explicit code, terseness over readability. The places that hire programmers like this are typically places where non-technical people are making technical hiring decisions. Put another way these exploitative jobs only effectively train you for other exploitative jobs.

The better way to learn is to go to a company that hires senior developers to do senior development and gives them time to mentor junior developers. That way you're standing on the shoulders of giants: you learn from people who have way more experience than you and show you how to write elegant, future-proof code. I suppose you could theoretically learn these things by gaining a few decades of experience at 60-hour-week jobs, but I think you'd learn it a lot faster with a job that gives you time and mentorship to learn.

Good code is never written after 5PM.

Thanks for saying you wouldn't hire me.

the schmuck wrote:

I am going to share one last (dirt baggy) story about Alf. In 1997 Alf drove an old dilapidated school bus to Davenport Canyon by the Enchanted Tower, where he parked and fixed it by disabling it. His plan was to live there on a semi permanent basis, but unfortunately the Forest Service got wind of it, and made him remove it. 

Alf being Alf, blamed our friend Sal for turning him in, which Sal denied. Alf threatened to chop all of Sal's routes, and then to shoot Sal. In response, Sal started packing whenever he went to the Tower. Some of us were genuinely concerned about a Wild West type shoot out between the two, but after few heart to heart talks and the aforementioned trail destruction incident, cooler heads prevailed. 

I was homeless and living out of my Honda wagon in American Fork Canyon back in 1994 when I met the guy. We hung out a bit, did some mtn biking, smoked some hobo hash together, no problems. FFWD to 2015 or so we had connected on social media, he was posting tons of nice pics of the desert which was cool IMO. Then he started going to the playgrounds and taking pics of random kids and posting them online. I warned him that local parents(being one myself) might not take too kindly to some random dirtbag taking pics of their kids and posting them on the WWW and I believe he may have threatened to kill me, it was an over the top reaction for sure. I was trying to help...

Met a guide at Hueco a few years back, he was residing (not completely legally) in an abandoned trailer in the area. Not much better than a cave, if you know what colonias on the border can be like. No car as far I knew, commuted into the park on foot. Nice dude, and showed our group some new-to-us stuff on East Mountain. 10/10, would totally pay for his tamales a Doña Lupita's again.

There are many left. What I really appreciated from that Enormocast episode was how Bisharat explained that most of the time dirtbagging really isn't that much fun. If you're tripping solo, much of the time you're looking for partners or soloing routes because of the lack of them. In my opinion, you're not a real dirtbag until you're sitting in your 98' Honda CR-V outside a Vons scrolling through MP whilst eating days old bread and cheese. In the end, its undoubtedly worth it because you become immersed in the real culture that doesn't occur with weekend warriors. 

All the dirtbag climbers are dead? I'm not dead, I'm just a one-percenter now.

I was a total dirtbag climber back in the 1970s and 1980s. 

I was homeless and slept in my Volkswagon for a few years. My VW was baby-diarrhea brown, but it was totally tricked out with curtains in the windows and a tape deck and... Well, maybe my VW wasn't very tricked out. But it did have a Chouinard sticker in the back window.

I broke off the key in the ignition in the START position, so to stop the car I had to pop the clutch to stall it, and then disconnect the battery. When I wanted to start my car, I connected the battery, put the gear in neutral, and pushed the car as fast as I could, and jumped in to pop the clutch.

Then the accelerator cable broke, so I ran a cable inside of the car back to the carburetor and operated it by hand.

It was a real dirtbag climber's car. We even drove that old VW all the way to the Bugaboos in 1982. We crossed the border into Canada at 4:00 a.m. and stopped for gas right away. A Canadian at the adjacent pump welcomed us yanks by giving us a free bag of weed. He said that he felt sorry for Americans. That VW was as good as a jeep on those old Canadian logging roads.

Eventually the engine blew up and I abandoned the car, so I just started hitch-hiking everywhere. I slept in parking lots under pickup trucks when it was raining, and when the weather was good I just walked out into the woods with my sleeping bag. 

One summer I couldn't even afford a sleeping pad or sleeping bag, so I slept in the High Sierra directly on the ground in a bivy sack. It was truly miserable.

One year I got a job and bought another car, but 6 months later I quit my job, sold everything that I owned (including my car), and went to Denali. 

Winters could be tough. We found a hotel with a big roaring fire in the lobby. When the desk clerk wasn't looking, we tip-toed into the lobby and went to sleep on the floor behind the couch near the fireplace. Another alternative was to find a lonely Curry Co. chick who could keep you warm during the winter months.

For money, sometimes we went gambling in Reno, pooling our last $20 for the gas to get there. (This was back when there was still single-deck blackjack). We gambled for 3 or 4 days straight, drinking a lot of free Heineken and eating at $2.50 breakfast buffets. We would make $200 to $300, which would last us another 3-4 months back in Yosemite. We always pooled and shared the money. Does that mean we were hippies or Commies? 

But most of the time we collected nickel-deposit cans for cash. At the recycling station, we turned in our cans. While one of us flirted with the chick at the cash register, the other one re-collected the cans we had just turned in, and then turned them in again. And again. 

Food was never much of an issue. We went diving in the dumpsters at 4 a.m. for most of our food. One guy held the lid open and the other guy rummaged around inside of the dumpster with a headlamp. You get used to eating moldy bread and rotting black bananas. Sometimes you score big with an orange, or a box with a couple of donuts.

We also stood around at hamburger joints to dig food out of the garbage cans. 

The Yosemite Lodge cafeteria was a great place to eat, because you could scarf people's left-overs after getting in the door with only 25 cents for a cup of coffee. The best seat in the house was where the conveyor belt of dirty dishes went back into the kitchen, because you could sit there all day and pick plates of mostly-eaten food from the conveyor belt.

Once an older lady walked up to me in Yosemite and handed me a large grocery bag full of food -- out of the blue! She said that she was the fairy god mother of climbers.

Well, sometimes food was an issue. One summer in the High Sierra a family visited our campsite and gave us a string of brown trout. We devoured the trout raw, right off the string. I didn't realize that this was a very strange event, until much later, when I realized that at 6'00" I was down to 120 pounds. I was horrified when I saw my emaciated body in a mirror.

I never stole anything from anyone, food or otherwise. The thought of stealing never even occurred to me.

Of course, in-between all of the above adventures are climbing trips to the High Sierra, Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Tetons, Sandias, Rocky Mountains, South Platte, North Cascades, Squamish, Bugaboos, Denali.....

Man, I could go on and on about the life of a dedicated, homeless, dirt bag climber.........

Awesome post. Seems like it ended the thread.

Outstanding post, Harry!  What a life you've lived.  What are you up to now?

Jon H wrote:

Outstanding post, Harry!  What a life you've lived.  What are you up to now?

"I'm not dead, I'm just a one-percenter now."

Jack Lumber wrote:

Seems like it ended the thread.

Sorry

Harry. Please write a book! Seriously! you can self publish and post the link here and on Supertopo..