MAGIC IN THE HILLS

BY DYLAN JONES

At high noon on a beautiful fall day last year, Joel Brady pulled himself atop the narrow fin of Seneca Rocks after an hour-plus battle on the rock. He looked around at the stunning valley surrounding the Mountain State’s iconic pinnacle and became overwhelmed with emotion.

Brady had just completed the first free ascent of the Green Wall—a blank and vertical cliff on Seneca’s South Summit aptly named for the neon-colored crustose lichen that creates striking patches contrasting the white quartzite face. After nearly 100 attempts, Brady finally found his way up the great wall without error. In doing so, he etched his name into proverbial stone by establishing Seneca’s newest and hardest climbing route.

Although Brady’s ability to free-climb the Green Wall clean (meaning without falling or weighting his rope) took around six months, the story of the route was years in the making. In the mid-twenty-tens, Andrew Leich, a rock climber and route developer based in Morgantown, was regularly visiting Seneca to scale its legendary cliffs. Leich would often wrap up his day with a cool-down lap on Green Wall (5.7), a moderate traditional climbing route (meaning the climber places temporary gear in cracks and seams in the rock for protection) that ascends a system of cracks and corners to the right of the actual Green Wall. “I kept looking over at how incredible the face is and started noticing little shadows and features that looked like holds,” Leich says.

Leich, always on the lookout for a challenge, had his friend take a photo of him standing on a ledge atop the Green Wall. They zoomed in on the image to hunt for potential holds in the interest of finding a route up what many climbers had cast off as an impossibly blank face.

It should be noted that the Green Wall has technically been climbed before, first ascended by Harrison Shull in the 1990s as an aid route named A Whiter Shade of Pale. Aid climbing is an increasingly passé style where gear is placed into the rock and pulled on to ascend a wall, meaning that the aid practitioner isn’t always climbing the rock itself.

But Leich envisioned free-climbing the Green Wall, meaning the climber places gear for safety purposes but only gains upward progress by using the natural holds in the rock. To do so, he would need to enlist a dedicated partner. Leich invited Brady—the two have been ticking off hard climbing projects together for seven years—to analyze the photo of the Green Wall. The pair knew it would be a classic climbing challenge, filled with uncertainty, drama, and, hopefully, success. “I knew it would be a huge undertaking, but because Andrew and I work so well together, I had a sense it would be achievable and enjoyable,” Brady says.

Brady, a 42-year-old religious studies professor at the University of Pittsburgh, is low-key famous for several things: his celebrated collegiate course on vampires, his appearance in 2015 as a contestant on American Ninja Warrior, and his first ascents of exceedingly hard sport climbing (meaning permanent bolts are drilled into the wall to serve as protection points) routes in the New River Gorge region. But there was one catch: Brady, a 30-year climbing veteran, had never been to the traditional climbing mecca of Seneca Rocks. “For me, Seneca was aways the place I would go whenever I couldn’t do hardcore climbing anymore,” Brady says. “It was an outlandish idea to go where I’d never climbed before and immediately attempt the hardest route.”

Before the climbing could commence, the team had to decide how to equip the route. In rock climbing, ethics matter—especially at a traditional climbing destination like Seneca, where old-school dogma often views placing bolts in the rock as heresy. Let the record state that there are a handful of sport climbs at Seneca, but hardcore traditionalists tend to scoff at adding new bolts.

Leich and Brady could stay true to the Seneca ethic and go ground-up, meaning climbing the route in an exploratory manner with no knowledge of where they might find protection points. This is a method often used in traditional climbing because the questing climber is likely—although not guaranteed—to encounter weaknesses in the rock in which to place protection. But the Green Wall is extremely blank and offers virtually no placements for trad gear, meaning a ground-up attempt would likely result in horror.

In February of 2022, Brady and Leich took the pilgrimage to Seneca to begin their work. They made the call to rappel down beside each other to get a hands-on look at the imposing wall, finding more holds than expected. “It just absolutely blew our minds as we found each section could go,” Leich says. “A large portion of the Green Wall is of high quartzite content that features perfect lines of sharp, little crimp holds.”

Their initial inspection of the route found some rusty rivets and copperheads—aging remnants of Shull’s original aid gear bashed into the rock. While working the route, Brady weighted one of the copperheads, which immediately exploded out of the rock. “After thirty years exposed to the elements, it was total junk,” he says.

With Shull’s gear out of the question and only one marginal traditional gear placement, there were no options left but to bolt. “The only real placement was a blind reach with a super-small piece that most certainly wouldn’t hold you in a fall, and you’d have to climb 5.14 moves to even get to it,” Leich says. “It would have been certain death.”

The team wanted to equip the line while making sure it aligned with the bold Seneca ethic. They consulted several Seneca regulars, including longtime local Tom Cecil, a prolific first ascentionist and owner of Seneca Rocks Mountain Guides. Cecil agreed that bolts would need to be placed to make the route safe enough not just for them, but also for any future climbers who might want to test their mettle and live to tell the tale.

Knowing it was too dangerous to place the bolts while climbing on lead from the ground, they decided to rap-bolt the line, meaning rappelling from the top of the cliff and placing bolts in the wall while hanging safely in their harnesses. If placing even one bolt at a traditional climbing crag is heresy to the orthodox trad climber, rap-bolting a sport route is total blasphemy—an unforgivable sin that might result in the bolts being removed.

But even with Cecil’s blessing, the team wanted to avoid confrontation while placing bolts, hoping instead that the route would speak for itself once it had been completed.

They placed just seven bolts over the 90-foot length of the Green Wall’s blank face to a set of existing anchors on the ledge above the hardest portion of climbing. After the ledge, they opted to leave the final 35 feet of climbing as is, meaning any suitors would have to bring a few pieces of trad gear to safely gain the summit following the bolted portion of the show. “To me, that just captures the spirit of the Seneca ethic. We didn’t indiscriminately just start slapping bolts into the route, we thought very carefully about it,” Brady said.

With the route safely equipped, it was time to piece together the sequence of moves required to reach the top. In climbing, this process is called projecting, an arduous undertaking that often requires months—or even years—to unlock routes of the hardest difficulty levels. Brady and Leich are no strangers to projecting; both have completed first ascents in the 5.14 and 5.13 range, respectively.

Climbing at this level requires extreme precision and efficient movement to conserve energy. Through projecting a route, one can get to a point where the moves feel secure, offering a greater chance of success. “Imagine a rubber band running from the tips of your fingers all the way down through your body to the tips of your toes; you have to keep that rubber band tight to stay on the wall. If you have any inefficiencies along the way, the rubber band goes slack and you fall,” says Brady.

The hardest series of moves in a route is called the crux. The crux can be just a single move, or it can be a cryptic sequence of movements that must be perfectly linked together. Brady described one portion of the crux in detail:

“You start with both hands above your head, in opposition to each other on thin, slippery edges in the rock that can fit just an eighth of a fingertip. At this point, it’s critical to move your right foot about eight inches to the right to a very glassy foothold that’s barely discernable. You have to focus on engaging your shoulders and back just right in order to take enough weight off of your foot to move it. At first, I was trying to just move my foot and kept falling. But I discovered that if I planted my knee against the wall, I could use it as a fulcrum that allowed me to maintain just enough body tension to carefully swing my foot to the bad foothold. There are about five individual movements that go into moving one foot eight inches, and that move is just one of the 11 technical moves in this crux sequence. I fell on every single one of those moves as I was trying to work through it.

As the project dragged into summer, the duo adapted their schedule to avoid peak heat and humidity. Brady and Leich found they could productively climb from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m., or from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m., when the sun would crest Seneca’s fin and beat down on the west-facing walls. “The extremely friction-dependent moves become impossible when sweating in the sun,” Brady says.

The climbing itself was hard enough, but Brady, a father of four, says balancing family time and work with his goal of completing the project presented an additional challenge. Brady says his wife and extended family were incredibly supportive. “You have to figure out how to make up for that time away and be intentional about devoting time to your family when you are there,” he says. “Sometimes I’d be lying in bed at 10 at night, unable to fall asleep. On a whim, I’d be like I’ve got to go to Seneca . You can only do that so much.”

Brady estimates he made upwards of 100 attempts on the route over a span of 25 individual days from March to October 2022, often spending two hours hanging in his harness while trying to decipher the sequence of moves required to delicately dance his way up the blank wall.

On the morning of October 15, 2022, Brady met up with Matt O’Brien, one of several local Seneca climbers who had been filling in as belayer when Leich was unable to make the trip. In perfect conditions, Brady, as he had done nearly 100 times before, entered the crux sequence.

“He let out some grunts and threw up his right hand, and I saw his body slowly peel away from the wall,” O’Brien says. “I saw this huge loop of slack in the rope and Joel was waving his limbs in the air as he came down in a giant fall.”

Fortunately for Brady, O’Brien is an expert belayer and provided him with a soft, safe catch. “It was one of the smoothest falls I’ve ever had,” Brady says. “When I got lowered back to the start of the route, Matt was shaking his head with this wide-eyed look.”

Now that Brady had safely taken his largest fall—nearly 40 feet—near the end of the crux section, he was able to shift his full attention to the moves. Brady asked O’Brien for the two pieces of trad gear required to reach the summit, signaling his mental preparedness for completing the route. “That was the first time he had asked me for those pieces; I really think he believed he was going to make it,” O’Brien says.

But this time, as Brady approached the crux, he spotted a section of rock above it. “I looked at that spot and told myself that I wanted to be above the crux, looking down at where I currently was,” he says.

Up he went, performing the sequence of moves he had rehearsed so many times before. Everything felt right, including the move to the bad foothold. “He’s usually always grunting, but this time, he was silently floating up the rock effortlessly, like he was weightless in the gentle breeze,” says O’Brien.

Suddenly, Brady was above the crux, looking down at the spot where he had made his affirmation just moments prior. But with difficult climbing ahead, he wasn’t ready to celebrate just yet. “I got stressed because there was still some fairly tenuous climbing that was getting in my head a little bit,” he says. “I took a deep breath and thought, This is it. This is the one where you’re doing it. Just enjoy the moment.”

He let out a celebratory shout as he gained a ledge just big enough to lie down on, resting for nearly 20 minutes before ascending the final 35 feet of traditional climbing.

After over an hour on the rock, Brady pulled himself atop the South Peak of Seneca Rocks and broke down into tears. His thoughts immediately shifted to his close friend Michael Brown, a lifelong climber who had passed away the day before following a battle with cancer.

The week before Brown died, his wife invited Brady to visit after Brown was moved to his childhood home on hospice care. Brown told Brady a story about his favorite pig that found its way into his neighborhood when he was a kid. “I leaned back, thinking Is he really talking about pigs on his deathbed? ” says Brady. “Then he grabbed me and looked around with this gleam in his eyes. I leaned in and he quietly said, ‘There’s magic in the hills.’ Shortly after that, we prayed together and he fell asleep.”

As Brady was processing all the emotional events of the past week, he knew what he would call the newly minted climb. In honor of Michael Brown, and in part paying homage to the epic wall he had just ascended, he named the route Green Magic in the Hills.

After rappelling back down to meet O’Brien at the start of the route, the two embraced. “It was an emotional tidal wave,” says O’Brien. “We looked at the line, at this beautiful day we were having, and just soaked it in. Joel was especially appreciative of the people in his life that allow him to do this kind of stuff. It was a heavy moment that was a long time in the making.”

Brady bestowed Green Magic in the Hills a difficulty rating of 5.14b, adding the first 5.14 climb to Seneca’s storied climbing history. Previously, the hardest route at Seneca was Flyin’ Lion (5.13d), a steep and harrowing sport route first climbed by Matt Fanning in 2019.

Leich says he’s proud of Brady but is sad he wasn’t there for Brady’s historic ascent. He will continue working toward his first ascent of Green Magic in the Hills this year. “I’m really excited to have contributed to it,” Leich says. “I think it’s gonna build quite a reputation as a nails-hard classic because it’s not gonna go down easy for anybody.”

Before they started the project, Brady and Leich agreed that they would call the route a team ascent, regardless of who finished it first. “This is ultimately a joint partner project,” Brady says. “I don’t care how long it takes Andrew to do it. We did this thing together.” w

Dylan Jones is a has-been climber who is currently training for his ascent of Green Magic in the Hills. But first, he needs to build a time machine to go back to his twenties.

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