Sean McLane is a Salt Lake-based climber, mountaineer, and first ascensionist. This year, he gave himself a challenge to establish 30 first ascents in celebration of his 30th birthday. We caught up with him after his first ascent of Too Much Candy, a forty meter offwidth splitter in Indian Creek. This was Sean’s 28th first ascent for the project.

I wanted to chat a little bit about your birthday project - if I understand it right, you’re doing 30 first ascents by the end of the year?

Yeah. My birthday is on Christmas, so that pretty much lines up with the end of 2019. Since I turned 30 last Christmas, the goal has been to do 30 first ascents before the end of the year.

Are there any rules for the project beyond that?

For me it was about seeing what the first ascent process looked like, because I hadn’t really done any new routing before. I wanted to understand how that process works, and work through the challenge of learning it without having a mentor—by seeking out people who wanted to adventure, and learning by putting things up.

Any routes on rock or ice were fair game. I started with more ice, just wandering around on my own and climbing little ice pitches that I felt okay with soloing. Then I got more into bolting and rock routes as the season progressed. I’m looking for longer routes, if possible. Alpine routes, if possible. I’m counting routes—not pitches—at this point, I’ve probably done 50 or 60 pitches for the project. It’s about just getting out there and exploring places that haven’t been explored.

So it seems that the adventure aspect is a big factor in the lines that you’re picking?

Yeah. You put in a lot more work, but you get a lot more out of it.

On the subject of work, do you have an idea of how much time have you spent on this project? It’s not exactly easy today to just walk up to a crag and find something with FA potential.

It’s hard to give a number, but I spent a bunch of time researching on Google Maps, just looking for rock and ice with the right aspect and exposure. That’s how I came across a couple of areas. With some of those, you go to the area, and you hike a ton of gear in and set up camp, and you spend all this time pulling dirt out of cracks. It’s a lot of work. On the other hand, some of the first ascents just came from luck and having your eyes open at otherwise well-traveled places. The routes at Indian Creek, I found by just going to a wall and looking between the lines.

Do you think it made you look at all the climbing you did before this FA project differently?

For sure. That was part of the idea too. I was looking back at the pioneers of the desert or the people exploring the Himalaya, trying to find the same type of adventure in this modern world—where we have so much more information and so much has already been explored. How much of that can I recapture and feel similar to that original exploration?

Also, it’s given me an appreciation for how much work it takes to put up a route—the time, and money, and bolting that goes into trying to leave the place better for the next person who’s going to come and climb it.

Have you heard from anyone who’s climbed one of your routes yet?

I know that someone climbed a route I put up in The Jungle called Bring a Machete. The name is somewhat indicative of the trials and tribulations of putting up a new route, and the guy who commented on Mountain Project was like ‘Did anybody clean this thing at all?’, and gave it a bomb rating.

My immediate thought was ‘Oh man, that’s really sad’, because we’d spent a whole day pulling off blocks bigger than us on this route, and just the first couple feet had some dirt still back in the off width. I think his opinion was colored by that. We do the best we can, putting up a good route and cleaning it, but you’re always going to have a critic.

Do you ever wish we didn’t have as much climbing info on the Internet like that? Do you always put your routes up on Mountain Project? Or are there routes where you decide to keep the info a little closer to the vest?

That’s a hard question. I’ve taken a line personally where I put everything on Mountain Project. It can be difficult working within local ethics, trying to be respectful of areas that aren’t on the map and might not be on the map because somebody wanted to keep them off. Part of the work of putting up routes is going and finding the people who are local and trying to get the history of the area, and being respectful as much as possible to the local ethics. Even so, there have been some places where it’s not possible to find those people or that historical information. I think that sharing on a forum like Mountain Project helps others to reach out and continue in the local ethic.

It’s tough, because we’re definitely kind of entering an era of over saturation in some places.

Yeah. Part of the motivation for me sharing stuff is recognizing that we, as climbers, have an impact. You see it very much in Indian Creek, with how Way Rambo looks terrible. I try not to climb it any more because I don’t want another pair of hands on that route, over and over again. We need more areas and more places to disperse the volume of climbers and spread out that impact. I think sharing the information about new routes is one way to do that. I try to encourage people to go and explore and try new things and check out new areas. There’s plenty of climbing away from the things that everybody knows.

Of all the 28 new routes that you’ve put up so far, have any of them struck you as a future classic?

There’s an area called the Wild Granites that I found by looking at Google Maps and going “That looks like it has ice”. It turned out to have a lot of good granite climbing and it’s so far out of the way that even with people knowing about it there’s never going to be that many people who climb there.

There are some really quality routes—Gold Dust, Forbidden Fruit, The Wrath and The Sword of Wotan are four really quality ones up there. The crux of Forbidden Fruit is a giant overhanging threes and fours dihedral. It’s a perfectly clean 30’ hanging corner. The Wrath has a roof pitch that comes on the arete at the edge of the dihedral, and you get hundreds of feet of exposure as you’re pulling the crux of the climb. The Sword of Wotan has a 50 meter face pitch on patina edges up to the little tower summit—it’s all just really quality climbing up there.

I put up some really fun routes in the Creek, too. FA number 28, Too Much Candy was one of the more quality routes. You don’t really find something like 40 meters of splitter number fives very often. Especially not visible from the road. I feel very lucky to have found that.

When it comes to more crag-style single-pitch first ascents in a place like the Creek, do you find that evokes a different mindset than some of the bigger, more remote objectives that you’ve taken on?

If you’re at a heavily trafficked, well-established area, it’s about taking a different perspective on your day at the crag. You have to be open to seeing something and thinking ‘that looks interesting’. Sometimes the only difference between a line that you’ve spotted and a well-established route that’s been there for 20 years is just that somebody went up there and drilled some bolts for an anchor.

It’s different being farther out in a remote spot. Part of that experience is just taking in the new area, and it’s not the same as going to a crag in the Creek where you know exactly what to expect. When you’re in a remote or undeveloped area, there are a lot more unknowns. It gives you a heightened sense of adventure.

Do you find yourself gravitating to one or the other?

I think it’s nice to have both. Sometimes you want to have an easier day, sometimes you want to go push yourself somewhere new and see what you’re capable of. One nice thing if you’re at a closer and more established crag is that it’s more likely that your route is going to get traffic, and more people are going to enjoy it as much as you did.

And that’s part of your goal for this?

Absolutely. I think route development is a creative activity. You make choices about how a route is going to come together the experience you want people to have while they’re climbing it. Should a route be run-out? Should it be very well protected? Do the anchors belong way up high?

Those types of choices are about creating something that has a certain experience for others. Sometimes you succeed and sometimes you don’t, but you have to try to make something that’s interesting for somebody to climb.

In a way, first ascents are a nonrenewable resource—there’s only so much rock out there that’s worth climbing. Do you think we’re eventually going to run out of FA opportunities in the US?

There’s a definite progression. When you look at the world of the 1950s and 60s and new desert towers and exploration—we’re never going to have a similar era. The types of routes and exploration that you can do now is affected by that past. It’s limited by it, and we’ll continue to be limited in the future, but I think taking a defeatist attitude around the ability to explore and adventure and do first ascents is similar to the attitude of people who said we’d never climb anything harder than 5.12 or 5.13, or whatever the next ‘hardest thing’ was considered. The progression of grades has slowed but it’s still continuing. When we have thousands of people who can climb 5.15, I think there are going to be a lot of first ascents that just weren’t thought about previously.

You only have two FAs left to put up before the project is complete. Do you know what those are going to be?

I don’t, yet! I do have a trip planned to New Mexico next week—I’m hoping to do a couple rock routes there. I’d also like to ideally put some ice routes up in Montana or Wyoming before the end of the year. I have done new routes in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Nevada, so I figure I should poke around north and see if there’s something interesting up there.

I’m going to keep going past 30 to see how high I can push that number before the end of the year—but even at this point I feel like it’s been a successful project. I’ve accomplished my goals of learning about route development, and proving to myself that this type of adventure does still exist in the modern age. The project has also opened up my view of climbing beyond ‘where am I going to go, and what routes am I doing this weekend’. Now, it’s about ‘where do I want to go explore’ and how I want to balance that exploration versus repeating routes and enjoying what others have already put up.

Once the project is over, do you have a sense of what comes next?

We’ll see. I don’t think there’s going to be a 31 first ascents project next year, I think I got what I needed out of having a structured goal this year. It may just become ‘how big can I go?’. The idea of putting up big new routes on big peaks definitely holds appeal to me.

Looking back, we’ve talked a lot about route development in general both as a practice and an art. What are the top things you’re going to take away from this experience?

There are a lot of practical and tactical skills I’m coming away with—how to put in a bolt, how to hand drill, hammer drill—all that stuff. But the main takeaway that I’d come away with is that I came into route development with an attitude of ‘let’s figure it out, it can’t be that bad’ and that has turned out to be true. It’s opened up a new world to me. I hope that somebody else who’s looking to get into putting up new routes can take my experience and believe that it’s possible. I’m also looking forward to being a mentor, because I really didn’t have one myself and I’d like to pass it on.

Read more about Sean’s first ascent project here.