One Weekend A Year, Lander’s The Center Of The Rock Climbing World

LANDER — A dream set Marissa Murr of Rock River, Wyoming, on a real life-changing adventure climbing over and under rock under a sky framed by pine trees.

“I was craving a sense of community and wanted more outdoor experience,” she said. “And I actually had a dream about climbing and just this overwhelming sense of community and family.”

Her dream panned out in real life just as she’d envisioned it while asleep. She’s made many new friends, including her boyfriend, and feels like she’s finally found her place in the world. 

Now another dream has started a new leg for the climbing journey. She’s started a new company she calls Domeco, which will make and sell portable geodesic domes with customizable climbing walls. 

“You can put this in your backyard or your living room or a spare bedroom and train with your entire family,” she said. “So, it’s great for kids. It’s great for mom and dad. You can have the whole family involved.”

The entire climbing wall breaks back down easily so it can be transported to new locations for easy setup.

It comes with all sorts of holds that a climber might need to use, social media climbing influencer Avianna Frady told Cowboy State Daily as she demonstrated the wall’s use.

“What I really like about it is anybody can climb,” she said. “Because there’s so many different grades. This (Domeco wall) is a little bit harder because it’s all overhung, so you’re holding yourself upside down.”

That makes it good training for the real thing, helping a climber to build up strength in a safer environment. There are soft mats underneath the wall in case the climber falls.

“The dome is great for anyone,” Frady said. “It can be used for families and fun, and then even businesses. You can put whatever holds on it that you want so even kids can play on it.”

Murr and Frady were among the 600 or so rock climbers who converged on Lander for a weekend of climbing fun and games. 

They went out to Sinks Canyon to climb and work on existing trails. Then they’d come back to watch films and listen to climbing celebrities talk about the rock-climbing world.

Called the International Climbers’ Festival, organizer Chelsea Rude told Cowboy State Daily the event brings in people from all over the world, including celebrity climbers. This past weekend was the 32nd year for the festival.

“We are the oldest running (climbing) festival out there, and one of the largest as well,” Rude said. “We’ve been around a very long time. 

“Our mission here is to raise money for WYO Climbers and to bring the community at large together and provide a good time for people to connect.”

World Class Climbing Mecca

“Lander is really famous for its limestone rock climbing,” Murr told cowboy State Daily as she flipped through a book outlining thousands of routes for climbers to try just in the Lander area.

“This is just one style of climbing,” Murr said. “This is primarily for sport climbing, but we could also get, like a bouldering book.”

Limestone sport climbing is the main reason Lander has become so well-known around the world as a climbing mecca, J.J. Mackenzie told Cowboy State Daily. She is another of the organizers who help put together the annual festival.

Originally from Canada, Mackenzie moved to Gillette for a wildlife biologist job.

“There’s a community over in Ten Sleep where a lot of climbers also go, and so I would go there for weekends in July,” she said. “It’s like a campsite, but there’s a lot of climbers there and it was only two hours away.”

While she was there, she kept hearing other climbers talking about a place called Lander, as well as a blow-out event for climbers called the International Climbers’ Festival. 

When she hit the town, she was immediately smitten.

“I was like there are mountains here, and I really like this town,” she said. “So that’s how I first discovered Lander, and the rest is kind of history.”

Lander’s limestone was made for climbing, Mackenzie said.

“It’s this very pockety limestone,” she said. “And there’s just tons of that incredible limestone here.”

She’s not the only one moving to Lander for the climbing. 

Jake Dickerson also submitted to the lure of the limestone, and said he’s met dozens of other people like himself. He mentioned a couple of the business owners in town who came for the climbing.

“Maven, they’re another example,” he said. “They’re all climbers. And like Cowfish, that guy is also a climber.”

Cowfish is a restaurant in Lander while Maven is an optics manufacturing company that makes high-quality direct-to-consumer binoculars, riflescopes and spotting scopes.

Dickerson started out with weekend trips to Lander from Colorado, where he was studying ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado.

The summer after graduating, he and his friends rented a house in Lander and spent the summer climbing, fishing and backpacking. 

“I’m a big fly fisher and the access to fly-fishing is incredible out here,” he said. “And I like backpacking, so I started working for Wild Iris in town, like the gear store. It was great work-life balance and super fun.”

The community was also nice and welcoming, and “it just felt like the right place,” Dickerson said.

Climbers Find T-Shirt Weather In Winter

One of the things that makes Lander special for climbing is an inversion that creates sunny, T-shirt weather about 1,000 feet above Lander on the south-facing walls of Sinks Canyon.

“It will get really cold in town like in the valley,” Dickerson said. “But then, when you drive up, like, about 1,000 feet to the cliff and then hike up, if it’s sunny, you can climb in a T-shirt when it’s zero degrees outside.”

At first, Dickerson didn’t believe this was true. 

“It’s crazy,” he said. “I’ve never seen a microclimate like that, so I was extremely skeptical. But it is completely true. And so that’s one of my favorite areas.”

Taking new climbers to experience the inversion makes it all new again.

“The other areas are also super fun, but they’re a little more remote and you need like a four-wheel drive to get to them,” he said. “But at the Sinks and at Wild Iris there are a lot of routes to choose from.”

Those different routes give climbers different puzzles to choose from on any one given day.

“That’s what climbers like,” he said. “Even though two routes look the same, they can have a totally different style and difficulty. It’s like a puzzle to solve, and that’s why I like it.”

It’s a problem that involves the body and spirit as well as the mind.

“You have to solve the problem with your body a little bit, thinking about how to interact with nature,” he said. “Because the rock out there, it’s a layer of Big Horn dolomite, which is kind of like compressed and fossilized seabed. 

“And that creates these kinds of solution pockets, so it’s really clean rock, but there’s just these holes in it that are like built for climbing.”

That’s what makes it a choice area for climbers, Dickerson said. 

“The rock is so unique out here,” Dickerson said. “It has a super unique characteristic, unlike anywhere else in the country. So that’s why so many people come here. And sometimes the pockets are big and sometimes they’re small, and that makes a difference in like,  how you figure out (the rock-climbing puzzle).”

Huge Community-Builder

WyoClimbers has done economic impact studies on how much money their sport is bringing into Lander, and it was around $4 million in 2023.

That gives the sport a lot of potential to be a community builder, Dickerson believes, because not only is the sport drawing people to the area to live, they spend quite a bit of money to support community businesses.

“I recognize the impacts that our tourism has on the area,” he said. “But I think the benefits outweigh the problems.”

His group also strives to be proactive about potential problems to learn what it can do to mitigate issues before they become full-blown problems.

“We have a great relationship with the Forest Service,” he said. “Like, ‘Hey, we have more users here, what do we need to accommodate for that?’”

That’s led the group to do things like build new bathrooms or add new parking lots. 

It hasn’t been hard to convince new climbers to get on board with WyoClimbers, Disckerson added.

“People will come to Lander for the first time and see how awesome it is,” he said. “And they like want to protect it.”

Harnessing that energy is also part of what the International Climbers’ Festival is all about.

“It’s put on by WyoClimbers, which is the climbing nonprofit in town, and it serves as like a fundraiser, as well as educational opportunities, to teach people about the funding in the area and kind of show how special Lander is,” he said. “We’ve grown as a nonprofit, and now we have two paid employees, so it’s definitely come a long way in a few years.”

Money from the festival also pays for youth scholarships and programs to teach people how to climb safely, as well as infrastructure and trail work.

Any money that’s left over is used for community building, such as movies in the park with barbecues, because that’s a great way to bring diverse people together. 

“Anything that can enhance the Lander climbing and outdoor community,” Dickerson said. “If we have any funds left over, we try to use it for that.” 

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.