Photo by Reid Dowdle 

Route leader

Reid Dowdle : A Sawtooth original

By Tina Cole

Reid Dowdle is one of Sun Valley’s best-kept secrets in the field of climbing and mountaineering. He prefers it that way.

Dowdle grew up in Atlanta, which, in his estimation, had no sense of adventure. At a young age, Dowdle appeased his hunger for adventure by joining a Scout troop and becoming involved in technical caving. On weekends with his father, Dowdle enjoyed the rush of rappelling 300 feet into the depths of limestone caves. By age 12, he had discovered the adventurous world of the West while on family vacations.

His first Western climbing experience took place in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park on the Grand Teton.

It was the first major climb of the trip for Dowdle and his father. Carrying huge backpacks of gear up the steep, seemingly endless approach, they spent the night at Petzoldt’s Caves, barely making it to the Lower Saddle the next day. The altitude was brutal on their sea-level systems and, dejected, they hiked down with raging headaches to resume their tour of the national parks system. Weeks later on the drive home, Dowdle’s dad looped back via the Grand Teton.

They climbed Grand Teton successfully.

During his teen years in Atlanta, Dowdle enjoyed technical caving in the winters, kayaking in spring and autumn, and hitchhiking to the Tetons or Mount Rainier during the summer months to climb.

He attended Antioch College in the Midwest for a year before taking up climbing seriously.

Like so many other climbers and skiers who have made Sun Valley their home, Dowdle arrived purely by coincidence. He had been climbing in Yosemite National Park, one of North America’s premiere rock climbing meccas, and was headed for Grand Teton National Park in July of 1976 when his ride convinced him to stop at Sun Valley just to check it out.

Dowdle liked what he saw and made it his home.
He soon fell into a familiar routine, spending spring and fall—when there was no work to be had in Sun Valley—climbing in Yosemite. Summers were spent climbing in the Sawtooth Mountains and the City of Rocks in Idaho.

For Dowdle, climbing is all about “going into the Sawtooths, carrying in all of your gear and putting up a new route. Today, climbing has become more fragmented and specialized,” he says.

Sport climbing focuses on the technical difficulty of a route that is oftentimes immediately approachable from one’s car. Sport climbers do not need the route finding or camping skills requisite for more traditional climbers. Much of the climbing in the Sawtooths requires multiple days, long approaches, carrying in large loads of gear and negotiating routes into trail-less wilderness areas in out of the way places.

The common sense factor of maintaining oneself for extended periods in mountain environments is not an issue when one can drive up to a sport climb, hop out, climb with bolts and chains easily accessible and oftentimes guided, well-established routes, rappel down, and drive home. Time is limited and they want the most climbing possible in a short time period.

Dowdle, too, enjoys sport climbing and considers it a different aspect of his overall climbing repertoire.  His analogy is that sport climbing is like eating fast food. It is convenient and fun but after a while it is hard to remember one climb from the next, whereas longer, multiple-pitch climbing routes are like eating a fine five course meal that Dowdle says he will remember in detail until the day he dies.

Dowdle and his climbing friends have had the Sawtooths almost to themselves for the past 30 years because of the popular preference for convenient and fast approaches.

“No one is spending much time putting up moderately hard routes in the Sawtooths, and the vast majority of climbers do not have the time or inclination to hike in and then camp in order to climb,” muses Dowdle with a smile.

For him, it is all about being in the mountains and everything that entails. The camping, the fishing, and just being in the mountains, makes the total experience fulfilling.

Kim Anderson, a longtime friend and climbing companion recollects a “classic Dowdle outing” when they made the first ascent of the northwest face of Mount Cramer in the Sawtooths. Anderson had never been on a big wall before and the new route involved two days of focused climbing and an overnight bivouac on the wall. Dowdle led all of the 14 pitches, and Anderson gamely followed.

At the end of the climb, Anderson was relieved to be standing on level ground when Dowdle, realizing they had an extra day to climb before heading out, asked him, “What do you want to do next?”

Anderson was completely done in. Dowdle just smiled and told him “Don’t worry, it’s your first big wall. Six months from now you’ll be over it and wanting to do another.”

In Anderson’s estimation, Dowdle is one of the safest and most natural on-site climbers he has ever seen.

Every summer for the past 10 years, Dowdle has taken a 10-day trip with horse support into a specific area of the Sawtooths with a group of climbing friends who call the outing “Camp Dowdle.” The purpose of the trip is to minimize the pain of carrying in huge loads of gear so they can spend more energy exploring and climbing.

Doug Abromeit, director of the National Avalanche Center in Ketchum, has attended Camp Dowdle for several seasons and can attest that Dowdle is not at all enthusiastic about duplicating old routes, be they his own or others’. Dowdle has put up so many routes in the Sawtooths and another famed Idaho climbing area, City of Rocks, it is hard to know if one is on his routes or not.

Abromeit backs up the opinion of many other climbers that Dowdle has “an uncanny ability, like having fly paper attached to his hands, arms and feet, to hang in a crack forever. He is clearly one of the most natural and beautiful climbers to watch. He also has a great singing voice and is a great yodeler.”

Dowdle’s artistry resides in his ability to read a rock face, see a route, climb it, commit the route to memory and then draw it on paper with detailed descriptions. Dowdle considers the Sawtooths, although a fairly benign and small range with a short climbing season, one of his favorite places to climb. He has also climbed extensively in the Wind River and Teton Ranges of Wyoming, Mt. Huntington and Mt. McKinley in Alaska, the British Columbia ranges and Peru.

Dowdle reflects wistfully that it would have been nice to climb some of “the classic” routes in Europe. Still, at 48, Dowdle has plenty of time for it. His life is a fine balance of climbing, work and family.

The group of Sawtooth pioneers is an illustrious one, including the legendary Fred Beckey, (an octogenarian friend of Dowdle’s), Louis Stur, the Lowe brothers, Gordy Webster, Kirk Bachman and several others. Dick Dorworth, a writer and close mountaineering friend, best sums up the essence of Dowdle in an essay featured in the February 2004 issue of the Mountain Gazette titled “Encounters with Fred,” as in Beckey.

“I think we all assumed that Dowdle, who had done it before, would lead. Dowdle is one of America’s fine unsung, unknown, unpretentious hard man climbers. His impressive climbing resumé, as well as the intention, spirit and integrity of his career, are in the mold of Beckey. Indeed, Dowdle is a Beckey alumnus cum laude, and he probably has more Sawtooth experience than any other climber. Dowdle is a minimalist in most things, especially the description of climbing routes, and he laconically said that the last pitch of our climb was ‘interesting.’”

During the winters, Dowdle continues to get into the mountains via backcountry skiing on a regular basis.

He is a fine wood worker and craftsman and owns a construction company. He can be found skiing on Baldy with his son, Quentin, an avid snowboarder, and delights in his little daughter Nora and wife Robin.

Low-key, calm and assured, Dowdle is the person to have at the end of the belay rope in a tight spot. •