(Lander, WY) – Behind Squaretop Boulder, in the shade where the hill toward the sunny side starts to climb, there’s a 40-foot block of rock that peeled off the wall above at some point long before anyone was around to see it happen. It rolled to a stop right at the base of the slope and has sat there ever since, a good landmark and, this past Friday, the meeting spot for one of the more important clinics of the Climbers’ Festival.
This is where Nate Liles held his rebolting clinic, co-taught with professional climber Jonathan Siegrist. With temperatures pushing 100 degrees for much of the festival, Nate wanted a route that would stay out of the sun all day, and the back side of Squaretop, tucked into Sinks Canyon, is just what he was looking for. 
Nate has been rebolting for most of two decades, but he’s quick to point out it wasn’t some grand plan of his from the start. Nate’s journey into stewardship started almost by accident at Penitente Canyon in Colorado, one of the first wave of American sport-climbing areas developed in the mid 1980s. By the time Nate, who’d just recently become interested in sport climbing, got there, the original hardware was old and, “frankly, scary.” At a stewardship day, he asked one of the area’s original developers who was responsible for fixing it.
“He basically said, ‘Well, you can,'” Nate remembers. “That was a light bulb moment for me. Stewardship of climbing, when it comes to fixed hardware, isn’t done by any land manager. There is no responsible agency. It’s completely user-created infrastructure, which is super unique on public land, and a huge privilege in a lot of ways. And for those reasons, it’s incumbent upon the community to maintain it.”
The idea that the bolts holding climbers onto a route exist because someone in the community decided to put them there and someone else decided to look after them is at the crux of Nate’s mission. He didn’t come to rebolting through some love of hardware or hanging on ropes doing maintenance work. He came to it because he felt like he owed something back.
“I’ve gotten a lot from climbing over the years,” he said. “It’s given me a new direction in my life. I was in a world where the direction I was going was not probably a healthy one, and having active things to do in the outdoors that are really engaging was a much healthier path for me. In a lot of ways, climbing was a huge gift and a huge privilege for me. And for that reason, I started thinking, how can I do more than just take from this thing? How can I also give to this thing?”
He’s spent years turning this drive into something bigger than himself by mentoring newer rebolters, helping raise funds for quality hardware, and working with the American Safe Climbing Association to expand stewardship education so more areas get the attention historic crags like Penitente eventually needed. It’s not glamorous work. Nate describes it as “kind of blue collar,” hauling gear, drilling, hanging on ropes in the heat… perhaps the job could be described as the unglamorous cousin of the climbing days maintenance is meant to protect.
Having Jonathan Siegrist alongside him for this one added additional perspective from someone with a lot of skin in the game. Jonathan brings a career’s worth of route development experience from around Las Vegas, along with a rare thing in professional climbing – a willingness to use his platform for stewardship rather than just performance. Nate’s up front about how uncommon that is. “Within the professional climbing landscape, we don’t see a ton of stewardship efforts, frankly,” he said. “If you’re trying to be a high-level athlete, it’s hard to give anything else to other things.” Jonathan, in Nate’s eyes, is one of the exceptions, someone willing to spend a hot Saturday teaching hardware replacement instead of training or projecting.
The group that showed up to learn was a mix, some with prior rebolting experience, others just getting their footing, but everyone left with more than technique. Nate was clear that the hands-on skills, while the obvious focus of the day, were really just a small part of the bigger point.
“The number one thing is an understanding that this is a shared resource and infrastructure that we all count on as climbers, and it will require our showing up to steward it,” he said. “No one is going to do it for us.”
Through the discussions about hardware standards, the technical instruction, and the hours spent working in the shade while the sun baked everything else in the canyon, how to be a good steward was the consistent theme throughout the Friday clinic at Squaretop.
“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the table,” said Liles. Climbing access, in his view, isn’t guaranteed. It’s negotiated, maintained, and earned by putting in effort. Whether or not someone ever picks up a drill again, Nate hopes they leave understanding they have a seat at that table, and a responsibility to use it. Using it might look like donating to a local access organization, showing up for a trail day, or just understanding what it takes to keep these places open.