From Pamphlet to Podium

As a second grader, I found a pamphlet for Green River Preserve on the coffee table in the lobby at school. I took it home, handed it to my mom, and begged to “go there, please.” More than a decade later, the red eft on the front cover that initially caught my eye lives permanently on my body as my first tattoo.

The ukulele that I picked up because I wanted to play at Council Fire with the Green River Ramblers turned into a collection of string instruments too numerous to fit in the back of my Subaru.

The tea my counselors and I brewed on camping stoves from sweet birch branches and sassafras leaves became a shelf in my dorm room lined with botany textbooks.

The people that put up with my complaining as a child are now the people I am lucky enough to call my colleagues. They are the numbers I dial when hard things happen, the couches I crash on across the country, the arms I jump into when I want to be sure I will be caught.

For more than half my life, I have had the incredible opportunity to spend some portion of the year at GRP. Those mountains have been an unceasing source of growth, the catalyst for countless lifetime loves.

Perhaps the most transformational of these loves has been climbing.

After being introduced to the sport on the GRP tower in my childhood, I joined the youth competition team at my local climbing gym. Where the sports I had participated in before were hyper-competitive and individualistic even when scored as a team, climbing (scored individually) was collaborative. During competitions, climbers I had never met before would approach me. “Have you considered trying the route this way? I think it might help you.”

The instant camaraderie took me straight back to camp. Amongst the superficiality and societal pressures that often governed perceived worth in middle and high school life, I relished being back in a space like Green River that asked, “how strong can you be?” “How brave can you be?”

I met Courtney Bellissimo during a two-week session at GRP in my early middle school years when she led my mentor group on a hike to Big Laurel. As I played in the creek, she studied my movements, watching me hop from rock to rock. When I returned to where she was sitting at the base of the falls, she read me like an open book. “Are you a climber?”

Ten years later and 2,000 miles away, she stands next to me at the base of a 50 foot wall at the USA Climbing National Training Center; I am about to tie in for my first route of the top rope qualification round of Collegiate National Championships. Courtney talks through the sequence with me, reassuring me, hyping me up. I look over at her, the Oquirrh mountains in the distance, and think back to ninth grade, leaving the Green River Valley for what I thought would be the last time. I was terrified that aging out of base camp meant losing the family I had built on the Preserve. I didn’t realize how much more I’d be lucky enough to learn from them.

Courtney boards her flight to head back home the next morning, and a few hours later I check in for bouldering finals. A volunteer whisks me away to isolation, where all the competitors are sequestered away from the climbing walls, away from the audience. A short while later, we are lined up and allowed a two minute preview of each bouldering problem that we will attempt over the course of the round. When we are deposited back behind the curtains, the climbing community that I have come to know and love rears to life. “I have colored pencils!” “We can rip some pages out of my journal!” Suddenly ten of us, supposed rivals all vying for the same national title, have gathered knee to knee. We draw each route to the best of our collective memory, talking through each hold: how it’s angled, what part of its surface looks best, when and how we plan to use it.

Sitting on the floor amongst folks that were strangers only days ago, preparing for this challenge together, I feel like I am back at camp, my cabinmates and I crowded around a map of the preserve, tracing trails with our fingers before campout. My nerves slowly begin to ebb.

I step off the podium that night as the 2025 Collegiate Women’s Intermediate Bouldering National Champion. I collect all my gear that is strewn throughout the venue, and I follow my mom back to the rental car. As soon as the doors close, I call Courtney. GRP magic washes over me in waves.

My role at Green River has changed over the years. Instead of the climber racing up the tower, I am the belayer cheering from below. Instead of the picky eater approaching the kitchen window for the third time in a single meal, I am the assistant behind the counter happy to refill the craisins once again. Instead of the cabinmate who always managed to step on the yellow jacket nest and swell up like a balloon, I am the Wilderness EMT who appears with a giant first aid kit ready to soothe worries and clean wounds.

And while I may no longer be the camper sobbing so hard her tears snuff out her wishboat on the shoreline of the lake the last night of the session—instead the musician singing softly on the dock—I remain the last one to leave the hill. The last to say goodbye. My shoulders still shake in my mentors’ arms. I still find Catherine so I can hear her say “I’ll see you next year, kid,” and I still wish on every tealight that she’s right.

No matter how much of it I carry with me, home never gets easier to leave.

Story by Ru Stevens with photos by Brandon S. Marshall & Samantha Keebler