Pawtuckaway is impenetrable. The forest extracts a haunting “Blair Woods” paranoia from its visitors. The old-growth trees live adjacent to a stagnant swamp that has to be one of the largest breeding grounds for mosquitoes in the world. The bloodsucking pests rise through the cool, wet air like hellfire damnation.

Unfortunately, some of New England’s best boulders are doomed to lie in this deciduous jungle till the coming apocalypse melts them down into liquid, which one day will become a breeding ground for even bigger, thirstier mosquitoes.

Despite these circumstances, climbers like frequenting this New Hampshire bouldering locale. Pawtuckaway, unbelievably, has even gotten some recognition in national rock-climbing magazines despite the fact that it’s not in Colorado.

The first time I went to Pawtuckaway, I didn’t send a single thing. My friend Dave and I spent two hours driving around all lost and pissed, cursing the Internet directions that had obviously been written by a dyslexic, caged, sexually abused animal in Boston.

We found the bouldering, finally, and it was pretty cool. I placed my hands on the starting hold of a nice-looking V4 and instantly my skin turned blacker than morning coffee and it burned just as piping hot. In the time it had taken my brain to interpret reality, the mosquitoes had decimated my hand into a swollen, massacred lump of raw flesh.

The bugs nearly drove me insane that day. We had no bug spray, and stayed much longer than we should have—because we are climbers, so horrible suffering is a normal thing. I never made it to the top of a single problem and that day I vowed never to return to Pawtuckaway.

The day I returned to Pawtuckaway was mystical and bizarre. Why did I go back? This seems strange to me now, but why make a big deal out of past mistakes? Atonement is for cowards.

With nothing more than a bouldering pad, bug spray, one liter of water, four beers, tape, half a pound of chalk, a headlamp,  and a pocket edition of Rock Craft by Royal Robbins, I walked around Pawtuckaway looking for boulders to climb on. The bugs weren’t as bad as they were on my first trip, and I was enjoying the isolation and peaceful silence.

This pleasant feeling was instantly ruined when I ran into another climber, an old geezer with a king-sized mattress strapped to his ragged frame. Right away, he pegged me for just the sort of sap who’d be too polite to turn him down on his offer for an afternoon of bouldering friendship.

“Hey, you!” he called. “Come here. What’s your name? Can you spot me? Let’s climb.”

He was manic and a bit crazy, but I wasn’t necessarily scared, just intrigued. Old Crazy Guy (OCG) started showing me around. He explained that he had been climbing in these woods for over 20 years, and indeed he knew just about every single problem and its beta like the back of his hand.

The OCG gave me beta on classic, bullet V4s, V5s, V6s and I flashed them all.

“Thanks, Old Crazy Guy,” I said. “This is great. I appreciate you showing me around.”

That’s when the day turned weird.

“Oh, if you like those problems, you have to check out all these new boulders that I’ve been developing. You HAVE to do them.”

The way he said it was undeniably threatening. Then, he took me to a collection of mushroom-shaped boulders with tops only about three feet off the ground. I’m not exaggerating.

“These are my mantel problems,” Old Crazy Guy said. “Just mantel up. Do it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. I honestly had no idea what he was talking about. I had never seen anyone climb on anything so … SMALL!

“Here, damnit, I’ll show you.” Old Crazy Guy placed his pad down next to the boulder—the pad’s thickness was roughly a quarter of the way up the “boulder.” OCG laid down flat on his back and reached his hands up to the lip of the rock. He grabbed on, threw a heel hook, and manteled up onto the rock.

“See?” he said. “That’s a V2. You try.”

“Huh?”

“Try it. Do it. Try.”

Must I? I was committed to doing what Old Crazy Guy told me—he had, after all, given me all that beta before. Fuck! Why must young people be doomed to entertaining all the misguided, crazy, illogical convictions held by old people with a straight face? Is it out of politeness or remorse?

With a terrible feeling that what I was doing was both stupid and wrong, I sat down on the bouldering pad, laid down and grabbed onto the starting—and finishing—holds of what stands as the shortest problem I have ever climbed. I matched my heel by my hands, and tried to mantel up onto the block. It was surprisingly hard, but I still managed to do the one move.

“Brilliant!” Old Crazy Guy said. “Let’s keep going. Here, there’s another mantel problem over here. I put this one up, too. You have to check it out. It’s V4!”

This next one was barely taller than the V2. Still, I tried it, and the next, and the next and all of Pawtuckaway’s incredible sub-four-foot mantel problems that had been established by this progenitor of the pointless and absurd.

At least it was apt. That, after all, is the essence of bouldering. Still, I’ve never been back to Pawtuckaway. There’s just too much unbelievably sick manteling to do here in Colorado.