During the school year, I would go to the Schwelland-Gunx every weekend because I became obsessed with climbing.

You know, I'd hitch rides, I'd do anything to get my 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13-year-old self to the cunks.

My name is Hugh Hur.

I began climbing when I was seven years old.

Every summer, my family would, we would go on these extended road trips all over North America, often for three months from

June to September, sometimes to Alaska, to the Canadian Rockies, Yosemite, all over the continental

U.S. And it began with sort of hiking and backpacking and fishing, and then it progressed to peak bagging.

And then the walls got steeper and steeper.

And by the time I was eight, nine, ten years old, we were doing vertical rock and ice work,

we being myself and my two brothers.

That's the slippery slope. You start with hiking and pretty soon you're doing a vertical

waterfall ice and you're like, oh geez, how did we get here? That's right. And then I started

climbing really well when I was 11, 12. I started to become known within the gunks. Certainly the

first ascents in terms of my age, but very quickly progressing and first ascents, you know,

independent of age. Yeah. And so what year was that, roughly? Late 1970s.

Doesn't that make you maybe the first climbing child prodigy in the country?

Because I feel like there have been many since, but does that make you maybe the first child prodigy?

Probably.

Yeah, that's probably correct.

My climbing accident was in 1982 when I was 17.

My climbing partner at the time, Jeff Batser, we set out on a road trip,

we drove from Pennsylvania to North Conway, New Hampshire.

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