Southern Super Nova

Thirty-plus Years Ago, Driven First Ascensionist Rob Robinson Discovered the Tennessee Wall. In His Career, He’s Authored Hundreds of New Routes and Dramatically Expanded Chattanooga Climbing.

- Elaine Elliott

“I HAD A TREMENDOUS appetite for being right on the line where everything was at stake,” says Rob Robinson. In July of 1985, on a humid 105° day, Robinson jammed out a 35-foot roof, one of the largest at Chattanooga’s Tennessee Wall. He hung once on the “one in a million” crack. That night, Robinson slept in the same dirty clothes to preserve the bond he felt for his new project. He returned the next day, partially inverting his body to move through a blank crux section, and fought through a shallow slot to the finish.

“My energy and the climb’s seemed to fuse,” Robinson wrote in his ChatTrad guidebook. “I felt like I had merged with the Center of the Sandstone Universe in a spectacular and incomprehensible way.” Robinson dubbed the route Celestial Mechanics (5.12), a term he’d learned while studying astrophysics at the University of Tennessee. Celestial mechanics is the calculated movement of astronomical objects in space, and the name reflected his years of orbit around the development of Southern sandstone.

In 1975, when he was 15, Robinson got his start on rock during a month-long summer course in Wyoming’s Tetons and Montana’s Beartooth Mountains. Earlier that year, disinterested with private-school life, he had left Chattanooga’s prestigious Baylor School. A relative of the family, who was a former NOLS instructor, suggested that Robinson might benefit from time in the mountains. At first, the perpetually frozen fingers and rigors of mountaineering did not appeal to Robinson. But on a sunny day toward the end of his sojourn, he climbed the 400-foot Baxter’s Pinnacle, a 5.9 in the Tetons.

“That climb cemented my love for climbing,” says Robinson. “So when I got back to Chattanooga, I looked at all the cliffs around here and started exploring.”