Enter the Eyeball, Wild Ontario Multipitch
MEET THE CLIMBERS DEVELOPING ONTARIO’S BIGGEST AND MOST ENIGMATIC MULTI-PITCH CLIFF
When a little shove sent the belay ledge at the top of the first pitch of Northern Etiquette off of the Eyeball cliff, I was wary of what lay above. My second, Jimmy Rogers, laughed. What was the etiquette? he wondered.
The pitch below us started up a mossy slab and continued up some f lakes hanging out of cracks like giant war swords. Deliberately jammed rocks on either side of the flake kept the top-most flake from falling out. It was only 5.8, but it required you to decide whether you thought the flakes were loose or solid and then go with your decision for the rest of the pitch. I decided it was solid, and one of our party decided to pass.
The climb improved. A short, solid traverse along a horizontal finger ledge to a great belay, a pitch up hollow flakes with a fun hand traverse under a roof to a tiny, exposed belay ledge, the crux – five metres of sport climbing – was solid and fun. After 110-metres of adventure, perhaps for the first time ever, I felt like I had done a proper long route in Ontario. The views over endless Algoma forests and the vertical drop to the talus below actually gave that elusive (in the east) “big cliff” feeling.
The game of looking for longer crags in Ontario goes back a long time and there are other cliffs as high as the Eyeball, but few as ideal for climbing. It’s easy enough, sitting in some eastern city
and doing your climbs out on 20-metre crags near subdivisions, to conjure up in your mind big walls hidden in the hills of the huge great northern Ontario Shield. It’s another thing, however, to find good ones to climb.
Big cliffs are everywhere in the Rockies, but until recently, if you couldn’t go to the Rockies every weekend, and were looking for big stone in Southern Ontario, all you had to go by was climber’s lore, a few out-of-print, dubious guidebooks, (including one by yours truly) and your own exploration. One legend says that John Turner used a postcard to find Mazinaw Rock, where he put up the 100-metre-long route The Joke, at 5,10+, maybe the hardest pitch in the east (in the 1960s). The more usual way is to spend days crashing through forest and bog in search of cliffs you thought you saw from the road.
A few cliffs have been found this way; crags with fine enough pitches not more than half a rope in length, or slabs between forested ledges. Fun, in a way, with a few stand outs in Temiskaming’s wilderness and on the Ottawa River, but nothing continually steep for more than a pitch or two at most. Invariably, taking a road-trip to New Hampshire or the Gunks was more fruitful.
The Eyeball is an Ontario stand out by a long shot. It’s got a steep, unbroken section 200 metres wide and 120 metres high, and three more kilometres of cliffs between 100 to 50 metres. There’s some loose rock, but it’s mostly cleanable by hand and in addition to beautiful vertical cracks, there are horizontally striated faces. It would be famous and well developed if it were in range of an important climbing area.
The cliff was discovered by one of the rare breed who comb northern Ontario’s forests for big cliffs, a sort of Fred Beckey of the north, named Danylo Darewych. Darewych has climbed at 50 cliffs in Algoma, in winter and in summer, only a fraction of the number he has visited on long treks by foot through thick subboreal pine forests, assaulted by mosquitoes and blackflies.
Darewych has long hair and a lean ascetic’s face. He wears aviator glasses and always looks like he’s ready to go search for crags. He has lots of time for such pursuits, partly because he has removed many distractions from his life. “I don’t have a cellphone,” he says, “if someone else answers [his land-line], just ask for me … don’t leave a message, I never check messages,” and, in his words, he’s “not married, never been married, no children or anything of that sort.”
Darewych teaches grade 6 in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga. He splits his time between the Ukrainian-canadian community, where he volunteered as a leader in Ukrainian scouts for 20 years and did extensive backcountry tripping, and the climbing community. Climbing came fairly late in Darewych’s outdoor career, when one of his scouts, Andriy Kolos, took it up with a vengeance and inspired Darewych to do the same. Kolos became a hard rock and ice climber, Darewych preferred to climb moderately but extensively.
Darewych found the cliff while driving along the White River Road, which is separated from the cliff by 300 metres of forest and the White River. A chance glimpse at the right moment was all that revealed it, but from the start, it was clearly a monster, by local standards. That was in 2011. Darewych did not return until 2013, when he tried to get to the base with Daniel Mckay, who was poked in the eye by a branch bushwhacking through the forest. Staff at the Blind River hospital announced that Mckay would recover, but gave him a temporary eyepatch. “I usually name cliffs after the nearest lake,” said Darewych. “But this time, I decided on the Eyeball.”
After a couple of trips accompanied by Blind River climber Dylan Cummings, and southern Ontario friends Graeme Taylor, Mike Grey and some other intrepid friends, they had established a few routes ground up. Some of Darewych’s routes take corner lines that look especially full of loose rock and vegetation. “Sometimes there are horrible conditions, so I rap off trees,” says Darewych. “I lead 5.7 or 5.8 up chimneys or stuff with trees I can bail off of. Inevitably, solid rock is slab with scarce protection. I do rather enjoy gullies and cracks. My advice to anyone is to come up and climb, try it, anyone can succeed here with basic trad skills as long as they are very careful. Don’t get into a flow state. Be aware of your surroundings. After all, it’s as close as the Adirondacks.”
A real impetus to launch out onto steeper rock came from Randy Kielbasiewicz. Yvon Chouinard once said that you always love most the kind of climbing you started on and Kielbasiewicz started climbing on Canadian Shield rock at a teenage bible camp. He would ditch the bible, but the love of that ultimate esoteric fanatic’s stone, Canadian Shield rock, stayed with him. Back home, in Oshawa, on the opposite side of the Greater Toronto
The Eyeball is an Ontario stand-out by a long-shot. It’s got a steep, unbroken section 200 metres wide and 120 metres high, and three more kilometres of cliffs between 50 to 100 metres.
conurbation from Darewych, Kielbasiewicz and his pals fell in with the 1990s trend in sport climbing, went to gyms and bolted routes. They also took off to the Adirondacks (back then, still very much on the sidelines of American climbing), every long weekend. In his mid-thirties, some of his Niagara Escarpment routes were given derisive names by sport climbing guidebook authors mainly because he was outside their Toronto-based social circle. Naturally disappointed by this, he re-assessed his priorities and re-visited the Canadian Shield, where he had fallen in love with climbing to begin with.
Kielbasiewicz began a campaign of new routes on some of Canada’s most obscure cliffs, many of which were never recorded. He was looking for experiences, not routes that would make him famous: “I really dig [northern] Ontario climbing because it is adventure climbing, not the vanilla climbing you get on sport climbs. Even tons of loose rock covered in lichen can be safe if you’re knowledgeable. It just takes a different skill set.”
In the midst of this resurrection of himself as a climber, Kielbasiewicz met the perfect partner.
Darweych was amazed to actually find out that Kielbasiewicz was even a real person. “Because of the silly names the guidebook authors had given my routes and the fact that my last name is so hard to pronounce,” says Kielbasiewicz, “he thought I wasn’t even a real person.”
Kielbasiewicz had a drill and was a strong free climber, mostly doing his routes ground-up. The bolts weren’t meant to make the climbs safe, just to make them reasonable for Kielbasiewicz to climb, a fair tactic when climbing ground-up. His advice on those who want to follow? “Don’t have an epic. The point of these routes was adventure. Route development for the most part on southern crags has to be done with a community mindset, routes on the Eyeball I just did for me.”
Kielbasiewicz isn’t some kind of social misfit elitist who wants to pull the ladder up after him. He was one of several dedicated climbers who retrofitted Rattlesnake Point and is an access leader on the Niagara Escarpment. When it comes to Algoma, Kielbasiewicz, hopes climbing there will remain raw and rugged and maybe even a little inhospitable.
But sport climbers have been attracted to the cliff as well. Gus Alexandropoulos is a shorter fellow, with a Popeye-like physique, designer frames, and his own Moon Board (it’s in his private climbing gym). Alexandropoulos is the sport-climbing developer’s developer, whose knowledge of bolting and prolific output (he discovered and mostly equipped The Swamp and Al Qaeda, two of Ontario’s most popular crags) are pretty much unparalleled in Ontario. A sort of absolute urbanite, he moved from Toronto to Hamilton when it became hipper. His road-trips tend to be to Red River Gorge rather than Cannon Mountain. At first glance, he’s hardly the kind of guy you’d expect to meet up halfway down a logging road to a giant cliff like the Eyeball being consumed by mosquitoes while digging his axle out of the logging-road mud, but there he is, an unlikely denizen of the Algoma suffer-scape. How did he let himself get involved in this?
“I kept drunk calling my friend Randy Kielbasiewicz,” says Alexandropoulos, “and bitching about how there was nothing left for me to do in southern Ontario. He told me about all of these cliffs in Algoma, and sent pictures. There’s something in the dna of climbing that comes from mountaineering, something about exploring, that just hooked me, when I saw these photos of a huge cliff. I know I could have just driven to New Hampshire and done something that big that was established, but there was something about the fact that the Eyeball was so big and almost no one had climbed on it.”
“I kept drunk calling my friend Randy Kielbasiewicz,” says Gus Alexandropoulos, “and bitching about how there was nothing left for me to do in southern Ontario. There’s something in the DNA of climbing that comes from mountaineering, something about exploring, that just hooked me.”
A farmer who is a Seventh Day Adventist allowed (up until time of writing) access (mostly for All-terrain Vehicle recreationalists), to a point on the logging road matrix past the worst hills and potholes, but closed it from Friday night to Saturday evening. If the farmer is not home, you could get locked out, or in (at time of writing the farmer charges a very reasonable $20 to use the access road he maintains). The first time Alexandropoulos went, he tried to by-pass the gate and got stuck. The second time, he brought his wife, Christine Triggs, also a keen developer, and went a different way in through the maze of logging roads. This time. Alexandropoulos saw the cliff and was blown away, but the next morning, temps dropped to -15 C and a foot of snow had fallen. He drove back to Hamilton.
The next time he brought his friend, Nate Kutcher. Kutcher is mostly known for his triumphs in the niche sport of competition ice climbing, and although he has described himself as “really nobody from nowhere,” in the comp scene, he won the Ouray ice comp in Colorado in 2018.
He’s a carpenter and is handy with tools of all kinds and careful and precise about putting up new routes. His routes at the Eyeball range from 5.11 to 5.12 and two of them follow beautiful plumb-lines. They’re bolted, which says a lot, since he’s a 5.12
gear climber, but still require a rack. With a reputation for speaking his mind, loads of experience and a taste for new routing, if anyone was a good partner for a modern approach to the cliff, it was Kutcher.
“First time I went up there,” says Kutcher, “Gus was directing me toward the top of a wall with a radio. The bugs were incredible. After a couple of hours hanging on a rappel rope cleaning, I got down and my ankles were just raw from black fly bites.” That was the Buddies Wall, an overhanging, 70-metre bulge partway up the Big Wall section, as the highest part of the cliff is called. They both worked on projects there, with Kutcher completing two 5.12s.
Alexandropoulos worked on a couple more routes, including No Country for Old Men, a thin crack project that forms a plumb line right to the top of the cliff. When it’s finished, it will be one of the most dramatic multi-pitch free routes in the east. Kutcher did two more beautiful 5.11 lines on the Big Wall section. He named one Lord of the Flies after the nonbiting friendly flies that are parasitic to tent caterpillars and swarmed the cliff in the last couple of seasons.
“There’s a lot of potential, I love putting up new routes,” says Kutcher. “Sometimes [the Eyeball] is loose, dirty, kind of low angle and I ask myself ‘what am I doing up here, it’s kind of pointless?’ There’s a lot of issues, it’s close to being really good, but you add everything up and its problematic, then the farmer’s road, then there are the bugs. I’ve had miserable weather. I spent a week up there with Gus Alexandropoulos and it rained every day.”
Type 2 fun for sure, but that’s some of the appeal. “Getting in there is an adventure,” Kutcher says. “The appeal is to go up there and hang out in camp, Talking and doing whatever. You’re cut off, like an expedition.”
“In hindsight,” says Alexandropoulos, “the short season, bugs, difficulty, and jenga-like stacks of loose rock hinder the enjoyment.” But his fixed ropes are still up, and he’s planning to return.
In Sudbury, a city of some 164,00 people, only a couple of hours’
drive from the Eyeball (as opposed to the seven-to-eight hours it takes most people from the gta to get there), the decidedly not very burly-trad institution of a rock climbing gym, arc climbing, opened, in November 2014. In 2015, Statistics Canada surprised Canadians with the revelation that the citizens of Sudbury (with their newly opened climbing gym), were the happiest people in Canada.
Happy local lad Colin Shepitka came back from a trip to New Zealand and Australia with a newfound passion for rock climbing. The new Sudbury gym was up and running and creating new climbers and providing a hub for the new community. And yet, “there were only maybe 25 climbers going outside,” says Shepitka. “A few people were new routing. Marco Foladore, Hudson Mayhew, Andrew Junkin. Most other people top-roped. There was a fear of pushing limits. People do outdoor stuff in Sudbury, but it’s mostly hunting, fishing, canoeing, not climbing.”
The locals had developed a bunch of crags, many of which have perfect granite, but the Eyeball was the only crag getting much buzz outside of the Sudbury area, if only because of its size.
“I met Danylo [Darewych] and we went to the Eyeball,” says Shepitka. “Danylo had great skills, As soon as I saw the Eyeball, I could see all this mind-boggling potential, two hours from my house.”
Shepitka repeated Kutcher’s Lord of the Flies, Northern Etiquette and a bunch of other climbs, and started his own project, Chemical Imbalance, a 5.11+ on which he has climbed two pitches ground-up. “I never met anyone there, but I want more feedback on our routes.” He said that although he is worried about climbers without the proper skills or caution getting into trouble at the Eyeball, in balance, “more people will help climbing at the local crags grow.”
Taking into account its proximity to most of the population of the province, its potential, the creative energy of the developers and the uniqueness of its size, the Eyeball may be the most significant find in Ontario in decades. If anything, it will inspire more northeastern Ontario climbers to be stoked about new-routing.
The Eyeball is a rare place where sport climbers, trad explorers, aspiring locals and some climbers so eccentric that their partners wouldn’t give me their contact information share an endeavour. Darewych has observed how, after a few trips to climb in Algoma, where access trails, roads and camping spots are often primitive, southern Ontario climbers of all styles begin to take an interest in chainsaws and trade their puffies for Kenora Dinner Jackets, as the checked red and black flannel outerwear associated with lumberjacks and backwoodsmen are known.
A new crag, like the elephant in a dark room, can be many things to many people. For some it’s a haven in the woods to escape from climbing’s crowds, for others, it’s a shot at elevating a scene, for seasoned climbers, it’s a place to practice their craft. But even if none of these routes ever see much attention, that’s all right. In Grey’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, quoted in the movie Bull Durham, are the appropriate words, “Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen/and waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
Kielbasiewicz started climbing on Canadian Shield rock at a teenage bible camp. He would ditch the bible, but the love of Canadian Shield rock stayed with him.