Acclaimed director and artist David Lynch died on Thursday. His body of work, including films like Blue Velvet, Elephant Man, and Mullholland Drive, as well as TV series Twin Peaks, is an unparalleled example of a masterful artist pursuing a singular vision throughout a 50 year career.
As fans mourn the loss of an artistic giant, myself included, we look to the impact he made on the world.
A rock formation within Joshua Tree National Park, little known outside of the Morongo Basin’s climbing community, is named after him. The crag, which is a cliff or rock formation with established routes, is known as the “Lynch Crag.” Several of its climbing routes are named after the director’s iconic films, including Mullholland Drive and Eraserhead It’s hard to find, and a four-hour, mountainous hike from the Indian Cove Campground, but Seth Zaharias, owner of Cliffhanger Guides, looked into the origins of the National Park’s Lynch Crag, and though records are difficult to source, he suspects that it was developed by climber Steve Sutton in the 90s.
Zaharias explained how crags come to be named, saying,
“It’s definitely a pretty informal, organic thing, how crags get named.
What’s called the first ascensionist party, the first humans to walk out to a cliff and be like, “Oh I think I can climb that” and they get the rope up there and successfully climb the formation, they get to name that formation. Historically, that would go in a paper copy of a guide book. As we transition to the age of information with the internet and all that, MountainProject.com tends to be the catch all for routes.”
On some level, the Park does accept those names officially. But if it’s on Mountain Project, it’s considered to be official by the park service. It’s considered to be published, even though Mountain Project is a crowdsourced website.”
Zaharias said that there are 12,000 routes within Joshua Tree National Park, and no single person can climb them all. He said that he personally hasn’t climbed Lynch Crag, and that he and other expert climbers consider Lynch Crag to be particularly remote.
“I called a few old schoolers, and they all knew it, but they said it’s in the middle of nowhere. Why are you calling about that? I said, ‘Well David Lynch just died and Z107.7 reached out to me.’”
MountainProject.com describes the Lynch Crag as “ a smaller, dark brown, crag on the (north) side of the Valley, about 150 yards east and across the Valley from The Helmet formation. It faces south and has several obvious crack systems.
If you’re keen to climb the rock that bears David Lynch’s name, you can punch in latitude 34.07411 and longitude -116.14171 into your gps and give it a go. It’s unlikely that David Lynch himself ever reached the summit. He was a notoriously heavy smoker.
I’m not much of a climber myself, but if you make it to the summit, I’d encourage to take it all in with an artistic eye and appreciate what Lynch might describe as “beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way.”
