Southeast Revival

By Corey Buhay

In 2023, Jereme Ransick was scrolling Zillow when he saw a listing that left him frozen to his trackpad. It was a 2,506- acre property within Kentucky’s Red River Gorge that the local climbing community had been trying to buy for 20 years. Ransick had been told, repeatedly, that the land wasn’t for sale. But now, here it was: the privately-owned Ashland Wildlife Management Area. Thousands of acres of green Appalachian woods, fast-flowing creeks, sandstone boulders, and more than 14 miles of pristine cliffline for sale, right there, on Zillow.

The Venue, Red River Gorge © Caleb Timmerman.

Ransick was a board member for the Red River Gorge Climbers’ Coalition (RRGCC), one of the most powerful local climbing groups in the country. So, he had some pull. And Access Fund, a longtime RRGCC partner, had also been keeping an eye on the property for more than a year. But now, all of a sudden, the land was on the open market. And if Ransick could see the listing, that meant all the loggers, mining outfits, and real-estate developers in the region could see it, too. The clock was ticking. Ransick picked up the phone. Texts and emails flew. And chaos erupted. The RRGCC wanted the property, no question. The issue: It cost $15 million, and the landowner wasn’t willing to sell it piecemeal. This was an all-or-nothing deal. “From a process standpoint for a conservation project, it’s not great when a property gets listed—that means the pressure is on and things can get chaotic,” said Daniel Dunn, Access Fund’s eastern regional director and policy analyst. “Right off the bat, we were on our heels because the property was getting shared around quite broadly.” Access Fund and RRGCC had, essentially, just been dropped in the middle of a blind auction. They’d have to make their bid without any knowledge of what the other guys were offering.

But if the Coalition could pull it off, they’d nearly double the size of the Red’s permanently protected climbing terrain. If they failed, they could miss out on their one chance to secure legal access to the cliffs crossing the Ashland property.

All across the Eastern U.S., this is a perennial problem. Out West, parking areas, approach trails, and cliffs often fall within the region’s vast tracts of state and federal land—and as such are open to the public. But east of the Mississippi, the land is more densely populated, and properties here have had hundreds of years to get sliced up and parceled out. Today, the landscape is a mad patchwork of ownership with just a few pockets of public land stitched amid acres of private.

As a result, much of the region’s climbing falls within private boundaries—which means the landowner gets to make the rules. In the Red, only about two thirds of the routes that lie on private land are owned by local climbing organizations. The rest are beholden to the preferences of private landowners. And every now and then, a proprietor gets fed up and shuts the gates overnight. That happened at The Zoo, a marquee crag within the Red River Gorge, in early 2025. The landowner cited erosion of hillsides and belay areas, climbers leaving trash, and bolting without permission. The cliff is now closed indefinitely. The RRGCC couldn’t let that happen to the Ashland property so, with the help of Access Fund, they came up with a plan— one that had to go exactly right or the whole thing would fall apart.

The Venue, Red River Gorge © Caleb Timmerman.

By early 2025, with the help of Access Fund, the RRGCC had won a few big-name grants and could afford to front a portion of what the land would cost. The Ventura family (of Miguel’s Pizza fame—a legendary pizza joint in the Red beloved by climbers) stepped in, offering a substantial amount to help the cause. Other climbers promised small loans at low interest rates, or threw in money in exchange for small plots of land within the Ashland property. After all of that, a few million still remained. That’s when the RRGCC turned to Ian Teal.

Teal is a local entrepreneur, luxury cabin builder, and one of the biggest recreational land developers in the Southeast. He’s also a climber. In the midst of the funding chaos, he quietly approached the RRGCC with the idea of working together to acquire the land. With the help of Access Fund, they developed an unusual strategy: a simultaneous closing.

As a cabin-builder, Teal didn’t need the cliff or the tangled, stream-latticed forest floor at its base. Conversely, RRGCC didn’t need the land atop the cliffs. So, the two entities planned to split the parcel: Teal would first buy the whole property outright, then immediately turn around and sell the climbing zones—718 total acres—to the RRGCC.

However, the original land owner—the oil and gas company, Ashland Inc.— required the buyers to stick to an extremely tight schedule. For the plan to work, RRGCC needed to get all parties to the table, with all the money they’d promised, right on time. If anyone backed out, if any check cleared late, it could all crumble. For weeks, the crew scrambled to prepare. Ransick found himself poring over the land’s original deeds while Dunn was in near-constant meetings to iron out details behind the scenes. He and other Access Fund personnel helped guide RRGCC’s strategy with Ashland, hash out negotiating tactics, and get the organization logistically prepped to manage hundreds of acres of additional land. Other RRGCC board members and Access Fund staff threw themselves into community engagement, drumming up financial support until the very last minute.

When the signatures finally dried and the checks cleared, Ransick almost couldn’t believe it. “When we first started going after this [property], I had not in my wildest dreams thought that this was going to be how it ended,” Ransick said. The Ashland purchase—the bulk of which is now called the Cave Fork Recreation Preserve—was the biggest land acquisition ever completed by a local climbing organization in U.S. history. The RRGCC doubled their landholdings overnight, dramatically increasing the acreage of permanently protected rock climbing in the Red River Gorge. It was a massive victory.

Little Brushy, Tennessee © Nathalie Dupré.

While Cave Fork Recreation Preserve may be the biggest Southeast access win in recent headlines, it’s far from the only one. In 2022, the Carolina Climbers Coalition successfully purchased Maibauer Boulders outside of Charlotte. In 2023, the Southeastern Climbers Coalition acquired Alabama’s Citadel Boulders, a 58-acre parcel of high-quality sandstone blocks. Both acquisitions were made possible with Access Fund financing. And in June of 2025, Access Fund helped the Southeastern Climbers Coalition ink a long-term access agreement for Little Brushy, a band of impeccable cliffline in the Sequatchie Valley near Chattanooga.

If it seems like things are really heating up in the Southeast, that’s because they are. That said, land acquisition isn’t a new strategy here; in some ways, the Southeast invented it. The RRGCC bought its first property— the Pendergrass-Murray Recreational Preserve—back in 2004, and the Carolina Climbers Coalition bought the iconic, 1,000-foot-tall Laurel Knob in 2006. “At that time, some of the most exciting and important work in the country was driven by these local organizations,” said Brady Robinson, who was Access Fund’s executive director at the time. “In fact, it was really the work of some of these highly effective organizations in the Southeast that inspired the Access Fund to create its revolving loan fund.”

One of Robinson’s first jobs as executive director was to implement that fund, later dubbed the Climbing Conservation Loan Program. Today, the program is the secret driver behind many of the country’s biggest land acquisitions, including the CCC’s Maibauer Boulders, Rumbling Bald, and Hidden Valley purchases.

Now, driven in part by that loan fund, the Southeast is seeing something of a “second revival” in terms of acquisitions, said Access Fund’s Dunn. The wins are coming faster, and organizations are taking on increasingly daunting projects. But while climbing organizations are more confident, better resourced, and more competitive than they’ve been in the past, the acquisition landscape is also much more complicated. “There are more climbers than there have ever been in the Southeast. It’s become a destination on a national scale for climbers moving into the region,” Dunn said. “So land is more expensive than it’s ever been, and there’s more competition. There are land developers who see climbing as a money-making asset and might want to own the access for that reason. And there are some climbers who think they might want their own private reserve, as well.”

As a result, advocacy organizations are under increasing pressure to move fast and snap up parcels. “We’ve had internal debates about whether we should be spending our money on new acquisitions or improving the infrastructure on our current properties,” said RRGCC’s Ransick. “But if a coalition or nonprofit doesn’t acquire the land, the risk is that someone who’s not friendly to climbing will.”

Now, climbing organizations no longer have time to wait on grant applications to go through. Instead, they’re getting creative. The Ashland purchase—with its unlikely but effective partnership with a real estate developer—is one example. The nearby Cliffview Recreational Preserve is another. To secure that crag, RRGCC purchased a 20-foot-wide recreational easement lining the top of the cliff and a 40-foot easement lining the bottom.

“We got slivers of land over this much bigger tract, which is unique,” said Ransick. The strategy allowed the landowners to continue building mountain bike trails and other infrastructure unencumbered, and let the RRGCC secure longterm climbing access at a very low cost.

Each clever solution is another tool available to climbing advocates across the region—and they’ll need it. The Carolina Climber’s Coalition is already looking at four new properties. The Southeastern Climbers Coalition and RRGCC have even more crags on their radars, and Access Fund is working hard to position each group to secure the best grants, deals, and strategic partnerships possible. In terms of the Southeast’s second revival, this is just the beginning.

“A number of the pistons in the advocacy and access machinery are firing all at once,” Dunn said. “The pipeline is stacked, and we’re getting in position for some even bigger wins.”