Everyone has to get started somewhere, and that is no different in the world of climbing stewardship, where a mentor can be a huge boon to ensuring your early days aren't wasted. But how do you know if you've found a good mentor? And when should you pursue instruction rather than a mentorship? To find out, we sat down with Peter Thomas.

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Peter Thomas is a Colorado-based…Well, a lot of things. He’s a climber, developer, and crag steward. He’s the former anchor replacement coordinator for the Boulder Climber Community’s Anchor Replacement Program. He is personally responsible for the replacement of thousands of bolts, not just in the Front Range, but across large swaths of the American Southwest.

Peter has served both formally and informally as a mentor and instructor on bolting and rebolting to dozens of individuals, including with the Narrow Gauge Slabs mentorship program. (If you’d like to learn more, there’s a great American Alpine Club Podcast episode, as well as a short film from Jefferson County Open Space on YouTube). Established crag stewards will inevitably know his name, as he also builds and ships tools such as the YABR that have become standards in bolt replacement nationally.

In addition to all of that, he’s also a climbing guide, so you can hire him for your prospective Front Range adventures. That being said, if you wanted to pay to fly him out to Kalymnos to crag with you for a week, I’m sure he wouldn’t say no either.

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LINKS:

• American Alpine Club Podcast Episode - CONNECT: The Next Generation of Crag Developers

• Jefferson County Open Space Youtube Video - Beyond the Bolts: Proactively Developing a Sustainable Climbing Area

Why the heck does the world need another climbing podcast? And why should we be the ones to host it? We'll talk about that, and not much more, in our first episode of Born From Stone.