Today I heard the news that my friend John Crock finally lost his battle with cancer. He was one of the nicest people I have ever known, and anyone who has met him will tell you the same thing. I met John, as many climbers did, by walking into his store. John started selling climbing gear out of his mobile home to pay his way through school while he was working on his PhD. By the time he finished, John had decided that he liked time in the mountains more than than time in the lab, so he left the university and found himself an actual storefront to pay for his trips.
His little shop, Hyperspud Sports, became the meeting place for climbers in Moscow and Pullman. By the time I was finished with college, I was basically hanging around the store so much that John decided to hire me. John’s biggest flaw was that he was simply too nice for his own good. He was probably the smartest person I’ve ever known, but he was a terrible businessman because he always wanted to make sure that everyone around him got a fare shake. Often at his own detriment. Come to think of it, he was too nice for my own good too. His employee-purchase policy was simple: take what you want and just keep a tab on a piece of paper under the cash register. It wasn’t long before we started having pay-day conversations that went something like, “So Adam, I owe you $700, and you owe me $1200. How much money do you need?
I heard somewhere a long time ago that there are two kinds of genius. There is clean genius and messy genius. John was a messy genius. His shop was quite possibly the most unorganized place I’ve ever been. All of the employees did our best to try and keep the place organized, but it was futile. We always used to joke that the most important papers were the ones with the footprints on them. His messy genius came out in planning as well. When I first started at the shop I worked only a few days a week, but I was the closet thing John had to a full-time employee. One day he called me from the road and asked if I could work the next two weeks. He was on his way to Mexico and had simply forgotten to get someone to keep his store open.
John was all about the adventure of things. He occasionally went cragging or did short ski tours, but mostly he was always off to some place you’d never heard of to do something that sounded like a complete and total suffer-fest with a large chance of simply getting stuck forever. He loved canyoneering, especially first descents. I was flipping through a canyoneering guide book in the shop one day when I came across a photo of a pile of tiny rocks with a sling sticking out of the side. The caption read something like, ‘Sketchball anchor in such and such canyon.’ I brought it over to John and said, “Check this out!” He looked at it for a second and smiled. “Oh I remember building that anchor, that was pretty sketchy.” He had done the first descent of the canyon, and they used every rock for a few hundred yards to pile on top of a stick that the sling was rapped around. John said there was nothing bigger than a baseball in the whole pile.
On another trip John came back with a bunch of these really cool green-ish rocks that he wanted to put in his garden. He emptied out his water and filled his pack with these things, so he could bring more home. A couple days later he was messing around with some of his friends from the lab and they figured out that a Geiger counter would spike if you brought it close to the rocks. He had to throw away his pack and all the clothes he wore on the trip, and it took several trips to the car wash before his truck was no longer radioactive. His stories of climbs were incredible to listen to. When he’d come back from a weekend trip I’d ask what he did, he would rattle off a half dozen peaks in the North Cascades. His bigger trips always got a bit epic, like coming down from Denali when he kept stepping out into the air, falling into crevasses and off cliffs because the visibility was so bad that he couldn’t see his feet.
One time a customer came into the store and told us that he had to leave almost the entire rack of cams that he bought a few days ago while bailing off Chimney Rock. The customer left and John said, “Hey, can you watch the store tomorrow.” I knew immediately where he was going. I don’t remember exactly what John did with the gear he recovered, but I’m pretty sure he sold the cams back to the same customer for about what he spent in gas to drive there and back.John has been lost in more places than I’ve been to, and he was never one to pass up a trip. He was scheduled to travel to India with some friends only a couple days after his original diagnosis. He sent me an email telling me what was going on, and said that he was trying to decide what to do. A little while later I got another email that said he was going on the trip. He explained his philosophy, “I’d rather go to India with some good friends than sit around here and wait to die.
Although John and I did very little climbing together because one of us was usually running the store, we became good friends over the years. John even married me to my ex-wife (though I don’t do’t hold that against him). After I moved to SLC, John would come to town twice a year and stay with me during the OR show, still driving the same Mazda pickup that must have had four billion miles on it. He would catch me up on the happenings around Moscow, and we’d share stories from trips we just took, the ones we were planning, and the ones we one day hoped to do.
A couple weeks ago I was in Moab and I accidentally ass-dialed John. He didn’t answer the call that I didn’t intend to make, but he called me back while I was out climbing. His message was extremely hard to listen to. It’s still on my phone and I can’t bring myself to erase it. He had been battling the spreading cancer, and after some moments of hope and shrinking tumors, it got even more aggressive and the doctors gave him a couple weeks to live.
John lived more life than most of us ever will, and I think he knew that to some extent, but he still talked about regretting not going on more trips, bigger trips. There were still places that John wanted to see, more things that he wanted to do. I called him back and left a message, but I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just talked a bunch of gibberish while fighting back some tears, told him to call me back if he felt up to it, and hung up. John will be missed by his family, his friends, and the community he gave so much to. The world is a lesser place without him.
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