Transcript
Stretching from Vancouver to Lillooet, the Sea to Sky highway is a 160 mile long road following the ancient pathway of the Squamish trading route through the Canadian Rockies. The link formed between coastal fishing villages and alpine meadows fuses sea to sky, as fish to bird, and canoe to climb. Steep rock faces and rugged canyons capped with glaciers open up onto wide expanses of blue water, filled with Rainbow Trout, Bull Trout, Coast Cutthroat, Dolly Varden, Kokanee, Steelhead and four species of Pacific Salmon.
But every flower has its thorns, and the thorn that would grow in Squamish in the mid-2000s went by many names. Most knew him as Jesse James, not the outlaw of legend, but a 27-year-old who rolled into town in 2010. He didn’t have a past and he didn’t have a future. Over the 11 years he spent in Squamish, no one would ever get close enough to learn his real name or why he had come to the mountains at all. He didn’t seem to have a plan, all he was interested in was climbing. His friends, his girlfriend, and the belayers who held his life in their hands would only ever see the confident man who was clever, considerate, and supportive. He didn’t celebrate birthdays, didn’t like his picture being taken, and always closed his laptop before anyone might see what he was up to. There was something mysterious about Jesse, but no one knew just how deep the mystery went.
Early one morning, in 2017, the cops were called to investigate a torched car parked near a recreation site off the Sea to Sky Highway. And around 9:30am they reported finding the charred remains of a man inside. What they didn’t know yet, was that the autopsy would reveal the man had been shot dead and that his true identity wouldn’t be uncovered for another three years. So while his murder may have been a shock to his friends and girlfriend, what investigators later revealed would make it more plausible but even less clear who killed Jesse James.
Welcome to Stick & Stone.
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Hi, I’m Sydney and this is episode 5! I want to say I can’t believe it’s already episode five, but honestly it’s been so much work to make this show. I have a full time gig and the rest of my time is mainly spent running around at the gym, biking, kayaking, hiking, and I really haven’t been able to knit as much. If you’re watching, you can see this dress I’m holding up. It’s about a third of the way done and I’ve been working on it for maybe three weeks, but I’d really like to finish it soon. I’m recording this in August and I want to wear it on a trip I’m taking next month. So, I gotta get to it if I want that to happen. If anyone is curious, it’s a pattern by Ronja Hakalehto (a Finnish designer), and I’m using Cotton Lino by The Wandering Flock, knitting this on 4mm needles.
But I’ve really enjoyed all this research for the show, so far. Maybe this isn’t very relatable but I think I’m enjoying books more because I’m taking notes and researching while I read. And I bought all these cute sticky notes and a new pen, and I’m such a nerd because I’m really excited about it. Some of the sticky notes look like oil paint tubes and I use them to mark chapters to make it easier for me to go back and reference them, and it’s super gratifying to add them to a page. I’m using them a little bit for this story, but I didn’t originally get this one from a book—although I did later find a book as well.
I first found this story when I was researching dirtbags in climbing culture and I stumbled onto the five-part CBC podcast special called “Dirtbag Climber.” It was put together by a reporter and climber who lives in Squamish named Steve Chua. As you can tell from the intro, our Dirtbag Climber has a lot more to him than just climbing. In fact, climbing wasn’t THAT BIG in his life until later on. That among the speculations around his wealth beg the question: Was he even a dirtbag climber? Luke Mehal of the Dirtbag State of Mind podcast and The Climbing Zine disagreed enough to make a post about it. Saying, quote:
This podcast was interesting, and really well done, but for a pod titled Dirtbag Climber it hardly really talked about climbing or dirtbagging. Instead the focus was a con man, neo Nazi who called himself Jesse James, among other things. Other than the fact that he lived out of a car and he climbed, I wouldn’t even call the guy a dirtbag; after all he was super rich.
Because of this, I want to talk about what a dirtbag is. Some people find it an offensive term, others wear it like a badge, and some people earn the title without asking for it. A LOT of people have written about this and some people are very opinionated. Let’s start with the word: dirtbag. Obviously, it means dirt in a bag and if it’s used offhand by the average person it means a dirty or contemptible person. The way I’ve heard it used, before I climbed, was to describe a scummy ex, maybe someone who played around behind your back.
I think there’s always been some joy in taking words that feel wrong with meanings that are gross or bad and using them angstily for clout—like rat boyfriend or calling something dank. And the terms go out of style, of course. But it’s definitely the same childish joy we get from people’s reactions that makes it so fun—like when we first saw our teacher’s expression after shouting out one of our favorite new words in pre-school: poop.
Dirtbag seems to have at least one origin from an 1897 Iowa newspaper that stated: “Hundreds of section hands are striving to keep the water back with dirt bags.” So, in this case, they were calling sand bags, dirt bags which was another term used for vacuum cleaner bags or dust bags when they more commonly had a bag instead of a bin attached to them. That’s right, I’m talking about vacuum cleaners on a climbing podcast. That’s how far off topic we’re going today. Anyway, the negative use applied to a person is first documented in an Ohio newspaper from 1976 in reference to a popular singer/actress (Claudine) at the time who shot and killed her boyfriend (Spider). Quote:
Spider, the object of constant adulation, persistent attentions, used to say, “I’m just a dirt bag. Who am I trying to fool?” … She [Claudine Longet] didn’t consider herself a dirt bag.
But the origins for the kind of dirtbag we’re talking about, the climber, point to Camp 4 in Yosemite—because if we’re talking about climbing history and it’s not Everest or somewhere in France, it’s always Yosemite. Camp 4 is just a campground but it’s conveniently located near the northside of The Valley making it a choice spot for climbers to camp out. It’s become something of a climbing mecca and now requires a reservation in advance. And that’s likely because it was made famous after climbers who spent the night there came to establish well-known routes in the 50s onward, names like Warren Harding, Royal Robbins and Yvon Chouinard. Pitons and rappels were first used in the park as early as the 1930s but the tools were rudimentary until John Salathé experimented on piton-making, using his blacksmith experience to create pitons hard enough to be driven into the granite walls. This opened up the door for the flood of aid-climbing routes established in the 50s including the Northwest face of Half Dome and the nose of El Cap. Of course, these were later climbed with other methods, like Lynn Hill’s free climb in 1993. But going back to Camp 4, by the 70s, kids—who’d grown up hearing stories like Robbins and Harding’s race to send the most famous peaks in the park—were now coming out to climb the routes themselves. Climbers who seemed to (and some actually did!) live in the park were first called beatniks (someone who rejects “the man,” materialism, consumerism, capitalism, the -isms)—a spur off term from the Beat Generation. It’s hard to pinpoint when or who decided beatnik wasn’t relevant or derogatory enough anymore, but at some point, maybe a distressed dad driving his family—screaming children, exhausted wife—in the Sedan, trying to grab hold of one blissful holiday weekend off the 9 to 5 in San Jose, saw a scruffy bunch of 20-somethings dressed in ropes, smoking dope, and blocking his parking spot. And he couldn’t help but shout: get out of my way, dirtbags! And thus, the golden era of dirtbags was born.
From then on, dirtbag became synonymous with someone who eschews the establishment to live their dream of becoming a nomad, living in the woods without a calendar or clock. Other sports, like cycling have also claimed the moniker. But when it comes to climbing, the term gets fuzzier with each passing day. For a while, probably 80s to 00s, the word meant someone without a dime to scratch up dinner, and drew up the image of raggedy clothes, a belt in place of a climbing harness (terrible idea), and a smell that can be described politely as raw. Its use started going out of style, probably the same time climbing gyms expanded, soccer moms signed up their kids for classes, and the sport became a lot less dirt-baggy, in general. More recently, the word is coming back, but now its application is changing. On August 8th of this year, Climbing Magazine put out an article with the title: So, You Want to Date a Dirtbag Climber? Here’s How to Lure One in on Hinge. Gabby Vermeire writes on the topic:
A certain recent documentary (The Dark Wizard) has exposed the general public to Dean Potter’s wild hair and wilder eyes, revealing what we freaky climbers have known for decades: Dirtbags are hot. Luckily, even the most Luddite dirtbag probably has a smartphone and a dating app profile these days… here’s how to maximize your chances of landing the dirtbag climber of your strangest dreams.
On the other side of our strangest dreams, there are many talented people who want to make their dirtbagging into a career, taking their climbing skills from a well “earned” night on yet another friend’s couch, to one that actually pays the bills. The Dirtbag Fund is a nonprofit dedicated to saving climbing’s endangered species. They offer grants to individuals who’d climb for free if they didn’t need to pay for expensive gear or a place to shower. I think this is a cool idea but it also changes the definition of dirtbag. That’s in part because the nonprofit only chooses a handful of applicants each year, extending to the title to those few selected climbers, and not all but many of the grant recipients have a lot of Instagram followers—and when we see the k in follower counts I think we all know that means brand deals, which means more income. And that’s great for people who want to earn their livelihood from climbing alone, but does that mean they lose their dirtbag status or are they still living the dirtbag lifestyle with a savings account? Are you still the same dirtbag climber when you buy and refurbish a sprinter van? When you quit your office job, but you do freelance off a hotspot? Are you a dirtbag when you add it to your profile? Can you be one for just one night? Do you GET to call yourself one?
The old guard in American climbing in Yosemite Valley—the Stonemasters, Masters of Stone, Stone Monkeys—were the first generations to wear the title and pass it on. The lore tells of climbers who lived out of their cars and tents and portaledges. They didn’t work or they had on-again off-again hourly, seasonal, or odd jobs when their money ran out. They were misfits who didn’t fit in with their families, had run away from the city, or had a hard time connecting with the average person. Sometimes they climbed and then got high, sometimes they climbed while they were high, and all of them were hooked on the adrenaline of being high—high on the walls where they could escape the Park Rangers and enter a realm only the birds and rock squirrels, and the inch worm could reach. The place where they could feel small in the palm of the great natural world, on a wide granite wall 8,800 ft tall, looking back out onto the void where their mortality existed and their lives had purpose. Dirtbags, every one.
And today? Dirtbag feels a little less genuine. And maybe that’s because the climbers of yore have earned a lot of respect and live on a pedestal, while dirtbag climbers in our era, those who are halfway up the wall now, are still earning it. It’s also really hard to not justify the income from sponsors or ads because that’s the system of economy that exists now. A lot of jobs, even ones that don’t require education, are really competitive. So turning to taking photos and posting them only costs as much as a phone bill but might only earn as much as the next meal—you’d be surprised how short-lived fame is and how small the dollar signs are compared to full-time employment or even part time work. But to play devil’s advocate to this argument, I know there are also what people might call the “posers” who are either living off family money or have retired early in life with a cache of savings. And I agree, that dirtbag implies a spartan lifestyle and that includes a lack of money, but I’m fairly certain the well-off people who earn the name poser over dirtbag are pretty obvious about not really being a dirtbag—and honestly, if they’re being called out as posers it’s either because people are jealous of them or they’re being a jerk. Whipping out a fancy camera with a set of fixed lenses, never using the same gear twice, or pulling up in your $100,000 Ford pickup is probably excessive even in the world of the most sponsored dirtbag. While the line isn’t solely defined by wealth, I personally think dirtbag means climbing nomad—someone whose paid the price of losing normal social connection in a trade to spend all their time climbing, passing through places with the transiency of a through-hiker, sleeping in odd places and on the charity of new friends, and getting by on whatever money they’ve got but without a clear line of income in their future. And I do think you can dirtbag for a day.
It’s a word that, for the purposes of the Chua’s Dirtbag Climber serial, has a double entendre. It represents both a person who’s made climbing their everything in life and someone scummy with selfish intentions.
And that’s where our story comes in. With a guy who never seems to work, isn’t up front about his past or even his name, but who lives out of his car climbing the walls in British Colombia, Canada, in a town called Squamish.
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Squamish is a town named for the Squamish people who’ve lived there for thousands of years. The location was previously called Keh Kait meaning, and I’m serious, “the place of many maple trees.” It sits on the north end of the Howe Sound, about an hour’s drive from Vancouver and Whistler (it’s basically dead center between the two). And if you’re feeling unsure about your Canadian geography, Squamish (and Vancouver) are in the province of British Columbia which is the westernmost province with a coastline running over 17,000 mi (27,000 km) along the Pacific Ocean. And if you’re thinking, California’s coastline seems pretty long, I bet they’re pretty similar. You can tell I’m about to tell you you’re wrong. The California shore is 3,427 mi, that’s a fifth the length. Even the entire Florida coastline is only 8,436 mi, which is half. The best we got is Alaska at nearly 34,000 mi, so double, but that’s basically a part of Canada, and all the Canadian provinces are huge, so I don’t think that’s fair.
In 2023, the Squamish celebrated 100 years of amalgamation (100 years since the 16 villages became the Squamish Nation) but the history in the area has been dated by archaeologists to at least 8,600 years old. Prior to Western settlers arriving in Greater Vancouver, Squamish people lived together in longhouses and most of them had summer and winter houses—because Canada is cold, if you didn’t know. So they would move based on the season. Between the late 1800s and turn of the century, reservations were created by the Crown so essentially the British wouldn’t feel bad about taking the rest of the land because they had agreed to leave a little bit of it to the Squamish. Out armed and out-numbered, the Squamish lived at the whims of the settlers who would eventually “convince” the people to sell reservation land for industrial and urban developments—and by convince I mean they had no choice. That’s when the amalgamation happened, because sixteen villages are stronger than one. It took eight years for everyone to come to an agreement, finally approved in what’s called the “Prayer of Amalgamation,” a petition signed by 76 Squamish people. They formed a type of collectivism in which all properties, interests, and accounts held in trust belonged not to a single person but to a single entity, the Squamish people. Since they live by the sea, their traditions revolve on the water. Cedar trees play an important role in their lives because their ancestors made canoes from them to fish for salmon (my favorite, it’s so delicious!). They also used the tree for weaving baskets and other fishing supplies. Today, cities and roads and cafés throughout the region bear Squamish names, recognizing the long human history in this place. Since 2000, the Squamish people have drafted their vision for public land use and managing the forests and wilderness within the Squamish Territory. The document they created, the Sacred Land Use Plan, has been used as the guiding document to support landmark agreements between the Squamish, the Province of B.C., and other stakeholders. They’re continuing their work and updating the plan, shaping conservation and land use for future generations.
And they’re not the only ones who are interested in how the land is used. Climbers have been on the walls since at least the first documented climb in 1957 by Hank Mather and Jim Archer. They took on the South Gully of Stawamus Chief, or The Chief, the center of climbing in Squamish, a granite formation with mainly cracks and slab (as granite walls do) and really solid rock with a lot of vegetation depending on the route. Previous to this ascent, the climbing was mainly left to mountaineers. The first recorded climb in the area being the 1907 ascent of Mount Garibaldi (known to the Squamish as mnn-ch-KAY), a dormant stratovolcano. July 16, 1913 is recorded as the first women’s ascent by Pansy Munday and L. C. Hanafin. They sent the west face and they also sent Mamquam Mountain during the same expedition—because they’re awesome! I wish I could be friends with them. The peak has also been the site of a deadly plane crash and a wedding, in which two school teachers were helicoptered to the top to say their vows.
Back to The Chief, this granite monolith is one of the largest in the world at 2,297ft (700 m) above the waters of the nearby Howe Sound. I couldn’t find a full pronunciation for the Squamish name of this mountain but it’s something like see-YAM s-MA-nit which means Chief Mountain. Oral histories say that it was once a longhouse transformed into stone by spirits known as the Transformer Brothers. And there’s a prominent cleft in the cliff face, which is said to be a scar from a giant two-headed serpent who slithered over, cleaving the peak with its coarse skin.
And as is typical of many granite monoliths, The Chief is a pluton which formed when the magma cooled deep in the Earth, later revealed after millions of years of erosion of surrounding rock. Erosion in this area is mainly the result of glaciers passing through which has shaped most of the Canadian landscape—because the country is far North and the polar ice caps have frozen and thawed over millenia, dragging ice back and forth over rock. The result of this is a beautiful mountain and excellent climbing, said to be better even than Yosemite. There are hundreds of routes for every level of climb, and some of the best are on the Apron, a low-angled formation on the north side of The Chief. It’s one of those magical spots where, when you’re above the trees, you get a view straight out across the water and over the town. I haven’t been there myself, but looking at these photos has got me very interested! I would absolutely love to visit someday. I went to Vancouver once as a kid when I lived in Canada, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t itching to go back and see all the places I visited when I was little. For some reason, most of my dreams of travel are just to revisit everything my parents took me to.
Some classic climbs on the Apron include Banana Peel (5.7), Calculus Crack (5.8) and Deidre (5.8). And among the most popular routes to the summit are Angel's Crest (10b), Ultimate Everything (10b), The Squamish Buttress (5.10c), and my favorite name: The Squamish Butt Face (5.9). There are nests of boulders at Grand Wall where you can v0 to v-whatever-you-can-climb. It’s the mountains and great rock, so pretty much any difficulty is possible—which is the whole reason so many people are attracted to this area. Besides that, it’s a gorgeous mountain town, close enough to Vancouver to get your fill of city when you need it, and far enough away you can wake up to the birds chirping. And in 2010, that’s likely the reason Jesse showed up in Squamish. To get away, or maybe hide away, from the rest of the world, and just climb.
Jesse James, AKA not his real name, was secretive about his past, but when he came to town with a borrowed name, everyone noticed but no one cared. He lived out of his car and bathed in the creek, didn’t have a job and climbed most of the time, but so did a lot of other people in town—much to the chagrin of the locals and environmental conservationists. The #vanlife community has created unmanageable environmental impacts and caused a lot of friction with locals and the climbers themselves over the years in Squamish. Jesse did stand out in other ways though, like the time he free soloed an overhung 5.10a crack called Talking Holds, a 48ft (15m) trad route. I found the phone camera footage of him on YouTube (which I’ll put a link to in the episode notes on my website). It’s not the whole climb and the quality is a bit poor, but it shows the cruxy moves. I do think Jesse was a good free soloist because he looks connected to the route, knows his beta, knows his rests, and isn’t looking down at all in the video. But everyone, and especially climbers, know that free soloing is a death wish. It’s not simply how good you are, it’s being lucky. And this wasn’t Jesse’s first free solo: in Bugaboos he climbed the McTech Arete a 5.10-, and the West Ridge of Pigeon Spire which is mostly 4th-class scrambling but massive exposure (because it’s a mountain ridge).
With confidence like that, it makes sense that Jackie—one of Jesse’s friends—said he would always argue about anything with the pretense that he was, quote: “some kind of philosopher climbing king.” Jackie’s name is an alias Jesse’s friend used when he was interviewed by Steve Chua to distance himself from the case. A lot of people and especially climbers in the area had a bad taste in their mouths after they learned about the past Jesse had hidden from them. Another friend, Joe Wong, mainly knew the important day-to-day information a friend would know: that Jesse was a vegan, he loved playing chess, would criticize brands for their lack of diversity in sponsorships, and didn’t have to work because he had money from some kind of investments. And everything Joe knew about his friend’s past could be said in a sentence: Jesse was a semi-pro tennis player from New York who moved to Canada to climb. One of the weirder factoids about Jesse that Joe learned was that he’d written a book called Psychology of Seduction: Master the Psychology of Attraction and Seduction. And I have to read you the about the book:
Bridging the gap between science and seduction, the book puts common pickup artist techniques, such as 'negging,' under the microscope of scientific theory. Finally, Mr. James answers Sigmund Freud's age-old question "What does a woman want?" And the answer might surprise you.
Ew! This book gives me the ick. Even the cover sucks. It’s the top of man’s head so you can only see his eye with a furrowed expression and the top of his head is a pool with a girl in a bikini sitting on the edge. Ew ew ew. I hate it. Anyway! The description of the author is actually the most interesting part of his book, go figure. It reads:
Jesse James is a Canadian rock climber, disruptive technology pioneer, artificial intelligence developer, author and adventurer. Jesse holds a theoretical physics PhD from Stanford and served as an officer in the Israeli Defense Force.
So, basically he was a liar. I hate to be blunt, but that’s a lot of qualifications for someone who doesn’t have any links to a PhD or Stanford—except that he said he did in his author byline. And as for the IDF, even Jackie was skeptical, laughing at the idea that his lanky friend would ever have been bulky enough to join the special forces. I know there is compulsory conscription in Israel, but he said he was from New York and so his service would’ve been voluntary if he did actually serve. It’s not impossible, but there’s a lot of evidence we’re going to get into that really goes against any kind of support for his statements.
Jesse didn’t stop writing there, he was also a prolific blogger. He had a website called Whippers and Tears where he logged some of his climbs and offered up his opinions on climbing culture. And because it’s from the era of the blog, there’s a short list of info in his bio that reveals a lot about how he wants the world to see him. It reads:
Name: You Know It!
Birthdate: In A Time Long Ago ...
Education: Stanford, PhD. Physics
Professional Skills: Quantum physics, mathematics, artificial intelligence (strong AI), emerging technologies
Hobbies & Interests: Rock climbing (duh!), evolutionary and social psychology, nutrition, classical and ecological economics, veganism
Employment: Professional Rock Climber, Author, Futurist
Life Goal: To Save The World (obviously)
And then his welcome message:
Welcome to my rock climbing blog. I'm a professional Canadian rock climber, philosopher, futurist, author, vegan, nutrition researcher, adventurer, writer and (sometimes) poet. The sole purpose of this blog is to entertain (mostly myself).
It’s a pretty similar character to the one he draws up as the author of his pick-up artist manual. It reads to me like someone with a chip on his shoulder, that he has to say all these things to convince people he really is smart but at the same time cool and unassuming. The thing is he has a great tone of voice in his writing, you can hear him through the text and it’s the playful razzing you’d expect from a bunch of fun rowdy climbers hanging the crag. He’s direct and funny and unserious but quick to pull you into his opinions and place himself as the authority on climbing. On December 23, 2015, on his “rants” page he made a post titled Squamish Dirtbags Rule, accompanied by a photo of his friend “cooking dirtbag-style” inside a grocery store. The post is short:
There’s an awesome HARDCORE dirtbag crew in squamish this fall. i mean these are the live-on-forest-road-in-pouring-rain-under-leaky-tarps-rummage-nesters-dumpster-for-old-pizza-shower-at-homeleas-shelter-go-for-night-session-bouldering-in-zero-degrees kind of dirtbags. Not those SOFTY dirtbags who drive south in october in a mercedes sprinter bound for yosemite to climb where its actually WARM
When he posted his climbs it was always in the range of 5.10 to 5.12b, even one called Blue Jeans a 5.13c multipitch. He also had some attention grabbing titles on blog posts, like:
“A guide to sandbagging newbies and sport climbers on Squamish’s grand wall (5.11a)
“Red Bull climbers suck
“Attacked by hornets in the ghost river, jumped off a cliff to get away!
And, typical of any lost boy, a list of rules to follow, a la Fight Club:
Four Rules of Alpine Climbing
The Leader Must Never Fall
Speed is Safety
If You're Not Climbing, You're Hiding
The Only Rule that NEVER Gets Broken: GRAVITY
This has nothing to do with Jesse, but I wanted to bring it up. I found another post by some random climber on Facebook with their rules and I think it gives a good contrast if you hear what this person has to say:
The 4 rules of mountaineering:
It’s always further than it looks.
It’s always taller than it looks.
It’s always harder than it looks.
Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.
It’s also a bit tongue-in-cheek but there’s no angst in this Facebook post which I think is an important difference in the way Jesse communicates his feelings. My favorite part about his blog is that his header is a quote, from himself. He says:
Rock climbing dispels all illusions: love, hate, hope, fear. Only the mountain is real. The climb… is all there is.
It’s a bit dramatic, but it’s very sincere. I think he found a lot of peace through climbing. I don’t think it entirely consumed him though because he was still online a lot, getting caught up in the world and unable to escape the Wi-Fi. As much as he was running from something it seems like he couldn’t stop himself from turning to look back at whatever he was running from. The fact he never worked at all was a little conspicuous, but the other climbers didn’t push it and ask questions. He did tell his girlfriend, Eva, he had made a lot of money through crypto and the reason he was living in anonymity was to stay out of the eye of thieves and criminals. He’d made SO much in crypto that he’d put himself at risk. It sounds really wild but enough added up to make it real. Jesse’s reluctance to open up, the way he hid his laptop use, the hours upon hours he spent playing chess. Somehow chess is always an example of a great thinker and I think it played really well into this image of someone who could outsmart the system and play the game to make bank in crypto. And it’s important to remember that he lived in Squamish from 2010 to 2017 but it seems like he first entered Canada sometime between 2006 and 2010. And if we look back, in 2006 Facebook was two years old at that point and Twitter was a year away from launch. Making millions in crypto seems very possible considering how early he was on everything internet-related.
The thing is, he did make a lot of money online, but it didn’t start in crypto. In fact, the first place he learned to make money was in an online neo-nazi group.
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Jesse James was born Andrew ‘Britt’ Greenbaum in New Port, Rhode Island in 1978. His family moved up to Lakeville, Massachusetts an hour north but moved again a decade later to Medfield, a suburb southwest of Boston. Britt, as his friends called him, was quiet and extremely intelligent. Part of his quietness probably came from his time in elementary and middle school in Lakeville where he was relentlessly teased by classmates for his scrawny size and possibly his Jewish name. His homework was thrown into puddles, and as his mother recalls, quote:
Then the teasing turned into physical abuse, where two boys rolled his pants down in homeroom and the other boy would hit him as hard as he could on the top of his hand. He was thrown over chairs.
The Greenbaums moved up to Medfield to give their son a second start. At his high school, Britt’s friends remember him being reluctant to open up to people, likely from years of putting up walls to deal with bullies. But it became clear pretty quickly that once you reached out to him he would reach right back. Britt wasn’t shy but he lived in a world of his own. He didn’t get invites parties and he didn’t seem interested in being invited. He wore long pants, never jeans, and button downs to school—which did not fit in with his classmates in the 90s.
There’s only a couple of photos from his years in high school that I could find, but from what I can tell he was dressed in preppy fashion. And if you don’t know what that is I highly recommend the podcast Articles of Fashion, it’s a super fascinating rundown of various clothing histories and they have a whole season dedicated to preppy style which is a mix of Ivy school and timeless elegance. The kind of clothes that could be described as off-duty British royalty or yacht club. It’s cable knit sweaters (my favorite), khaki pants and skirts, untucked button downs, and the same kind of effortless beauty trends that pop up again and again. It’s simple, it’s safe, and it’s very minorly updated to fit the most modern silhouette (think baggy versus fitted or fat tie versus thin)—which is probably why it never really goes out of style. And the reason I bring this up is because preppy clothes are a signal of wealth, they’re about class and education and possibly race, which will become clear soon, and I think for all of those reasons Britt chose to wear these clothes. It was more popular in the 80s, less so by the time he was in high school, but like I said it never really disappears from fashion.
To credit his skill at lying (and interest in preppy sports) he did in fact play tennis in high school, but like any good liar he polished up the truth when he said he had played at a semi-pro level. In reality, the 1994 Westwood High School tennis team had a season of losses but still earned Britt the award of “unsung hero,” so he was definitely pulling hard for a team that was written up as “fairly young” and “better next year with another years’ experience” in his sophomore yearbook.
Not only athletic, Britt was very smart and it didn’t especially show in his grades, but it did somewhere else, mainly in chess. Not exactly a prodigy but playing at a skill level well beyond anyone around him, Britt earned a rating of 1800 when he was 16 which is the low end of the chess ranking Class A, a step below Expert level which squarely places him among advanced players—people who know the game, know the strategies, don’t fumble on beginner mistakes, and can think multiple moves ahead. So basically, someone who would be really fun to play against because, past the fundamental concepts of the game, chess really becomes tactical, about wit and foresight. 1800 is still a long way from the Grand Master rating over 2500, but as far as the average high school club goes Britt was easily at the top. I think his love of the game and how he could use it to show off he was better than other people was the first sign his ego was growing. It’s not a negative skill to have depending on how we choose to use it. In climbing, having more ego nurtures confidence. That can get you a lot farther up the wall but I’ve also seen people get hurt and worse I’ve seen someone hurt other people because they had an unbridled confidence.
I was on a walk a few months ago and I sat down at this local crag to watch the climbers. A guy was teaching his two friends to sport climb. He was a little short and his tall friend eagerly stepped up to go first on the wall. The spot they were climbing is called Guide’s Wall because it’s usually used by guides to teach beginners, but it’s been touched so many times that the limestone has become polished. I watched as the tall guy tied in to lead. He emphatically declared he’d led twice before and the shorter one, with helmet on, nodded and said he was a strong climber so this route should be a good place for him to start. The tall one jumped onto the wall and slid, not looking anywhere for feet before he started. After a few attempts he found his position and made his way into the crux, about 15ft up, where the footholds are the most polished and the next hold (the shield edge jutting up over the next ledge) was a high reach. He needed to find the foot hold on his left and delicately shift his weight while holding hips to the wall to get the height he needed. Instead, the tall guy approached it the same way he had on the ground. Aggressively pumping his shoe over the tiny hold like Thumper kicking his foot. And out of nowhere he gets traction and leaps and of course he misses the next hand but in the time he was trying to find his foothold he’d wrapped the rope around his right leg. Either the short guy belaying him didn’t notice this or it happened too quickly for him to react since the tall guy was moving quickly and erratically. We all know not to let the rope go over our legs when leading, and when it does we quickly get our leg unwrapped, so the rope is always between our legs. And what happened? He flipped upside down. He hit his unprotected head BUT what he hit was his shorter friend’s head. Remember the short guy belaying is the one wearing the helmet and the tall guy didn’t get far off the ground, so when he fell into his belayer. So when the belayer got hit in the head, he was the one who hit the wall instead. The tall guy flips back upright like nothing happened and says, “I’m good, I’m ready to go” and starts climbing, but he gets short roped. And that’s because his belayer is looking distant and dizzy and says, “No, man, you’re not climbing anymore. I need a minute.” It took the tall guy a full ten seconds to absorb and understand his friend was hurt. Not badly, but he was dazed. The tall guy got lowered to the ground and when the short guy recovered he declared, “You’re not leading again today.” I tell this story because the tall guy clearly wanted to prove he was fearless but he did it at the expense of his friend’s safety. I wouldn’t call climbing a team sport but it is super collaborative, and the inability to see that is dangerous and it’s not as fun. I mention this story because it applies outside of climbing too, where people like Britt outwit the system, ignoring the rules to get ahead and sometimes that’s ok but other times it goes beyond the pale with complete disregard for others.
His intelligence, desire to be alpha, and his penchant for shirking rules culminated in malicious hacking. While still in high school he installed a software on one of the library computers that enabled him to program a teacher’s phone to ring every five minutes. And nobody knew how to turn it off. I assume the teacher had to call the phone company and change their number. It does sound super funny as an anecdote but the fact he followed through and he did it to a teacher is a little weird. Added to that, Britt carried around a black book, names of everyone he held a grudge against. His friends laughed it off because, remember this is before 1999, before the Columbine shooting, so it wasn’t an obvious indication of anything. And clearly he didn’t follow through, so MAYBE it was just a joke. I definitely remember kids making lists like that in school, people they hated, liked, and adding names like movie stars and book characters to it. And I think we’d throw those out at the end of the day because the joke was over, and it wasn’t funny to keep it going.
Britt’s hierarchy, placing himself above other people, going as far as downgrading individuals to a “hitlist,” came to a head near the end of high school when he developed an interest in the Confederacy. He made offhand comments about Black students in his school, saying that they shouldn’t be bused in and they should go back to the plantations. The South, segregation, the Civil War all led him to WWII quickly followed by nazism. And in senior year, everyone at school knew him as the neo-nazi.
It was now 1996, and everyone around him applied to schools in the northeast but Britt only looked at schools in the South. I don’t think he really had a plan at this point because he applied to Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina which, today, seems like a pretty progressive school. I know Texas is sort of both the South and West, but we don’t have a lot of Civil War history here. When I’ve been to Tennessee, however, there were a lot of Civil War monuments. And I don’t know if they were simply historical markers since a lot of the Confederate statues were torn down after the Black Lives Matter protests, but similar to nazism in Germany, the Confederacy still lingers over the South and so I can see Britt choosing any college there just to soak in that part of the culture, no matter how small it may have actually been on campus. And right before he left for school, he changed his name. Not to Jesse James, he changed his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum to Davis Wolfgang Hawke.
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At 18 years old Britt, now Davis, denounced his heritage by claiming that his dad (who was a quarter Jewish) was actually his step-father and that his real birth father was a German man whom his mom had had an affair with—which the family says is not true, and was later proven not to be true through DNA testing. For two years, he quietly made good grades, holding a 3.8 GPA as a double major in, you won’t believe, German and History. What most people didn’t know was that his dorm room had collected tons of paraphernalia from nazi flags, to hitler videos, and a collection of military knives—a hobby of his since high school. Davis had been holed away in his room when not in class, working on a website called Knights of Freedom (or KOF), an organization for white rights.
By 1999, with black pants and boots, custom KOF shirt, dark hair smoothed back into a ponytail, and meager square of a mustache, Davis was no longer hiding his political views. The website had steadily grown, attracting hate-mongers from around the net who would pay $5 a month for membership—to get their member card and KOF armband, access to a chat room and membership portal with videotaped hate speeches by Davis, and a subscription to his newsletter: The White Pride News Service. And the web header? An image of their leader “Commander Bo Decker” yet another alias Davis went by. He’s pictured dressed in a nazi uniform but he looks more like a kid in a costume, not a commander of anything. Ridiculous or not though he may have looked, it didn’t matter, the hateful content caught the attention of the audience he was looking for. And in two years he had 200 paying members, not a lot of people but for Davis that meant $1000 and to a college student in 1999 that was a lot.
He may have been smart enough to make money online, but his brazenness didn’t go unnoticed. Another student had somehow stumbled onto Hawke’s website and when they saw their classmate’s photo at the top of the page, they went straight to the local paper, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal who quickly ran a front page story exposing the local racist, adding in the detail that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC, a non-profit supporting racial justice) had been tracking the little neo-nazi since he was in high school. Mark Potok, the head of the SPLC told the paper that Davis was Jewish and thought he’d cleverly hid his heritage from the KOF members by changing his legal name after graduation. If they didn’t know then, they did now.
Having already been under attack from other white-power groups, jealous of his internet savvy and small but growing circus of neo-nazi fans, the hate redoubled from within. A leader from one of these other groups (whose name was hidden in the KOF website’s metatag code to optimize search results) called out Davis, saying that if it was true and he was Jewish then he’d have “no stature” and lose his following. But before his house of cards would fall online, his college would turn against him. Wofford students and professors were incredibly upset by the fact that this hate group had been growing underneath the campus, and so they held a candlelight vigil in opposition to hate and bigotry with 300 students (a third of the student body) in attendance. I’m really glad they did that. That it wasn’t quietly swept away. The professors devoted their classes the day after the article was published to talk about the website, hate group, and their classmate—which is exactly what colleges should be for. To discuss and debate and not stand for the growth of hateful doctrines. This story just makes me so uncomfortable. I don’t like it when people hurt other people. And it’s especially sad because Davis was young, but he also was old enough to know better. That said, we’re still very impressionable in our early twenties. It makes it easy for any of us to lose our compass or for someone to move the needle such that we lose our way. I don’t know how Davis lost his. It’s the mystery of personality, who we are and how we got here. But what I know for sure is that there’s no place for an argument against civil rights. And it’s really sad that Davis believed any of this and that he enjoyed making money off of it.
For better or for worse, the college wouldn’t expel him on the grounds of free speech, BUT they did bend the old rule that students had to live on campus. And with that, probably eager to leave as his infamy grew, Davis moved out of the dorm and finished his semester from a trailer he leased in the woods. But after that, he was through with school. In March of 1999 he called his hate group to gather at a rally for the 100th birthday of hitler. Despite only a dozen people showing up for his hate speech, the news, unfortunately, broadcast a snippet of this middle-of-nowhere hate gathering on ABC News’s Hard Copy—once called “exploitative infotainment” by Ken Bode, the Dean of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The funny, not funny, thing is that this coincided with the Colorado Columbine High School shooting where two students massacred 13 fellow classmates and a teacher before they killed themselves. I say funny because for one, it’s been theorized that the two killers had made plans for the massacre to be on hitler’s birthday and because Bode’s statement about Hard Copy was made in response to this shooting. He was repulsed by the bad practices of exploitative networks, paying their way for an ounce of blood, just to cover the Columbine story. So, the fact that Hard Copy also filmed Davis and friends makes a lot more sense—they were cooking on a narrative that they justified through any story that fit the bill, the big and especially small ones. While it’s unlikely the killings occurred as a result of the coverage of his tiny KOF rally, the media swooped in yet again to interview Davis. This time Fox Files asked for his opinion on the massacre and whether it was racially motivated—again, in an effort to create a more salacious story, not for the noble pursuit of equality and tolerance. But ego versus ego, Davis didn’t let the Columbine students take any credit from him and kept the conversation to the topics of his group and himself.
While Davis didn’t have to answer to the media, he did answer to his mom. She called him crying and screaming into the phone, “Are you happy now?” to which he replied, “What do you mean?” She’d seen his interview and couldn’t stand to see her son become this. She went on to say, “How do you know your website didn’t cause those boys to go crazy in Columbine? It makes me sick to think that you might have spurred them on. I hope you’re happy now.” And then she hung up on him.
I hate this part of the story so much. It’s so painful but it’s important to hear because history repeats itself. When we know what to look for we recognize the signs. Even his mom saw the connection between her son and Columbine in an instant, I’m sure the news interview only confirmed what she’d already thought.
Davis’s next phase was to drop the nazism from his brand, starting with a new website for the American Nationalist Party with a header featuring American flags this time. Now with 1600 people subscribed to his newsletter, he decided to gather a much bigger rally, this time in Washington D.C. He called the National Parks Service to get a permit and told them he expected 300 party members to show up on Saturday, August 7th 1999. And you would not believe the grapevine at work in Washington. If you obtain a three hour demonstration permit for a hate group on a Saturday at 2PM, on Saturday at 2PM the NAACP, American Jewish Committee, Latino Civil Rights Center, and many more advocacy groups will be there within the hour. And ALL of them planned counter-demonstrations to Davis’s rally to advocate for racial and religious tolerance. In addition to that, the city organized 2,000 D.C. police officers in full riot gear up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and surrounding Monroe Park with over 300 National Park Service police, Secret Service agents, AND the D.C. Police Chief, not to mention over a thousand protestors holding pro-love and anti-nazi signs.
Ok, right now, come up with a number in your head between 30 and 300. How many of his followers do you think showed up? Do you have it? Did you think of a number? You’re wrong, whatever it is, you’re wrong. Because the number is four. Four people showed up in SS costumes. And guess who wasn’t there? Davis got out of town in the middle of the night. He KNEW no one was going to show up and he just kept shaking that soda can and then left it out for someone else to pop. And then it didn’t pop. The demonstrations were totally peaceful and everyone left feeling a lot better.
Unfortunately, that is nowhere near the end of Davis’s wild story, but it was the end of his neo-nazi group. Dejected by his obvious lack of fame (despite the pandemonium he’d caused at great expense to the city of D.C.) Davis sent a goodbye letter to members, notifying them that the website would be shut down because, quote: “The party has failed to achieve the standards I set forth one year ago.” Blame the members, not their leader. One of his racist followers was very disappointed with this turn of events saying, quote, “That is desertion in the face of the enemy. Normally, you’d be shot for that.” What lovely, lovely people. The in-group hate among these people is the epitome of their skewed realities. It’s all ‘everyone’s out to get me’ when in reality they’re the only ones making threats and freaking people out. Goodbye and good riddance hate group.
And so it was done, but every new beginning needs a new name, and this time Davis would be offering that service to other people on a website where he advertised booklets about creating fake IDs. His marketing of choice for this new venture? Spam mail. The sample image? The (fake) ID of a 22 year-old white man, with no ponytail or hitler mustache, seemingly slightly shorter than the 5’11” written under height. Could it be Davis or is it… Michael Girdley?
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While Davis, for the most part, continued to use his legal name, the idea of changing his name to change identities was still very much his M.O. online. His latest re-invention included selling not only fake IDs, but pyramid schemes, government grants, extended car warranties, inkjet printer refills, penis-enlargement pills, porn, and instructions for ‘how you too can become a spam scammer.’ And no, obviously these were not legitimate businesses. Every website was a ploy to lure in the desperate, the curious, and the gullible. On an internet discussion forum, the author of Spam Kings, Brian McWilliams, talks with readers about his book and the nature of scams. One commenter notes how the internet gold rush brought out the worst in people with Davis’s scams falling into the, quote, “classic ‘something for nothing’ category.” Adding that they were surprised to learn he and other scammers were actually fulfilling orders—but not with, you know, great products. Brian replies to this reader, acknowledging that yes, while the products were sent out, they either didn’t work or weren’t what the customers were expecting based on the ads they’d clicked. Not only that, but they couldn’t reach Davis for returns because he’d used fraudulent addresses and forged routing headers to hide from them.
And this is not important, but this spam story eventually got a lot of pick-up from the media and every one of them highlighted the penis-enlargement pills which is really stupid and funny. Obviously, there are people out there who want that and I have no comments to offer, do what you want, but the fact the press was running their stories with those pills being a hook just legitimizes the successfulness of the scam. I mean, Davis’s marketing was spot on. Like, if you’re scrolling around and you see ads that say stuff like mood-regulating supplement, or new summer capsule wardrobe, and then you see penis-enlargement pills—they’re all kind of earworm terms for us—but which one are you secretly the most interested in reading more about? He was really good at recognizing the insecurities and taboos that catch our attention, not to mention all the quick-and-easy or too-cheap-to-believe content that reels people in.
The method of choice for these scams was ultimately the source of Davis’s success: junk mail. Using his computer prowess, he exploited the under-regulated internet, buying software called Stealth Mail Bomber (a program for sending emails in bulk) and mailing lists people had compiled with millions of addresses. He used what I’d call spam-math, and that is math that uses the 1% rule—essentially, I only need 1% of people to buy from me to make bank. If Davis could hawk his not-so-legitimate products out to a million people he’d potentially make $100,000. It’s the same way paid media works, which is the regulated and legitimate form of this marketing technique. But that also takes a lot of money and having, you know, something very legal to sell.
To boot, he’d figured out that selling physical products was a lot harder to make money off of, taking him upwards of thirty minutes to fulfill a single order just to make five bucks—basically minimum wage. So, instead he created digital products, specifically digital manuals (proto-PDFs). Later, he’d change the software he was using to send bulk mail in order to dodge angry ISPs (or internet service providers) who sniffed out spamming and would shut him down if he didn’t move on to another provider fast enough. His efforts expanded to CD-roms which, while a back-step to physical media, was a lot less effort to make copies of and cheaper to ship than his previous products. Eventually, he’d find more lucrative opportunities for high margins on shippable products, such as the batch of pseudoscience backed herbal diet pills he bought, reselling them at a $25 markup.
Although Davis’s businesses Quiksilver Enterprises and Amazing Internet Products were not anywhere near as large as other spam mail operations, nor was he by any means a genius (there were many breadcrumbs left behind more sophisticated coders could follow), the scams were low cost and high return. And what Davis was especially good at was making the sale. It’s been estimated that, at its height, he may have been making over $100,000 a month (at one point, possibly up to $500,000). This activity did not go unnoticed by America Online (AOL).
AOL is another ISP but, at one point, it was the most recognized in America with millions of users. In 2004, the scams caught up to Davis who was accused of violating anti-spam laws. With the Spam King exposed, Potok, Head of the SPLC stated:
I think he is basically a petty criminal. He's a gang leader, a cultist. He was always about forming groups in which he's the Führer. And I think that's probably the case again here.
AOL won their case in a $12.8 million judgement against Davis but they wanted it paid out in a really weird way. Apparently, Davis had left his neo-nazi beliefs behind to pursue the next most obvious political evolutionary step to libertarianism, through which he had become averse to using banks. Instead, he had cashed out most of the money he’d made into gold bars. It was alleged that he’d buried most if not all of these on his parent’s property. So, in 2006, when AOL announced they’d be digging up his parent’s yard in Medfield, Massachusetts to go on a treasure hunt for gold, the word got out. The news raced to print headlines and the Greenbaums (his parents) were obviously against having their sidewalk turn into a front seat for the media to gawk at the excavations. The way his mom expressed that though, is pretty funny and direct, quote:
I don’t care if they dig up the entire yard. They’re just going to make fools of themselves. There’s absolutely no reason for them to think that Davis Hawke would be stupid enough to bury gold on our property. My son is long gone.
A year later, AOL decided not to pursue the dig, although they still very much believed there was gold under the house.
And now you must be wondering, where is Davis? He left with no word sometime around March 2006 and bounced around for a bit, someone spotting him in Colorado playing chess under the pseudonym David Wallace. But come summer, he disappeared completely, and that’s when Jesse James drove his red 2000 GMC Yukon XL into Squamish.
It’s not very surprising to learn that Davis had brought his gold bars along, probably burying them again somewhere in Canada. In 2008, the first decentralized cryptocurrency was invented, something called Bitcoin. When it was released in 2009, Jesse was quick to convert his gold to Bitcoin, and because he got in on it before the rush he (and a handful of other early adopters) made the most profit from their investments. I don’t know enough about crypto to talk about it intelligently, but from what I understand the payouts were bigger for those who cashed out at the peak of its value, like selling a stock when everyone’s buying. I might be wrong. But I think that bitcoin specifically isn’t at that stage anymore. It had its bubble rise but I don’t know if it popped or not. I’ve heard other cryptocurrency names come up but not much about Bitcoin anymore. And everything I’ve read about it is so black and white that there’s really no way for me to figure out what the nature of it is because everyone is so opinionated about the ethics of it. All I know is that it’s still very new and I don’t really like things that are less than 50 years old. And don’t come after me for podcasting on that, this is basically radio and radio is definitely more than 50 years old.
Anyway, whatever Jesse had made in spamming he almost certainly doubled it if not multiplied it many more times over with Bitcoin. Other than ducking into cafes to steal some hours on their wi-fi, Jesse mainly lived out of his car and developed a passion for climbing. In 2015, he met Eva McLennan, another climber, and before long the two were dating. He mentioned almost nothing about his past to her. His racist beginnings and scamming end were completely behind him and buried out of sight so that neither Eva nor anyone else ever saw. To her, he was someone who truly loved her and looked out for her. He was a friend, he was supportive, and considerate, even though he had his eccentricities—always dodging cameras aimed at his face, asking never to celebrate his birthday—he did celebrate hers and they treated each other well. In her own words, quote:
I don’t think his Nazism was an act. It’s just that I saw no signs of it, absolutely none. I found no signs of anti-Semitism or racism, and I went out with him for two years. This may sound stupid or naive of me, but I know that he was very honest with me on a day-to-day basis. Our life together was climbing, which he took very seriously. We lived and breathed climbing together. And I know that I knew him well, in terms of us as climbing partners, making life-and-death choices together. But of course I feel guilty for not knowing more about his past.
And while she didn’t know more about him, certain pieces of himself came through. Like the name, Jesse James, everyone knew it was a pseudonym. He encouraged Eva to come up with a new name for herself and, not to be outdone by him on the whacky scale, she chose the name BigAbi Garbanzo. Jesse would call her Abi.
And like mentioned earlier, Jesse was writing blogs at this time. While his girlfriend had this perspective of him as a nice guy, both online and to everyone else in Squamish he came off as full of himself and acted superior to others. He kept his climbing on the Whippers and Tears site, opening another blog called SurvivorMan.net dedicated to his live-forever-diet which meant eating raw, organic, vegan, gluten-free, no sugar. Back in high school he’d been obsessed with a movie and TV series called Highlander, which is all about immortals. It’s little pieces like this that came up from his past even though no one knew the connection. And we all have stuff like that, but without laying out our life stories those connections can be hidden even from our closest friends, and sometimes ourselves. I like climbing now and it feels like it’s new to my life since I started about six years ago but sometimes I’ve sat down and thought about it and I see glimpses in my memory of times I climbed things as a kid and they stood out to me enough to remember, so there’s obviously a root there even if I never thought about that when I first walked into a climbing gym and signed up for the membership or tied in my rope for the first time.
On June 13th, 2017, Jesse parked the Yukon at his usual camping spot just north of Squamish at the Cat Lake recreation site surrounded by tall pines. He hung out with his girlfriend for a bit until she wished him a goodnight. They said their I-love-yous and she left for her tent at a campsite a few minutes walk from the lot. And some time that night, someone with a gun, either by accident, or more likely on purpose, shot and killed Jesse. Covering up the evidence with a blistering fire that melted the very paint off the truck. At 9:41am the next morning, the camp site manager arrived to let in a student who wanted to camp there when he found the torched vehicle. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP, or Mounties) arrived to investigate. They found the body, later identifying him as Jesse. His girlfriend was interviewed but she’d been too far away to hear the shot and hadn’t seen anyone else around the parking lot. The Mounties called the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT) to look into the case. At first, they thought he was a homeless guy based on all the reports, maybe not fully understanding when locals called him a “dirtbag climber” they didn’t exactly mean he was destitute. And I guess I never really think of people living out of their cars anymore as homelessness only because I’ve met many people who are climbers that live out of their cars.
I couldn’t find a reason why it took three years for his DNA test to hit, possibly it has something to do with Canadian and American DNA databases being separate, or maybe they didn’t get a hit until someone in his family did an ancestry test, or possibly his photo got shared to someone who previously knew him and they altered the family. I don’t know. But in 2020 they confirmed his identity, comparing a DNA sample from his parents, which also confirmed his dad was in fact his real father. There’s still no concrete leads on his murder, but the investigators have determined it was not a suicide and after uncovering his past the possibilities have expanded exponentially. People in the area speculate that it was more likely another climber he pissed off than an angry neo-nazi or someone after his crypto fortunes. If you have any information to contribute you can reach the IHIT at 1-877-551-IHIT (4448), or by email at ihitinfo@rcmp-grc.gc.ca. I know, they’re super long. Anonymous tips can be left through Canadian Crime Stoppers on their tipline at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477) or on their website canadiancrimestoppers.org.
So, that’s the story of the Dirtbag Climber. Before I go, I want to wrap this up by saying, first, that Jesse, Davis, Britt, the Dirtbag Climber was very ahead of the curve. He started scamming in the early 2000s with herbal supplements and basically PDF manuals, which are scams that have become very big much more recently. He went down the pipeline from neo-nazi to libertarian to crypto-vegan and—I didn’t mention this but it shouldn’t be shocking—Elon Musk superfan, all (air quotes) before it was cool. He got into climbing and chess, not at the start because they’ve been around a while, but arguably also before they were made cool in the last decade or so. I think part of this is because a little less than 20 years ago the internet became a highly social place where not just the computer-savvy could dial-up and log in. Of course people have been DMing or IMing from their AOL.com accounts on AIM since ‘97 but I remember there being a significant change around the time Obama and McCain were running for president in 2008. Social media was taking off. In 2010 the iPad came out, and I remember my high school investing in them my senior year. Before that, we had to either use desktops in the computer lab or library and if we wanted a laptop we had to check it out from this massive odious cart that would get wheeled around the campus. So that’s all to say that Jesse would’ve been a better influencer had he been born now just considering how easily he picked up on trends before they became bigger. But I’m glad he didn’t, we have a lot of scammers now that abuse the internet and take advantage of people.
I’d feel more sorry for him, because what a horrible way to die and how sad it is to be estranged from his family for 15 years, but he put himself there. And to a lesser degree, he gives a bad name to the dirtbag culture. He’s not representative of all people who want to live out in the woods and climb all day. And while in a story I can divide the climber, the boyfriend, the sharp-tongued blogger from the scamming, hateful neo-nazi right down the Canadian-American border, he as an individual cannot be separated from all those things. It really sucks. I like seeing the good in people and I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but I think Jesse is part of the story of climbing, at least within dirtbags.
And I want to leave this all on a lighter note, so with that, dirtbags are essential to climbing. They’re our mascots, they’re our bravest explorers, or maybe the weirdest and often the most darling, sleeping on our couches, in stairwells, eating scraps from strangers like they’re the local wildlife, and pushing climbing beyond sport into a way of living and loving rocks, nature, and National Parks. If you aren’t a dirtbag now, you should be one for a night. Book a campsite, pack up your gear, wake up with the sun, and go climb—and always check your knots!
Bye!
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