Southern Appalachian Section
Back to sections
Home to some of the finest rock climbing and bouldering in the United States (and some winters, even ice climbing!), the Southern Appalachian Section of the American Alpine Club encompasses three states which span the southern Appalachian mountains, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. While the focus of the section's events and its membership's climbing priorities are oriented to southeastern crags and bouldering sites, AAC members from the section frequently travel to the alpine environments of the Rockies, Tetons, Cascades, Alaska, and the greater ranges of South America, Europe, and Asia.
Significant climbing venues within the Southern Appalachian Section include the T-Wall and Little Rock City bouldering of Chattanooga (ranked number one climbing town to live in by Climbing magazine) and North Carolina's Looking Glass, Table Rock/Linville Gorge (located near Boone, ranked number ten climbing town in US), Stone Mountain, Laurel Knob, White Sides Mountain, and Moore's Wall.
An upsurge in American Alpine Club membership in the section has fueled a growing number of AAC-sponsored events ranging from well-attended local dinners, barbecues and fund-raisers in North Carolina to climbing and bouldering weekends in Tennessee. We encourage you to join with other members and take the initiative to produce grassroots AAC social, service and climbing events. Members are also encouraged to support the section newsletters by submitting their input to the Section Chair, David Thoenen. Please forward news on your most recent climbs, and remember that this is not the Alpine Journal- reports on any climb are welcome on this site! Treks qualify as well. We use the newsletter as a vehicle for spreading the word on how much fun we're having in the southeast on our climbs, big or small. While we're eager to applaud our fellow AAC member when she wins the Triple Crown of Bouldering or succeeds in the first ascent of Rum Doodles' North Wall, we'd also like to hear about your road trip out to JT, your trek up the Khumbu, or your weekend in the Linville Gorge. If you're into Facebook, make a point of joining our Facebook group, the American Alpine Club Southern Appalachian Section.
You're not already an AAC member? Send me an email and I'll be happy to discuss the benefits of membership with you. Or better yet, just click https://www.americanalpineclub.org/joinnow and join up.
David Thoenen
Section Chair - Southern Appalachian Section
dthoenen@nc.rr.com
Interested in becoming an AAC Ambassador for the Southern Appalachian Section?
AAC Ambassadors are climbers who are active in their local climbing communities. Like Section Chairs, they promote the AAC in their area. Local communities consist of climbing locales, population centers with significant numbers of climbers, and special interest groups like ice climbers, women or boulderers. Communities are best served by multiple ambassadors, those with time and energy to coordinate with Section Chairs and rally climbers in the area.
Contact David Thoenen at dthoenen@nc.rr.com for more information.
Section Chair - David Thoenen
David started climbing in college in 1964, attending rock climbing classes sponsored by the college outing club. He then retired from climbing to focus his college years on beer, lacrosse, and sloppy partying. However, he's always been an enthusiastic reader of mountaineering literature, collecting climbing books since he was twelve. When he hit the double nickel, after four decades of mountain backpacking, it occurred to him that the time had come to get back into climbing or give up the notion for good. So off he went at fifty-five to an eight-day Outward Bound rock climbing school in western NC. He survived, much to his amazement, relearning not only the basics of climbing but also some very interesting new dialect from his twenty-something classmates.
Now approaching his mid-sixties and collecting social security, David's climbing takes him regularly from his home in Raleigh to play on the crags of North Carolina and West Virginia, enjoy the rigors of the Tetons, freeze on the ice climbs in North Conway, and pant up the summits of North Cascades. He tries to push his rapidly aging body up moderate routes as hard as he can without breaking anything. While no poster boy for mountaineering accomplishment, he's terrific at helping guide services pay the bills. David loves the mountains and mountaineering despite the fact that he's not the hardest man in base camp. On the plus side, he's recently retired after thirty-five years at IBM so he now has time to invest in Golden Years Alpinism.