Artist Preserves Memories And Legacies Of Climbers Through Rope Craft

A small group of rock climbers, all women, are gathered for a workshop in Hendersonville, North Carolina. With rain pouring down on a screened in porch, they pay close attention to their instructor, Shelby Treichler. 

A climber-turned-crafter, Shelby saves old climbing gear from landfills, by upcycling the ropes, harness straps and buckles into beautiful vases, bowls and wall hangings. She usually works with donated ropes that are too old to use safely anymore. But sometimes, she is asked to craft pieces in memory of loved ones – using their old climbing gear. 

At the workshop, Shelby is teaching the women how to make a “can cozie.” She shows them how to coil the old rope to make the flat base and then bring the rope up and around the can, forming the walls of the holder. 
“The dirtbag climbing community is very resourceful,” Shelby says, using the term “dirtbag” affectionately to refer to climbers who reuse everything from backpack straps to food containers. Shelby says at some point, almost every climber tries making a woven or knotted rope rug, and her work exists within this dirtbag lineage. But when she started turning her art into a business, Cactus to Pine, around 2019, there weren’t that many people treating it as a craft, and selling their work.

Now, with her workshops, she shares important tidbits she’s learned along the way, like how not to glue your can to your cozie while you’re making it. “Just twist your can every now and then and make sure it’s not getting stuck,” Shelby instructs the workshop participants. 

She says a few times, she’s glued a can of warm beer to a cozie she’s making. “I’ll just go ahead and crack it and drink it, because it’s easier to get an empty can out than a full can…Waste not, want not, right?”
Shelby has also developed a signature aesthetic with her work. The pieces she makes with coiled rope seem to have no beginning and no end, the rope mysteriously folding in on itself. Other pieces require her to delicately remove the inner core from the sheath of the rope, which she dyes to make colorful wall hangings. She does all of this in a twelve-by-six foot trailer on a five-acre plot, north of Asheville.

“It’s a small space, so we’ve gotta maneuver some things,” Shelby cautions as she steps into her workshop. The trailer has wood paneling inside, and as Shelby says, it kind of feels like the hull of a ship. Her grandfather’s workbench is the center piece, surrounded by climbing ropes, spools of thread and various tools. It has a wooden top, “like old grain wood, you can tell that the grain is really tight on it. And it’s just covered in dings and scrapes and burns, and pieces of tape from where my grandfather worked on it,” she says. “My dad remembers sitting at it when he was a kid, and now I’m putting my own dings into it.”

She started working with climbing ropes after seeing old ones being thrown away at the gym where she climbed. (Gyms are often required to get rid of old ropes for liability reasons.) She picked up weaving and knot-tying skills from climbing and nautical books — and from YouTube. But she says her connection to the materials and the craft comes from her mother and her grandmother, a seamstress who worked in a tuxedo shop.

Shelby and her sister would help her grandmother at the tuxedo shop during prom season.  “They would just slip us some cash to break down the tuxes as they were coming back after prom,” she says. “Anything we found in the pockets we would get to keep, which was always really exciting.”

Shelby treats all the found and donated materials she works with now with great care, throwing nothing away. She makes another version of can holder that uses flattened rope, with the inner core removed. She essentially turns the flattened rope into fabric pieces, and then sews them together. “Eventually they become one can sleeve,” she says. 

Her wall hangings are made from the ropes’ white inner core. She dyes the core strands various colors, then glues them onto a wooden backing to create her designs –  flowers, fruits and vegetables. This way, she is truly upcycling the whole rope. 

Shelby isn’t just on a mission to save these materials, she’s also preserving the stories held by these old harness buckles, ropes and hardware. Whenever she can, she makes sure whoever buys her products knows where they came from, especially when she’s upcycling climbing hardware, called bolt hangers, that are actually drilled into the rock at specific locations. “So, when I’m building these pieces, I can tell people, ‘Oh yeah, that one came from Linville Gorge, you might have climbed on this,’” she says.

Sometimes, though, the stories carried by the ropes and hardware are heavier than just a casual day of climbing. “Recently, I had a person contact me that had lost their spouse, and asked if I would make an urn cover for them,” she says, choking up. ”That one was … kind of hard.” 

Shelby says the person sent her the ropes they had climbed on together. She describes it as a sense of honor and responsibility to take on this kind of a project, “It’s just so much bigger than just climbing rope …It’s not just a sport. Like for a lot of us, it’s a lifestyle. Even though I don’t climb as much as I used to, I still consider myself a climber.”

Shelby Treichler stands smiling holding a wall hanging she’s made out of the inner core pieces of old climbing rope. The wall hanging, artfully designed to look like a bright red flower encircled by sage green leaves, is about the size of a placemat. Rebecca Williams/West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Her work has become so well known in the climbing community, that when a young climber named Annabelle McClure was killed in a car accident several years ago, one of her friends brought the young climber’s ropes to Shelby. 

“When Annabelle climbed, she just looked like a dancer on the rock,” says her friend, Andrea Hassler. “It would often just stop people in their tracks, if they were walking by. She was just the climber you’d want to watch…because it was just so beautiful.” 

Andrea and Annabelle were close climbing partners, and with the type of climbing they did – multi-day trips on big, difficult stone – that relationship is a tight bond. “Your joy and successes, as well as your failures and fears…you experience it all together, and you can feel it, like viscerally, through the rope,” Andrea says. “You’re both tied into either ends of this rope, and that is your literal lifeline.”

So, even though the family gave away some of their late daughter’s climbing hardware to friends, it just never felt right to Andrea, to climb on her friend’s old ropes. And after she explained the ropes might not be safe as they got older, Annabelle’s mother, Dana, agreed.

“You know, Dana is a very strong willed, smart and decisive person. She goes, ‘Okay, we are not climbing on these ropes, I’ve made the decision,’” Andrea says.

With the McClures’ approval, Andrea reached out to Shelby to make some pieces for the family out of the rope. Also, for Annabelle’s close friends, Shelby made a batch of can cozies with neck straps – they call them “cruizies.”

“I pretty much designed this product with her in mind,” Shelby says. And the fact that Shelby’s business, Cactus to Pine, is based in North Carolina made the whole project feel like a homecoming in honor of Annabelle. The McClure family’s roots run deep through North Carolina. Dana was from a small town outside of Winston Salem, and Annabelle’s father moved there for the climbing when he was young. Andrea says when she and Annabelle traveled to the state, she could tell her friend felt at home.

“It was unlike any other place that we had been to. It was just very obvious that she had this very deep connection,” Andrea explains. “Because it wasn’t just connection to the climbing, it was connection to the place…like a coming home.”

So, Andrea picked up Annabelle’s rope in Colorado where her parents now live, and drove it across the country to North Carolina. “I met up with Shelby in North Carolina in the Linville Gorge,” says Andrea. “We went and climbed with Annabelle’s rope…And Shelby hiked the rope out.”

The items Shelby made from that rope, now scattered across the country, are part of how Annabelle lives on. Each piece of rope core and thread are put to use. That’s exactly what Annabelle would have wanted, Andrea says. The obituary written by Annabelle’s mother makes that clear.

“Even after her time on this earth has passed, Annabelle is still giving by being a tissue donor. Her legacy now includes helping someone else see, have a heartbeat, feel the sun or take a walk. Please go for a walk, hike, ride or climb, and keep ‘sending it’ to remember our Annabelle.” 

Andrea does climb and hike in Annabelle’s honor, often with her “can cruizie” around her neck. “If I’m sitting around a fire drinking beer, it’s like with her rope,” Andrea says. “She would just love that. It’s like a little piece of her that gets to live on in another way. [It’s] like we’re tied in.”

Sitting in front of her grandfather’s workbench, Shelby Treichler says she’s honored to be a caretaker of these objects and their stories. “I am surrounded by things from loved ones that aren’t here any more. And to me, the best way to honor them is to keep using their stuff, and have their stories become part of our stories.” 

She says that taking care of the “heavier stories” is part of the job but, through her art, those stories are woven into new stories that live on. 

Special thanks to Folkways reporter Rebecca Williams for the interviews and photos from North Carolina for this story. 

Shelby Treichler, her dog, and the Cactus to Pine workshop-trailer are all safe after Hurricane Helene. Her art can be found at North Carolina Farmers’ Markets, climbing festivals across the country and online.