Dirtbag

Mychal, Sophie and friends sit in Mychal’s living room.

SoCal Dirtbaggers: Choosing Homelessness Over Paying Rent

It was midnight as I followed a caravan of strangers through the windy roads up Mt San Gorgonio. This was a spur of the moment climbing trip with Mychal Fierro, whom I had met only a week before, through a friend, on Instagram. Fierro, 27, didn’t hesitate to invite me on this adventure with his friends, and we met up earlier in the night at a gas station off of highway 330, about 10 miles from the city of San Bernardino.  

At 2 a.m,, our three car caravan pulled into Holcomb Valley, where dozens of campers were already soundly sleeping. Moonlit rock faces towered over us as we pitched our tents and settled in. I was exhausted and so was everyone else, but the excitement of finally getting to the valley called for a celebratory beer. 

Mychal and friends packed in the van.

The six of us crammed into Mychal’s 2004 Dodge Sprinter—a sprinter van is a commercial van typically used for transporting cargo—and I finally got a chance to introduce myself to the group. Our plan was to wake up at eight in the morning, before the temperatures got so high that the rock started to sweat, but we stayed up until four in the morning anyway, sharing stories and haphazardly playing Mychal’s moon drum. At one point in the night Mychal showed us his freshly scabbed wounds on his hands and shins from a mountain biking accident he had the week before. 

Mychal, and his friend Joshua, looking through the San Bernardino mountains guide book.

At dawn, as the warm sun light started to push away the morning chill, the six of us brushed our teeth and packed our bags with snacks and water in preparation for the hiking and rock climbing ahead of us.

People were already flocking out through the dirt trails towards the giant granite rock formations in the distance. As Mychal inhaled his breakfast—cereal and milk in a zip lock bag—a man with a heavy eastern European accent and greasy golden hair, approached him to pay a compliment. “I’ve seen a lot of them, but this is a really good one,” the man said. He was pointing at Mychal’s van, which had the sliding door open, revealing it’s wood floors, furnace, bed, kitchen, wood stove, wall-mounted iPad that doubled as a television, and a small book shelf stacked with climbing guide books from Vancouver to Yosemite. 

Mychal is a “dirt bagger,” a rare breed who lives life unanchored in order to pursue adventure.  The label might sound like a pejorative, and the choice to be voluntarily homeless is far from everyone’s dream. But to many climbers, being a dirt bagger is aspirational.

Mychal preparing his breakfast.

For rock climbers, traveling from forest, to desert mountain peaks in search of new boulders to climb and big walls to conquer—without worry of rent or house payments in increasingly expensive urban California — is half of the fun. The other half is revisiting these places with friends. 

Dirt bagging, however, isn’t all about, traveling, climbing routes and escaping urban life. It has become a creative economic strategy to deal with California’s housing crisis. “As affordability becomes more problematic, people ‘overpay’ for housing, ‘over-commute’ by driving long distances between home and work, and ‘overcrowd’ by sharing space to the point that quality of life is severely impacted,” declares a 2018 report by the California Department of Housing and Community Development. As California’s homeownership rate continues to decrease and rental costs increase, some members of the rock climbing community are choosing to turn their vehicles into homes, experiencing every climbers secret wish to live on the road, and in some cases, the challenge that comes with being homeless in urban environments. 

The U.S Department of Health and Human Services defines any person living in a vehicle as homeless. While in many cases, the high cost of housing have driven people into experiencing homelessness, some of the members of the climbing community are uniquely homeless by choice. 

ADAPTING

Daryl Del Rosario, a rock climber who works full time setting indoor routes for a popular chain of climbing gyms, was paying around $800 per month to rent a room in Culver City. He was spending fourteen hours at the gym—eight hours working and six hours training—and commuting up to two hours between gyms.  It was then that he realized that he could be using his time and money more efficiently. So Daryl converted the backseat of his Toyota Corolla into his bedroom. He then upgraded to a Toyota 4-runner and then once more to a Honda Element before a car accident made him decide it was time to buy a van. 

Sprinter vans are not cheap. Mychal spent around twenty thousand dollars to buy his van and convert his into a home. Daryl spent two years saving and had to make sacrifices to ensure he got the van he wanted. 

“I had to sacrifice a lot,” he said.  He spent less time eating out and hanging out with friends. “Pretty much all I was eating for a while was brown rice and cans of tuna and sardines just to make sure I had enough to pull the trigger,” he told me, laying on the gym floor surrounded by power tools and plastic multi-colored holds. 

Daryl’s van is a tool that transports him from where he is to where he wants to be. He sees the lifestyle he has built as one that allows for constant self- improvement. Every climber has a project, meaning a climbing problem, that is on the threshold of ones own personal ability, and  that can only be overcome with focus, practice, and peak physical performance. Being able to bring your home to your project can offer the flexibility of staying somewhere long enough to finally complete the climb that has become an obsession. 

“I can put myself in a situation and never really feel like I shouldn’t be there. It’s always a step forward” says Daryl. These movements forward are enabled by the minimalist life that comes as a result of living in a van. Progress for Daryl means becoming a stronger climber and learning to be resourceful when standard commodities become difficult to access.

“As human beings we are adaptable creatures,” he says. “That's what makes us so amazing. If we set our minds to things we can change the environment around us and we can change ourselves. I really think that it's represented in climbing as well. The amount of focus. The amount of training. The amount of dedication you put into it can show you your progression.”

Daryl has adapted to living without a bathroom by taking advantage of gas stations and his local Best Buy. When he needs to shower or park his van overnight he goes to the climbing gym where the community celebrates the idea of living a lifestyle that allows more time and opportunities to climb. 

There is a hierarchy in standard of living when it comes to living in a vehicle. When parking in the city streets, the windowless cargo space of a sprinter van makes it easier to hide. While Daryl was in the Toyota Corolla however, he experienced people peeking through his car windows and in some cases, screaming at him, as he laid in his back seat late at night, trying to sleep.

L-I-V-E L-I-F-E

Aaron Wilkins, 28, who I met one morning, spent time living in his Ford Explorer for the first six months out of California State University, Long Beach, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in nutrition Science. When the lease of his apartment was ending, he decided that it might be fun to live in his SUV for a while and avoid paying rent.  

His first month was filled with paranoia from not knowing where to park at night. “I didn't know where I could sleep. I didn't prepare anything. I didn't have any curtains on the windows. I woke up with the sunrise every day. I always thought I was gonna be fucking robbed,” said Aaron as we sat in the back of my SUV in Malibu one morning before hiking out to the “tunnel boulders.” On each of his knuckles are tattoos: L-I-V-E  L-I-F-E.

Like Daryl, Aaron learned to adapt. He parked his Explorer on a cul-de-sac where he noticed a group of high school kids smoking weed every night. His instincts told him that if the local kids were hiding out there, it must be a safe spot. His sleep improved but he found that the lack of stable electricity left him with little to do once the sun went down. Aaron found comfort by spending hours at Hangar 18 climbing gym in Long Beach where he would climb, nap on the the chalk-covered couches (climbers use chalk to dry their skin for increased friction between hand and rock), and shower.  Working full-time as a food scientist at a dog food factory, made finding a place to shower and groom a necessity. 

Besides boredom, Aaron had to learn to deal with loneliness. He coped by setting a routine where he’d visit different friends on different days of the week to ensure he didn’t over stay his welcome with any of them. He quickly started to sense that he was burdening them with his constant presence. “They feel awkward because they don't want to put you on the street but they also need to get on with their lives,” he told me.

Still, Aaron got some of the experiences he was hoping for when, in the spirit of one of his favorite books—Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—he decided that living in his Explorer might be a viable alternative to paying rent. The savings allowed him to take climbing trips and solo hiking trips. Also, being alone didn’t always mean being lonely. Aaron learned to appreciate the calmness of solitude. He described to me one of his most treasured memories of being caught in his SUV while it was raining. “I was lying in the back of my car at night and it was pitter-pattering on my roof and I've never been so calm as I felt right then. I was never more happy living in my car than I was right then. Hands above my head, feet crossed up above me, and I was just listening for hours and hours.

BYE CRACKIE 

Through the thick foliage, surrounded by pine trees and boulders piled more than 40 feet, I hiked with Mychal and the others trying to decide whether we should look for boulders to climb or set up a rope on one of the giant cliffs. Climbing boulders requires only a crash pad as protection since the climbs are much lower to the ground. As we trekked through the gravel, a young German woman in our group, Sophia, could not stop asking Mychal about his van. Sophia Pellmann, 23, wanted to know everything from the types of fabrics he used to sew his seat cushions, to the type of security he has in case someone tries to break in. Sophia is making the transition from her Ford Escape to a sprinter van of her own.

Sophia escaped the gloomy weather of Münster, in northeastern Germany, almost three years ago, preferring California’s year-round sunshine. She’s new to climbing but she is a seasoned unicyclist, surfer, and skateboarder. When she arrived in the U.S she rented a room with a group in Pasadena with friends she met through competing in unicycling.

About a year after moving to Los Angeles, she decided to buy a mattress so she could take over night trips in her Escape. It wasn’t long after that she decided she’d abandon her apartment and commit to living in her SUV full-time. 

“Rent in LA is so crazy that I would have to work so much and I wouldn't have time to adventure. I'd always be working. I can just live in a van, work half the time, spend the other half of my time traveling in my van. That just seems better,” she told me. Sophia works as a circus teacher at a daycare, teaching kids how to unicycle. 

Soon after deciding she’d abandon her apartment, she called her mother in Germany to tell her about her plans. Naturally her mom was worried and tried to dissuade her, but quickly came around and loaned her the money to buy the van. Sophia is planning to take a road trip with her mom once the van is finished.

Mychal, Sophia, Catherine and Joshua looking at “Bye Crackie”

Sophia was extra cautious in digging through sketchy Craigslist ads to find her perfect van. Still, the van she ended up buying came with a faulty transmission that took a month to fix.

Getting the van exactly where Sophia wants it means installing insulation, wood floors, electrical outlets, a ceiling fan for temperature control, and cabinets for storage. All of her time is consumed in making sure her home is up and running. For now, Sophia will rely on her friends and her Ford Escape for shelter.

Mychal ‘soloing’ Bye Crackie.

We decided we were going to climb an easy route—one that everyone in the group could do— called “Bye Crackie.” “Bye Crackie” stands about 60 feet high and is distinguished by the constellation of protruding rock chunks that make for good climbing holds. Getting to the rock face meant scrambling up piles of boulders to a slab with a view of the valley. Around us were dozens of climbing partners spread out across the rock face, some tied into the wall and some belaying—in a climbing pair, the belayer is the person who uses a belay device to feed and take rope from the person climbing. We decided that Mychal would lead—in sport climbing the leader sets the rope by clipping protection into the bolts drilled into the rock face and passing the rope through fixed anchor points on top of the route. Once everyone got a chance to try the route, it would be my job to climb to the top and rappel down to “clean” or remove all of the gear set on the wall by the leader. 

None of us even had a chance to put our harnesses on before Mychal started to free solo (climb without a rope). He got about 35 feet up before he paused on a committing move. We all stood and watched him as he climbed down then climbed back up again, hesitating to throw his hand out to the large rock flake. If Mychal was tied in, this move would be no problem, but without protection, the move is precarious to say the least. One misstep from that height could mean death. We called up, trying to convince him to retreat. Finally, he climbed back down. 

Mychal has been living in his van for the past year and has been rock climbing for two. “First I started climbing and then I started going places in my car and setting up a tent,” he told me.  We sat on a slab of granite watching the others take their turn on “Bye Crackie”. It was experiences like these that encouraged Mychal to outfit his two-door hatchback with a full-sized mattress and cabinets. In late 2016 he drove the hatchback, a Volkswagen Golf, up to Squamish for a six week climbing trip. He also drove it to Salt Lake City where he caught a flight to North Dakota to protest the construction of the Dakota access pipeline near Standing Rock. When he came back he decided he wanted to buy a van to live in full-time. 

The living area of Mychal’s van is about 35 square feet and is furnished like a miniature studio apartment. Underneath his bed is a mountain bike, climbing rope, and bouldering pads.

You can’t fit much into a van so moving in required him to shed most of his possessions, he told me. “I filled a lot of stuff [into] trash bags and dropped [them] off at Goodwill. You know [how] you have this huge closet so you just keep filling it? It’s like having a lot of memory on your phone, you don’t need it but you just kind of let it fill up instead of cleaning it out.” 

Living in a vehicle presents challenges for most people, but Mychal feels he has his system is pretty dialed in. At night, Mychal parks his van on a cul-de-sac right down the street from his employer or at one of the various climbing gyms around Los Angeles and Orange County.

Mychal sees his van as an asset. He has no health insurance or retirement savings but he says that the money he could get from his van is probably more than the money he would have saved, had he decided to save for retirement. He has plans to sell his van and buy a 2018 Ford Transit with a medium roof, allowing him to stand straight up while he cooks—he cooks slightly hunched over in the van he has.  He’ll drive the new van up to the Bishop in central California to work on last seasons bouldering projects: Acid Wash, Fly Boy and High Plains Drifter. 

He sees himself living in the van for another five years. “Eventually I want to have a family. Have a normal sized house. Slow down you know? But right now is the time of my life where I can actually do whatever I want.”

Once everyone had their turn on “Bye Crackie,” I made my way up to the top of the route to catch the view of the army of pine trees and rock formations that surrounded us. I could see Sophia, Mychal and the others sitting on the rock platforms trying to decide who was going to make the hike back to the campground to grab the bouldering pad. I looked down at my belayer and yelled “good!” My belayer shouted back “off belay!” (you need to make more clear above (see my notes) what a belayer is – it’s a person, right, someone that does a particular job? I clipped into the fixed protection bolted into the rock and untied the rope from my harness so that I could pass it through the anchor points and rappel down.

The group decided to retire the rope and find a cluster of boulders they found in the guide book.  It was getting late for me so I decided not to join. I needed to get back to my life and apartment in Los Angeles.  Mychal understood.  He smiled and shook my hand. “Till the next trip,” he said.