“John (Verm) Sherman, he’s been everywhere, and when he swept through the Southeast, it was still an unknown, wild area,” says Andrew Kornylak, an award-winning photographer and filmmaker. Then he describes a black and white photograph in Verm’s book Stone Crusade: A Historical Guide to Bouldering in America from 1994 that he says today is that photo connects his three most recent climbing films: The Flaming Crimp, Inner Mounting Flame, and The Mapmaker.

In the photo is Jim Horton halfway up a tall V6 called Raw Terror at the underground bouldering area Blowing Rock in Boone, North Carolina. Horton’s eyes are closed except for a smidgen of pupil staring down – petrified — at his spotter’s outstretched hands. “You can’t tell if he’s going up or down because he’s stuck on this mantle,” says Kornylak. “Thirty years later, it still encapsulates so much of Southeastern climbing in a single photo. That photo is awesome.”

It wasn’t until years later that Kornylak recognized the spotter’s hands as Joey Henson’s, the subject of The Mapmaker, the third film in his trilogy of the North Carolina high country climbing scene. 

As a long-term climber myself, I’m familiar with the photo he’s referring to because it’s the very same one that inspired me to move to North Carolina back in the late 90s. Besides my friend Matt Childers, who lived in Boone, telling me how legendary the climbing was in the area, this photo sealed the deal. I went there, climbed Raw Terror, and climbed with Horton, who started the Triple Crown Bouldering Series, as seen in The Flaming Crimp. And I climbed with Henson, who, as seen in The Mapmaker, is almost a shaman or guru in bouldering. Watching Joey on the screen, everything feels still and quiet except for the flowing rivers. Life is slowed down and singularly focused. 

Since the rocks in and around Boone are spread out along the hillsides, when it comes to high country climbing, Kornylak, from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, says, “Everything is hidden…everything is a secret, not by choice necessarily, but by geography.” The Mapmaker documents Joey and his detailed hand-drawn maps of these climbing areas. 

Though a lifetime has passed since my tenure in the South, my memories of climbing at Joey’s property remain. One is of Joey sitting by the river surrounded by boulders. I observed as he smashed open nuts with fist-sized rocks and tossed them back with water from a clear Tropicana bottle. Everything seemed so simple. More importantly – or maybe one in the same — he knew where the best boulders were in the woods and creek beds. And he knew how to climb them with perfection. 

He lives in a three-walled barn built from repurposed wood from an old gymnasium. Back then, a homemade hydroelectric generator rotated a tiny scoop in a nearby creek that appeared to power it. The generator produced just enough energy to power a few dim lights and the radio. It had a trampoline, punching bag, and wooden climbing wall with more spinners than solid ones. Upstairs, he had a drafting board surrounded by windows looking over the hillsides. 

His place might resemble a sprawling shanty, but the landscape draws him there, where Kornylak says hundreds if not thousands of visiting climbers worldwide have benefitted under Henson’s mentorship. “They come to the barn to learn the Southern culture and rules, get led around all the secret areas, and check out Joey’s maps,” Andrew says. “Here, they just live climbing at its rawest form.”  

In The Mapmaker, climber Taylor McNeill sums up Joey’s philosophy, saying, “That’s the dream, even when you’re at home, you’re always on a climbing trip.”

Joey’s backyard boulders are just incredible – grippy sandstone where every climb requires power, familiarity with the subtleties of the rock, and boldness to ascend.  

Early Years

Photo and film are in Andrew’s blood. During his childhood in Southern Ohio, his dad traveled with work extensively and took photos constantly. Then, he presented slideshows to his family at home, with shows often going late into the night. Kornylak recalls that he was the only one who could keep his eyes open. “My grandparents were artists as well, painters, so there were always some cameras and stuff around,” he says. “Then, in college and at the University of Chicago, where I studied mathematics, I met my wife, and she got me into climbing, and immediately the two worlds went together.”  

Andrew’s first published photo, back in 1999, was a double pager in Outside Magazine. It was a self-portrait of his hand reaching back to clip a bolt as he ascended a giant roof at Dry Canyon outside Tuscon, Arizona. When seeing his shot printed huge in the magazine, he knew he’d become a career photographer (and later a filmmaker), but it took six more years working as a software engineer before he could transition to it full-time.   

Andrew has worked for Apple, National Geographic Television, Wall Street Journal, Red Bull, Patagonia, and various climbing-specific titles. His first cover photo was for Gripped in 2003. He was also the creative director at Outdoor Retailer Magazine, where he and I met in 2020 when I worked in the newsroom. All day, he’d oversee the coverage of the Show with friend and colleague Carlo Nasisse, also an avid climber. When we’d get together during each event, I’d gawk over Andrew and Carlo’s climbing photos and take in their Southern bouldering stories. Talking with them brought me back to that particular time and place. 

One night, as we met over stiff drinks — Andrew likes his Southern bourbon served neat— he showed me footage of his upcoming films, The Mapmaker (co-directed by Nasisse) and Inner Mounting Flame, productions generously sponsored by the Whitewater Center. 

The Trilogy 

With the addition of The Flaming Crimp, all three films are about North Carolina climbers, with Crimp documenting Jim Horton starting the Hound Ears bouldering competition, which grew into the Triple Crown series. The second, Inner Mounting Flame, is about Mike Stam and the second ascent of the epic namesake boulder problem above the Blue Ridge Parkway. The third is The Mapmaker, where Andrew says, “You can’t take a photo of every boulder in Linville Gorge – but you can draw it. Or at least, Joey Henson can.” Linville River bisects Linville Gorge in Western North Carolina in Pisgah National Forest at the base of a 2,000-foot canyon. 

Inner Mounting Flame

Inner Mounting Flame features music, interviews, and historical footage of Stam, plus new school climbers Taylor McNeill, Nathan Draughn, and Elijah Kiser, sending a slew of double-digit lines deep in the woods and attempting to repeat Stam’s desperate highball. 

Andrew’s footage captures not only the action but also the dichotomy of the landscape: a discarded T.V. left in a junk pile in the foreground and a climber sending a cutting-edge boulder in the background. This area is near the climbing area called The Dump, and the whole hillside is filled with garbage. 

“Mike and Joey were inseparable in those days,” Andrew says of when the Inner Mounting Flame went up in 2011. “At that time, they were putting up some of the high country’s hardest and scariest boulder problems. Joey and Mike lived as close to the rock as lichen.”

The climb is named after a 1971 album by the jazz-rock fusion band Mahavishnu Orchestra, which sat unrepeated for twelve years after Stam put it up. “The most attractive thing for me was finding that experience that I might never be able to find again,” Stam says of the climb.

The climb is in Watauga County at the Viaduct Boulders. Here, a thirty-minute uphill trudge takes climbers to three stunning boulder problems where “the vast majority of lines there are ridiculously tall, ridiculously hard and pretty scary,” Mike says in the film. Inner Mounting Flame requires a running start to launch into micro crimps and tiny feet. An all-points off super-man-style dyno follows this, a capper move that will leave the climber — if they fail to latch the final grip — slamming into their face into the ground from twenty feet and likely also get skewered by a rhododendron. 

“As long as I’ve been a rock climber, everybody’s tried it and just been completely unsuccessful,” says Mike. “It’s gymnastic and difficult, and it’s got a perfectly flat landing. The only thing I can think of is the height and the fact that you have to make an all-points off dyno at the top, which is pretty scary.”

Like Henson, Stam lives in a homemade shack he built in the woods. It’s as rustic as it gets but has what he needs, including his well-worn fiddle and guitar, which he plays beautifully throughout the film. “There could be a whole film of Mike’s musical talents,” says Kornylak. The video stitches Kornylak’s new beautiful footage with Joey’s historic grainy recordings of Stam and his first ascents of hard highballing with bone-shattering consequences.

“Mike Stam took Boone to another level,” says Taylor. “He was in a space all to himself, and nobody to this day has touched any of his hardest, tallest stuff. 

Comments on YouTube of Inner Mounting Flame include: “As good as it gets,”… “Left me with a feeling that very few bouldering videos do,” and “One of my favorite climbing short films.” 

Andrew says his trilogy came together due to 15 years of living in the South, trust-building with the community, and telling stories about Southern climbing culture. In those years, he’s done some 100 short films and a dozen longer ones about the South, including non-climbing award-winning films Stay Here Awhile (also co-directed with Nasisse) and Who Owns Water. In addition to the trilogy, his other climbing films include A Fine Line, Heart of Stone, and a series of shorts called The Beta. 

Upcoming Book 

Today, Kornylak has a photo and essay book on Southern climbing culture in the works called Spare These Stones. Though he’s currently touring the southeast presenting his high country Climbers trilogy in partnership with the Carolina Climbers Coalition, he initially envisioned having the book on hand. This way, he could promote it while visiting various cities in his home state, including Chapel Hill last October and Ashville last November. This spring, he plans to tour the western U.S. 

“I love how John Sherman’s photo introduces all these three films, and they all dovetail together,” says Kornylak. “They’re all related to the iconic Raw Terror photograph and represent Southern climbing culture.”

While touring, Kornylak shows the director’s cut of The Mapmaker, which you can only see in person. He talks with the audience about the films and provides a deeper context to them. 

He says of the Southern climbing culture that he documents in images and words, “There’s going be a junkyard, and then around the next corner, there’s going to be an amazing face of sandstone. That’s just the way the South is. The culture follows the geography. There’s a lot that’s hidden, a lot that’s secret, and at the same time, there’s a lot of energy here.”

Below is the trailer for Inner Mounting Flame: