Interview by: Jackie Hueftle

Tim Steele has been a legendary figure in my mind for as long as I’ve been a routesetter—a condition largely due to the stories my setting mentors would tell about him.

One time in the middle of a Nationals Tim Steele jumped from the huge pillar the setters were sitting on to the overhanging lead wall and soloed up it to tighten a hold,” and my favorite: “Tim set a 5.12 slab at the University of Miami wall and climbed it in pink fuzzy bunny slippers.”

Add these feats to a historically comprehensive California bouldering video (West Coast Pimp), a major presence in the development of Bishop bouldering, a job teaching middle school, mad DJ skills, an original Atari, and a cat named Seuss, and you’ve got a very interesting guy.

JH: So, Tim, how long have you been setting, and how did you get started?

TS: I started route setting at Miami University in 1993 on a 20 foot high, mostly vertical plywood wall. At that time there were not many climbing gyms East of the Mississippi and the holds were very rudimentary. Most of them were very sharp. Let’s just say that flappers were much more common back then – climbers hadn’t yet discovered the word ergonomic. Some of the main brands were Vertical Concepts, Entreprise, Petrogrips (basically bolt-on rocks), and Gripheads (ceramic holds). There were also virtually no pockets, just blobs and edges. We didn’t have any specialized foot jibs either. So the setting was, likewise, very rudimentary.

After returning from one of my first trips to Hueco, a few of the local strong boys—KC Kopp, and the Berlier brothers—built a bouldering woodie. I guess that was the first time I really started taping up problems based on the moves I had encountered at that bouldering area. I remember setting a Hobbit in a Blender simulator that turned out to be much harder than the real problem. By the time I got back to try Hobbit the next season, it felt pretty easy.

In 1995, a new recreation center was built at my college, and along with it, a state of the art climbing wall. I actually got hired by Radwall during my spring break to do grunt work for them. I got to see first hand how a wall was designed and built. That wall became the first real testing ground for me to develop my setting techniques because it was 40’ tall, with a 16’ roof.

I had also started competing by that point, so I was starting to emulate the setting styles that I encountered at the comps I was going to.

After college was when I really started setting, from about 1995 through 1997. I got hired as the head route setter at Rockquest in Cincinnati and convinced my boss to send me to an (American League of Forerunners) ALF certification course offered at the old Clipper City Gym in Baltimore.

It was a three day workshop led by Mike Pont and Steve Schneider in which they tried to wear us down by making us set comp style routes and deprive us of sleep before giving us a climbing ability test on the second day. To get your Regional ALF certification, you had to on-sight a 5.12a and red point a 5.12b/c (you got 10 minutes to work the route, then had to do it next go). Pretty easy by today’s standards.

That course was really inspiring to me because I knew that Pont and Schneider were among the best at setting in the country and the course had brought together a bunch of the strongest climbers on the East Coast. It was motivating and eye opening to be critiqued by my peers. It was the first time I really began to think of setting as an art to be perfected.

Over the next year, I set dozens of routes a week at the gym. This was mainly accomplished through tons of all night solo sessions with the stereo cranked. That season, Jason and Tiffany Campbell trained at my gym for about a month and gave me a lot of pointers and critiqued my routes, which helped me polish my style. They were my earliest setting mentors.

I was hitting up all the nationals and regionals that I could go to at that point as well. I really wanted to get my nationals certification and very few people had one at that point. I can think of a couple of people — I never met, but heard about — like Jim Redo and Hank Caylor, but the list of national setters at that point was really short. In order to get nationals cred, you had to test at a higher level and set under one of the four ALF nationally certified instructors: Mike Pont, Steve Schneider, Tony Yaniro, or Christian Griffith.

These guys had started the ALF to set for ASCF (American Sport Climbing Federation, now USA Climbing) events after going to Europe and getting certified by the UIAA under Antoine Le Menestral. So, I basically planned a nationals to be held at Rockquest so I’d have a chance to set for one.

Steve came out and tested me (you had to onsight a .12b and redpoint a .12d second go), then I called up Mike Pont b/c most people thought he was the best setter in the country at that point. I had a blast working with that guy and learned so much.

I moved to California late in 1997 and haven’t set much since, though I’ve done a bit of forerunning here and there. I’d be psyched to get into it again, but there aren’t any gyms in bishop, so I just put my creative energy into finding new boulders now.

JH: So you used to compete—how was that?

TS: When I started competing, there were very few climbing walls and gyms around. I drove all over the place to a lot of the early comps on the East coast: Dixie Rock, The Sporting Club in Atlanta, Louisville, Lexington, and Michigan, Baltimore, and Illinois to name a few. My most memorable comp win was the Knox Rocks comp (c. 1995), which was the premiere bouldering comp in the East.

As far as competing, I did all right at the regional level, but pretty much sucked at the national level for difficulty climbing. I never made finals. At that point, if your name wasn’t Sharma, Caldwell, Vinokur, Branford, or Campbell, you probably weren’t going to make it.

It was great to hang in ISO with a lot of strong climbers, though, because I picked up a lot of technique and mental training tips. Plus, I got really psyched about what was possible. Everybody at the top level was saying the same thing: “Climbing’s mostly in your head, it comes down to what you can believe in.” If you want to become better, than climb with the best climbers you can.

Around that time, I also got into speed climbing by accident. My friend Rene Keyser-Andre signed me up at a Nationals on a whim. I kind of got sucked into my first speed comp and did pretty well over the course of a year, missing the X-Games cut by one slot. But speed climbing never got much credit. It was kind of like the short-bus-side-event.

JH: I heard you had a cool setting bag. How’d you get hooked up with it?

TS: Around the time I was setting for the nationals, I had a Verve Larka (bag) that I had been using to set with, but it wasn’t really meant to haul a lot of weight. While I was gone on a climbing trip, one of the gym patrons got a hold of my bag and totally tricked it out. It looked like candy-raver on a bad acid trip: with leopard fur, flowers, sequins, and dragonflies all over it. Cool as it was, I gave it to Christen Griffith (I don’t know what happened to it after that). In turn, after giving CG some input, he designed a special beefed up Larka for me to set with that I still have. It has a bunch of compartments for bolts and wrenches and a burly, padded shoulder strap – pretty sweet!

JH: Did you really jump off a pillar and solo up a wall to tighten a hold mid-comp?

TS: I don’t remember doing that, really. I did have to aid out a roof during the nationals to tighten a hold after scarfing half a pan brownies; I had no idea what I was getting into.

JH: What do you think about the comp scene now?

TS: I’ve kind of lost touch with the comp scene to be honest. I’m totally amazed by how far the level of climbing has come and by the setting that’s being done now. The holds are all so much better now — there’s endless variety. I guess every setter knows that the most important thing isn’t so much how hard you climb (b/c in general the setters never climb as hard as the competitors), it’s more important to know the climbers you’re setting for really well. Know their strengths and weaknesses. Take criticism and don’t be afraid to try new things. Give them a fun route and separate the pack.

It always sounds easier than it is – that part will never change. Don’t get into setting for the money or the chicas. O.K., I lied, maybe you will get the chicas, unless the legends about me are true, in which case I may have created too much game for the setters out there now to match…

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