First a little backstory. Last semester (so Spring 2023), my friend told me about some potentially climbable rocks he spied in the Nolichucky River Gorge where he works as a rafting guide. I had been wanting to get Chiquita some action, so we planned to head out there with some climbing gear to check it out! It was my first time dropping class IV rapids and it was a pretty exciting trip just by virtue of that, but we also stopped half way through to scramble up this epic rock buttress! We brought and needed to use my trad gear and rope, but what we climbed was absolutely not worth repeating. Through exploring the buttress in that fashion, though, we discovered a few lines that might be worth coming back to try! Unfortunately, my friend left to study abroad, but he was kind enough to give me the go-ahead to come back without him to give the cool lines we spied a go!
Which brings us to the story...

Nolichucky River Gorge

I found two friends who were interested in trying for some ground up, trad first ascents. None of us have bolting gear, so we brought a huge rack of trad gear so we would have enough bail gear if we needed to sacrifice anything to get down safely.
Furthermore, since we weren't rafting the whole river, we hiked in just shy of two miles on train tracks then used my packraft to ferry ourselves and our gear across the river to the sandy beach where we would make basecamp for the climbing ahead.

We made it to camp just in time to set everything up before dark. We had dinner on the way there, so we just had some snacks and a nice campfire (and a little bouldering on a rocky overhang at camp) before heading to bed for a big day tomorrow!

The two nights here were very interesting. While we all slept like absolute rocks, we were positioned at a bend in the river, therefore also a bend in the train tracks. Three or four trains would pass by through the course of the night. Each time they came through they would put on the brakes through the curve, causing the screech of metal on metal to fill the gorge and reverberate through our heads. Rough way to wake up!

In the morning we had a massive breakfast, racked up, then dove into the forest. While the approach to camp is super mellow with zero elevation change, the approach from camp to the climbing is absolutely heinous. We gunned it almost straight up the steep gorge walls, scrabbling through dirty, rocky debris and underbrush. Eventually, though, after about 40 minutes, we made it to the familiar, inspiring horizontal crack that I'd been thinking about for the last 4 months!
We relaxed for a few minutes before we got everything in order to start climbing. We draped the flaked rope over a branch, anchored Abby to another branch so she wouldn't get pulled down the rocky hillside if I fell, and I cast off on the crack. It had a convenient ledge from which I could get some initial protection, but immediatley after that the business was on.
The crack I had been eyeing was hard to use due to a rock bulge right below it, so I had to skirt around it using pretty small handholds and delicate foot placements. I was encouraged by how good my gear was, knowing that if I were to fall I wouldn't go too far. I pushed through and eventually made it to the point where I could get excellent hand-jams inside the crack and I knew it was on! From that point onwards I knew I had passed the technical crux and I only had to endure to a ledge at the end of the crack. I contind to traverse the crack, using footholds on these beautiful striations below that were quite delicate. One even broke loose, but luckily I had great handholds and was able to hang on despite the broken hold. I pushed through the pump and finally made it to the ledge at the end of the crack where I built a belay!
After resting for a second I put Abby on belay and brought her over. She fell victim to the loose rock as well, but unfortunately she fell all the way and weighted the rope. I was a bit worried about how she would get established back in the vital horizontal crack, but she was able to use the delicate striations to face-climb back to it and made it over to me anyway!
We swapped gear at the ledge, then Abby cast off for the lip of the buttress and the end of the climb. She led a pretty strenuous face-climbing section with some excellently placed, rather elusive gear, and I followed her up to the top to celebrate our first ascent!
Elias elected to stay at the base and hang out in the forest. Abby and I tried to convince him to join us, but he is newer to trad climbing and was just not feeling it that day.

After climbing Prime Rib, we set our sights on a cool bit of exposed rock on the second tier that we had spied from the train tracks. We packed up our stuff and bushwacked to the base of the second tier and quickly found a cool looking, dirty corner with a crack in the back. It was begging to be climbed, but also our bellies were begging for some snacks by this point, so we parked and snacked it up for a bit. After gassing up, we also took a quick stroll around the corner from the line we found to see if there might be more climbing and we didn't find much. Around the corner was some tall rock, but it was pretty broken up and not fun looking.
We decided to just swing leads for this trip, so since Abby had just led a pitch I took the lead for the corner. It was some fun, easy, 5.6 or so stemming with lots of garbage to clean up. I threw down several ~8 pound rocks and a ton of dead rhododendron branches and even a whole dead rhododendron sapling! The sapling got stuck in the rope so I had to get to a solid stance so Abby could grab it and throw it into the brush behind us. Despite the mess and the dirt anywhere, the climbing was pretty fun and had good protection!
Before long I reached the top of the corner and a steep, dirty ledge. I crawled up under the underbrush to a rocky outcrop below another short cliff. Time for a belay! I made a gear anchor and belayed Abby up to me.
She took the lead on the next pitch, and it was right up her alley. She found good protection right where she needed it, and got to a really tricky face section. When eyeing up the pitch, we had hoped to go up this slanting corner directly above the belay, but she couldn't find a safe, sane way to get into it and instead opted to dodge left up a shallow crack system with lots of crimps to top out the second tier. When I followed the pitch, I was really impressed with the line and the gear she found, I definitely would have been pretty spooked!
As we climbed a group of 4 guided rafts drifted down the river faaaar below and we were treated by their whoops and hollers and screams as they tackled the rapids!

Now for the second half of the day: getting down! We brought tons of extra gear just in case we had to create a rappel anchor in rock, but we got lucky and there were trees aplenty to use for anchors! I brought two lengths of static rope that I cut from an old gym toprope and two quicklinks to leave behind. From the top of 19'-hexanoyloxyfucoxanthin, though, I wasn't sure that a single rappel with our 70m rope would get us to the bottom of tier 2. To conserve our rappel anchors, I rigged the first one with a 240cm sling and a carabiner, but, much to my chagrin, it did indeed get us to the ground! We then rigged another rappel from the top of tier 1 with the beefy static rope and quicklink that easily made it to the ground. That was definitely my favorite rappel, since most of it was freehanging over the intense overhang near Prime Rib and right into a patch rhododendron! Much laughter could be heard as I gently descended into a thick patch of rhododendron.

After getting our feet on solid ground at the base of tier 1 and joining Elias, we began our laborious descent back to the river. Much wandering and sliding was had, but eventually we made it back! The rest of the story isn't quite as interesting as the climbing. We swam about, cooked a massive pasta dinner, played with trad anchors at camp, and bouldered a wee bit.

After waking up in the morning, we decided to go cliff jumping at Twisting Falls, so we whipped up some breakfast, packed up camp, and made our journey across the river! Several trips in Chiquita later we were all loaded up and bookin' it upstream along the tracks.

Thoughts

All in all, it was an incredible trip! I've gotten first ascents before, but not on anything I felt was remotely worth recommending to anyone. While these climbs arent at Moore's, Linville, or somewhere legendary like that, I love them all the same!
When I was thinking about how it would feel to climb something I knew would be an FA, I was way off. I thought I would feel intrepid, like I was forging new ground and casting off into the unknown. Don't get me wrong, I did feel that a bit, but the experience wasn't far off from the usual experience of onsight trad climbing, which is something I love to do. The main difference between the FA experience and onsight trad is that there's really no way to do it wrong. We were making our own way, finding the natural line, and just letting the rock guide us. When onsight trad climbing I often worry about and think about where to go to stay on the line, but when climbing these FAs I was more preoccupied with where to go that would just take us to the top safely!
I had expected a mindblowing, spiritual experience. I thought I might feel like a changed climber after making those FAs. What I got was a great day out with good friends, and I really feel no different. In a way, I think it's better that it turned out that way!
Being unchanged as a climber speaks to how this expedition was a logical next step for my climbing for which I was well prepared. In terms of the lack of spiritual experience, I think the spiritual experience was really having shared the expedition with good friends. Our joint endeavor is cemented in history; perhaps history not many people care about, but history nonetheless!
I'm not sure I'll have time to go back to do more climbing, but I hope that this write-up and the guidebook I threw together help other people get out there to climb more lines and have a great time :)