By letting climbers auger in long-term, Miguel allowed a local community to form, which has allowed America’s best cragging venue to ferment and rise. The shop was Miguel’s biga: a starter dough. Read More: Not Just Dirtbags: The Economic Impact of Climbers in the Red River Gorge Always inspiring you to work harder, dream bigger, and perfectly slice the potatoes, one of 48 pizza toppings-including pasta spirals and mango salsa-you can order here. Miguel’s laid-back nature appealed to me, and, surely, the gobs of other transient climbers Miguel has helped mold under his watchful tutelage of employment. Flour from pizza-making or paint from his art marks his hands, chafed from a lifetime of use.
RED RIVER GORGE KENTUCKY SKIN
Miguel himself is not chatty he’s reserved even-a mystery behind his olive skin and dark, moody eyes hooded by thick, paintbrush-stroked brows. When I left to head West, Miguel gifted me a tiny hand-carved spoon, saying only, “I carved this for you.” As I’ve learned, it’s a gift he gives all of his former employees. But soon I blended into the community when Miguel employed me in his kitchen, where I worked for two seasons prepping veggies and making pizzas. When I began climbing here in 2001, I was drawn in by the cliffs’ mélange of colors and impossibly perfect routes that unfurl magnificent hold after magnificent hold. It’s an amalgam of amphitheaters and walls and mini-towers of perfect orange and brown Corbin sandstone, home to thousands of routes amidst rolling, thickly forested Appalachian hills. Photo: François Lebeauīeing back in my home state reminded me why I miss the Red. Sasha DiGiulian climbs Dario Ventura’s route Witness the Citrus (5.11c) at Fruit Wall. Miguel had misplaced some of the earliest ones, like the one in which on Jarrard’s first visit he left Miguel his phone number and a note: “I’m interested in bolting routes.” (Jarrard is still waiting for Miguel’s response.) Books from the late 1990s and early 2000s contained other noteworthy signatures: Dave Hume, the quiet strongman who established stiff, no-nonsense routes like True Love (5.13d) at Gold Coast and Thanatopsis (5.14b) at the Motherlode, and Kenny Barker, who discovered and opened routes at Purgatory. We scoured through signatures, relics really, within old guestbooks from the shop. Dario, unbeknownst to me, had culled together Hugh Loeffler, Chris Snyder, and Porter Jarrard-three still-active Red climbing legends who helped launch the sport revolution here-in a makeshift, crag-side interview (“ Some dude named Whit is going to interview you guys …” Dario had told them), followed by an impromptu nine-person dinner up at Miguel and his wife, Susan’s, house on the bluff above the restaurant. In typical Ventura fashion, there was no plan. Combs Mountain Parkway east out of Lexington with few words from Dario other than, “Be here at 10 a.m.”
So I bought a $100 round-trip ticket, borrowed a car, and hit the Bert T. Perhaps Dario, the go-between, thought Miguel would be too reticent on the phone.
Over the course of its many iterations, Miguel’s Pizza has been an ice-cream shop, then pizzeria, then pizzeria-turned-climber-doss-turned-mega-campground-turned-Climber-Ground-Zero, all linked with the history of climbing at the Red. The restaurant was closed for two more weeks during Miguel’s annual winter break. “He won’t talk to you on the phone,” Dario Ventura said of his father, Miguel Ventura, owner of his namesake restaurant in Eastern Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. This feature originally appeared in Climbing in 2017.
RED RIVER GORGE KENTUCKY FULL
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