Stewart Green, climbing pioneer and prolific Colorado Springs writer, dies at 71 (2024)

Of all the beautiful places he visited around the world, one of Stewart Green’s favorite places was the porch of his Colorado Springs home. He called it his “outdoor office.”

A prolific author, photographer, rock climber and historian of his native city and of the sport he pioneered, Green would sit there at the porch typing out his next project. He’d glance up now and then at Pikes Peak through the greenery of maple trees, pausing to appreciate the chorus of bugs and birds in the morning, the rising sun illuminating the dew.

“It’s a good morning,” he said there on the porch as the sun rose on the last day of May.

Days later, Green would die suddenly of a suspected heart attack. He was 71.

“If I knew he was gonna go this quick, I would’ve asked him another 1,000 questions,” said Green’s son, Ian, who knew his dad as an overflowing fountain of knowledge. “It’s a severe loss for our family, for friends, the outdoor industry, the travel industry and the literature world.”

Green’s Facebook page had been something of a repository over the years; he would post his pictures and eloquent words on nature and fellow climbers of a golden age, along with reflections on his beloved Colorado Springs of past and present.

Following Green’s death late Thursday, the Facebook page became an outpouring of remembrance.

“A great friend, photographer, climbing icon, Springs icon and just plain wonderful soul,” read one post.

“A mentor, teacher and father figure,” read another.

And another: “Thank you for all you have done for the climbing world!”

The climbing world expanded with the impossibilities proved possible by Green and a young, long-haired band of mavericks.

In Green’s 1963 Volkswagen, the friends from the Springs ventured to heights then thought to be unreachable. That included red towers around the dusty, barren outpost that was Moab. They ventured also to Boulder’s Eldorado Canyon, Longs Peaks, Black Canyon of the Gunnison and beyond — Green conquering all that rock with limbs that earned him the nickname “Stretch.”

“They were pushing the envelope,” a climbing friend of more recent years, Brian Shelton, said in a previous interview. “Actually, no, they were building the envelope.”

Green is credited with hundreds of first ascents across the West. Asked about the number in a previous interview, he shrugged. “I never really kept track.”

He similarly shrugged off questions about his favorite climb, whenever admirers asked the soft-spoken man over the years. “I usually say it was the last place I did.”

And so the answer was usually somewhere around his hometown.

“Rock Climbing Colorado,” one of 70-plus books he published, inspired a new generation of climbers and continues to be a go-to guide for people breaking into the sport. But it’s in his native Springs where Green perhaps left his greatest mark.

“He will be a local hero in the climbing community forever,” Shelton said.

As Green saw his free-for-all era turn to a tense time of regulation, he partnered with land managers. Where there was worry about route-bolting and damage to rock, Green with that soft voice successfully lobbied to ensure freedoms.

He led the way in maintaining access at Garden of the Gods and North Cheyenne Cañon. As Red Rock Canyon was opening to the public in the early 2000s, he was trusted to create routes across the sandstone. He went on to form Pikes Peak Climbers Alliance, which took advocacy to crags high on Pikes Peak, Elevenmile Canyon and Shelf Road near Cañon City.

Between advocating and guiding trips, Green voraciously wrote. His guidebooks spanned climbs, hikes, drives and sightseeing around the world; “Hiking Waterfalls Utah” was published this month.

Green published more than guidebooks. One of his latest favorites: A collection of historic works from Helen Hunt Jackson, whom Green knew as the “grande dame of Colorado Springs authors.”

The infant town’s scenery cast a spell on Jackson, inspiring her to make the Springs home until her death in 1885. Green delighted in her poetic ruminations on the local mountains, canyons, rocks and plains. It all similarly cast a boyhood spell on him more than a century later, inspiring him to stay in the Springs all his life.

Along with Edward Abbey — Green said he once met the desert scribe while looking for petroglyphs — Green counted Jackson as an important influence.

“For how we should view nature and the world and our place in it,” he said about a week ago. “And I was really drawn to her first-person accounts and observations of where I grew up. Colorado Springs was always part of me, by the luck of the draw.”

Born in 1953, Green grew up near the base of North Cheyenne Cañon; as a child he often visited the waterfall there named for Jackson. His father was a brick-laying immigrant from England, a mountaineer who understood his boy’s wanderlust.

“He said he would just take off when he was like 12,” said Martha Morris, Green’s longtime partner. “He’d tell his mom, ‘I’m going, I’ll be back for supper,’ and he would just walk up into Cheyenne Cañon and explore.”

In the wild a quiet, thoughtful boy could find peace and connection. The more rowdy, pot-smoking climber friends seemed unlikely connections. But they similarly railed against Vietnam and similarly craved greater challenges and greater heights to greater beauty.

While those friends continued to push boundaries through the ‘80s, Green settled down to start a family. He settled into a writing career.

“I wanted to do something more of lasting value,” he once said.

Green became nationally regarded, a widely trusted source of climbing history and a bygone era.

Those were “the good old days,” he recently wrote on Facebook, “when the world was our oyster, social media and other bragsheets didn’t exist, and we climbed for the joy of movement, the love of hard rock, and the lasting friendships we shared.”

It seems like yesterday to Jimmie Dunn, Green’s lifelong climbing partner.

“I’m the one who told Stewart that Ed Webster died, I’m the one who told him Doug Snively died,” Dunn said, thinking of friends from recent years. “God, now I’m telling people about Stewart.”

He’s recalling Green’s deep curiosity, his kindness and patience. Green was indeed never in a hurry, content to simply be.

Content at his “outdoor office” on the porch.

He’d been working on a memoir lately. In it, he wrote of “an elemental earth poetry” to Pikes Peak, of a lesson gained by that granite marvel always looming:

“The rock delves into the ages of the earth, to witness mountains, valleys, rivers, floodplains and seas from long before our brief time, to feel the origins and evolution of life itself from minute microbes to the rich panoply of creatures that share our planet. The rock speaks about life’s impermanence and the emerald wash of ceaseless tides across sandy beaches.”

And, yes, Green had been reflecting on Helen Hunt Jackson lately.

He’d been visiting her grave in town. “I was there Monday,” he said about a week ago.

He mentioned the sonnet engraved on the gravestone, and he recited a favorite line:

“Oh, write of me, not ‘Died in bitter pains,’ But ‘Emigrated to another star!’”