The Coz

In the 1980's and Early 1990's, When American Climbers Were Still Deciding Whether to Accept Sport Climbing, Scott Cosgrove Established Some of the World’s Hardest Sport and Trad Climbs. Opinionated and Vocal, He Was Loved and Disliked Sometimes Simultaneously. When He Died in February, 2016, American Climbing Lost an Icon.

- Jeff Jackson

ON SUPER BOWL SUNDAY, January 31, 1988—his 18th day on the route—Scott “Coz” Cosgrove tied in to try his project on the northeast face of Little Hunk in Joshua Tree, California. Belayed by his boss, Bob Gaines, who had drafted Coz right out of Hidden Valley campground and put him to work as a guide for his company Vertical Adventures, Cosgrove crimped up the tiny slopers on a blank-looking 80-foot slab and ran it out to the anchors. He called the line the New Deal, a reference to FDR’s plan to put Americans back to work after the Great Depression. But anybody who knew the cantankerous Cosgrove knew that the name was also a little slap on the ass of the vanguard of California ground-uppers still clinging to trad style with an almost political fervor.

“Climbing was evolving at that time and we all had different thoughts on how to proceed,” Cosgrove wrote in 2013 in the comments on the New Deal page on mountain project.com. “I felt that always climbing ground up and not hang dogging”—resting on the rope and trying moves instead of lowering directly after falling—“was limiting my ultimate ability.”

In a testament to his ground-up skills, Cosgrove had placed the first five bolts on lead, but was afraid that the hooks he’d have to hang on to drill the upper bolts might break holds and “ruin” the face. Hence, in his words he “took a walk on the dark side” and drilled the last four bolts on rappel. The New Deal really was a new deal, a hybrid of trad and sport styles, and Cosgrove’s routes have come to represent an important era in American climbing, a liminal space when sport climbing was still considered by some to be neither sport nor climbing.