Each issue, we crash someone’s personal space in a bid to find out why it means so much to them. For Huck 74, we catch up with climber and podcast host Kathy Karlo at The Red, Kentucky – the latest stop on her perpetual American road trip.
Text: Niall Flynn – Photography: Sarah Hoskins
Recently, Kathy Karlo was trying to describe the Red River Gorge to a friend who’d never visited before. Despite her best intentions, the climber and podcast host could only offer one valid comparison when it came to painting an accurate picture of the famed Kentucky canyon system: Jurassic Park.
“It sounds kind of crazy,” she says, laughing. “But I’ve found leaves there that were as big as my torso – like, the size of dinosaur footprints. If you go there during the spring it’s so green, because the east coast – the south east especially – gets so much rain. But in the fall, you get these gorgeous oranges, reds, and everything looks like it’s on fire.”
The Gorge, known simply as ‘The Red’ by the climbing community, just so happens to be the latest stop on Kathy’s perpetual American road trip. Since December 2018, she’s been fully mobile, moving from state to state, community to community, and living out of her trusty van. Ask the 34-year-old – who stands at five-feet tall and weighs about 100 pounds “on a good day” – what spurred the pivot to transience, and she’ll tell you, with confidence, that every significant decision she’s made in the last nine years has been based on one simple question: ‘How can I go climbing more?’
Kathy grew up on the east coast, New Jersey and then New York, in what she calls a “typical suburban family”. What wasn’t so typical, though, was her free-spirited nature – or, what her mother terms “insubordination”. From an early age, Kathy displayed a steely independence: as a kid, she competed in swimming and gymnastics, before quitting both the second she felt like she’d mastered them. Later, as a teen, she’d make trips out of the state for the weekend, only revealing where she’d been upon her return. She read and wrote voraciously, too, convincing her mum to buy her a laptop (“which, back in the ’90s, was this gigantic brick thing”), so that she could get to work on the next great American novel.
But she was never ‘outdoorsy’. It wasn’t until 2010, when her partner at the time introduced her to ice climbing, that her journey began. In short: Kathy and her boyfriend broke up and she wound up moving to New York City, w
