Seneca Rocks: Where the Army Learned to Climb

The white quartzite fins of Seneca Rocks rise nine hundred feet above the North Fork of the South Branch Potomac River in Pendleton County, West Virginia. The rock itself is ancient, deposited about four hundred forty million years ago as seafloor sediment and compressed over eons into one of the most erosion-resistant formations in the Appalachians.

In nineteen forty-three, the United States Army came here. The Tenth Mountain Division needed soldiers who could fight in the Italian Alps, and Seneca Rocks was designated the Army's only low-altitude assault climbing school. About one hundred eighty men cycled through every two weeks, learning rope work, piton technique, and silent ascent under combat conditions. The rock face where they drilled was so heavily worked it became known as the Face of a Thousand Pitons, and some of those iron spikes are still visible today.

The first recorded civilian ascent dates to nineteen thirty-five, though a mysterious inscription discovered during a later nineteen thirty-nine climb suggests someone stood there as early as nineteen o eight. Today Seneca Rocks hosts more than three hundred seventy-five climbing routes and is considered one of the premier technical climbing destinations on the East Coast.