CLEBURN
By Jan Capps
Tim, Greg Hodges, and I loaded up Tim’s beatup orange Volkswagen GT and took off for Cleburn. I’ll never forget that first trip. Cleburn isn’t exactly open to climbing. Back then, a gun-toting redneck fondly known as "The General" used to patrol his land and point climbers to the door with his trusty shotgun. We had questioned a few climbers and knew that he didn’t confiscate any gear though, so we figured it was worth the risk. Tim was a little paranoid, so he had us get our packs ready so we could park and be out of sight as quickly as possible. It wasn’t clear how we should proceed since the obvious visible entrance, a dirt road with a huge gate across it, was clearly visible from the General’s house. The other option was to scramble through dense brush and trees and come in behind the cliff. We gave this a shot and luckily found some dirt trails in the woods. At one point, we came up to this barbed-wire fence with a "No Trespassing" sign on it. There were shotgun holes in the sign facing out. We took a moment to meditate upon that before proceeding. It took a bit of scrambling, but we finally made it to the cliffs. ... Mileski cont.
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Right in the heart of hickswille Texas is the most gut-wrenching, ass-kicking, and basically humbling climbing area known to man. Cleburn. Otherwise known as "the Burn" by those bad-ass gurus of climbing that have frequented it is recent years. You can’t just ask someone how to get there. You have to gain the respect someone who’s been to be deemed worthy as a climber. Of course Tim Hunsinger, my ex boyfriend/climbing partner managed to get around that bullshit by reading between the lines in an article that Jack Mileski wrote about in "Climbing Magazine" a few years back. Mileski didn’t
exactly tell how to get there. He just mentioned Cleburn and Chisolm State Park in the same paragraph. To someone as resourceful as Tim, that was all it took. He just figured that Mr. Mileski wanted climbers to check out the area or he wouldn’t have written an article on it.