ENTOURAGE - #36 > FEBRUARY/MARCH 2009

SARAH GARLICK

With a graduate degree in structural geology/tectonics from the University of Wyoming, Sarah Garlick, 30, possesses stone knowledge on a different level than your average rock jock. And Garlick climbs, too, adding an experiential twist to her scientific understanding — so it’s not too surprising that she recently wrote the 224-page Flakes, Jugs, and Splitters: A Rock Climber’s Guide to Geology. (The hardest part of writing the book, she admits, was cranking out “work in volume, rather than obsessing about every little word, which is more in my nature.”) Drawing on the copious amounts of information she compiled while working on the book, Garlick wrote an Homage to her favorite rock type, granite (p.66), extolling its many virtues. Garlick was exposed to climbing early, via her uncle, but her litho-love crystallized when she moved from North Carolina to Rhode Island for college. There, she took the city bus to Lincoln Woods to boulder nearly every day. “I think my interest in geology comes from a deep sense of wanting to understand the land around me,” says Garlick, who today lives in the Northeast climbing haven of North Conway, New Hampshire (The Granite State), with her husband Jim Surette and a cat named Nor’easter Chronic (aka Nora).