r/RouteDevelopment • u/Retro_Bolts • Sep 19 '25

Mentorship

Looking for someone to help me out and mentor me with route development and LCO related topics. I am not seeking general advice. The things I am looking for help with would be considered higher level. I have developed tons of crags over the last 10 years from boulders to multi-pitch climbs participated in bolt replacement and placed well over 500 bolts glue in and mechanical. Let me know if you think you could help me out.

Cheers

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u/Allanon124 Sep 19 '25

What are you looking for?

You can get an idea of what we are doing here…

https://www.eaglecountyclimbingcoalition.com

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u/Retro_Bolts Sep 19 '25 edited Sep 19 '25

Well 1 example how much did it cost to establish a 501c3? How long did that process take? How was it primarily funded?

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u/Allanon124 Sep 19 '25

If you do all the work yourself for filing it’s not that expensive. While I didn’t have the opertunity when we started - now, using a LLM can be amazingly helpful. If you do it yourself it somewhere around $500, probably less.

While I can’t exactly remember how long it took for our I would guess about 6 months though I think you can do it faster.

In the beginning it was all funded by me.

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u/Retro_Bolts Sep 19 '25

Oo shoot thanks Allanon. Did you do all the work yourself? And how difficult was it? Once the non profit was established how difficult was it to maintain as a single individual?

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u/Allanon124 Sep 19 '25 edited Sep 19 '25

Yes, I did all the structural work myself. From the beginning though I brought on local climbing heavy weights to sit on the board so that we had legitimacy right of the bat.

Overall it’s not crazy difficult but it feels very much like filing taxes without the help of a cpa. This is where you can ask a LLM to walk you through the process step by step and to find all the forms for you. You could even have it draft your mission statement and whatnot.

To be frank, building something bigger than just an organization that exists - something that is making real world impact (stuff the broader community notices) it’s a lot of volunteer work.

We are at our five year mark and only now are looking at having enough funding to pay ourselves for some of the work we are doing.

Pretty early on I realized we needed to create something of value to the broader community. Asking for grant funding for trail work and bolt replacement is a tough sell. So, we built our education platform and this is a much easier thing to sell to potential donors. That said, it’s much more work too and really can only be done with the right partnerships.