Background

Sam Jury has spent nearly a decade guiding rock climbing across two continents. At Pisgah Climbing School, he's focused on one thing: building better climbers and better instructors.

Sam grew up in Georgia and found climbing while studying Sustainable Community Development and Outdoor Leadership at Toccoa Falls College. The sport took hold fast. After graduating, he converted a Suburban into a rolling basecamp and spent years climbing across more than 30 states — learning crags from the sandstone bluffs of the Southeast to the granite walls of the West, sharpening his technical skills and developing the teaching instincts that would define his guiding career.

That restlessness eventually carried him across the Atlantic. Sam most recently lived in Kenya, guiding climbing throughout East Africa — navigating unfamiliar rock, diverse clientele, and remote logistics in a way that very few American guides ever experience. It's the kind of background that's hard to manufacture and impossible to fake.

Now based in western North Carolina, Sam is one of Pisgah Climbing School's primary instructors for AMGA Single Pitch Instructor courses. As an AMGA SPI Provider, he is credentialed to not only guide at the highest rock guiding standard but to teach the next generation of climbing instructors — a distinction that puts him in a small category of guides in the region. Whether he's working with aspiring guides through the SPI curriculum or leading clients on the crags of Pisgah National Forest, Sam brings the same thing to every day of work: genuine enthusiasm for climbing and a deep commitment to doing it right.

When he's not on the rock, Sam is outdoors with his wife and two kids — living the same values he brings to every rope he ties in on.