Climber

Weekly Wrap-Up: 9/8

As I’m typing there is a fan pointed at the back of my head, my knee is wrapped in ice, I’m drinking cold Kombucha (like a good hippy), and still there are beads of sweat dripping onto my keyboard.

There’s only one place I’ll put up with this kind of heat, and that place is a good 500 miles and four mobile limbs away from me right…

The sight is common in Yosemite and Joshua Tree – a honed and fit 20-something male with a dancers body tries to finesse around and lieback up weird cracks, choosing to horrendously run out large sections rather than hang out and place gear he has no trust or experience with. Clearly he is skilled at moving over rock, as his strength and ability to compress between features got him up the route –…

So, Fall. It’s here. Halloween candy, excessive over-eating, big hairy spiders making webs across your doorway.

Despite all the wonderful things going on this time of year, there’s also the reality that as summer ends and winter is waiting and that draining feelingsome have is very visceral. It sucks that I’m starting off only my 2nd wrap-up with yet another climber passing, but that is the world…

Summer is nearly over, and while we wait for heat to dissipate and days shorten to make cooler weather in the high deserts most are comfortable to loaf about on beaches and creeks, trading a helmet and rack for a stand up paddle board and oar.

While a few of us choose to soldier on, either enduring waning heat at lower elevation crags or shivering in the fading afternoon light up in the high…

Jeremy felt like there was a bit too much O2 at 14,500′

The small rocky outcrop nestled high above Escondido was a popular place for graffiti art and homeless intercourse, but today the crags around Dixon Lake would serve as a backdrop to photographs that will accompany an article about outdoor activities in North County. The kind and doddering photographer ambled helplessly in between the gentle…

It was a typical Tuesday night at the climbing gym in August, and by that I mean the small space was cramped with large men sporting fast metabolisms. The higher up the wall one climbed there was a distinctive change in climate as a thick musk began to coat pores. Dropping off from the top felt a bit more like coming up for air, but for locals stuck in Southern California there just wasn’t a lot…

Low Hanging Fruit - How to pick what you've been missing

I  have this great race car. The thing is a blast to drive, handles well, but dammit I’d like some more performance out of her (she is getting a bit old, after all). I have the best engine money can buy. It’s all imported Titanium from a top secret lab in Sweden. I spend about ten hours a day perfecting the electronics so the pistons fire to within ten thousands nanoseconds of efficiency and it’s…

  Vrrt-vrrt

An iphone on vibrate  hidden somewhere in my sleeping bag wakes me up to a game of hide and seek. I’m currently stuffed in a tiny tent behind a gas station tucked between my Chevy Cavalier and a burnt shrub covered in broken glass. I’m hoping the alert is a text message from a climbing partner that is driving up to the Eastern Sierra to meet me for a few days of climbing letting me…

The only thing I fear - I don't fear death, I don't fear pain. The only thing I fear is something happening to somebody I care about and not doing everything in my power. So, to me it means when - I'm getting a little fired up thinking about it. When the shit's on, when it's time to go - I have to be ready to go. If my family, my wife, my kids, my brother, my sister, parents, any of my friends, even anybody on the street needs help, I'm doing what I have to do. I don't think that I could live myself if I watched something happen and something bad happened. So, for me, when it's a dangerous situation to greet with fire, to do what I have to do.

Jim Miller

From an upcoming interview by @TrentReinsmith 

Blah blah blah...

I was the only seven year old I knew with a magazine subscription.

I had two, actually. The first the baseball Beckett guide, a monthly price index of their fluctuating ‘worth.’ I hated baseball and couldn’t sit through more than a few innings, but the idea of currency and accruing real wealth drove me to ride a single speed bicycle three miles downhill every time I scrounged up four dollars for…

My Favorite Climbing Videos

Todays post will be a bit different.  The internet is clogged with ‘blog’ sites that share other…

My Weight Loss Story Part 3: Posture

“In all forms of strategy, it is necessary to maintain the combat stance in everyday life and to…

Highball

I meant to tell mankind about a new state about which I could tell them little or nothing, to…

I meant to tell mankind about a new state about which I could tell them little or nothing, to teach them to tread a long and lonely path which might or might not lead thither, to bid them to dare encounter all possible perils of nature unknown, to abandon all their settled manners of living and cut themselves off from their past and their environment, and to attempt a quixotic adventure with no resources beyond their native strength and sagacity.  I had done it myself and found not only that the pearl of great price was worth far more than I possessed, but that the very perils and privations of the quest were themselves my dearest memories.  I was certain of this at least: that nothing in the world except this was worth doing.

A Quick Update

The past year has been kind of weird.

I’m always surprised at how things seem to just fall into…

Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Bab

Lloyd Petrungaro on Illusion Dweller

“ROPE!”

Almost two hundred feet of rope satisfyingly spirals…