Some fantastic writing by Alex Honnold for Alpinist Magazine about Sendero Luminoso, his thought process is something different and maybe we can all take away a part from this. Geshido, Mac 70 Sendero Luminoso Alex Honnold Posted on: July 31, 2014 http://www.alpinist.com/doc/ALP47/70-sendero-luminoso-alex-honnold Alex Honnold approaches the crux of Sendero Luminoso (5.12+, Jackson-Peacock-Smith, 1994), El Potrero Chico, Mexico. "It is the most technically demanding and involved big wall I have climbed," he told Alpinist in a January 20, 2014 interview. [Photo] Cedar Wright
JANUARY 14, 2014: I'm connected to the wall by only a small, sharp limestone undercling above my head. The air is still and slightly humid. Trusting a tiny smear for my left foot, I raise my right foot almost to my waist, and I lever off it to reach my left hand to a distant jug. Six hundred feet of smooth grey rock sweep away beneath my feet, ending in the Mexican desert far below. The town of Hidalgo bustles in the distance, a sprawling grid of roads and rough houses built around a giant cement factory. Up here, away from the honking horns and the rumbling diesel engines, I'm alone and focused. I grasp the jug, shift my weight over my left side and charge up the final stretch of blocky terrain to a ledge.
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Reminiscing about a recent trip, amazing how similar the experience was. Geshido, Mac Almighty Dolomites. Rooting around the big, pale mountains By Andrew Bisharat | 07-20-2014 http://eveningsends.com/climbing/almighty-dolomites/ “There’s people down here!”
“Yeah, watch it, you Austrian pigs!” Jesse Mattner and I were yelling to no one—no one who could possibly hear us anyway. Rockfall rained and we cowered closer to our anchor of 80-year-old pitons, protruding like little black roots, necrotic and flexing in the shattered stone. We were a mere 300 feet below the summit of the Cima Grande, one of the six great north faces of the Alps. Toasters and microwaves whistled down, dislodged by a clumsy team on the summit. You always hear the biggest ones before you see them. A sound that shrieks like an incoming missile. “I’m too scared to move,” I said. But that wasn’t the main problem. We had no good idea where on this massive mountain we were. Nothing in the topo I’d uploaded to my iPhone made sense anymore. And, of course, it was getting dark. Thunder clapped. Jesse is my good friend from Denver and, since we both love espresso, chianti and long routes, we had been dreaming about coming to the Dolomites for over a year. Jesse is 31 years old, 6’2” when he slouches, and a buck-ninety-five on a lean day. He’s got the flexibility of an iron rod and gets worked on the overhangs, which, ironically, he enjoys most. When it comes to the run-out techy slab stuff, he swears he hates it, but he’s as light-footed as a dancer and cool-headed as a sniper. “I was cursed when god made me good at slab climbing,” Jesse once groaned sadly. Some comic relief for your mid-week shenanigans. Enjoy! Geshido, Mac http://www.outdoorresearch.com/blog/stories/fun-with-catalog-photos-commitment Fun With Catalog Photos: Commitment
By Brendan Leonard and Hilary Oliver, July 14, 2014 We have hundreds of beautiful photos from talented photographers, featuring our athletes in action—but we never quite get the chance to use all of them, or, as we've found to be more fun, Photoshop in speech bubbles and dialogue between the athletes in those photos. But now we're going to make time for that. So every Tuesday, we'll take another image from our stock photos and make a comic out of them. Necessary terminology for anyone climbing while traveling! (Please click on link..) Geshido, Mac ALL THE GOOD ONES FROM WIKI/GLOSSARY_OF_CLIMBING_TERMS
By Outdoor Research, June 13, 2014 http://www.outdoorresearch.com/blog/stories/all-the-good-ones-from-wiki-glossary-of-climbing-terms Climbers come up with the craziest words for things and have a wikipedia page to prove it. As if all those ridiculous, raunchy, and inside-joke route names weren't awesome enough. A big shout out to all the anonymous folks who put this glossary together! Lately I've been having to really adapt my ways for climbing. I hadn't been to a gym before this month since early last summer, or more. I can't even remember. So I thought this may be suitable for those of you that maybe have the same ideals as I did. Geshido, Mac A TRAD CLIMBER’S GUIDE TO THE CLIMBING GYM
posted on May 22, 2014 Trad climbing is the foundation of our sport—the backbone, scoliotic from humping too many loads, that braces us for run-outs unknown and summits untouched. Trad climbing, and its attendant skill set, is what allows us to get into some of the coolest, raddest places on the planet, whether that’s the flank of El Capitan, the chimney of a lonesome desert tower, or even straight up a rowdy Patagonian spire. For the most part, though, you don’t really need to climb particularly hard to be a trad climber—at least not in the sense that building a textbook three-point anchor requires having Daniel Woods-grade pinch strength. But you know what? Climbing hard(er) sure does help. In fact, it helps a lot. And nowhere does one learn and train to climb harder than in a climbing gym..... Arc'teryx Athlete Ines Papert Climbs Finnmannen on Senja Island Norway
Submitted by Katharina Habermann on Wed, 04/30/2014 - 13:20 http://blog.arcteryx.com/arcteryx-athlete-ines-papert-climbs-finnmannen-senja-island-norway YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: CLIMBERS’ INVERSE HIERARCHY OF NEEDS
By: Hilary Oliver http://www.outdoorresearch.com/blog/stories/youre-doing-it-wrong-climbers-inverse-hierarchy-of-needs Chilled to the bone, limbs leaden from physical exertion and fighting off cold, trudging down the canyon in bulky boots with pick-laden packs and helmets, we could have been mistaken for miners, or maybe construction workers. But when we rolled into Mouse’s Chocolates in Ouray, Colo., and pulled out our phones to laugh over the funny photos from the day, it was obvious we were nothing so serious—just a bunch of climbers. As our fingers and toes began to thaw, we started noticing the tender spots on our legs that would eventually turn black and blue, casualties of falling ice chunks and clumsy climbing moves. And I thought: This is pretty absurd. We work hard at our jobs all week so we can live comfortable lives, have a home, a car, good food to eat. So why do we set aside our relative safety and comfort to get blasted by icy winds, push our bodies to their limits and come home hungry, dirty, sore and exhausted? Most of us studied Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs at some point, probably in a freshman psychology class. The “Theory of Human Motivation” goes something like this: The most basic needs of a human are physical, like thirst, hunger and sleep. Once you’ve covered those, you can achieve safety and security through employment or accruing resources. After that, you can expand relationships and develop self-esteem or a sense of achievement. Then, when all those lower needs are met, you’re free to focus on creativity, morality and self-actualization. But for some reason, climbers—and most outdoorsy people—throw a wrench in that logic. For some reason, after we’ve worked so hard to achieve the lower parts of the pyramid, we can’t seem to get into the tip-top self-actualization part without revisiting the very bottom, fundamental levels. On Friday after work, we point our cars up to the mountains for the weekend, gaining elevation and making it hard for ourselves to breathe. We head out on backpacking trips where obtaining water is a serious chore. We shack up in tents or outside near climbing destinations and get up before the sun, depriving ourselves of precious sleep to get an alpine start. And we pass up the healthy, gourmet food we’ve worked so hard to earn, subsisting instead on energy bars, GUs and dehydrated food. Our hierarchy of needs is jumbled, and somehow our self-actualization has become melded with discomfort. Only a few decades ago, miners were risking life and limb to chip away a decent living from the same canyons we now flock to for recreation. The very act of swinging ice tools feels like folly compared to the people who’ve swung tools for a living, with the concrete purpose of struggling up Maslow’s pyramid. Some people work hard for important things like food, shelter, safety and esteem, and relish in the comfort and security they achieve. But for some reason, some of us push those things aside and continue to seek some sort of enlightenment through discomfort. Maybe we feel a need to push ourselves to see what we’re really capable of. After all, Maslow said, “What a man can be, he must be.” Maybe we’re actually highly developed people, pushing the limits of what we can be as humans. Or, then again, maybe we’re just conquistadors of the useless. MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR CLIMBING OPPORTUNITIES By Bryan Gilmore, March 24, 2014 http://www.outdoorresearch.com/blog/stories/making-the-most-of-your-climbing-opportunities Things were about to change. My wife got into grad school in Boston starting in January, and I had an alpine trip to Patagonia scheduled to leave in early November. Long story short, I had to try to cram all of my "unfinished business" into a short, finite time period.
Having goals is great, but danger comes from having too broad an array of goals. Instead, you need to be very specific. I lived in the San Juan mountains of Southern Colorado for the last decade and I basically wanted to do everything. Well, seasons would come and go and if I didn't tick something off the list, no problem…there was always next season. Wrong! I had just built my garage with an amazing woody training wall, content that my mountain home base and training facility would help me achieve my long list of local goals, when my wife applied to her graduate program. In the blink of an eye, it seemed, we were planning a trip to Argentina, arranging to have my mother-in-law help out with our daughter, trying to sell our house, flying around the country for grad school interviews, flying to Patagonia, tying up loose ends. The list went on. Things went from cruise control to out of control and my poor list of goals pretty much got scrapped. The Guiding Life
Climbing's challenging but highly rewarding career is a lifelong pursuit. By Rob Coppolillo Come down to Crested Butte sometime, and I’ll show you,” the gentleman said. Exum Mountain guide Zahan Billimoria shows the way in Wyoming's Teton Range. It's Exum custom to have clients lead the final steps to the summit of the Grand Teton. Photo by Andy Bardon. Swiss-French, slightly built, mellow, self-assured, and my neighbor on a flight home to Colorado, he wrote his name into my journal in Euro-cursive, with a phone number, too: Jean Pavillard. He’d just spent a half hour describing ridge traverses in the Bernese Oberland, bottomless powder lines in the Rockies, and his little village in the Swiss Alps. He said he was a professional mountain guide. I’d heard of such a thing, but no one had ever described the job in detail. This guy had just permanently warped my 23-year-old brain on the idea of helping others ski and climb, and making a decent living at it. The year was 1993, I’d just graduated from the University of Colorado in Boulder, and I had to make a living… right? The full compilation of the Dawn Wall season...into one film. Have a great weekend!
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