Alex Honnold on Belly Full of Bad Berries

I am experiencing a giant climber crush on Alex Honnold. Watch the video of him climbing Belly Full of Bad Berries at IC. Holy crap! This guy makes off-width climbing look elegant!

Fantastic thread about the route, including links to videos of others climbing it, over at Supertopo.

Borneo Big Wall

A bunch of big wall climbers got together, got sponsorship and headed out to establish climbs on the big walls of Borneo. Among them was Jimmy Chin, a phenomenal photographer and videographer -- if you've been following climbing mags and movies over the last few years, then you've definitely seen his work. The result was a series of fantastic videos documenting the project, which are posted here. I really enjoyed them, and then I had tons of fun going through the websites of the team members and reading more about their respective adventures.

Bachar interview on climber radio

I heard about this fantastic interview with John Bachar on Climbing Radio from ClimbingNarc. I love the whole thing, but I especially loved his description of free soloing on-sight towards the end of the interview. He talks about how he went through two sections on this 500 ft 5.11 climb and thought, surely, each of them must be the crux, only to get to a lieback section further up and realize that's it. So he describes how he made it through that section feeling not solid, but not like he was going to fall either, then got up to the top of the climb and stood there feeling hollow, like he hadn't so much achieved something, but more like the mountain had let him get away with something. He likened it to surviving a car accident, where you walk around in a daze for the next few days. I think he hit a couple nails on the head there...

Something that really impressed me about Bachar (but, be warned, Ben and I interpreted this differently) was that he didn't rise to what I thought was obvious baiting by the hosts of the show when they asked him what he thought of Dean Potter's free-soloing with a BASE rig. Bachar's response was well-considered and completely lacking of any "oh these youngsters these days, we were so much cooler" attitude. He basically said that he didn't think having a BASE suit on did anything to diminish the seriousness of Dean Potter's free soloing. Dean still had to be solid climbing, and, in addition, needed to have the presence of mind to push off the rock and deploy the rig correctly if he was to derive any benefit from it. I guess you'll always find me rooting for old-timers with a healthy respect for the younger generation and the fact that times inevitably a-change.

Steph Davis free soloing the Diamond

Little snippets and shorter versions of this video have made into every climbing website, as well as the movie "the Sharp End". I like this one because it's high quality, complete, focused, and therefore seems authoritative. There's a lot of footage of the actual climbing, as well as the really recognizable snippets from the movie and the quotable bits. Personally I like the claim that "the fear is the danger", and I think it's true not just in the free soloing context but also in the leading context. All considerations of danger and contingency belong to the preparation phase of the climb. When they creep into the climb actual, they become a danger in themselves.


Steph Davis - Castleton And Diamond Free Solo from Andrew on Vimeo.

Lynn Hill & Katie Brown video

I watched this video on youtube and absolutely loved it! It's really cool to see Lynn Hill's particular style of mentorship, which is very much like my own towards younger women in my line of work.



This belongs to the Patagonia collection of climbing videos, which represent fantastic production value, in my opinion. More of them can be found here.

Nightmare

When you're in grade school, maybe even high school, you have that nightmare where you're naked in class. Then you get older and you think it's over, but you go to college and get the one about having registered for a class and then forgetting about it, and getting an F at the end of the quarter because you never showed up. Then you get even older and start climbing and as a follower you get the one about the stuck cam. Motherfucker won't come out! Then you start leading and you think, smooth sailing from now on! But no! Then you get the one about, I bought new cams but do they come with biners? Do we have enough biners?

Rack

Today was a momentous occasion: I celebrated the one year anniversary of starting to climb. Not that I'd never climbed before, but it was end of January or early February of last year when Wil and I resolved to climb consistently and started going to the gym. Or was it later? Because I moved into Winthrop in April... Hmmm. Anyway, one year anniversary is what we'll call it. So I bought a used rope, a 10mm Mammut, and started (well, properly, continued, since I've had tri-cams for a while) a rack.
I am now the proud owner of miscellaneous curved nuts with smiley faces, between sizes 12 and 3, #1 and #2 C4 camalots, a dozen neutrino wire gates , 8 dyneema slings, and 3 more metolius quickdraws. My tri-cams span the small gap between my 12 nut and the #1, so I have a pretty big range covered.
I'm not dying to go out and use this stuff so much as I'm dying to go out toprope soloing, so I may do that soon.

Trapped in Greece

I've been watching mountaineering documentaries and reading books about sailing and climbing expeditions, as I'm trapped at home with my parents in Greece. Right now I'm re-re-re-reading "Sea, Ice and Rock", which I've had since 1996, and which has certainly played a big role in forming my obsession with sailing and climbing. I like Bonnington's explanation of the qualities he looked for in crew:

They also had to be congenial. Congeniality may be defined in a number of ways, but for crew I mean competent, hard working, willing, plus a good sense of humour. There is nothing worse than confining several people in a small boat who do not get on, and good humour overcomes most situations.