This winter has been a mishmash of work, being sick and climbing here and there. I have spent a good part of 2012 on the couch with, first, and upper respiratory infection that I couldn’t kick and, second, a minor cold that came for a wonderful surprise follow-up visit.

Being sick is lame and unnerving not just because of the symptoms that cripple you with a lashing and harsh sentence on the couch, but also because it’s a reminder that we are fragile. That something we can’t even see with a naked eye can put such a vicious hurt on us.

You can’t always be in top form and those constant reminders — sickness, injury, weather, work –might suck at first sight, but they open up the opportunity to see things in a different light. How bright and colorful our winter can be.

When I have been able to get out, I tried to take advantage of Matt’s camera to take photos of some of my favorite places and things around town. And, of course, climbing. Here are a few we took so far in 2012.

Sunset Park, a mere five minutes drive from my house (or 5-ish mile run straight uphill):

What used to be the Discoteca, a bar/pool table lounge, has turned into an urban tagging experiment:

The bridges that lead you to downtown and back, and the designs in them:

Walking on Frazier Street in North Shore:

Matt!

Climbing in Rocktown:

Surprisingly green growths in the winter woods:

Bridges that lead to miles and miles (and miles and miles) of trails:

Lines:

And more climbing at Dayton…

Matt sending!

Patrick getting psyched!

A few months ago I traveled to Sicily to go climbing. Among the climbers I traveled with was Chris Kalous. I remember his from when I lived in Colorado, but had seen him maybe once since I moved back east in 2009.

While in Sicily, we climbed on crazy dangler route on multi-pitch limestone walls plopped down right at the foot of the ocean, and listened to his “Uh, Yeah, Dude” podcasts on the drives between crags. I remember Kalous mentioning a thought of starting another podcast and that day has come! Check out the Enormocast. Much anticipated. He talks a bit about our trip on the first episode. Subscribe and check in regularly to hear a slice of the climbing life! Nice work Kalous!

It was posted in the Alta Lodge kitchen outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. I was in Utah for the Outdoor Retailers Trade Show and I was temperarily occupying this kitchen while  helping my friend, Brittany, cater a 150 person wedding  (Brittany seen below, left).

I was there as “the help” along with Amy (the middle one). Amy has an amazing voice and later that very week sang “Beat It,” my favorite Michael Jackson song, at the Outdoor Retailers Trade show. She was a guest singer with the Black Diamond band. She was by far the hit. And how could she not be? With lungs like that.

(Amy seen here shattering my camera’s focus with her iron lungs).

The wedding at Alta was beautiful. I knew the groom, but had no idea it was his wedding until we got there. I even held the wedding cake, along with Amy, while the bride and groom were cutting it.  I made the pictures!

(this guy’s classic)

But back to the sign. It read in big letters “Stop Blowing It.” I passed it as I ran in and out of the doors rushing around to get the badass spread of food out to the many guests and help Brittany and Amy scramble last minute to prepare a few extra dishes. It should have had a big finger pointing straight at me, because passing by it time and time again trying to hold it together in the moment of the rush I repeated it in my head like a mantra. “Stop blowing it. Stop blowing it. stop blowing it. stopblowingitstopblowingitstop…”

Last night, I read an old post from the Cleanest Line by Kelly Cordes. I’ve met Kelly one time, at this past OR actually. I doubt he would remember me, but I talked with him and numerous other people one night as we scarfed down sushi rolls and tipped back tall boys. Up to that point I had only heard his name as a friend of friends and read his writing, specifically, posts on the Cleanest Line. It my head he was much taller, and more curmudgeony and when I met him all I could think about was how well he pulled off his mullet.

In his post he made observations of Tommy Caldwell’s attempts as his Dawn Wall project in Yosemite about what it means to have talent and how far that will take you. Kelly references Malcolm Gladwell and say that talent is only part of it, and the pure grit, gurr and love of the process is the other piece of the puzzle, will basically have to pick up where talent left off.

It’s amazing to me how many times we see talent fade in and out of our sport. A climber progresses from zero to hero with the quickness, and just a heardbeat later becomes obscures as the fall leaves fade to dry cold ground of winter. But what sticks is not always the sheer talent, but those whose love of the sport is unmatched. Talent will only get you so far.

In my mind, some of the greatest climbers in the sport, aren’t necesarrily the ones setting the standard, but the ones making failed attempts with the same enthusiasm as the first.  I often find the passions of solitary efforts more inspiring than an onsighting ticklist  of incomprehensible grades, because there is something very tragic yet very uplifting about failing and still trying that inspires us.

While Tommy’s tick will be one of the most impressive, history-making ticks in climbing history (and also the most well-documented ticks of all time), I didn’t intent to talk about talent or Tommy. But the more I thought about this post, and Tommy’s unending psyche and vision on something that at some point seemed so impossible, the more I thought about how amazing it is that he is still failing and still believing. Someone of his caliber of strength, talent and drive is still coming up short, is just as inspiring as the inevitable send will ever be. He’d be blowing it not to keep trying.

I watched Kelly’s posts on Tommy’s effort change over the past few. From the first, when he had humored doubts, to the last when Kelly, himself, can almost see it possible. An idea, as it flashed in my mind, seemed brilliant and the most astute rule to live by in climbing, I could have. Blowing it, is not trying and failing, blowing it, is to fail and walk away.

But of course, this idea is not that new or novel. It’s just a repeat in the cycle. and while it’s a good motto to live by… As I looked at the picture of the sign, perhaps in the Alta kitchen the face-value meaning needs to remain. I mean, people need to have their cheesy fries. Now damnit!

While there I attempted a short single-pitch climb that gently arced through an alcove on the upper 30 meters of the cliffline. The moves trended right through thin crimps and technical sequences: there were long lock-offs, high feet and a desperate stab out left. I came back to it many days in a row trying to dial in the beta.  As much as I wanted to do this route, and as much as I thought about it and tried to redpoint it, it was the middle pitch of another route I climbed one time that I remember the best. The route was roughly 10 pitches long, and I don’t remember the name but locals called it The Kiwi Route because some climbers from New Zealand put it up. But that doesn’t matter much in my mind. It’s the last dying light that splayed across the rock behind us and the feeling of the light breeze that I remember. The movement felt so natural up there that I felt like that moment was the only thing in the universe that existed. It made perfect sense.

I search for moments like these often, but rarely do them justice. However, the upcoming climbing film, “A Fine Line,” touched that vain for me. ”A Fine Line,” the climbing film by Andrew Kornylak and Josh Fowler scheduled to debut  October 2011, is a full-length film starring the Southeastern bouldering brawns Jimmy Webb and Brion Voges and featuring Dave Graham, Daniel Woods and Peter Beal. The film explores the motivation and drive behind these boulderers’ quest to find new lines and exposes a raw passion behind climbing. It is a job well done by all. I’m not just high-fiving my fellow climbers and creative artist from the South, but congratulating the well-told story and images that gave stagnating climbing films a power spot.

After seeing a series of climbing films at the Summer Outdoor Retailers Show back in August, it seems the climbing industry is moving away from pure climbing porn, and shifting towards meaningful stories that capture us in a way we all can identify. “A Fine Line” does this, and illuminates, just for a moment, a puzzle piece in the human quest. It is filled with success and failures and captures a spectrum of emotion behind the sport that transcends the over-played and flattening characteristic of climbers being just plain psyched. It distills climbing into a journey to find ”something beautiful and meaningful.” The movie, filled with stellar boulders and beautiful landscapes from Chattanooga, Tenn., Castle Rocks, Idaho, and alpine bouldering areas in Colorado gives us a peek not just into the minds of these boulderers on their quest to establish beautiful lines but into what we all search for in the topout.

Atlanta-based Kornylak and Folwer are two very talented photographers and video artists less known in the climbing film world than those like Peter Mortimer, but their  fresh view and subtle, tailored eye gives a new perspective into the bouldering community from a sometimes overlooked part of the country. The videography was worth the movie alone, and spoke just as loud as the voices behind the film.  The sometimes subdued, muted colors, expansive shots and unique framing glowed as the filmmakers own aesthetic quest came through the film. The images’ mood mirrored, in my mind, the tone of what was said on screen as if Kornylak and Fowler were on their own aesthetic quests. It takes climbing into the world of art and gives meaning to what can seem like a senseless chase. Why do climbers go through (as Beal says) the misery and torture to climb little rocks? Check out the film to find out.

A Fine Line – Film Trailer from Andrew Kornylak on Vimeo.

Since the climbing season currently is slightly less than ideal, I’ve been partaking in these other things, like running up on Lookout Mountain. These photos were taken around the grounds of Cravens House, famous as a battle site on Lookout during the Civil War. Cravens House is part of the Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park and from the lookout, you can see miles and miles into the distance as the low lying mountains turn from green to blue to soft puffs in the background. In 1863, the Battle Above the Clouds happened here and while the house stood with little damage as Union and Confederate soldiers duked it out, it was later destroyed in a drunken Union brawl (but rebuilt after the war).

It is here where I often go for runs on trails that snake from Cravens up to Sunset Rock (where I did some stellar trad routes for my article “Soul Rising” in Rock and Ice issue 195) and Point Park. The trails in Chattanooga are extensive and this is only one of countless to choose from. While it is a tourist attraction in Chattanooga, I find it to be peaceful. Both for its excape into the woods and elevated lookout, but, perhaps, also its seat in history. It might be disconcerting for some to walk the grounds of the dead, and relive history by touching the land they touched. But for me it’s not.

In many of the articles I have written (published and/or pending) recently about climbing, I have delved into the history of things more than I otherwise would.  And through these little lessons and stories from the past, I see climbing and people and places and things through a lens that gives it shape and depth.

“If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development,” said Aristotle.

It’s not that I’m all that into history — you give me a series of dates and I’ll likely confuse it with a phone number. But it’s the stories that make us that interests me. Because they are telling. Sometimes you have to understand where you’re coming from to know where you’re going.

Which is why experience Chattanooga not only through its summer — in all it’s hot, humid, rain-blasted glory that creates the most stellar sandstone in the U.S. — but also its history is important. It seems to make even the smallest things more lush and green.

The Crash Pad: Chattanooga climbers find new place to land

Last Friday, on June 3^rd, two Chattanooga-based climbers, Dan Rose and Max Poppel, cut the ribbon to The Crash Pad, a boutique hostel located just minutes from downtown Chattanooga. The Crash Pad caters to outdoor enthusiasts like climbers, trail runners or mountain bikers, or anyone looking to check out Chattanooga on a budget. While its reach is a broad range of user groups, its inspiration came from the desire to give climbers a better place to stay….

Read the full news story here on rockandice.com.

As soon as I stepped off the plane coming back from sport climbing for two weeks in Mexico with the Petzl RocTrip last November, I embarked on a journey to find the best 5.9 trad climb in the Southeast, which I hinted at here. As often happens when I think I have more time than I do to get things set up, the week-long road trip was, to say the least, poorly planned, jammed packed with unneccessary backtracking and full of twists and turns. But isn’t that the pure definition of a road trip?

The week started when I picked up friend and photo extraordinaire Keith Ladzinski from the airport in Louisville, KY.
I had traveled to France with Keith in 2008 for a Rock and Ice story on the Verdon Gorge, and we had been plotting another story since.

We scanned the city for a couple of hours looking for a camera shop to get a new battery, then drove to Lexington, KY to pick up Dario Ventura, who was joining the trip and who had the trad rack that I had forgotten I needed.

We  then headed to Asheville, North Carolina where we would set up shop on some friends’ living room floor and base out of for the next few days. All in all, from Mexico to Asheville, is was a solid day’s worth of rushing. What followed over the next five days was an asinine amount of driving and hiking and a few routes scattered in between.

The three of us, along with Pat Goodman and Jessa Goebel as the NC tour guides, journeyed through some of the areas most classic gear lines.

Old school, sandbagged and full of history, we got a glimpse into the sandstone that makes this one of the most amazing climbing areas in the country, and not only because of the bullet rock, breathtaking backdrops or stellar routes. Though we don’t have the drastic elevations gains of the Colorado Rockies or the seemingly endless expanse of sky of the Las Vegas desert, we have the bubbling expanse of the Appalachian Mountains, older and more grandfatherly than so many bigger ranges. Bigger is not always better, and the simplicity of age, time and history can teach you just as much about yourself.

As I have come to learn on many things, I need to always double what I think I need. Perhaps much of this has to do with the lack of preparation necessary for sport climbing, my style du jour, that I have gotten accustomed to. I thought five days was enough, we could have easily worked with 10. I thought one #4 would have worked, I would have been psyched with two. Regardless of my pathetic ability to judge the correct time, gear or preparation necessary, we made our pilgrimage. While our list of 10 routes was cut to 8, mostly because of time constraints, we hit Rumbling Bald, Looking Glass, Linville Gorge, Tennessee Wall and Sunset Rock in five days.

What followed was not only great routes, but a lesson in history and personal meaning of climbing: how what we do can help us measure up in a bigger world.

During the writing of the story, I gathered this Jeep Gaskins quote from guidebook author Harrison Shull, who had interviewed him years before.  ”If you have depth to your soul and insights into life’s lessons and you didn’t get them from risk, then congratulations, but I can’t relate. Climbing can be deltoids or it can be Zen; it can be runout or short, safe falls; it can be skies filled with lightning or crisp air ahead of mare’s tails. It is never standing in a grocery line.”

The poignancy of his quote, its simplicity and force, sticks with me even now.

So what happens when this sport climber goes trad climbing in the Southeast? Find out in the Rock and Ice July issue # 195, which just hit newsstands.

This was the first year that I taught a clinic, which I love doing, and am psyched to get on the list to do the same next year.

photo: clinic attendees for the Crank Like A Girl Clinic that I taught with fellow Petzl ambassador Andrea Szekely.

Over the past three years, I’ve witnessed climbers catwalk in 70s lyca (a highlight for the 2010 event, which I covered here for Petzl),

arm wrestling contests with hundreds of dollars of swag give-aways, crashpad sumo wrestling and Dessertapalooza, to name a few.

As part of that sugary spread this year, Elissa Williams of West Virginia, made the cake for  the Access Fund (see photo below) to celebrate it’s 20th anniversary.

Also this year, La Sportiva added another event, Run Like Hell — a trail race in which time can be subtracted at the end for each beer that the runner successfully chugs (which must be done in style). Drink up!

While the events get better each year and new activities, festivities, music, booze and fun get added, the organized chaos of the event takes on the feel of a modern-day Woodstock (even the rain).

This year, the event had more than 1000 participants and the New River Alliance of Climbers (NRAC) raised close to $30,000. The money raised goes toward preservation and maintenance of the New River Gorge, one of the premier climbing spots in the country, which I wrote about in a Rock and Ice article called ”The New Spot.”  It can be found on my clips page here.

While everyone is recovering from the three-day binge and fun-hogging, the NRR is already looking towards the extravaganza for 2012. Next year will mark the 10th year in existence, and, I’m sure, will be a full-on blowout. Keep checking the Website as the year progresses for information on the 2012 event, and sign up early.

Here are some additional photos from the event:

BrionVoges looking at the camera.

Brion on Quinsana Plus (5.13a), right before the send.

The NRG sky.

Getting served by JT of Black Diamond.

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Amy Pickering, who gave a sample of her little heard, yet unbelievable voice during the Access Fund Happy Birthday song alongside Kurt Smith, climbing legend and music maker extraordinaire.

Devaki Murch, getting her photo on. See her gallery here.

Jennifer Clay. One of the attendees of my clinic who was PSYCHED!

Mountain Hardwear athlete Pat Goodman, looking tough.

The leaders of the Petzl pack at the NRR: Chuck Odette and Brad Dorough.

Elissa’s cake masterpiece.

Photo man from above.

Sean Stewart, men’s arm wrestling champion.

Treats from the sugary spread.

Sean before the win.

Time is funny: it moves both slow and fast, feeling both like the speed of light and sloth-like, but always at the same ever-present pace. How is it that at different times it can feel so drastically dissimilar, such a spectrum of experience?

The past few months have felt fast, and I have slacked on keeping up, looking back and assessing. It is hard to step back and look at things, to analyze them and mine their larger meaning when there is so much going on to keep you busy. I guess this is the beauty in the slow times. But, regardless, in the midst of moving I have started taking some photos (albeit with a borrowed camera). Here’s a few shots from the past few weeks in Chattanooga, Phoenix and Flagstaff, and the blur that is feels like in my head. Most are mine, but there are a few that others took as well: