Touring my old sketches of life in Korea, I unearthed this old piece. Not only is it amazing to sneak a peak into the looking glass of a life you can barely believed you lived, but even stranger is reading your old writing. Well, maybe amazing isn’t the right word… Alas, we all shed skin and grow in so many ways, and I kinda love the torture of reading my old pieces. Call it a fetish.

Anywhoo, thought I’d share an old piece I wrote somewhere near the end of the last decade, straight outta Korea! Enjoy, friends.

And yes, I even had hair back then…so few years ago…

Here in Korea, there’s an eight year old in my class. He sits in the front row, on the right side of the class, and he’s always wearing his tae kwon do uniform. Normally white, his smock is stained orange here and dull yellow there, a testament to his snacking habits and utter lack of motor skill command. His fingers are sticky. A filthy little ninja in my class and his name is Rainbow.

Today we’re reading a parable of familial bonding and oedipal confusion, a child’s illustrated story called “Chompy’s Big Day.” Chompy is a big green dinosaur, the kind stuffed in the third aisle of every toy store, the kind with rounded teeth and full, smiling lips. This dinosaur…everyone wants to pet this dinosaur. I want to pet this dinosaur. I want to sing it songs. I want to offer Tyrannosaurus protection and candies. I can’t even imagine how the kids feel about the cute little monster. In the story, Chompy goes on a picnic with mom and gets into some sticky business with a cranky Triceratops, biting into its tail thinking it a piece of fruit. His mother saves the day, and the picnic turns out to be a great success, despite Chompy’s mischief.

These kids mean business.

Rainbow is crazy for Chompy; he can’t stop squirming in his seat. He stands and lisps – Rainbow has a remarkable lisp and a raking, raspy voice – to read the next page, breathlessly adjusting his uniform and retying his belt.
“Teasher! Teasher! Me read!”

“Hold up, Rainbow. Next. Next. Okay?”

“Teeeeaaaasher!”

“Sit down, Rainbow. Wilma is next. Chomkoman (wait).”

Rainbow releases a balloon of air, squeaking, slowly lowering like a hydraulic compressor. Rakes my damn nerves, to tell you the truth, as he’s up and down like some Cheetos-stained piston gone crazy. On an ordinary day he’ll shoot out of his desk as if Chompy had taken a piece out of his ass, running figure eights around the class and usually landing on his back and flailing his arms and legs like a flipped turtle on methamphetamines. This last crash landing happens, specifically, right at my feet while I’m stunned to silence in the midst of a lesson on this…or that. But not today. Today he hisses and then goes stoic and quiet. And he sits, turning pages to his own beat, oblivious to Chompy’s great literary adventure.

Cutest kids…EVER!

This silence is unnerving. Silence is dangerous in a class full of eight year olds. Silence is a harbinger of mutiny, especially with Rainbow. Nevertheless, each kid reads a page, slowly, carefully, finger following each word on the page. I love these kids, most of whom really want to learn English. Their progress is amazing, smart little buggers. But still, Rainbow has stopped hissing and lisping and roaming aimlessly about the classroom. I can smell the danger, pungent and grim.

And then the rapture is broken, and the children begin a chorus of “Teacher, oh sangsangnim! (teacher)”

“Sam, man, what’s the problem? Wilma, what’s up?”

“Teacher. Rainbow. Look.”

Deborah is beside herself, stabbing accusations at Rainbow with her bony little finger. All the children are chirping now, pointing at our man, mouths agape. The silence has broken, and the wave begins to crest.

So, I look at Rainbow, and by god the little deviant has succeeded again in making my Korean teaching career an awkward and hellish landscape. Rainbow is slumped in his chair, a confused grin smeared upon his goofy face. I notice for the first time that Rainbow is a little cross-eyed. I think he’s looking right at me…maybe.

This is what it looks like right before a teacher gets tackled.

Below him sits a lake of urine. Rainbow has peed his pants. Quietly. Rainbow peed in absolute silence and thus avoided detection. Somehow his desk is glistening with urine. He also peed on the floor. The streams are crawling towards me at the front of the classroom in horror movie slow motion. His tae kwon do uniform has suffered the ultimate indignity.

The kids reach some heretofore hidden level of furious hypocrisy (what, you’ve never peed your tae kwan do uniform in English ESL class? Please…), throwing fits at Rainbow’s lack of integrity. Chompy is lost to them now. Only Rainbow’s pee-fest remains. I don’t know what to do, as one doesn’t want to ostracize Rainbow for sprinkling the lawn by throwing him out of the class, or telling him to go see the secretary. One must be gentle. One must take care not to put into motion some psychopathological juggernaut that will someday carry our protagonist into the throes of multiple homicides.

So, I decide on no action. Frankly, that is the clearest path. Best line of sight to the end of this madness. There’s only two minutes left in class, then Rainbow goes home and the afternoon middle school classes begin. Let his parents deal with it – pee patrol rests well outside my pay grade. Maybe if I ignore the whole mess this will all go away? Yes. It will. Everything is okay…

“Wilma, page 186.”

“But teacher…”

“Wilma…”

“’Chompy ran up the hill…’”

This is what it looks like AFTER a teacher is tackled…

The bell rings as a singing voice from heaven, and I spend my ten minute break cordoning off Rainbow’s desk with newspaper and string, trying to mop up the mess and making sure no one plops down in his befouled seat. My eight year olds’ classroom looks like a crime scene. I have no hazmat suit and I have no rubber gloves. Only Rainbow’s pee puddle and an open reading book, Chompy smiling at me and wondering what a triceratops’ tail tastes like.

You can listen to the conversation in full when we get our damn iTunes feed working again, but I wanted to throw my two cents into this mess. Maybe the main reason I wanted to write this is to illuminate a rambling story that I tried to tell on air, but somehow lost the plot halfway through and forgot what the hell my point was. Curse live radio! Allow me to tell this tale with a bit more nuance and then bring it to a point, which helpfully popped into my head on the way back to Denver from the Boulder ClimbTalk studio.

I spent a couple years teaching and then writing in South Korea. Along the way, our crew of insanely motivated climbers discovered scores of first ascents in the areas surrounding Seoul. We’d wake at 8am on Saturday morning (after a night of endless partying in the 24 hour bars of Seoul), jump on the subway and then bus, disembark in Bukhansan National Park, and finally board the “Buddha Bus” that would take us to the Buddhist statues and forested boulders in the long shadow of Insubong, a tradster’s heavenly peak.

I don’t know how many first ascents we put up there. I truly lost count somewhere along the way, after two years of steady brushing and sussing and failing and finally sending. Scores, from manky warm-ups to classic moderates along with a couple tough ones, which saw me returning at every open moment I found, leaving my home in Incheon every Friday night and riding the tube at 11pm, arriving at my best friend’s luxurious apartment in the foreign diplomat area of Seoul, partying until the wee hours, crashing, and rising like a rock zombie phoenix the next morning, out the door with my crashpad as soon as I’d guzzled a pot of coffee and a gallon of water.

The Project, following a line up and then under roof and out an established V10 lip to a final arete seemingly a mile away.

One problem defeated all of our efforts. The line rose out of a wave-like cave feature, wildly overhung while featuring long, desperate moves on tiny crimps and horrendous slopers. I had found the line while working problems nearby, noticing shitty holds and a vague path of ascent with no chalk present, no trail of former effort. It wasn’t in the guide that had recently been published in Climb, Korea’s now defunct climbing rag. I tried the line every time I arrived in Insubong, sometimes by headlamp as our day waned after 12 hours of straight climbing. Steady progress, to be sure, but the line was over my head, likely somewhere in the V11+ range. A few of us had handily sent a V9 on the opposite wall of the cave, and this puppy was many ticks harder. It was the toughest FA dash of my life, and I was in full-sprint mode before my time in Korea came to an end.

The headlamp sessions.

One afternoon in the fall of 2007 my friend James and I were warming up on a fantastic highball crack that we lapped countless times as a warm up. As we sipped our sweet canned coffee and nibbled on kimbap, a metallic pong and tink reverberated through the hilly bouldering area, bouncing off trees and reaching our ears, eerie. James and I looked at each other, instantly knowing, how I can’t quite say.

“If that’s a chipper, I’m gonna fucking kill him.” James said something like that.

“Dude, let’s go. Now,” I said, tossing off my climbing shoes and sliding on my ancient Mountain Masters. We dashed over the hill separating my project and our warm up, the hammer tinking growing louder. Steady. I could sense the hot tension reverberating between us like some metronome aflame, growing in intensity. I was sure of violence to come.

We rounded the corner of the cave and I shall never forget what we saw there, as it defied what I had held as a logical possibility as a self-righteous climber who at that time – at that time – thought a rock was some sacred thing, some holy playground for climbers.

There in the shadows, directly beneath my project, stood one of the strongest climbers in South Korea, a fellow known to send V11/V12. In tank top and shorts, he swung a hammer against a chisel again and again, sparking off rock for footholds. He occasionally swung his tools to his backside, bent down to inspect his work, blew off the rock shards and dust, and straightened and began swinging again. His girlfriend snapped photos with a small point-and-shoot, jogging about searching for perfect angles. I may be so bold as to note the cultural differences that would have a girlfriend snapping photos of her fella chipping a stellar piece of rock.

The Chipper

Now, I had fancied, just moments before, smashing a climber’s face into the crystalline granite. Like ozone in a lightning storm, I had smelled it in the air, this anticipation of violence. I’d wanted to destroy the tinking, obliterate that pang and tonk. But something happens when you round that final corner towards physical collision and that ephemeral notion of chipping is replaced with a person. Shadow noise to humanity. Although I loathed the action, I felt that I could not harm this person chipping my route. I didn’t want to smash this person’s face any more than I wanted to help him chip my project. I didn’t really know what to do. I reckon I was in complete shock, arriving at this sudden understanding that there’s always a person, a boyfriend, somebody’s kid, a father, behind this ridiculous climbing crime.

I spoke a good bit of Korean at the time, as did my buddy, but we weren’t really sure what to say. Stuttering silence, such was the bewilderment of seeing actual chipping in progress at the hands of an actual climber. It had always happened to other people, in other areas, the act done by sick bastards we would never know.

“What are you doing?” I asked in Korean and then in English, my hands raised to my sides.

I don’t recall what he said, but I remember his face, a mirror of my own stunned features. Through his raised eyebrows and tight smile, however, I saw no shame. I was infuriated by his lack of climbing ethics, but I didn’t know how to handle someone who didn’t raise his calculations in the same mathematical paradigm as I did.

“No climb,” he said. He meant the line was impossible.

“No,” I said. “That’s my project. I’m trying that climb. Oeriopda, ne. Pulganunghan, aniyo!” Hard, yes. Impossible, no!

I don’t remember what his response was to that, either. I remember James and I talked with him a bit longer, his tools hanging limply at his side. His girlfriend stood in the shadows of the cave, somber and scared. I was starting to feel terrible about this whole situation and I had no idea why. This wasn’t my country, but I’d already established dozens of lines, many stellar. This wasn’t my area, but I’d contributed a hell of a lot more to the bouldering than this clown. Still, and this is undeniable, I was a foreigner with imperfect Korean language skills who had been in the country less than two years. This was not my home. Although I thought I was fairly playing an international game on turf I had come to feel was my own, I was not. This was not my home.

In the end, it would have taken fists to stop the guy. We would have had to tackle him and beat the shit out of him with his own hammer and chisel. He simply did not get it. The error of chipping did not register, didn’t click at all. Frustrated and confused and deeply saddened, James and I sighed and walked away from the fellow, the tinking of steel on granite haunting us for the next hour as we continued warming up.

He ended up perverting, and in my mind, destroying the line I had so cherished.

This story is meant to illustrate a couple different conclusions I have come to through DIRECT contact with chippers and chipping (this is not the only time, just the only time it was so disastrously personal). To wit, I loathe chipping. Remember that, with all that is about to come. And, attendant to that, I am not sure what to do with it when I encounter it.

There are a whole lot of people, however, hiding behind their online avatars, who claim to know exactly what to do with it. These individuals, displaying the saddest and most disgusting sort of bravery – Avatar Courage – clog the climbing websites at every hint of chipping. I sometimes find it humorous, to see these nameless people piss and moan, people who have likely never encountered a chipper face to face, or who have never had something they will ever climb chipped, or who maybe haven’t left the bouldering world for the wider range of climbing life, or who haven’t even left the goddamn gym. That’s not to say they can’t have an opinion. They can. They should. I guess some of them just shouldn’t be such fucking pricks about it.

Let’s round this sucker back to recent events. Weeks ago, professional climber Ivan Greene was caught taking a chisel and hammer to rock in the ‘Gunks. That is indisputable. We’ve all seen the footage. It is important to say that I do not know Ivan. Online, since I live in Colorado and am not part of that scene, I have read that he had been warned to not chip in the past, numerous times. This caused great frustration in a portion of the local bouldering community, of course. I know this from the writings of the frustrated people. And, as much as I can, I believe it.

In the end, a couple folks hid in the bushes and somehow managed to film Ivan chipping/aggressively cleaning (what a ridiculous name for altering holds) a virgin block. With the help of Deadpoint Magazine, they published this video online, to an international audience, ostensibly in order to bring the issue of Ivan’s rampant chipping to the entire world. Now, with two exceptions, I have no problem with any of this.

Exception #1: Why didn’t they present the video to Ivan first? Why not give him a chance to explain his actions? And, if any of that did not work, why not tell him that this video was obtained legally, and therefore may be published at any time on the internet? Heretofore, if Ivan is caught chipping again, the video goes online and viral. Why not give him a chance to at least justify himself before throwing the thing online, the thing you know will probably destroy his reputation in the climbing world forever? Fairly, perhaps they took this course of action and I never read about it.

Exception #2: Why not, after filming the chipping, walk down the hill and interview Ivan on film, as Ian Caldwell so professionally did in 2010 at Smith Rocks, another video brought to fame on dpmclimbing.com? Why hide beneath the shadowed canopy, take this incriminating footage, and then slither away through the bushes? Why not tackle this great bane of the climbing world head on? Why let all the nameless online drones pass judgment when you were right there to render that most American kind of justice, allowing Ivan to defend his actions before simply demanding his shame and ruin without a chance of fair riposte? It strikes me so asinine as to be unfathomable.

It happened the way it happened. The folks took the video, presented it to DPM, and DPM published it. I have written for DPM and greatly respect the work they do. I don’t think any of those parties fumbled the ball outside of Exceptions #1 and #2. In the end, that’s not the skinny on what I’m trying to say.

Almost all of us know that chipping is not the appropriate way to approach our beloved sport. To say more about that would render me redundant. However, the issue itself doesn’t seem to be the main hurdle we need to overcome here. Chipping continues no matter how many online, nameless punters throw vitriolic pitch upon the licking flames. Let’s reduce that for a moment. All those Brave Avatars who posted Ivan’s home address, who posted his coffee shop address, who threatened him with violence, who self-righteously called boulders holy and sacrosanct and howled that his actions violated the very harmony of our universe…they did NOTHING to add constructive commentary to a serious issue in the climbing world.

Perhaps the real issue is that we haven’t had an official climber’s summit on the issue of chipping, a sort of pantheon gathering of respected national (and international, too) climbers and land managers who can work to suss this issue out, thereby instating some sort of groundwork over which we may traverse this craggy ethical landscape. By that I mean to say we need some big talents and some bigger brains to work on an issue that is as far from black and white as a spring shower rainbow.

Consider this. Is it okay to chip an established boulder/route? No, of course not. Okay, we all passed that test.

Let’s try this. Imagine a wall with a sheen of mirror smooth marble. It will never be climbed. Ever. Not a single crimp or dimpled defilade is present. It does not stand in a national or state park, but in the middle of a farmer’s field. It is not a tourist destination, for whatever reason. Is it okay to chip this, establishing some sort of natural cum chiseled climbing apparatus?

Let’s say Johnny Whomever owns a nice parcel of land in the hinterlands of Montana. On Johnny’s property rests a boulder. Under the laws of our land, Johnny owns this boulder. Is it acceptable for Johnny to chip this boulder that he could, protected by US laws, never let anybody else climb on? If so, wouldn’t that still enrage all those folks who consider rocks holy? I reckon those same folks – and there were many on the boards commenting upon Ivan’s chipping –must grind their teeth when considering ancient cave painting and four of our most esteemed presidents’ heads in South Dakota.

The shades of gray roll out like an endless carpet. None of this is to say that chipping is ever right, or always wrong, but rather to note the vast labyrinth we must map before we can build a constructive conversation about this irascible issue. Nameless, cowardly venom on the World Wide Web is meaningless in this paradigm.

Finally, I would like to touch on one of the most painful aspects of the recent chipping debacle. Ivan Greene took a chisel to rock, and in my opinion, that is not an ethical way to weave one’s legacy through our sport. I don’t agree with his actions. However, who cannot recognize that Ivan is a real person with a real life and perhaps real issues (don’t we all have issues?). In my estimation, he made a mistake. Yet, because he took a couple square inches of granite off a block of rock he was taunted mercilessly and his life was threatened. His business address was published online and a few Brave Avatars recommended (or at least insinuated) physical and proprietary damage as recompense to the injured rock.

Think of the trauma you’ve caused loved ones or unknown victims throughout your life. Think of the wrongs you’ve committed. I have a friend who accidentally blew up someone’s boat with a homemade pipe bomb when he was a young man. He was never caught, and although no one was injured, he rarely escapes a month where he doesn’t suffer from guilt over this action. He ended up the valedictorian of his class in high school, has a wonderful career as a hospital professional now, along with a beautiful little girl. My father has told me of the awful, unethical things he did in two tours of Vietnam, but he raised my sister and I the best he could. I can’t tell you how many shameful things I’ve done to people or property. I’d be too embarrassed.

I say this because I want you to imagine a camera catching you doing that one thing you know you shouldn’t have done, that you’re secretly ashamed of but do anyway. And that camera takes that thing – that crime or lie or cheat you perpetrated against property or business or even loved ones – and set it upon the table of all those Brave Avatars. Can you imagine that? A mistake (in this case against a chunk of granite) broadcast to all those Courageous Avatars, hands hovering over keypads to ruin your life and reputation and business as best they can from thousands of miles away and in another universe of experience entirely. I would hate to be judged in finality on my worst day. It’s a nightmare.

Fuck Avatar Courage. We need real discussion about chipping, in a calculated national forum.

Shitty jobs are for people who didn’t sprout from wealthy parents. Shitty jobs are saved for people like me, who came from lower middle class, spent tens of thousands on a university degree in Insane Optimism (English/Philosophy double major), and currently slog through life anchored to the helmeted, hulking, horrific Baby Huey of college debt. I can prove all this, with cited references, but I’ll spare you the melodrama. Of course, I could just be really good at getting shitty jobs.

Shitty jobs are also set aside for dawdlers, dreamers, and dipshits. Check, check, check. Often times, we think, If only I could start my own business! If only I could be my own boss doing what I love! Why, that’s not a job at all! They construct a storefront in the mind, the crisp smell of new product on the shelves or proprietary coffee boiling away in lustered silver vats or maybe a glass of wine next to their computer as they troubleshoot a client’s latest Macinitosh disaster.

Never a fist pump and whoop while imagining balancing the books. No little jigs dreaming of mopping the floors every night. Nary a chuckle, I tell you, while dreaming of being the entrepreneur, the manager, and the salesperson, all at once, every day until the head splits open and a god damned Gremlin pops out. These folks dawdle with their dreams because they’re dipshits.

I am a dawdling and dreaming dipshit. Allow me a dream, here with my shitty job, my college debt and my Poindexter degree.

This is my dream, perchance a possibility had I a) sprung from the loins of the rich and powerful or b) not been such a wanderlusting, dirtbag climber for the past 15 years. My dream, my monumentally clever subterfuge out of the many shitty jobs this world has bestooled upon my soul: I want to own my own book store.

Stop laughing, you bastards.

I’ve often thought, over the years, what passion I would give up for another, in some ridiculous and hypothetical apocalypse of volition. Like, if you had to choose between never climbing another rock and never opening another book? Or, you can write and read but you can never strum a guitar or throw a baseball again? All these rhetorical debates later, all this conjectural bludgeoning of conventional decision making, I have come to a somewhat surprising but quite simple conclusion. I am a hopeless word nerd. To wit, were my imaginary decisions manifested in real life, I would have sold all my climbing shoes, my guitars, and my holy and precious baseball gloves. And I’d be stuck with books. And pens. And journals, ironically covered in witticisms such as “Christians have the best sects” and “Apathy: I could take it or leave it.”

Thankfully, I don’t have to give up a thing to own a bookstore because it’s a juvenile pipe dream in this nation of glamourized stupidity, publishing crises, and a euthanizing of local indie book sellers by the fearsome Godzilla, er, Amazon. Now, I’ve done accounting before. So, I could handle that. I’ve been a manager at various shitty jobs since college. I’ve even worked for myself, in a faux-entrepreneurial sense. So, the entrepreneur, manager, salesperson. Check, check, check. God knows I’ve mopped my share of floors, as well. Janitorial Services, check.

Alas, I have no bankroll. Not enough for that. So, I spend my brain’s monopoly money in a Total Recall-esque reverie where I lovingly alphabetize my shelves, chat with customers about Bukowski and Dostoevsky, pour gratis coffee to the cute girl reading Colson Whitehead (an offering she purchased in my store, for your information), listen to acoustic cassette tapes whilst whittling down which local singer/songwriter will perform in the corner of the shop on Friday night, and straighten all of the posters of myself – shirtless – climbing rocks, which I have festooned the entire place with, along with a poster here and there of Michael Chabon and Susan Sontag. I dream of doing the books. Mopping the wood slat floor, an elation. Depositing the day’s money in the bank every night, a luxury of passion. And just tooting around the shop, I imagine, pulling indies from the shelves and leafing through, reading the Economist while pattering around, simply standing amongst my many heroes and kind of drooling upon my lapel, the very portrait of a lower middle class word nerd made good.

It’s a nice dream, you have to admit. This economy, my income, probably my sloth, and the God forsaken university minions ever jamming their Debt Thumbs square up my ass, however, provide stasis and protraction of the dream. Just a dream.

But a really, really good one.

And so, I visit the book stores four or five times a week: Tattered Cover, Kilgore’s, Mutiny Now, Boulder Book Store (my absolute favorite), West Side Books, Capitol Hill Books, even Barnes & Noble. Many of these folks know me and I know them and I grow giddy thinking about the nerdy conversations we’ll have as I pay for my six used books I don’t need and won’t get around to for the next year. That’s the life of a guy who dreams of owning his own book store. A guy who fucking adores stories. A guy who would give up climbing, guitar, and baseball just to own a shitty little corner shop full of dusty tomes and over-hyped indie collections of short stories.

In the end, all I have of this dream are those trips to my stores and the reading and writing itself. I write a lot, get published a little, and then write some more. But reading; that’s where it’s really at. Magazines, books, pamphlets, shampoo bottles whilst turning one out on the crapper. Many people would tell me it’s all the masturbation, but I think my eyesight grows dimmer by the year because of all the reading. My palms remain hairless as a babe’s bottom, after all.

That said, I’m once again thrilled to present the Year in Words, 2012 edition. I spent about two months on the road this year, during which I tackled a large chunk of the following list. I also don’t have a girlfriend and my dog is 15 and lazy and my porch features a superb reading chair, so I took care of a lot of word slaying right here in my Denver abode. I read at stop lights. I read in waiting rooms. I read in tents and around campfires and in the desert and in the mountains and in my bed and, yes, on the shitter.

This is what I read, in a five star paradigm, with random little bon mots.

The Five Star Gems, In Order Of Consumption, That You Should, Probably, Read Right Now

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Non-Fiction (NF), David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace (DFW) is kind of a polarizing fellow. First of all, in 2008 he hung himself in him and his wife’s living room at the age of 46. That can be a turn-off to some people. Secondly, many lionize DFW as perhaps the greatest writer of the last 30 or so years. That sort of hyperbole can be a turn-off to other people. Thirdly, he writes meta-fiction that finds favored status on the book shelves of literary snobs and hipsters. What hipsters read can be a turn-off to many people. I hate hipsters and submit that they should be boiled alive in melted fluorescent sunglass rims and flayed with scalding fixie chains and cloaked in a swathe of herpes laden cut-off jean shorts. But I love DFW. Go figure.

The thing about DFW’s non-fiction…how can I say this? In my humble and entirely non-professional opinion: he is the greatest essay writer in the history of humankind on our terrestrial sphere. I’ve read Orwell, Hitchens, and Updike; Talese, Sedaris, and even Hunter S. Thompson, if you want to lump his Gonzo journalism in with the essayists. The thing is, to me, is that DFW does it better than all of them, in a number of ways. For example, he’s the funniest bastard I’ve ever read. Also, he plays with his words and sentence structures and footnotes like a 14 year old boy plays with his wang. That means he really gets down to business and whips that sucker around to get just the perfect feeling. Finally, his brain is a force of nature. He’s the smartest guy I’ve ever read, which says a lot after you’ve danced with Christopher Hitchens.

I’ve read every piece of DFW non-fiction that I’ve seen published. Admittedly, they are not all Five Star Gems. This one is. Chuck Klosterman, a fine journalist and essayist in his own right, struggles with one of DFW’s essays when assigned to report on a “classic rock” cruise ship sailing through the Caribbean. Citing DFW’s essay, the eponymous passage in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and originally published in Harper’s as “Shipping Out,” Klosterman writes:

“There are three main hurdles involved with the writing and reporting of this story. The first is that the definitive cruise story has already been written by David Foster Wallace…in 1995; this is evidently the most popular essay ever produced, as roughly six thousand people have mentioned it to me during the forty-eight hours prior to this trip.”

Chuck Klosterman, an absolute fucking rock star of the essay and best-selling author to boot, is worried about somehow escaping DFW’s shadow. That says something.

Along with the previously mentioned essay, the must-reads include: “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All,” “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” and “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness.”

At least two of these are the best essays I have ever read.

DFW can be awful intimidating. He casts a long shadow, kind of like Klosterman found out while listening to REO Speedwagon on a cruise ship and kneading his brow trying to figure out how he could do it in any better than DFW did a decade before. The thing is, Klosterman nailed it. He admitted he was doomed and trudged forward, damn well knowing that he could produce a fine piece, without chasing the near-perfection that DFW accomplished with almost every essay he ever wrote. In other words, you can’t copy Wallace, you can’t be Wallace, and you can’t escape Wallace. Accept it and keep writing.

Anyway, that’s a lot of hot shit and really personal and maybe DFW isn’t for you. But if you’re going to pick up one book of essays this year, I beg you it be “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” Maybe more than anything, read it because DFW really cared about his readers and about how his words and pieces would be consumed by the general public (despite his suicide). With that in mind, I’ll leave it with an apropos DFW interview quote:

“The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I’ll hush.”

The Name of the Wind, Fiction (F), Patrick Rothfuss

This past spring, there I stood in Spellbinder Books in Bishop, CA, rubbing my head maniacally while trying to find another read for the tent. Hands dusty with climbing chalk, my friend Anthony handed me “The Name of the Wind.”

“It’s my favorite book of all time,” he said.

“Dude, it’s fantasy,” I said, scowling and turning it over in my hands.

“Yeah.” And he shrugged and walked away. You have to give it to a guy who plays the fantasy card without any sort of caveat. Balls, my friends. Still, I put it back on the shelf.

About an hour later, after fondling any number of different titles and chucking them back to the shelf, I ambled back to Anthony’s earnest suggestion. The cover featured a cloaked fellow standing in a forsaken land, the hues blue and gray and black and sinister. I groaned, picked it up, and bought it.

Now, I am not tacitly anti-fantasy. Actually, I occasionally like fantasy. I just don’t like other people knowing I’m reading it. So, secretly, I packed the 722 page monster back to Denver and absolutely devoured it the week following my climbing trip. Basically, Rothfuss constructs such a wondrous and believable world chock full of characters you either really want to be or really want to kill, you’re left helpless to fight the magic and banditry and alchemic studies of the main character, Kvothe. I know. Fucking fantasy books. Why can’t it just be Doug, or something?

In the end, all I can say is that if you’re having a rough month or are sick of the daily doldrums forced upon you by your shitty job, pick this book up. Visiting Rothfuss’s “Four Corners of Civilization” is a fine respite from the mundane trappings of Middle Earth, er, Earth.

Norwood, (F), Charles Portis

If you haven’t read Charles Portis, I recommend hustling directly to a book store and buying any of his works. They are short, wacked out, and alive with the kind of comically quirky characters that Cormac McCarthy may be capable of but has obviously left to other writers of southern gothic fiction.

Did you see True Grit, the recent movie starring Matt Damon and Jeff Bridges, or the original one for which John Wayne won his only Oscar? That’s Portis, and the book blows the movie out of the ever-loving water. Still, thank the Damon/Bridges version for bringing Portis re-issues back to our book stores.

McCain’s Promise, (NF), David Foster Wallace

I can’t possibly blather on any more about DFW, so I’ll just give a quick synopsis: DFW rides on the media bus chasing Senator John McCain in his bid to become President of the United States of America in 2000. Striking insight and hilarity ensue, with the camera guys and boom girls and random media blowhards taking center stage. It’s short, it’s fantastic, and you’ll wonder why more writers can’t have as much fun with our solipsistic and power-hungry leaders.

More Baths, Less Talking, (NF), Nick Hornby

For many years now best-selling Brit Nick Hornby has been writing literary critiques for Dave Egger’s mag, The Believer. For the last handful, they’ve been published in yearly collections, including 2012’s “More Bath, Less Talking (Stuff I’ve Been Reading #4).”

That’s right; it’s a book of collected literary criticism. How…unbelievably…boring.

Wrong. Hornby’s charm dips and weaves through this book because of the clash between his cerebral observations and his absolute taking the piss out of himself as he diagnoses his pop culture fascination, deals with his kids fucking about the house, and churns out his own work. All while attempting to read more books than anyone else every year. And then telling us all about them – and his latest tizzy fit after Arsenal loses a football match – and exactly why and how we should be reading more.

The Chris Farley Show, (NF), Tom Farley

When Chris Farley died, in 1997, I was a junior at the University of Iowa. And we were all, including the five other dudes living in our dumpy college house, Farley acolytes. Farley had stumbled and crashed into our lives during a golden age of Saturday Night Live, along with movies like Tommy Boy and Black Sheep. At that time, you either stood in the Sandler camp or the Farley camp. We were entrenched with Farley.

I remember finding out the news of his death and three of us immediately jumping in a car, driving the three hours to his favorite Chicago bar, and entirely saucing ourselves in honor of Farley portrayals like Matt Foley, the Lunch Lady, and the unlucky Japanese game show attendant. In true Farley style, I don’t even know when we left the bar or where we slept that night. The only real thing I remember is trying to elbow my way past this huge dude at the bar, only to see Chicago White Sox legend Frank Thomas spin and shove me against the bar until the brass railing nearly split my damn spine.

As Farley freaks, we read and watched everything we could. We wanted to know every last detail about this strange tubby dude who had us ceaselessly crying “Holy Schnikeys” by 1995. But, after his passing and all those other big stars tragically dying back then (Kurt Cobain, Bradley Nowell, River Phoenix, Jeff Buckley, Shannon Hoon, etc), you just didn’t want to read anymore. You were pretty sure you didn’t really want to know.

And so, all these years later, after coming to rejoice in Farley again, it’s a ridiculous treat to read an oral biography of Farley’s life told by his family, best friends, and business associates. As you’d expect, hearing of Farley’s rise through the comedic ranks is funny and inspiring, especially for a Midwest guy like me (Farley was from the Badger state). Of course, it’s crushingly grim and mournful, as you’d also expect.

In the end, I was left with a guy not unlike a lot of us, but way more talented: a normal Midwestern smartass who wanted all he could get out of life, and in the end, more than he and his familial baggage could handle.

Bill Bryson’s African Diary, (NF), Bill Bryson

I love Bill Bryson. He could have a shit on a napkin and title it A Visage of the Brown Desert and I would buy it and read it and probably sleep with it resting on my pillow.

Hence, any review of an author from whom I would buy a turd-laden napkin probably depreciates itself.

The Four And A Half Star Gems, In Order Of Consumption, That You Should, Probably, Read Sooner Or Later

The Wave, (NF), Susan Casey

If you’ve ever been interested in how we – as surfers, boat folk, or simply while living on the coast – interact with the more pissy attitudes of the five oceans, this book is a must read. The statistics and research that Casey presents in the context of actually piloting a surfboard or a boat through ball-shrinking ocean monsters…it blows a fuse in your head.

Newjack, (NF), Ted Conover

I’d never read any Conover before and I knew I was worse off for it. Not only is he a Denver boy, but he’s been published by the world’s largest media conglomerates, written best-sellers, and stands widely respected as one of the finest in-depth, investigative journalists on terra firma. For “Newjack,” Conover actually went undercover, entered a New York State Department of Corrections training program for prison guards, and eventually landed a job at the infamous Sing Sing Correctional Facility in the town of Ossining, New York.

Conover spent a year at the maximum-security facility, working a number of different shifts as he plodded his way up the guard ladder. The folks he meets and deals with both behind and locking the bars prove a complicated mess that Conover weaves into a stunning behind-the-curtains peek at our massively fucked up penal system.

His in-depth reporting provided a landmark event in American journalism. If you don’t read this book I think you should go to prison.

Crossers, (F), Phillip Capote

Capote is such a bad ass. “A Rumor of War” is one of my favorite books about the Vietnam War, but I had never delved into any of his more recent pieces. This book, with all of its cycling themes, provides both an exciting and heartfelt glimpse into Capote’s evolving work.

“Crossers” follows the travails of Gil Castle after losing his wife in the 9/11 attacks. He quits his lucrative New York City job and lights out for his ancestral family homestead in Southern Arizona, a wide parcel tucked against the Mexican border. While struggling to piece his life back together, Castle takes in an illegal immigrant fresh off a drug deal gone bad. This act of good will sets in motion an opera of violence and retribution that I won’t talk about because you should really just read the damn book. If you’ve ever wanted to get a sniff what ranch life on the southern border is all about – in novel form – read it now.

The Raw Shark Texts, (F), Steven Hall

Steven Hall is an up-and-comer. Maybe he’ll be a flash in the pan. Maybe he’s the next Arthur C. Clarke. Maybe he’s the next…whoever wrote something great in 1999 and then never wrote anything worth merit again. I do not know what to think about this guy.

“The Raw Shark Texts” arrived upon my desk via a friend’s suggestion. Once again, because I was about to dip my toe into science fiction or fantasy or blippity blop, I felt snarky about picking the book up. Two days later, I was done, sick to my stomach that it was over, ready to write Mr. Hall and threaten him with great bodily injury lest he call me and recite Bedtime Stories Inspired by Fictional Events in The Raw Shark Texts.

Mums the word on what this book is about, because the greatest treat Hall affords us is the manic explosion of literary nerd-talk that instantly tears the world asunder when two buddies share their thoughts on this mind-bender. It is a treat.

I don’t want to say this but I’ve been thinking it all year. Out of all the books on this list, “The Raw Shark Texts” was by far the most puzzling, intriguing and weirdly emotional book I’ve read in a couple of years…

The Sisters Brothers, (F), Patrick DeWitt

It’s an oldie western written with modern awesomeness about a pair of psychopathic brothers. They drink. They whore. They tell some funny jokes. They steal. They kill. Et al.

Okay.

It’s written very well, and besides, who doesn’t like a western about a pair of psychopathic brothers?

Touching the Void, (NF), Joe Simpson

I used to be a climber in Iowa. HA! But, it’s true. Back then, I really had no clue as to my aspirations and goals. I just wanted to climb. And in Iowa, we are taught that real climbing involves hiking up big old mountains in Asia with oxygen thingies on your face and sherpas (whatever those were) carrying things for you and tents made by The North Face (which you think is the greatest mountaineering company ever). You see, that’s all most Iowans really know about climbing.

As you’re wont to imagine, I devoured book after book after book about climbing at altitude, even as I clipped four bolt routes and trained in a racquetball court cum climbing gym. That’s why it’s so surprising that I hadn’t read “Touching the Void” until this year. I’d seen the movie. I’d met Joe Simpson. I’d clipped the chains on 17 bolt routes. That’s mountaineering, right?

This year, I brought it along to Bishop and read it by headlamp in my tent over two nights. It’s shockingly simple to read. It’s horrifying. It’s totally fucking beautiful and heart-breaking and life-affirming.

And also, I am never going to alpine climb. Except in Iowa.

Super Sad True Love Story, (F), Gary Shteyngart

This is the book I passed on to friends most this year. The book reads with such stunning heart and hilarity that I felt entirely dunce-like for never having heard of Gary Shteyngart. Since I don’t have this book anymore (I’ve given away three copies), I’ll let The New York Times do the reviewing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/books/27book.html?_r=0

The Passage, (F), Justin Cronin

You’ve probably heard of this blockbuster, or at least seen it spotlighted on bookshelves throughout the nation. Vampires. Rogue FBI agents. Clairvoyant six-year-olds. A post-apocalyptic wasteland after the humans lost the war with the vampires.

Jesus, seriously, if that doesn’t do it, nothing will. The next in Cronin’s trilogy, “The Twelve,” is out in trade paperback right now. You should buy them both, post-haste.

The Restraint of Beasts, (F), Magnus Mills

Another friendly suggestion, which I had great luck with this year. Three drunken Scottish dunces take on a fence-building assignment in England, where pints are mercilessly slayed, bystanders are mistakenly murdered, and fences, for the most part, kind of get built.

This book, Mills’ debut, won the McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitebread First Novel Award in 1999, and I can’t believe I’ve only met one other person who has even heard of it (the guy who recommended it to me!). It’s too tremendous to languish unknown.

If you like the Coen brothers’ work, this is the book for you.

Everybody Loves Our Town, (NF), Mark Yarm

Listen, I’m not ashamed to be a Grunge Child. Rather, I proudly wore two flannels at a time for many years throughout the 90s, bought about six cheap guitars from 1993-1999, wrote tragically bad poetry, purchased over 150 bootleg Pearl Jam CDs and albums, and knew all the words to Seaweed’s “Recall.” I had long, luscious, flowing sandy brown locks from 1994 to about 2003. I played guitar and sang in a semi-successful punk/rock outfit called Sgt. Sturmy. I once got my Gibson caught in Christmas lights over a stage and in a stoned/drunken fit of Grunge epiphany I beat the ever-loving shit out of the hanging thing in front of about 150 Doc Marten’d and flannelled freaks. My Sonex-180 still has a crack in the neck. I mean, seriously. That’s Iowa Grunge, right there.

“Everybody Loves Our Town” is a fantastic homage to this seminal moment in American rock history, told as an oral biography by the folks who lived it, worked it, and died for it. You remember Tad? How about Seven Year Bitch? Malfunkshin? How about Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, or Alice in Chains? By turns totally hilarious and desperately heartbreaking, Yarm’s book brings Seattle’s 80s/90s scene rushing back into your life, a life you used to spend at record stores before Amazon and iTunes killed all that, a time when tuneless guitars revealed something important or maybe nothing at all about the people playing them. Most of all, it reminds you about the desire to play and listen to soulful music, even if that music did eventually turn into Creed and Seven Mary Three and Limp Bizkit.

Killing Rommel, (F), Steven Pressfield

I read two Pressfield novels this year because I was in the mood for some historical military fiction. This guy is the master of the genre. He spins his yarns with complete historical accuracy (weapons, battles, dates, etc), but has the fine touch to weave in emotion and moral dilemma amidst the rift of war. Like, Tom Clancy with a heart, or something like that. If you like the genre (which I don’t necessarily love, but Pressfield is a stone cold killer), read it. If not, well, there’s always JK Rowling’s detective novel for adults.

The Four Stars, In Order Of Consumption, That You Should, Probably, Read Some Day

The Windup Girl, F, Paolo Bacigalupi
The Plague, F, Albert Camus
The Psychopath Test, NF, Jon Ronson
Pulphead, NF, John Jeremiah Sullivan
Gates of Fire, F, Steven Pressfield
Population: 485, NF, Michael Perry
Travels in the Scriptorium, F, Paul Auster
The Black Dahlia, F, James Ellroy
Me Talk Pretty One Day, NF, David Sedaris
Shakespeare Wrote for Money, NF, Nick Hornby

The Three And A Half Stars, In Order Of Consumption, Which I Had Fun Reading And So Might You

The Ask, F, Sam Lipsyte
The Hunger Games, F, Suzanne Collins
The Terror, F, Dan Simmons
Tiger Force, NF, Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss
The Body Artist, F, Don Delillo

The Three Star, Which You Should Not Read Unless You Really, Really, Really Like Either Karl Popper or Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein’s Poker, NF, David Edmunds and John Eidenow

The Less Than Three Stars, In Order of Consumption, Which You Can Read If You Want To, But I Wish I Had Not

I Am Not a Serial Killer, F, Dan Wells
The Ghosts of Belfast, F, Stuart Neville
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon

Vail, Colorado’s very own 104.7 The Mile is the worst radio station on the planet.  A tour:  Jason Mraz, Counting Crows, Barenaked Ladies, and John Mayer, these all folded and spilled and puked one atop the other in the space of the winding Highway 24 leading out of Vail, through the lovely hamlet of Minturn, over Battle Mountain Pass and finally to Homestake Creek next to Red Cliff, home to the Teva Mountain Games’ annual Bud Light Lime Steep Creek Championship presented by Thule.  This is a kayak race.

Kyler, a photographer and friend from way back, writhes in his seat.  He frowns and squirms and glances with evil intentions as I drum the steering wheel.

“Kyler,” I say, “we’re here to cover the Teva Mountain Games.  We have to get in touch with the Vail culture.”  I ease the volume to a robust 14 as the Barenaked Ladies do…whatever it is they do.

We pull off the road into a wide gravel expanse – a high country parking lot – which should be packed with dust-blanketed Tacomas and Explorers and Four Runners.  Men with kayaks over their shoulders and folks sitting on tail gates and women in flip flops, where are they?  Other than a lonesome beige Astrovan, it’s just my Ford Focus hatchback, idling and bumping with the Ladies.  Across a tiny asphalt road shouldering the river sit a few port-a-potties and three creeking kayaks, neon green in a way that only kayaks and hipster sunglasses achieve.  Just sitting there, abandoned.

“Alright,” I sigh.

“I can’t believe it’s already over.”

“Fuck it, dude,” I say, backing up and doing my best Walter Sobchek, “let’s go bouldering.”

We park the car, load up my giant Misty Mountain crash pad, and head up the 200 yard trail for the fantastic granite bouldering of Red Cliff.  It is 3:30 in the afternoon and we’ve already missed one of the most highly anticipated events of the Teva Mountain Games (TMG).  What a splendid start.

***

The TMG have officially kicked off with the first Steep Creek kayaker’s put-in to the dribbling Homestake Creek, which the TMG website had hopefully hyped as “a paddling gem.”  Granted a decent winter snowfall and rapid run-off, Homestake indeed terrifies (me) and siren calls (nutso kayakers).  Nasty pool drops, meandering squeaks between bulging river-hidden boulders, and hull trundling slides all make Homestake a creek to fret over in the wee hours, wringing hands and pouring over online trip reports.  But now, it’s really a shame.  The creek…even I had little fear, which is saying something after basically quitting paddling after jamming both thumbs, pulling my skirt, and helplessly cartwheeling behind my bobbing friends in an innocuous face-to-face with a big old rock on the meager Class III Shoshone run of the Colorado River in 2005.  Homestake runs Class V, normally.

Alas, Colorado river basins are in for a tough year.  Over 90% of the state is currently suffering through various levels of drought.  The expected runoff through July projects below 50%.  By May 1^st, snowpack sat at an astonishingly low 19% of average.  As of writing, precisely nine wild fires rage across the state.  What does this all mean?  It means that Colorado kayakers are kind of screwed for the season.

***

Seeing as we’d already nabbed our press passes in Vail Village, there is nothing left to do after bouldering but head to EagleVail, where Kyler had secured lodging with one of his friends, Dylan.  It takes a long time to get there.  You see, Vail, EagleVail, Avon, all these little towns harbor torturously circuitous roads, spinning and circling like river eddies repeated.  I exit each convexity exactly one beat too early, causing an ironic sub-circling just to get back to the annular nightmare and repeat the process all over again.

Dylan lives in one of those mountain duplexey subdivisions shouldering a golf course, the kind where no one is ever a home owner but more of a home sitter, just kind of waiting for the rich people to remember what they’ve forgotten and come scurrying back.  I’ve never met Dylan before, so I am surprised to see that this talented skier, mountain biker and raft guide stands barely a skoshe over 5’5”.   Tanned and well-muscled and with floppy hay-brown hair betraying his SoCal upbringing, he actually cuts an impressive figure, even though, you know, he’s so short and all.

I walk in carrying a 12-pack of PBR, hoping to assuage Dylan and his roommates for the intrusion of our long couch-surfing weekend.  Kyler holds a bottle of Jack Daniels and a six pack of Coke.  I don’t know how many alpine skis lean next to the doorway.  A lot.  An expensive-looking road bike lounges against the kitchen island.  The place fairly reeks of sweat and mountain ambition.  One fellow splayed out on a white leather couch watching playoff basketball, his legs gargantuan in girth and tanned a deep baseball glove leather.  Dylan’s other roomie, a tall bookish fellow in tee shirt and shorts, nods at our arrival, scrubbing the blonde roughage atop his head.

“I hope you guys like PBR,” I say with gusto, raising the twelver over my head like a hero returning home, anticipating great sighs of appreciation or maybe a huddle of EagleVail-ites swarming upon my gift.

“I don’t drink,” says Mark, the basketball watcher with sewer pipes for legs.  He does not make eye contact.  He speaks, what’s the word:  dehortatively.

“Well,” I say, lowering the PBR to chin height and smiling at the blonde fellow on the opposite couch, “I bet you like PBR.”

“Ah, I shouldn’t drink,” says Ryan, kind of wiggling his hand in front of his face.  “I got the Time Trials on Saturday.”  It is Thursday.  Thursday.  What is he, a pro?  A Mormon bicyclist?  And what the hell are these “Time Trials”?

I lower the box and peek at Kyler.  “I hear it keeps well in the can,” I say, with much wit.  Jesus Christ, is this the mountains or a church group meeting in Littleton?

While Dylan gets drunk on something I never spot him drinking, Mark and Ryan sneak off to bed early.  Like, 8:30 early.  I end up, befuddled and ill-equipped for physical trial, losing both a thumb and arm wrestling match to the diminutive Dylan, who slurs, “I may be small…but I’m strong,” before wobbling off to his bedroom.  Rubbing my sore shoulder, Kyler and I unfurl our sleeping bags upon our respective couches and do that thing you do on the first night in a stranger’s house.  Namely, not really sleep much at all.

Friday, Very Early Morning

Dylan, like something miraculous, tinkers jovially and with total faculty through his house as Kyler and I assemble ourselves at the kitchen table, coffees dark and pungent.  We open our TMG guides, splaying maps, scrutinizing timetables.

So, we’ve missed the Steep Creek and Opening Ceremonies & Bud Light Mountains of Music:  Keller Williams.  That much we know and are very, very comfortable with.  The 61 remaining events – highlighted light orange, blue, varying shades of green, stretched and intermingled upon a timescale and coded with exact locations in Vail Village – this leaves us sputtering and wheezing.  More Bud Light Mountains of Music,  Eukanuba DockDogs Extreme Vertical Competition, Volvo 10k Spring Runoff presented by Garmin, Teva Slopestyle After Party with DJ Juggy, SUPSQUATCH Dual presented by C4 Waterman.  Yes, a veritable feast of mountain ephemera, sponsored by what-have-you at such and such a time, enough to sprain my forehead into a palsied ticking that leaves one eye cocked open and the other squinting.  What the fuck is a SUPSQUATCH, anyway?

Friday, Morning  

We are early to our first event of the morning, the IFSC Bouldering World Cup (Female Qualifier).  I probably should not hide my pretensions on visiting the TMG.  Kyler and I are climbers.  We are quite fond of the low art, bouldering.  As far as I can tell, the only International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) World Cup event slated for American soil has poked it’s head into Vail this year, and we aren’t about to miss it.

The Bouldering World Cup is a big deal across the pond.  The Cup circuit meanders through the old world – Edinburgh, Vienna, Moscow…Vail – before concluding in some startlingly gorgeous European locale where World Cup champions are crowned based on a befuddling system of wins, points, and yadda yadda.  Thousands of spectators show up to both outdoor and indoor bouldering walls constructed for these events, holds placed with bolt and T-nut by a cadre of crack international route setters who create “problems” both challenging to the world’s best climbers and exciting for the heavy forearmed and slope-backed audience.

The United States, all we’ve got is the TMG World Cup.  From what I can glean, it’s kind of a three part deal.  Part One:  A chance for ‘Merica to dip its toes into the turgid waters of international climbing competition, something which for years has caused nary a ripple.  Although the TMG hosts a fine event and the crowds continue to grow, World Cups in America historically do not even remotely compare to the spectacles on European or Asian soil.  Part Two:  An opportunity for foreign climbers to spend a week or two touring the Rocky Mountain spine, ticking off American bouldering classics and new-school test-pieces in Rocky Mountain National Park, Mt. Evans, and any of those other summer-time hidden areas none of us weaklings know about right now.  On their sponsors’ dimes, mind you.  Part Three:  An occasion for the International Olympic Committee to spy how international climbing competitions play in North America.  As of February 12, climbing has been formally recognized by the IOC, allowing it possible entry for the 2020 Olympic Games.  Every World Cup event from here on out, in that paradigm, is a test run.

***

A brilliant morning sun, the sort that kind of washes everything out like an overexposed photo, sneers above.   The IFSC Bouldering World Cup (Female Qualifiers) provides no shade.  The event, formerly held just uphill from the Golden Peak Base Lodge, kind of TMG Ground Zero, has been moved a half mile down the road to the periphery Golden Peak East venue.  It’s held in a great asphalt parking lot.  No stadium seating, no tree dotted hill to recline leisurely upon and sip from one’s Red Bull or Monster or Mountain Dew Code Red or whatever the hell people think outdoor athletes drink while watching their brethren perform.  No.  The World Cup is held in a parking lot.  The bouldering wall, tucked over a thick layer of mats and beneath a great plastic awning, necessitates spectators to stand, shifting uncomfortably from aching foot to aching foot, between yellow parking lines.

But that’s where the grumbling ends.  Kyler and I show up as Timmy O’Niell, professional climber and kayaker and humanitarian and comedian and any number of other magnificent monikers, stands beneath his little tent to the left of the wall with a microphone to his mouth.  Timmy provides play-by-play to a whole bunch of climbing events, a seriously talented performer behind the mic and on the rock/in the water.  The sun still casting its gruesome rays upon the wall, Timmy informs us that the event will not begin until the great mountain orb rises a couple ticks higher.  Friction, the big deal in rock climbing.  Sun means hot holds.  Hot holds mean reduced friction.  The sun as enemy and all that.

So, I have a moment to pull my press pass and notebook from my messenger bag, hang them in front of a bored TMG employee, and sneak behind the orange metal fence that separates coaches/competitors/judges/media from normal pedestrian-style folk.  Kyler declines and lethargically pulls one of many cameras from his bag, kind of resting it on his hip and yawning.

The sun eventually rises, a shadow curtain dropping on the wall, and Timmy begins introducing athletes as they sprint from isolation and onto the mats below one of five different problems.  Now, I could bore the ever-loving soul out of you by rattling off the rules and regulations of World Cup bouldering events, but I have neither the precise faculty nor the patience.  The IFSC rule book, Version 1.2, authored by Tim Hatch around February of this year, stands around 83 pages online.  Suffice it to say, “flashing” a “problem” is rewarded with the highest score, completing the problem in the least number of falls is awarded a lowered amount of points, while high point on the problem grants a competitor yet a certain lower score.  Not completing a problem in a World Cup event, the talent stacked and heaped upon itself as it always is, leads to almost certain defeat.

The women, clothed mostly in tank tops and capris and a few short shorts stitched up in patriotic colors (or at least with little flags) and dotted with sponsor patches from The North Face and La Sportiva and Mammut and on and on, charge through Qualifiers.  Last year’s Vail champ and (as of writing) the most dominant competition climber on the planet, Austrian Anna Stohr, kicks off the round.  The “American Alex’s” – Alex Puccio and Alex Johnson – soon follow to wild cheering.  And Shauna Coxsey from Great Britain, Melanie Sandoz of France, others from Japan, Hungary, Korea, women from 19 countries cycle through their five minutes on each problem.

Stohr and Puccio, to me the most intriguing match-up in the opening salvo, climb on the same five minute stint, dispatching problems in their own fashions.  Puccio, a visually stunning climber, powers from one giant blue blob hold to the next:  dynos, gastons, toe hooks and great sweat-inducing slopers.  She climbs like an 18 wheeler outfitted with a V12 Ferrari engine. Stohr, a seasoned veteran on the WC circuit, climbs more like a Euclidian methodologist.  Buzzer honking, she turns from her chair facing the crowd and stands below the problem, i.e., Problem Number Four.  Miming movement from the mats, her arms float through the air, hands adjusting ever so slightly, body swaying, she charts the line, analyzing her theoretic method of ascent.  It’s a sort of shuffle through the mental cum physical library, parsing out unnecessary movement proven funky or energy sapping while linking that high step just so with that meat-hook sloper slap but maybe that drop knee with that cross through.  I feel like I’m watching a philosopher building a constructive framework for hypothetical physical dynamics.  Only, this philosopher could probably choke me out in a bar fight.

Puccio, meanwhile, flashes Problem Number Two and drops from the final hold – a slight wave to the hooting crowd – while Stohr fondles the first hold and pulls her feet onto the wall.  Problem Number Four spits Stohr after a botched cross through sequence, but she sends it next go, well before the buzzer sounds.

If you really try to pay attention at a World Cup Qualifier, well, the mania and action and sounds threaten to render one’s brain spasmodic and blinky.  Dubstep electronica GRRing and BRRing and DONK-DONK-DONKing never ceases, just goes and goes, thrumming like some malevolent hummingbird’s black heart.  You think, Is that American climbing legend Dave Graham?  And then you think, Jesus Christ, that’s Melissa le Neve from France, who happens to be quite pretty and not Dave Graham-like in the face or body, but no one can deny that her hair looks very much Dave Graham-like.  You think, What is everyone cheering at, and then you see Alex Johnson’s lean frame hanging from the finishing hold on Problem Number Five and then everyone is cheering for someone else and a guy who looks like Napolean Dynamite leans over your shoulder and says, “Ha-haaah, man.  Hah!”  A coach flails his wrought-iron arms, nearly clipping your chin, screaming “Kadja!” (Come on!) because he is Korean and Jain Kim is having difficulties with the funky double-dyno-to-undercling on Problem Number Three and then Timmy O’Niell is pointing out a kid in the crowd who’s been dancing the robot for the last half hour and then a woman named Jill whom you vaguely remember from somewhere or other screams your name and says she just adores the bathroom you tiled for her last year, her snot covered toddler blurbling in her arms.

At exactly 11:43 am, young women from around the globe still circulating across the mat, I lurch from behind the media barrier and wobble off across the blazing asphalt, looking for Kyler.  I can take no more.  It’s just Qualifiers.  I need to go look at dogs jumping into water, or something.

Friday, Noonish

Kyler and I arrive at TMG Ground Zero (Golden Peak) to find the DockDogs Big Air (Wave 2) competition just getting started.  All dog-centric events are held here on a nice grassy expanse below the now green and Sound of Music looking ski slopes above.  Basically, the DockDogs traveling show (The World’s Premier Canine Aquatics Competition) erects a big rectangular pool stretching precisely 36 feet – a big ruler-like measurement runs the length of the pool allowing judges and crowd exact calibration – with a dock cum runway attached to one far end.  From this metal gangway owners or DockDogs representatives entice their canine athletes to long jump into the pool (Big Air), retrieve little rubber duck thingies (Speed Retrieve), and launch from the dock at heights not yet exceeding the world record of 8’3” in a sort of high jump (Extreme Vertical).

My god, DockDogs is the happiest place in the world.  Spectators situate themselves in varying reposes of sloth upon the hillside overlooking the pool, many with border collies and yellow labs and golden retrievers and weimaraners bounding around and over their outstretched legs.  No shih tzus in sight, stupid lacey bows holding bangs over foreheads.  This is a place for mountain, athletic, uber-dogs.  No purse dogs, at all.

And everyone – every single person on the hillside – has a goofy, almost drugged smile.  As I find an open patch of grass next to a dog named Kirby D, a caramel colored log of fluff with golden eyes who promptly shakes out his soaked coat all over me, I myself start smiling.  I mean, really, like, showing my teeth and wrinkling my eyes smiling. I even guffaw and pat Kirby on the flank.

“Bazoonga!” the hulking linebacker of an MC bellows over the PA as a dog launches some 12 feet through the air and into the pool.  Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” booms over the PA, tangling with the MC’s excited introductions and up-keeping of canine statistics.  Mr. Bigley, who looks like a Jack Russell, follows his handler onto the dock and bounces up and down and round and round as a retriever toy lashes about him, the handler whipping the little fellow into a proper frenzy.  Just when none of us can take the enticement any longer, the handler heaves the toy into the pool.  Mr. Bigley explodes forward little legs churning.  The crowd, obviously rooting for any dog named with the “Mr.” honorific, tenses.  Mr. Bigley founders at the edge of the dock, however, skidding to a stop just before the water, his snout arching over the pool, and barks wildly at the floating toy spinning its little circles in the water.  Eventually, after much applause and MC-booming and handler cajoling, Mr. Bigley kind of yard-sales a meager 6’.  Although himself not disappointed and probably unimaginably ecstatic, Mr. Bigley’s owner must sense that their performance at the DockDogs Big Air Competition has come to a rather embarrassing conclusion.

The sun, now pulsating its altitude enhanced UV rays through paper-thin cirrus and directly into my skull, seems improbably cartoonish here at DockDogs.  Really, everyone – everything and I’m even talking about the sun – is just so intoxicated by this feast of leaping dogs and their hopping and encouraging and loving handlers.  “Boom!” and “Wham!” goes the MC as a ridiculously cute parade of dogs leap from their metal dock, negotiating the air with varying distressed or wildly exultant or flailing degrees of success.  The crowd goes nuts.  Everyone, everything is nuts on this hill over the pool.

Eventually, clapping open handed like a kindergartener, I stand and check my TMG schedule.  Although I kind of want to quit my job and join the DockDogs traveling circus, the Gibbon Games Slackline Comp (Qualifier Rd 1) has begun over in Gear Town/Solaris, wherever that is.  Sadly, but still really happily, smiling Kyler and I maneuver our way through prostrate humans and their zig-zagging hounds, off to see what I can only imagine as a human transposition of the DockDogs event, except without the water.

Friday, Very Early Afternoon

One comes to expect certain things from one’s outdoor festival, if one has survived enough of them.  The onrushing clickity-clack of free-wheeled bike tires growing louder in your posterior means one must prepare for a great two footed leap sideways.  Everyone will have obscene, sculpted, entirely bronzed calves.  At night these very same marble-calved folk pull Patagonia R2s or Marmot puffies over their heads.  They have to take off their ball caps to do this, under which hides the most fantastic sun-bleached mountain scruff always situated in the perfectly odd-angled touslement.  Occasionally, an elderly man in a leather fedora – wearing a shark tooth necklace – will remark just how amazing this or that is, don’t you think?  You will see freeride bikers in tight jeans, road bikers with shaved legs, world class climbers who look like models, fly fisherman wearing oddly rainbow-reflecting polarized sunglasses.  There are mother’s pushing strollers who last week finished their 14^th Ironman competition, fathers hoisting their (Patagonia clad) toddlers who could tie a fly blindfolded in a wind tunnel, and teenagers who are so much stronger in their respective sports than you will ever be at anything in your whole long life.  You also know that you will kind of hate those teenagers, in a Well-I-Could-Probably-Kick-That-15-Year-Old’s-Ass-If-Nothing-Else kind of way.  But still, you probably couldn’t.  You will find yourself party to conversations about whether such and such a climb is 5.14d or 5.15a and whether such and such should be finally downgraded to 5.14b/c (although you will never, ever climb this hard), how the introduction of nonnative salmonids has negatively impacted the cutthroat species in the San Luis Valley, preferred open tread designs and knob lengths and profile shapes of mountain bike tires, and definitely the latest climbing/biking/paddling porn to rip asunder pre-determined expectations as to the human form’s ever-befuddling ability to crest the next highest ridge in futuristic athletic performance.  And finally, in some tree speckled mini-park on the festival grounds, you expect to see some jean-short wearing dipshits, having tied a length of 1” tubular webbing between two stout pines, walking back and forth above the ground, arms dallying hither and thither for balance, a faint wafting of pot kind of circumnavigating the whole scene.

And so, I do not expect what greets me at the Gibbon Games Slackline Comp (Qualifier Rd 1).  Pardon this, but it leaves me slack jawed.

Let’s get this out of the way.  Slacklining, as a “sport”, has charted a meteoric trajectory over the last couple of years.  Dean Potter, a professional climber and BASE jumper, has pushed the sport to new lengths by rigging a slackline between two canyon cliffs and walking the expanse without any means of safety but for his own mystical powers of concentration.  And just this last winter, “Sketchy” Andy Lewis, who looks like some apocalyptic version of Will Ferrill that could break all your ribs in one invisibly fast roundhouse to the mid-section, walked a slackline during Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime show, prompting a visit with Conan O’Brien.  Parents country wide felt the cumulative tug on their elbows, little Bobby or Sally hopping up and down and cooing, “Oh, I want one of those!”

In the end, I expect a meager crowd around this slackline “competition.”  I do not expect hundreds of people huddled shoulder to shoulder, standing up and down staircases, leaning over rails on the surrounding shopping center’s walkway, others reclining mere feet away from the line.  Kyler disappears into the maw, hunting out whatever photographers hunt for.  I slide through serpentine gaps in the cheering crowd, gently elbowing prepubescents and separating girlfriends from boyfriends, but just for a moment while I get through.  I have a press pass, after all.

Finally, finding exactly four square feet of open real estate, I get my first real look at the event.  The 2” slackline stands taut and rigged approximately 50 feet long, over 30 thick safety mats three feet below.  Atop this tiny filament, The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” pumping from all directions, a South American with ginger dreads sprouting from backwards ball cap, wearing cut-off jeans and knee high socks, bounces and contorts.  The MC, hidden somewhere in the brightly clothed crowd, analyzes the fellow’s ambulations with the sort of play-by-play I imagine cobbled together over precisely two 40s of Mickey’s and one Spanish cigarette the night before.  Soul Food, Buddha Butt Bounce, Butt to Revert, Crook, Scoot Back, Drop Knee, Chest to Back Bounce, Elbow Lever, Heel Clicker, Toe Tap, Spiral, Spread Air, 540 Free Fall, Frontside 360, Sticky 180, and on and on.

Now, I learned to slackline in 2001, while on a bouldering trip to Bishop, California.  I sucked, like, really bad.  Back then, memory serves, you kind of wobbled and frowned your way across the line, arms churning wildly.  The most bad-ass maneuvers ever displayed a sort of sit-on-the-line-to-standing position, reversing one’s direction and walking back and forth, or perhaps the odd bunny hop above the webbing.  Very cutting edge kinds of maneuvers.

Apparently, I am a dinosaur.  These guys are actually doing back flips and landing them!  They bounce from chest to back (Chest to Back Bounce), balance sideways on the outside of both feet (Soul Food), and use the line’s inertia to rocket them into the air while spinning 360 degrees before landing again (Frontside 360), wobble-free.  Such are their aerial dynamics that I begin chewing my lip, worried for the spectators crowded so close to the line.  A slackliner out of control – perhaps doing a back flip and terribly misjudging his landing – could easily end up in the lap of some bird-boned middle schooler, calling to action the few ambulances you occasionally spy in the wings at every outdoor festival.

An elderly gentleman standing nearby, his golf shirt tucked into a belted pair of pleated khaki shorts, nudges his trim wife, a visor shading her eyes from the implacable sun, just as the MC says, “A little butt to chest there.”

“That’s something!” he says.  “They’re like little monkeys!”

“I…uh”, his wife says.

Khaki Shorts is right, even if I feel some deep, confused umbrage at any elderly person struggling to understand the hedonistic refinements of an activity such as slacklining in their senectitude. But, he’s spot on – this is something.  These slackliners aren’t what I’d remembered.  Their assertory, protean manipulation of physical flux brings to mind Mary Lou Retton and Bart Connor.  I mean, they were Olympians.

Although hypnotic, the Gibbon Games has three more rounds to cycle through over the weekend and I’ve already sloughed off every paddling and biking event.  And the IFSC Bouldering World Cup (Men’s Qualifier) begins in an hour.  While a teenager orbits above what looks like fluorescent dental floss I climb the stairs and weasel my way through the howling crowd, through the outdoor industry’s Gear Town, and towards the Bud Light Lime Kayak Freestyle presented by First Ascent (Qualifier).

Friday, 1:20pm-ish

Oh, it’s so sad.  That’s all I can think.

I’m standing on the International Bridge, somewhere between the flying slackliners and the flying dogs, looking down at the Bud Light Lime Kayak Freestyle presented by First Ascent (Qualifier).  The flow – if I may be so bold – runs so meager that TMG officials have had to erect huge slats of plywood into the Vail Whitewater Park, thus diverting the trickle into a small runnel wherein playboaters may fashion their aerial kayaking maneuvers in these less than frothy environs.  I am even told that all stand up paddling (SUP) events have been cancelled because a fall off their ginormous surf boards may cause a serious head injury on the rocks usually hidden well-below the spume churning rapids.  SUP cancelled for danger!  Lo, the paltry water, for the sea janitors now banned (SUP folk really do look like “sea janitors,” standing atop their bloated boards and paddling away like high school janitors sweeping a narrow hallway).

I am stricken from my daydream by a short twenty-something woman in what looks like a flak jacket and military style helmet who squeegees me with river water as she bends over and shuffles through a mesh duffel.  Her father, maybe, stands beside her, looking worried.

“Seriously,” he says, “how’s your head?”

“It hurts really bad,” she shouts, standing up to face him and spraying me again.

“Did you hit it both times?”

“Yes.  Yes!”  And again, she bends over and flays me with mountain runoff.

She looks okay, though, helmet and all.  The kayakers below cycle through the event, each waiting to perform in shore-line eddies, eager to charge into the “wave” after the previous paddler loses control and is spit out.

The MC yaks the whole time.  Currently he’s launching into apologetic platitudes while, I can only imagine, gazing dourly at the trickle below.

“We are dealing with water that may or may not show up,” he says.  He explains that this water is free flowing – no dam release – and events like these are always a gamble.  The boats – Ronald McDonald red and yellow Jacksons, electric blue Daggers, mash-up swirly color Pyranhas – they just bob below in their eddies while a playboater in the hole performs, oh, say:  Superclean Cartwheels, Space Godzillas, McNastys, , or maybe the Tricky Whu.  I have no god damned idea what’s happening down there in the plywood reinforced hole, but I’m depressed about the water and wet from the woman water soldier and all I want to do is get out of here.

Friday, 1:50ish

On the way to the next event Kyler and I pass one of a million trillion bike taxis, this three wheel cab manned by a hipster looking dude wearing a tweed Gatsby hat, white button down shirt rolled to the elbows and adorned with skinny black tie, and gray Arc’teryx shorts.

“You guys want a ride in the Chariot of Destiny?” he asks, thin arms splayed wide.

Although we decline, maybe we shouldn’t have, because we miss the Teva Slopestyle presented by Chipotle (Qualifier).

Friday, 2:49 On The Button

Kyler and I, inside the orange fence, mill about the IFSC Bouldering World Cup (Male Qualifier).  Young MC’s late 80s hit, “Bust a Move,” bounces and bops from the PA as a crowd slowly gathers in the parking lot.  Out in the pedestrian masses, roving Rocky peaks below the bill of my Patagonia ball cap (yes, me too), I see one, a half dozen, a dozen people I’ve climbed with.  Hell, the girl from Hungary in the morning’s Women Qualifier, we had worked a particularly lovely boulder problem with her only three months ago in California!

The climbing world is very small.  Climbing in geographical paradigm presents finite loci of operation, from choss piles of crumbling sandy or greasy glassy basalt(see North Table Mountain in Golden, CO, just down the road) to world class alpine swirly sticky granite (see Rocky Mountain National Park outside of Estes Park, CO, just down the road).  You get the bug as a climber, you eventually end up traveling the country and then before you can sand the callouses from your totally gross hands you’re booked for Deep Water Soloing in Vietnam, traditional climbing in the Italian Dolomites, or dodging baboons for the next great boulder problem in South Africa.  It’s just part of the disease, expanding one’s library of Areas Visited and Classics Ticked, each day your climbing odyssey through the great rocky strata of Planet Earth growing finite, more finite, most finite, until maybe, someday, all that’s left is the Chossy Shit and Bouldering In Antarctica.  But that, you could never fit it all into a lifetime.  And besides, you could always just go to the climbing gym.

Anyway, because of climbing’s demarcations, you end up seeing the same people in different places.  Lady X wintering in Hueco Tanks, TX, two tents down, and didn’t you see her throwing herself at that long right hand move on Sunshine and Lollipops last spring in Squamish, BC?  Fellow Y sorting his sport climbing gear on the beach in Tonsai, Thailand, two huts down from yours, and didn’t you just see him a couple years ago queued up for Amarillo Sunset at the Red River Gorge in Kentucky?  Yeah, yeah, you chatted about your trips and how tough this and that is today because IT’S SO HOT and REALLY BAD TEMPS and GOOD LUCK BECAUSE THAT RIG IS GONNA BE IMPOSSIBLE TODAY!

There’s Will, the intern that just last week walked, camera earnestly in hand, into the Rock and Ice offices.  I met him in CA.  There’s John – who has finally grown into what I had thought of as a substantially over-girthed head – whom I met in Evergreen, CO.  There’s Cookie, who I knew as a little punk and then grew into a competing fury of crimping power and now no longer climbs but apparently enjoys watching other people climb.  I met him in Denver, CO.  There’s Chris, I met him in Morrison, CO, and Nina, saw her this spring in Endovalley, and there’s Kim Lee who just left me a text that he’s in the area climbing this weekend.  I met him in Korea.  I once saw a friend I’d met climbing in CA walking to a bouldering field in the hinterlands of India.  I sold a crash pad to a guy in CO whom I later befriended at Insubong Peak right outside of Seoul.  You see?  It’s, like, almost incestual.

I’ve even met Kilian Fischhuber – Austrian phenom, last year’s TMG World Cup champion, long-time boyfriend of Anna Stohr, ranked numero uno en el mundo, and really an awful nice guy – who now mounts the mats, buzzer calling he and crowd into great focus and concentration, and the Men’s Qualifier thus begins.

Like his girlfriend Anna (they are both incredibly, Cover Girl/GQ attractive, which should make everyone hate their magnifi-mating, but they’re just so affable and pleasant that hating seems a projection of self-loathing or psycho-libel or something), Kilian ruminates from the mats over more agonizing Dubstep, and when I look down to my feet horrifyingly tapping out the Amazonian beat, I miss Kilian’s flash of the problem and see him back in his seat, sliding off his climbing shoes and kind of dreamily smiling at the crowd, arm draped over the chair next to him.

It kind of goes on like this until Kilian has coolly dispatched the final hold of Problem Number Five, Timmy O’Neill back at the mic and trying to describe the ease with which he sussed each of the five problems.  Canadian Sean McColl, an elfish looking fellow, crushes.  Others crush.  All kinds of crushing.

American Daniel Woods, author of some of the world’s hardest first ascents, great American hope for a podium slot, does not crush.  Although his mere entrance onto the mats riles the crowd into a regular old tissy, he looks confused on Problem Number One, instantly aggravated.  A selection from my notebook:

Kilian on Men’s 3, Sean on Men’s 2, Dan Woods, M1.  DW looks EXACTLY like he does @ The Spot [Gym].  Khaki climbing pants + oversize white tee shirt.  This time has a flag on it.  Dan false start.  Falls 3xs.  Throws up his arms in confusion.  Falls for 4^th time.  Kilian sends, crowd getting pumped.  “Come on, Daniel!”  Daniel Woods does NOT send.  Big blows out mouth.  Slightly creased brows.

You get the picture.

Friday, Late Afternoon

After finishing a problem in the allotted five minutes, the athlete (from Japan, Australia, Germany, perhaps the Netherlands) must sit in a chair with their back to the climbing wall, facing the audience.  Viewing the next problem is strictly verboten, per IFSC regulations.  So, there they sit.  Looking at us, in some strange zoological irony.  They often bite their lips while kind of staring off into the middle distance, shaking their legs, shaking their hands, shaking their heads.  They dip hands into magnesium carbonate and blow on their fingers.  Some laugh and chat with the judges, but only the ones who have already smiled and pumped their fist at the crowd, hanging up there – controlled – from a final hold.  Some have dusts of white on their noses, making them appear to be exceptionally fit and motivated coke fiends.

I wonder what they make of us.  Do they wonder why we’re here, watching them, while a thousand climbing areas call our names just down the road?  It is strange, isn’t it, for a huge gathering of “core” athletes to skip a weekend at the crag/single track/playhole to watch a bunch of other “core” athletes doing what they kind of want to be doing?

I have a hypothesis about this.  Outdoor athletes perform their activities not in a stadium or gymnasium or on a field or pitch.  Generally speaking, they are alone – in the wilderness – or with a couple partners, a tight cluster of concentration and desire binding them in simulacrum to ascend the route, navigate the Class V rapid, or snag a small-stream trout with a Soft Hackle Beadhead.  It’s called “single track” in mountain biking for a reason.  A big wall climber might spend six days ascending a 2,000 foot route in Yosemite, only his gap toothed partner holding a poop tube to stare at during the waning light of each day.  I mean, it’s exactly what they want.  They are just where they’re meant to be roughly 361 days a year.

For many “core” athletes, however, the TMG provides a four day reprieve from the lonely pursuit of perfection, a sort of fellowship with their Patagonia-clad brethren, an escape into the ether with the greatest athletes the sport can provide, from all over the globe (even if you’ve already met them like two years ago at the base of that one gnarly route in Kalymnos, Greece).  You want to see the possibilities, the exigencies of world-class performance?  They’re on display at the TMG.  You want to chat with that guy/gal you’ve been reading about in all the glossies, buy him/her a beer at the after-party, rub shoulders with the dude who just dropped a monster waterfall in a snub-nosed kayak?  Stay out late at the TMG.

***

The men cycle through, an endless procession of lean musculature, the five-minute buzzer breaking Dubstep like a pulse over a pulse.  I fight my way through photographers and squeeze by Alex Puccio and say “hi” to Cookie and see a French guy with frosted hair like uncooked spaghetti jutting from his head crawling up the wall and I wonder if the safety pins holding on the athletes’ number cards have ever mini-gored their backs during a fall and this makes me incredibly nervous for some reason and then I’m out, damn near sprinting from the IFSC Bouldering World Cup (Men’s Qualifier) because I don’t need any more fellowship and indeed I only need a Chipotle burrito and I know, terribly and fucking sadly, that I must still visit the slackliners over at Gear Town and the bikers over at Golden Peak and I think maybe you should forget about everything I just said.

Friday, Very Early Evening

The slacklining is still going on.  I watch it for indeterminate minutes.

Friday, Evening

Before I know why I’ve leapt into the air – shoulders hunched and face twisted savagely as if I’m leaping through a flaming airborne hula hoop – a nefarious KABOOM echoes through Vail Village and up the slopes.

“Jesus!” I say, landing, if I might, with perfect style.

“Tire blowout,” says Kyler, arms casually resting on the camera case slung across his belly.

“You know,” an MC tells everyone for a radius of a mile or slightly less, “when we hear that sound back in New Jersey we duck.  But in a nice mountain town like Vail you can be pretty sure that’s a blown tire.”

I’ve blown a tire before.  You know what, I’ve blown lots of tires, a velocipedic failure after which my person is generally transported above, in front of, and directly below my handlebars. It has not once sounded like that fucking Claymore explosion.  I reckon the boys over here at the Teva Slopestyle presented by Chipotle (Finals) are playing with serious gaseous contents.

To describe the big-air course erected/excavated especially for the Slopestyle event, I ask you to picture your local skate park.  Now expand about an acre and cover entirely with dirt and dust.  Basically, that’s it.  I’ve never seen anything like it before (I am a locomotive biker, which means I get here and there by bike – here/there definitely not 27 feet above loose and clotted dirt).  So, the guys, mostly from Canada and the States and a couple out-of-continenters, charge this course on tweaked and shrunken mountain bikes (they look like a BMX bike and a mountain bike had very low-tech sex).  They jump and kick and flip and go completely nuts on the course for less than 30 seconds.  Judges score each rider on style, difficulty, big air, creativity, and other things bike people find appealing and exciting.

This is the last event of the day and the place is packed.  The waning sunlight washes Vail Village, the mountains, clouds, the crowds, the dirt for chrissakes, in a wonder of soft golden halo, kind of reminiscent of close up soap opera portraiture.  Although we have climbers and dog folk and the odd fly fisherman and paddlers milling about, a formidable percentage of the crowd exhibits a slightly more disheveled look.  I am speaking charitably.

Freeride bikers, by my initial estimation, dress just like hipsters that keep at the whole hipster thing even without a SoCal trust fund. Transpose the branding and you’ve got the gist.  Tight jeans, check.  Assorted headware (brand: Volcom), check. Skate or bike shoes, check.  Disheveled fantastic hair, check.

This, on an aside, reminds me how funny it is that many if not most rebellious and life-risking outdoor types – climbers and paddlers and bikers and not fly fisherman – huck aside conventional ball sport Americana in pursuit of their outdoor lifestyle or passion or raison d’etre or bla bla bla, but always end up wearing a uniform anyway.  I mean, me too.  How else would the lay person guess who exactly is behind the legendary achievements and stupefying exploits of the rebellious and life-risking outdoor type?  It’s only when we’re all dressed in Patagonia and Volcom and The North Face that things become confusing, the waters muddied, all of us kind of suspiciously eyeing one another and wondering where exactly did these poseur rebellious and life-risking outdoor types come from?

And how did I know it, but speaking of the uniform, there he is:  the Chariot of Destiny guy, standing on his pedals in the midst of this great outdoor swarm, holding court with his people, kind of lazily smiling and oscillating his head ever so slowly.  How perfectly fitting, I think, as I adjust my Patagonia ball cap against the sun ever so slightly.

***

Kyler and I join the freeriders and media inside the fence, on the dirt now, amidst the “spines” and “berms” and ginormous, scrotum-shriveling “ramped jumps.”  My god, media everywhere, photographers so nose deep in their cameras and cycling through photos-so-far it’s a wonder they get anything done, ever.  I cross the dirt field to the Second or Third Jump, stepping over and around bikes chucked to the dust like shiny skeletons, helmets lanced onto handlebars.

I seem to interrupt some sort of photographerly tussle here at the Second or Third Jump.  They’re like ants in a giant dirt ant farm, these camera people, roving here and there, clicking and filming and skeetering off to the finish and then under the launch ramp and then on one knee staring into their great humanity recorders.  These two guys, they’ve both spotted an angle or whatever and now the concomitant jockeying for who gets to squat where.

A skinny, older gent in all black stands over a huge British (I deduce this from his British accent) fellow with blazing ginger hair, prostrate on his belly and elbows below the Second or Third Jump.  The standing gent mentions that he’d had his eye on this particular enclave for some time.  What about that?

“You can lay on top of me,” deadpans the horizontal ginger.  A tense moment of silence, Brit Ginger v. Gent All In Black.

“I guess it’s all yours,” replies Gent All In Black, slinging his matching black Canon and puffing little dust clouds as he seeks alternative angles, perspectives, fields of depth.  The Brit Ginger follows his retreat for a moment and then sticks his freckled nose back in his viewfinder.

From my stance kind of in front of/almost beneath the Second or Third Jump the MC introduces another freerider who is suddenly off, the gathered and still gathering throngs roaring.  I catch sight of him pistoning his legs like mad and wonder why anyone would choose blue jeans when a more ductile fabric would obviously allow a more friction-free pistoning experience and then he’s ten feet in the air and knocking his front tire off a huge wooden kick wall.  He lands so perfectly I’m not sure how to quantify his expertise and then the bike is jerking from side to side as the pistoning thing happens again and he hits the Second or Third Jump – Brit Ginger and me right there – with what I gather as suicidal speed and he’s over the lip and man o’ man he’s in the air and it’s looking a little caddywompus and oh shit oh shit oh shit!

I think he’s dead.  I’d be dead.  Apparently, through forces obscured by my biking ignorance, he’d landed the Second or Third Jump slightly off course.  In any case, he’d gone ass over teakettle into an explosion of dust; right shoulder, neck, face, and cranium digging in like a trenching tool.  He sluiced along for what seemed an age, finally coming to rest all lumpy and definitely dead looking.  A rush of bikers scramble past me, but they get nowhere near our man before he stands, smiles, plucks his helmet off, and grabs his obviously sturdy bike and poof, he’s gone into the crowd of freeriders and photographers, back slaps and “Jesus!” and all that.

Let me caveat what I’m about to say:  I don’t want to see anyone seriously injured.  But, after the excitement of the first freerider I’ve ever seen perform in competition take a monumental face plant from 20 or so feet, I fixate on pedal driven disaster.  That first digger has filled the whole place with this visceral electricity, shocking crowd/photographer/your lone narrator to strict attention.  The crowd roars louder, the tires seem to boil-tear the dirt, the free-wheel clickity-clack like an automatic weapon barks, the sun glints through airborne spokes like a laser light show.  Everything gets more intense.

Nothing, from what I’ve seen so far, compares with the energy and vibrancy and basic all-around bad-assness of Teva Slopestyle presented by Chipotle (Finals).  The teeth-gritting speed, the whump of mounting a ramp at such speeds, the airborne freerider and his bike looming an elongated and warped shadow upon the dirt way, way below, and then the blast of tires landing and the pistoning again and the honey-colored sun glinting off helmet and seat stems and spokes like a strobe light until he’s up again and doing a back flip up there in the way blue and then he’s gone, down another ramp and pedaling away from you towards the frenzied TMGers and god damn it really is just about the most exciting thing ever.

Saturday, Early Morning

Ostensibly, one might consider Saturday the apex of any four day weekend mountain festival.  This is correct.  Saturday is Family Day.  By the time we arrive in Vail Village mid-morning Mom and Dad and Kid(s) swarm the streets and little walkways linking Golden Peak and Gear Town and finally and most especially Adventure Village.

Of all the TMG things to cynically point at and say “I hate that,” of those few, Adventure Village stands out as my brow-wrinkling, migraine-punching, agony-inducing polestar.  Located at TMG Ground Zero – cunningly tucked right below DockDogs – Adventure Village stands as either looming testament to the wonder of youth and innocence or testament to tubal ligation and vasectomy.

Per Teva Mountain Games Official Summer Program:  “Outdoor lifestyle fun for the whole family!  You and your family can get a taste for a few of the adventure sports featured at the Teva Mountain Games.  Kids can learn to kayak ‘sit-on-top’ style in a giant water tank, climb on a portable climbing wall or cheer on the pups as they jump to victory in the DockDogs competitions.  The best part?  All activities in the Adventure Village are free and fun for the entire family.”

Alternatively, per journalistic liberalities:  “All family-less attendees should take great pains to seek surrogate paths around Adventure Village at all costs to one’s hectic and time-sensitive schedule thoughtfully scrabbled together every morning before entering the TMG maw.”

Every mountain festival provides a place for kids to congregate and get tangled in your legs and cause you to trip over them or otherwise leap out of the path of a somersaulting four-year-old and into the onrushing charge of something like the Chariot of Destiny, a dire situation indeed.  This morning, passing through Adventure Village on our way to IFSC Bouldering World Cup (Semi-Finals), Kyler and I dodge a mother (inferred) out of control on twin pogo sticks that look like independent stilts on springs (are you fucking kidding me?), a tiny pig-tailed creature chasing after a dog in a red bandana, and an out of control adolescent ejected from a balance board.

You see, I’m not worried for my own physical well-being in a place such as Adventure Village, but rather the outcome of a careening, buck toothed nursling tripping head first into my upward trajectoring knee as I power-walk through the spinning madness of aforementioned youth and innocence.  My worst nightmare is holding Buck Tooth in my arms, a great crimson gash spewing forth the very life-sustaining effluvium the youngster needs to grow up healthy and strong and someday develop his own fear and loathing of places like the AV.  And then the swooping parents and the elbow to my shoulder and I’m on the ground pleading forgiveness and offering righteous platitudes and then the finger pointing and the “Why don’t you watch where the heck you’re going, you bald jerk” and I’m up and speed walking away and here come the deep, cavernous screams and Buck Tooth is bawling and over my shoulder I hear, “That bald man can’t hurt you anymore.”  So, you see, I circumnavigate AV whenever humanly possible.

Saturday, Mid-Morning

We safely arrive at the World Cup vestibule under which Semi-Finals has already begun.  Four US athletes, two Kiwis on the wall.  Crowd density has grown for the Semis and I can barely squeeze behind the orange fence.

Things are happening quickly now, the cattle drive of climbers racing from one problem to the next, a neat little five minute window opening, closing, onto the next problem.  The Semi-Final problems, all new and blue blobby or blue symmetrical again, definitely prove more a challenge for the early round gang.  A lot more falling and tilt-headed puzzling or inability to parse together one move at all and quitting early, the chalk bag kind of just defeated and swinging at thigh length as the thwarted climber puts a good face forward and takes a seat and stares at us staring at them.  Still, the pace grown manic since Qualifiers, the boulderers obviously sense the time to step it up has officially arrived.  Timmy, still under his little tent, tells us.  It’s time to step it up.

As a spectator, you’re not quite sure what to do with yourself.  Timmy asks us to step it up, that our cheers burn like jet fuel the very soul of the competitive climber and so we step it up and shout priceless chestnuts like “Come on, Netherlands!” and “Allez Allez Allez!” and “Sick, Daniel!” and “Pinch the shit out of it!”  As a good patriotic Colorado boy, I’m keen to follow each American on the wall, to cheer at the right times and moan at other correct times when things do not go so right.  When the Americans are either resting between rounds or stuck in isolation and the comp savvy internationals are looking very strong and confident on the wall, I note my waning attention.  I find this unacceptable in journalistic terms.

Also, this is climbing, a sport (or lifestyle, bro) not so far removed from the hippy, I-must-be-a-societal-castoff-because-I-quit-my-job-to-scale-rocky-faces-and-so-feel-free-to-call-me-counterculture, dirty folks down there in the desert, American-type origins.  It ain’t competitive, brah.  I climb for myself, dude.  Okay.  What I was heading to is that most climbers register an evolved quadrant of the brain commanding them to barf entirely obvious or unnecessary climberly shibboleths in the general direction of anyone planting hand/foot upon stone/plastic and thus scheming upward ascent.  Yes, it’s cheesy, but (most) climbers really want to see one another succeed.  Although painfully overused, sometimes contrived, and always devoid of actual usable counsel, I find climbers’ hooting and hollering endearing, a real offshoot of some soulful monkey-descendent desire to see their brethren ascend up, up, up.

And so, with the Americans locked into their highly oxygenated and pitch black isolation chambers (or whatever an IFSC Bouldering World Cup (Semi-Finals) isolation area looks like), it’s time to muster up a dark horse to whom I may provide my own special advisements and heartfelt exhortations.

Let me tell you why I chose Jain Kim as my sleeper, my own private also-ran to maybe, possibly find the podium, a slim chance indeed.  First of all, Jain is Korean and I lived in Korea for a couple years.  You can’t deny this practically makes me Korean myself.  While touring the Korean climbing scene I’d heard of this Jain girl, a tiny automaton Swarzenegger-as-rock-climbing-Terminator type of freak, crushing in the gym and on the competition circuit.  I’d also heard she was exceptionally tiny, which seems especially important when considering very successful climbers (do people still have the misperception that Koreans are short?  I’m here to tell you that I did, that for once in my life I imagined my 5’9” frame towering over the folk of this Lilliputian nation, my great balding dome unseen from so far below.  This did not come to pass.  Koreans are as tall as anyone else.  One cannot escape one’s puggy karma, I guess maybe unless one teaches kindergartners or elementary school kids.  I taught kindergartners and elementary school kids in Korea).

This fragile tether the only thing connecting the two of us, I began rigorously cheering for and taking notations of Jain Kim’s performance.

***

Jain Kim, my special dark horse, will probably not make the Finals.  This is how I know.  On Women’s Problem Number One, Jain falls about 2/3 of the way up.  Her foot pops on her next try.  She does not send before the buzzer peals.  Problem Number Two, she flashes, does not fall, waves politely to the crowd who really is cheering quite strongly for her success.  She delicately slides these dainty slippery things over her climbing shoes, walks back to the spectator-facing chairs, and performs – right in front of me at this point – a stretching maneuver, hands intertwined and arms slithering and circling quite violently around her bun of black hair and it makes my shoulder so absolutely pulsate with stabbing pains that I cringe looking at her.  Timmy is talking about climbing in the Olympics and then the buzzer and then Jain has her shoe-covers off and she floats (really, she seems not to jog but rather float) to Problem Number Three.  But she’s got bad beta, she can’t get far, she’s flummoxed, her small frame stretched to it’s very limit, until all of a sudden she’s listening to her interior snake charmer and she’s actually climbing higher by employing the most insanely backwards beta and then the buzzer sounds and she falls, her tongue out at the audience as if to say, “I tried, I tried, and thank you for cheering for me, you really stepped it up.”

By the time Jain faces Problem Number Four the Americans have returned, Daniel Woods the primary focus.  And so, although I must follow my dark horse, it is back to the manic viewing, the tennis court head swivel the only way to see more than 50% but way less than 80% of the action.  Jain, I see, has her tongue all the way out of her mouth, facing the crowd.  That can’t be good.  Back to Daniel.  He is slapping his thighs, his jaw pulsing with those teeth clenched cables that signify universal things about one’s immediate temperament.  Jain.  She’s up, oh no, she’s back down, and that’s that.  That tongue, now a signifier, remerges and she raises her fair arms and waves to us, showing appreciation, saying, “I tried pretty hard and I get that some of you were watching.”  Shit.  Back to Daniel.  He roars through Problem Number One, but time’s almost gone, tennis court head swivel to Daniel (one more hold), Clock (a couple more seconds), Daniel (controlling the final hold), Clock (0:00) and the crowd is absolutely berserk although it remains unclear if he’s beaten the buzzer.

The front-runners, some American, have finally escaped isolation.  DeLorean gray cirrus suffocate the morning heat and by the time the American Alex’s begin crushing problems the first raindrops sizzle upon the black asphalt.   Winds tear down Golden Peak and spectators elbow into their packs for soft-shell and windproof or maybe eVent layers.  I imagine the climbers must be stoked for the wind, the swampiness of the morning replaced by crisp, well-brushed blue blobs.

Saturday, Early Afternoon

I don’t want to be here anymore.  I keep thinking that to myself, no matter what event, at some point.  I don’t want to watch this anymore.

I have a two pronged theorem for always, eventually feeling this way.

Prong One:  The TMG, at 1:20 in the afternoon, provides approximately six different events, from the Teva Freeride Dual presented by Chipotle (Qualifier) to the launching of the Eddie Bauer Mud Run presented by Maui Jim, and all kinds of stuff in between.  I want to see it all.  I am a climber.  Enter existential psycho-athletic conundrum.

Prong Two:  There’s something mildly off putting about canned outdoor events.  Slackliners pinwheeling like Bath Salt addicts in front of the Alpine Bank, Vail Fine Art Gallery, and Forre & Co.?  You must agree, something is wildly amiss.  A huge bouldering competition held in a parking lot shouldered by a soccer field and the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens?  No, no, no.  Within a hundred mile radius of this blazing parking lot one could happily climb – in any discipline – for the rest of one’s life without repeating a single route, problem, or peak.  Kayakers dourly holding court in deflated eddies below great slats of creek soaked plywood?  Oh, for shame.  Generally speaking, about an hour is enough to satiate any hard-core mountain athlete before some deeply upsetting realization begins clawing its dirtied fingernails into your soul.  One must eject, walk on, find the next event, before the whole thing sours on the vine.  Check out the dogs.  The dogs are always good.

Saturday, Afternoon

A compendiary note on the 2 Fly X-Stream presented by Maui Jim (Semi-Qualifier/Rd 2).  I must admit that I accidentally stumble upon the fly fishing event, located at the International Bridge (kayakers all gone right now), having wandered visionless while hiccupping after a wicked tasty jalapeno burger.

A woman of middlish age, Mary Ann or Sandy (I am confused), stands atop the bridge, swaying her tiny fluorescent green fly back and forth, mesmerizing, charming.  Her head, pony tail pulling face taut and most of that face hidden beneath great polarized sunglasses, cranes from her body and over the railing like an excavator shovel, mouth tight lipped and glowing white from pressure.  Below her, in the creek and on either rocky shore, lay hula hoops and wooden cut-outs, surrounded by lazing judges.  Five targets in all.  I deduce this is some sort of timed, precision event.

Mary Ann or Sandy snaps the fly, which the MC says he specially designed just for this event (customized leader, yarn for fly, protect the audience).  “You can clap,” he admonishes us, “she can hear ya!  Git’ ‘er goin!”

Mary Ann or Sandy is a wizard, a fly fishing necromancer communing with the corporeal world in geometric and physic-laden languages I cannot hope to fathom.  She goes 4/4, her neon yarn thingy slapping back and forth through the sky before a silken inertia sends it sailing into a pink hula hoop, a blue wooden cut out.  It sits there for a moment like a glowing, radiated dead thing.  And then, snap, its swaying above her pony tail again.  She’s on fire.

My hiccups cease.  Mary Ann or Sandy falls apart in the end, her fly errant and belligerent but still enthralling to watch slicing the growing bruises of the sky.  My head kind of entranced, I wobble away from the International Bridge, the gathered folk politely applauding Mary Ann or Sandy’s magical performance.  I am befuddled and feel somehow tricked to have enjoyed such a thing.  That is all I have to say about fly fishing at the Teva Mountain Games.

Saturday, Early Evening

We have a saying here in Colorado:  If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes.  Coloradans adore this aphorism.  Everyone likes to say it, especially when an obvious non-native (the temerity of some people) squawks about an afternoon drizzle or a bit of shoulder-season and dandruffy snow.  “You don’t like the weather?” they’ll ask, eyebrows tented.  “Just wait fifteen minutes.”  And then they’ll finish making your latte or tuning your skis or, like, re-caulking your bathtub.

And so the incredible heat and that gargantuan alpine sun, it’s gone.  It’s really coming down just minutes before the IFSC Bouldering World Cup (Finals) begins, the crowd growing by the raindrop.  They know that in 15 minutes the weather will change, because they don’t like what is right now happening and Coloradans are cup-half full kinds of Americans.

Because I haven’t seen the very beginning or very end of any competition, let alone the IFSC Bouldering World Cup, I sneak a peak at the standings taped near the isolation area well before the event (isolation holds neither darkened chambers nor oxygen tanks, just a small wooden warm up wall and some chairs).  There, like I couldn’t have guessed, sits Kilian in the Number One spot.  Canadians, French, Japanese, Germans.  No Americans.  The American Alex’s are faring much better over in the women’s bracket, Puccio coming into Finals Numero Uno and Johnson right behind her at Number Three.  The strongest female comp climber in the world, Anna Stohr, sits between the Alex’s.

***

A mechanical camera crane jib boom looms over the crowd like some terrible robotic probe, drifting over heads and kind of bobbing and weaving the way that camera crane jib booms are wont to do.  GoPro helmet cams have been fastened to the top of each problem, 1-5.  Cookie is here with his camera.  Kyler out there somewhere.  Will representing R&I.  Hundreds and hundreds of others, all recording.  Still, I am the only one with a notebook and pen, which isn’t working out so well in the downfall.

The rain is breaking off, however.  It’s been about 15 minutes.  A beat before 5pm the 12 Finalists are invited onto the mats, waving big hand over head/bend at elbow waves and so festooned with sponsorship patches that they look very much like incredibly hale and trim NASCAR drivers.  Timmy informs us that the athletes will be given two minutes to consider Final’s problems, as a group of men and women.  Once again, the climberly teamwork, the mutual desire for bouldering success, the apparent lack of overt hating.

The comp begins.  The rain has ceased.  I can’t possibly be expected to keep play-by-play notes on all the churning action, the crowd growing up hillsides and throughout the wet asphalt parking lot and the Napolean Dynamite guy somewhere out there going “Hah!”  But I do.  Seven pages of notes.

I will not bore you with another transcription.  I’ll say this:  watching world class athletes exhaust every last broken molecule of will and tendon upon that wall has the crowd so stoked I think the whole parking lot might just spontaneously combust.  Only two things split the cranking Dubstep and those are a) the face squeezed and open mouthed Viking cries each boulderer cranks to the sky when latching that final blue blob hold and b) the spectator’s ear crunching explosions of psyche.  I am dumbfounded and find the whole seen hard to describe other than to say do not – ever – miss an opportunity to see a canned outdoor festival featuring an IFSC Bouldering World Cup.  Seriously.  Ever.

I will let you – for now – guess who won.

Saturday, Evening

Kyler and I wander exhausted through the wafting miasma of beer, pot, and cigarette smoke at what TMG calls Checkpoint Charlie, home of tonight’s Free Concert: Bud Light Mountains of Music, The Expendables.  Checkpoint Charlie also houses the Teva House (I escaped indoctrination), the Chipotle Mobile Kitchen (lines always too long), and the Vail Mountain Coffee Caffeination Station (my personal favorite).  Tonight, like always, a stage rests at the thermometer-like ball end of the street.  Checkpoint Charlie is rocking.  A gaggle of grungy dudes in dreadlocks and nasty duds writhe on stage, melding some sort of rock/reggae thing right there in public.  Also, the drummer is the singer, and I think no one should ever trust a drummer who sings the bulk of a band’s songs.  Totalitarian, that’s what that is, the rest of the band mere puppets parsed together in the drummer’s grand scheme of, in this case, a really forgettable – although not outright shitty –  rock/reggae sort of thing.

The crowd bumps up front like some great athletic pulse held restricted too long.  It’s a throng here at Checkpoint Charlie, bikers dancing next to fly fisherman and slackliners drinking from kayakers’ water bongs (that isn’t really happening, but can you imagine if it were?).  Brotherly and sisterly and mountain athlete love and that whole deal.

Kyler and I, still soaked from the rain and exhausted from 13 hours on our feet.  No, this is not the place for us.   All I want is Dylan’s slippery white couch to fall onto, writhe into for some odd number of minutes, and finally pass out upon, dead weight.

Sunday, Early Morning

We are standing at the Covered Bridge where the Road Bike Time Trials presented by Thule are well under way.  Mark is somewhere, probably seriously appraising his elephantine thighs in a bathroom mirror and gritting his teeth to stubs that he has to race in the Beginner Category.  I haven’t seen him at all this morning.

Ryan, clothed in one of those bikerly jerseys – his featuring Bucky Badger (University of Wisconsin mascot) apparently mid-stride on his way to somewhere very important – and matching spandex “shorts,” is very nervous.  I’m standing right next to him, kind of scootching out of his way as he fidgets with this and that.  This is Ryan’s first competitive bike race, his first Time Trials.  He’s been biking for two months.

“Nervous?” I ask.

“Nah.  Just going for a cruise.”  He smiles unnaturally large, too many teeth.  It is the smile of a man preparing himself for something that may just prove to be very painful or sinister or perhaps a wicked amalgamation of both.  It is also completely earnest and endearing.

I mention something about all the bikes, all the high tech equipment glistening in the early morning sun (not a cloud in the sky today), the clicking of tires, helmet’s being fastened, bike shoes clacking on the cement.

“Notice my aluminum frame,” says Ryan, Vanna White-ing his arm across his newish Trek bike.  “My somewhat light tires, next to carbon (points), carbon (points again), carbon (Vanna White thing again).  Whatever,” he growls, slapping his chicken-thigh white thighs, “It’s all right here!”

The guys are called to a long queue of bikers, most of whom are competing in the 55+ bracket.    Mark and Ryan stand together, an exposition in diametrically opposed years/months/days/minutes spent training and sweating and preparing for a moment such as this.  I occasionally must avert my eyes from all the latexy looking spandex.  Wind-shear, I know, but please.

Each Time Trial athlete launches from a trapezoid shaped wooden ramp, right there in the middle of the street.  A huge, World’s Strongest Man looking behemoth with bulbous gut and thick, tubular arms holds each rider’s seat as they mount their bikes and clip into their pedals.  The MC ceaselessly repeats rules and regulations: no drafting, special passing rules, stay right of cones, remember for God’s sake stay right of the cones.  Then the buzzer, TMG Strongman’s push and release and down the ramp each rider pedals and for how many minutes more they do this exact same thing, the pistoning thing again, I do not know and do not wish to imagine.

Ryan, finally on the trapezoid and Strongman struggling to right Ryan-on-Trek as he weaves and tilts dangerously sideways like he’s mounting a spooked horse and then the buzzer and we cheer and Ryan is pedaling away, all concentration and not looking at any of us.  Mark mounts the trapezoid a couple minutes later and the MC shouts, “Whoa, this guy’s ready!”  Something about his Cyclo-cross tires has stirred great admiration in the MC.  I don’t know what a Cyclo-cross tire is, although Dylan tells me Mark’s been riding on them for a year, regardless of which competition he’s entered.  He’s thrust down the ramp with the buzzer and the MC’s gaze follows him.  He’s been greatly moved by Mark’s Cyclo-cross tires.

Two riders later a kid – maybe a freshman in high school – plops up onto the trapezoid in a cotton t-shirt, those shiny kind of basketball shorts, and sneakers, braking his mountain bike and relinquishing his seat to the great catcher’s mitts that are TMG Strongman’s hands.  I wouldn’t trade my Uni-Ball for his bike.  No toe clips.  Rusty derailleur.  No bar ends.  This is what the TMG is all about, the MC tells us as the buzzer releases the freshman mountain biker for his run at the Road Bike Time Trial presented by Thule.  I think, God speed, brave young man.  And then I think, I wonder if he’ll catch Ryan.

Sunday, Morning

Dylan has called me a “pussy” for the second time in five minutes.  He has asked what I have to lose.  He has also called me a pussy again.

I’m holding my head in my hands at TMG Ground Zero, on the steps encircling Golden Peak Lodge, where climbers of all ages and abilities may enter, seek out the appropriate counter, and enter the Eddie Bauer Citizen Bouldering Competition (Wave 1 and 2) for a nominal fee.  This experience, the TMG, has worked it’s dark devilry on me.  All this action, all these elite athletes performing their passions for us normal folk, it has sparked a desire to do what I can’t exactly put my finger on.  Compete?  Maybe.  I haven’t entered a climbing competition since 2003 and not felt a single urge to before this exact moment, but it’s not quite that.  Be a part of the community?  I think that’s more like it.  It’s not enough to be in the crowd anymore, after all this rubbernecking.  It’s time to join my brethren in vigorous outdoor recreation, to jump into the gullet of this great canned outdoor festival.

Sunday, Noonish

I am athlete number 2143.  I have a little square paper thingy to safety pin to the back of my tee shirt to prove it.  I pin it just so, very neurotically, exactly in the center, safety pins pointed out and strategically placed so that if they do unfurl and lance me in the back (my great, unsubstantiated fear), they should penetrate a nice skein of skin and fat I’ve been cultivating since my late 20s.

A couple hours ago I’d shared a bit of a Seinfeld moment with the helpful young lady who logged me into the event in the Golden Peak Lodge.  You see, citizens may enter the competition per ability level.  Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Open.  I’m here to tell you that I am no Beginner.  Intermediate only when hung-over.  Advanced means you can climb at least V7.  Open is V8 and above.  Brain scrambling quandary.  Understand, I am not in shape (my great and oft-quoted mantra).  Climbers who have jobs kind of float in and out of fitness as time permits, and time has permitted exactly bupkis over the last two months.  So, perhaps Advanced.  However, I’d just climbed a V8 up at Red Cliff on Thursday night.  But, it took me about an hour and a half.  The competition lasts two hours.  Jesus Christ.

After consulting another TMG staff member who rather curtly told me he would gladly hand over his 75 page IFSC regulations packet and then promptly shuffled away, I decided to enter Advanced.  Looking over my shoulder, strangely cocky but in the most unwarranted way, I said to Dylan, “Well, if I’m crushing I can always just write ‘Open’ on my score sheet.”

Sunday, Exactly 2pm

The TMG has brought me to this, sitting here where Anna Stohr and Daniel Woods and tiny Jain Kim sat only yesterday, competing to be the best in the world.  The crowd, as one would imagine, is much smaller.  I am older than some of the parents watching their children compete against me (with me?  It’s all jumbled now).  No one is cheering me.  Kyler, post-race-Ryan, and Dylan lean over the fencing separating land-bound citizens from climbing citizens and they have just the most smug little grins.

I have velcroed my Five Tens and chalked up my hands and chatted with Kody from Buffalo, NY and Chris from Denver, CO and another guy from Atlanta, GA.  This is their first competition, to a man, and they are jangled with nerves.  Kody says he is going to warm up on Problem Number 32, the hardest problem on the wall.  I advise him against this.  Chris admonishes me and says he’s following suit.  Atlanta just wants to have fun.  Atlanta is lying.  I, the second oldest dork in the competition, seriously want to avoid embarrassment, above all else.  I will not warm up on Problem Number 32.  My cockiness, I lost it somewhere between pinning 2143 to my shirt and standing up after pinning 2143 to my shirt.

That, about the cockiness, is not entirely true.  For a while there, before these butterflies began an ornate tap dance just behind my sternum, I felt pretty confident I was going to crush.  A number of variables meshed to construct this serious and erroneous miscalculation.  Empirically speaking:  I felt strong climbing at Red Cliff just a few days ago, sending this and that with relative ease, although I hadn’t been climbing much lately.  But, in climbing, one good day rarely guarantees another.  Theoretically speaking:  I suppose the World Cup competitors have lulled me into some hypnotic catalepsy of warped self-awareness.  For two days, through rounds and rounds and rounds, I had watched the iron-forearmed masses scan, mount, ascend, wave atop, and then drop from some of the most difficult artificial bouldering problems set on the planet at just that exact moment.  They’d made climbing look so easy.  To extrapolate, this must be easy for me, too.  I mean, it’s just a bunch of citizens.  And finally, parsimoniously speaking:  I really wanted – very secretly – to podium.

Sunday, Late Afternoon

I shall now relay some lessons learned up there on the Eddie Bauer Citizen Bouldering Competition (Wave 2) wall.  Those problems, the blue blobby ones, they are really fucking hard.  I discursively found that warming up on Problem Number 32 causes great consternation and abject loss of hope and locutions such as “I just came here for the hell of it” and “I mean, it’s just a comp – who cares?” as well as “Fuck!” and “This is bullshit!” and “I wasn’t going to hand in a scorecard anyway!”  I found the pressure heaped upon myself (by myself and – I will unambiguously certify this – not a soul else) caused me to climb with a self-conscious tick, a kind of pyscho-blinder narrowing my ability level to a pin-hole.  My Citizen pressure, more than anything else, had me stiff-leggedly sort of stilting my way from problem to problem, sighing deeply when others succeeded because Jesus, I get it, you’re so good, and catapulting myself from Problem Number 19 to 27 to 24 to 26 to 17 and on and on without a single god damned rest or much desired cigarette.

No need to really get into it any more, other than to say once you compete you really gain some nugget of understanding about how it must be for elite athletes, in front of us rubberneckers, to prove value to their sponsors, appeal to their fans, and fulfill some deeply personal and churning desire for perfection.  What I’m saying is that, dilated by the natural splendor of Vail and the magnification of both event (World Cup) and competition (Kilian and Anna), I would literally be stricken unable to perform from all the shitting-in-my pants I’d be doing.  That’s big pressure.  And they, Kilian and Anna, the bikers, slackliners and paddlers – and even old Mr. Bigsley and the rest of the doggies – made it all look so effortless, even in defeat or submission or thudding, crunching crash.  Mark, too, he of the watermelon thighs, he won both events he’d entered.  Easily.

But not Ryan.  Ryan got second-to-last place.  Can you possibly guess who he defeated?  That’s right.  The frosh on the K-Mart special without toe clips.

And not me, either.  I miss my podium, even amongst the lowly Advanced pedestrians against whom I so self-consciously sparred.  Yup, I get Fourth.  Which is more haunting than last.

Alas, as I unpin number 2143 from my tee shirt (entirely unmolested by sharp objects despite my jillion billion falls) I know I’ve come to a fine ending to my TMG experience, as all those mountain folk already steering Tacomas and Outbacks and Four Runners back to wherever, to Denver and Empire and Pueblo and Meeker, must also be ruminating upon.  You know what we’re all thinking?

I am so stoked to wait – alone in the wilderness with a bag of chalk or with a couple friends buzzing down single track or maybe with dad knee deep and casting on the Miracle Mile or even snatching the poop tube from my gap toothed buddy — exactly 361 days before I even consider doing this again.

This is a picture of my dog, Hank, yawning while wearing a fedora. It has nothing to do with this article. I just thought you might like it. Everyone likes dogs.

Post-Mortem

Non-fiction writers, and this is just my reckoning, tend to lean towards the pitifully self-conscious.  Like, self-absorbed with self-consciousness, a kind of ego scrubbing wherein nerve endings become acutely sensitive to stimuli directly involving their work, self-perception of work, and tertiary admonishment/praising of work.  In simulacrum, this mess devolves into some sort of Tolkien-esque battle between the Hobbit (the writer, brave but drinking too much and also small in stature and a bit shaky on the whole battle thing), the Orc (self-perceived manifestation of work, maybe) and Gandalf (tertiary critique of work, from exterior, sagacious parties).  This can all end quite unhappily.

To that I shall speak.

I recently finished a piece concerning the Teva Mountain Games in Vail, CO, which took place at the beginning of June.  But let’s take a step back.  Kind of get at the root of genesis, the cobbling together of “concept,” the writing, and finally appraising the final work.

To wit, my friend Kyler and I were driving back to Denver from a May bouldering weekend in Newlin Creek, CO, and we started jabbering about the Teva Mountain Games (TMG):  if we were going again, if it were worth it, if there might hide a story in Vail Village and all those competitions (biking, climbing, running, fly fishing, slacklining, dog events, et al).  We decided, quite excitedly, that yes, a story hid somewhere in there, somewhere in all the madness and conceit of a mountain festival.

Kyler and I are no great fans of mountain festivals.  Outdoor sport competition seems a farce to both of us, at least vis-a-vis the whole spectator paradigm.  Like, why would “core” athletes take a weekend off from climbing with their friends to go watch other people climb?  Do these spectators find more inspiration in watching others climb than actually climbing themselves, outdoors and in the wild?  Bullshit.

The vein to mine stood before us.  We felt anxious to lambast this whole thing, kind of Gonzo-style and with great aplomb.

Problems cropped up.

Cause of Death #1

So, Kyler and I decided to do the article, he taking photos and me panning the whole monstrosity as A) a huge waste of time and B) an opportunity for outdoor gear companies to sponsor things and people and so sell these things and people to noodle-brained dumbshits.  We were all set.  We nabbed press passes and took off, the article a Writ-on-Spec sort of deal I was sure I could eventually sell to someone, somewhere, to some sort of magazine.

By Friday morning (the TMG spans Thurs-Sun) I knew I’d be scrapping my modus operandi, wholesale. Not a good thing but by no means always a bad thing.  Indeed, I found myself absolutely smitten by the whole scene, the fly fisherman – tight lipped and entirely earnest – flinging nylon flies into hula hoops in some sort of accuracy competition, the DockDogs leaping into giant pools and bubbling great frothing happiness in even the most granite hearted among us (those would be trad climbers), even the slackliners, who performed at a nearly Olympic level of athleticism.  Unambiguously, I was gotten.  The TMG, despite all its “sponsored by Thule” and “brought to you by Chipotle” and GoPro this and GoPro that, it had me.  Against all situated and finely prepared apathy and insouciance, I became a fan.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with becoming a fan, especially when it manifests naturally.  I wasn’t trying to become a fan.  Indeed, I was fighting fandom!  I fought involvement!  And in the end I had joined the “Citizens’” bouldering comp, after having not competed, I think, since 2004 at the now defunct Phoenix Bouldering Competition.  I became…blissfully involved.  The whole thing just went sideways on me, in a vaguely pleasant way.

Alright.  Readjust.  I’m good at readjusting.  We left the TMG on Sunday afternoon with the knowledge that this whole prospective article had morphed into more of an essay on why events like the TMG matter to such independent folk as outdoor athletes.  Like, for 361 days a year we yearn to get out there – the way out – and find our own slice of contentment or pedestrian perfection all by our lonesome or with our closest, most trusted friends and partners.  For just four days a year, however, things like the TMG allow an aggregation, a kind of tete-a-tete for grimy parishioners with dirt wedged beneath fingernail and Patagonia ball cap atop hurricane hair.  Together, we could see what each other were up to.  And not only that; what the world’s best were up to.  But not for too long.  Just four quick days and then back to the dust and rattling tent fly and poop trowel.

I liked it.

Cause of Death #2

Alright, this is where the whole mess gets a little sticky.  I’d been reading a bunch of long-form literary non-fiction for, like, months.  David Foster Wallace, John Jeremiah Sullivan, George Orwell, Chuck Thompson, Zadie Smith.  These folks write for the Paris Review.  GQ.  Harper’s.  For lack of a better term, the Big Boys/Girls.  I am no DFW, no George Orwell.  That’s okay.  I’m cool with that.  Neither is anyone else.  Somewhere in the riddling convexities and folds of my sanguine brain, however, I thought I could give it a go – write a whopper, magazine word counts be damned.  I had never really written a sprawling essay before.  This was my chance.

So, I experimented.  I employed tools I had never employed before.  I took 74 pages of notes, nearly filling a Moleskin.  Not only that, but I followed a strict daily notation device, which I had constructed days before we left.  Each day:  note weather, note pedestrians, note conversation, note (“play-by-play”) each event, note smells, personalities, tonal and fucking contextual variations in everything I might have even almost heard over the crowd’s din, etc etc.

Lugging that bloated Moleskin back to my desk in Denver, I began engineering an outline, each rung of the literary ladder jotted down on its own individual flash card.  These I pinioned with binder clips.  A binder clip for each day.  A binder clip for running postulations and suppositions, hypotheses that would eventually coral the TMG into one tidy piece.

I got to 8,000 words and I had only written to Friday night.  Fuck.

By the time I’d clicked “save” for the first draft, I was scrolling through 16,000 words.  Do you know that most novels average out at around 65,000 words?  I’d written nearly a quarter of a novel in three weeks particularizing a four day outdoor festival.  Fuck.

You know who gets 16,000 word pieces published in the outdoor magazine trade?  Jon Krakauer.  That’s about it.  Like you don’t already know, but, I am no Jon Krakauer.  Fuck.

Cause of Death #3

After a couple of edits, weaning the beast to a skoshe over 13,000 words, I liked it.  I never like anything I write.  Published or not.  I don’t like any of it.  That’s a problem.

Cause of Death #4 (penultimate cause)

After exactly two run-throughs, I sent snippets of the monster to two magazines, which shall remain unmentioned.  One, as of this writing, has not responded.  The other, it was not good.  With words like “problems” and “unfortunately” and phrases such as “perhaps this would be best in another mag”…you get the gist.

But, I knew it.  I swear to god, I knew it before I sent it out.  You have to believe me.  But I sent it anyway.  Remember that whole “self-absorbed with self-consciousness” thing from before?  That, although dangerously capable of journalistic emasculation, rarely stops you from sending “it” out.  Especially late at night.

Cause of Death #5 (The Biggie)

Jesus Christ save me, I actually like it.  Still, after all that, I like it.

Coroner’s Report

Okay, so I might send this thing out to an online rag for hopeful publication, but I also just might not.  I would love to get it out there more than this middling blog, but if 85 people see it – and that’s it – well, that’s fine, too.  After all, it might suck!  But I don’t think so.

So, tomorrow I’ll shoot this thing out to ya’ll.  Although it might not find publication, it shall find a home right here.  If you like it, send it to friends.  If it sucks, tell me.  I mean, gently, but you can still tell me.

Talk to ya on the flippity flop.

Dave

Post-Mortem Post-Script:  The above logged in at 1,404 words.  I am incapable of tucking and folding and tidying my words.  Like you didn’t know.  I have one final bon mot:  Fuck brevity with a broom stick.

Peter Beal of mountainsandwater.com and Jamie Emerson of B3bouldering.com are both very talented climbers.  Peter established one of the first 5.14s in Clear Creek Canyon, while Jamie has been putting up boulder problems along the Rocky Mountain spine for years.  Peter has authored a how-to bouldering book, Jamie a guide to the alpine bouldering in Rocky Mountain National Park and Mt. Evans.

All wonderful feats, but that’s not the reason I decided to transcribe this ClimbTalk interview from April 2012.  Jamie, and most recently Peter, have both received a spate of feedback from their respective websites, which many people would label controversial or stirring the pot or rambling on about inconsequential nonsense.  Everyone would agree, at the least, that they are writing and suggesting feedback because of their great passion for the sport and lifestyle of climbing.

But that’s not even the reason I’m posting this transcription.  I’m posting it not even because I believe what they write carries some vital wisdom that the climbing-verse can’t live without!  No, I do not agree with everything they write.  Sometimes, I don’t agree with a lick of it.

I’m posting this because I appreciate their effort, their work to get a voice out there for what they believe in or what they don’t quite understand or simply what chafes their hides.  They are purveyors of FREE MEDIA and, if nothing more, they provide an outlet to air grievances, have a meaningful discussion, or simply allow fuming or raging on the intertrons.

These guys suffer a lot of negativity (and a lot of positivity, but that’s not what I’m getting at), which is, in the end, fine.  You better have some thick skin if you’re going to challenge assumptions or rock the boat or, in Peter’s case, argue that climbing is becoming doused in commodification.  You better have thick skin if you’re a lowly blogger, the carp of the writing ocean.  They both have thick skin.

But it’s FREE.  What they write, it’s FREE to read.  The pictures Jamie posts, the information about new areas in Wyoming and every other damn area I’m not privy to, is FREE.  Peter’s beta videos for Flagstaff Mountain in Boulder are FREE.  His website, with content many consider hostile to climbing (I do not agree), is FREE.  In other words, you don’t have to read it if you don’t like it.  You can scoff and click over to 8a.nu.  And if you want to read it you are certainly FREE to comment in whichever way you see fit.

A final caveat about these guys who provide FREE climbing media and information and topics for discourse, something many should understand before bashing them personally (many do not bash them personally but rather bash them in defiance of their beliefs…which is fine…that’s fair game).  They are both good guys.  Peter is a family man, a dedicated father, and a really jovial fellow.  Jamie lives, eats, breathes, and probably shits climbing.  I don’t know about the shitting little boulders with chalked holds; it’s just a guess.  And he’s a good guy, too.

That’s the reason I’m transcribing this interview.  I appreciate what they write and the balls they have to put their names on the line – not like some pussy shit anonymous puke hiding behind a Cartman avatar and a meaningless anon label like “514Crusha” or “sickygnarGUY” – in the public forum.  Love it or hate it, it’s FREE and you don’t have to read it.  Or, if you disagree, rock and roll with that and seethe on their websites.  But, please, although sometimes I wonder if I’m just some dunce typing bullshit in this cave somewhere beneath the bowels of Denver, I STILL believe we all belong to the same tribe.  I think we should act like it.

And that’s about as controversial as I get.  God, I’m a sissy.  Enjoy the interview (if you don’t, please don’t come at me…I’m already weeping).  Josh Wharton/Kelly Cordes interview and then Chris Kalous from The Enormocast podcast is on the way next!

Mike Brooks:  It’s almost 9:00 [pm] here in Boulder, Colorado, and you are listening to ClimbTalk on Radio 1190.  My name is Mike Brooks.  Dave McAllister from pumpfactoryroad.com is the co-host, as usual.  Dave, what’s happening?

Dave McAllister:  Hey, Mike, how’s it going?

MB:  Good.  So, you’re just back from your vacation…again.  Where’d you go, what can you tell us about it, what did you send?

DM:  Well…I didn’t really send anything of import, but I was in Bishop for three weeks.  Tenth trip there.  I got my cast off my leg two days before I left.  So, I was climbing on a little spindly, toothpick of a leg the whole time.  But it was good.  It’s tough coming back from that.  As a matter of fact, I was just bouldering in Castlewood [Canyon] on Sunday and I haven’t climbed since because I tried to heel hook and blew my hamstring to smithereens, because I haven’t used it at all.  I’m writing this year off to injury

MB:  Okay.  So, we have climbers Peter Beal and Jamie Emerson here in the Radio 1190 studio.  Gentlemen, thank you for joining us on ClimbTalk.

Peter Beal:  Hey, Mike.

Jamie Emerson:  Thank you for having us.

DM:  So, what have you guys been up to?  Jamie, you’re in school now.  Peter’s in school, too, in a different fashion [Peter is a college art history and humanities professor].  But, you are in classes.

JE:  I’m just taking classes, studying mathematics right now.  It’s really exciting.  It’s awesome to have something that opposes my climbing in a very dramatic way.  I really appreciate that.  It makes climbing seem more interesting, because I throw myself into something really mentally challenging and then I switch…climbing’s still mentally challenging, but in a very different way.  It’s something I haven’t experienced in a long time.

DM:  Has anybody given you crap because people call you “The Sherriff” and you talk about grades all the time and that you’re only taking mathematics to crunch the numbers better?  Or am I the first?

JE:  You’re the first.  [laughter]

DM:  How’s school and climbing going?  You finding the time?

JE:  I do not climb as much as I used to.  I find myself climbing in the gym a lot more, which has its ups and downs.  I’ve met a lot more interesting people.  Normally I’d be out there with two or three friends in Wyoming, like we’ve talked about before, developing boulders or doing something like that.  Now I find myself in the gym talking to all kinds of people who I didn’t associate with before.  Not because I didn’t like them but just because I was doing something different.

It’s nice to explore the gym as a “climbing area.”  As a culture.  That’s something that I’ve kind of embraced.  That’s always been my mode of operation; whatever I’m doing I’m going to embrace it and go after it.  So, I’ve been climbing in the gym and I’ve been sport climbing a lot.  And I’m going to sport climb this summer.

DM:  Uh-oh.

JE:  Dirty word, I know.

MB:  You mentioned Lander earlier before we got into the studio.  Are you going to be sport climbing there or bouldering?

JE:  I’m going to be doing both.  There’re some great sport routes in Lander and I’ve tried a few of them and I want to do all the ones I’ve tried.  It’s important in my own climbing to experience as many different kinds of rock and as many different styles as possible.  Lander is a really unique style and I like it.  The town is awesome; it’s really pretty.  I’m really excited to go there.  I’m really excited to go to Utah and see some of the new things out there.  I’m excited to go to Rifle, which I haven’t been to.  The Monastery is incredible.  That’s a place I am shocked that doesn’t get more attention.  The routes are stunning; they’re beautiful.

MB:  Can I change the subject so early in the game, here?  We had ClimbTalk the Road Show at the Boulder Outlook Hotel about a week ago.  We had Dave Graham and Chad Greedy [on] and one of the points that Dave made was talking about chipping.  He said chipping is acceptable in Rifle but nowhere else on the Front Range.  Anyone want to voice an opinion on that?

PB:  He’s not really right about Rifle, although it depends on how you define “chipping.”  But it’s definitely not acceptable anywhere else.  I have to say, I haven’t seen or heard of a deliberately chipped route or boulder problem, that I know of, anywhere on the Front Range.  It’s definitely not cool.  There are debates as to what constitutes chipping, so that’s a separate topic.

DM:  Yeah, that was the object of [Graham’s] topic, I think:  What constitutes chipping, what is cleaning, and what is “manicuring”.

JE:  This is interesting that we’re bringing this up because I had a discussion with some friends the other day and we were talking about how generally, if the rock was so poor that you would have to glue it or chip it – like they justify in Rifle – that boulderers wouldn’t climb on it.  They would be like, “This is choss.  We don’t want to climb on this.”  But, for whatever reason, because there’s rock and because, “Oh, if I glue a hold on or I chip a hold here or there, we can climb this 80 foot section of rock,” and it becomes a sport climbing area and its fine and that becomes acceptable.  I think it’s interesting how people do turn the other cheek.  It’s okay, it’s accepted in Rifle, that people can chip routes.  Dave has given me a hard time about not calling people out for chipping routes in Rifle.

MB:  And how did you defend yourself on that concept of not calling people out for chipping?

JE:  I’ve never even been to Rifle.  I don’t know if it’s appropriate [laughter and everyone talking drowns out the end of his sentence].

PB:  I have a little more experience in Rifle than Jamie does.  The classic instance in Rifle is a long endurance route that sits in this .13d/.14a range called Living in Fear.  That was probably the first and most notorious example in Rifle where pretty much every hold or every other hold…a substantial amount of the route was enhanced, basically.  There were a lot of these little corner insets, sloping edges so that whoever it was – I can’t remember if it was Scott Frye, I know that he actually did the route – worked with the features.

Another notorious example is John Dunne, with his (I think) Bride of Frankenstein.  That was pretty much wholly manufactured out of choss.  It’s just a really steep cave.  It’s one of those popular, sort of soft .13d’s; some people call it .13c.  Those are probably the two most egregious ones that I can think of there.

A lot of the other stuff is either reinforced or pretty much let alone.  A great example is Zulu.  There’s a big jug you jump to that’s basically remodeled or reconstructed with a bunch of sika or epoxy or whatever.  Rifle is such a choss pile in spots that it’s really hard to figure out sometimes what is “original” once you clean out all the loose rock and the spider webs and the stuff that’s in there.

JE:  You know, my argument is that it would always be better if it wasn’t chipped or glued.  We’ve talked about these fine lines about what constitutes cleaning, what constitutes acceptable practice on rock, but I will always stand by the argument that it’s better if it’s not.  If you left it alone and didn’t climb it – didn’t chip it and didn’t glue it – I think that might be better.

PB:  I would definitely concur.  Of course, Rifle has a funny thing.  For instance, in the Arsenal, having entire sections of the cliff fall down.  So, again, it’s a very fluid and dynamic surface that people will glue…  I remember this on The Seven P.M. Show, grabbing a block that was kind of quasi-glued around the perimeter of it.  I’ve still never really gotten used to pulling on the thing because I just imagine it coming off in my lap.  The stories just go on and on of random blocks falling off trade routes.  It’s that kind of a place.

JE:  People often use the argument, and conversely, that, “Well, if I glue a hold on, there’s an 80 foot roof to climb and everyone has fun on it.”  But if you take that argument farther I think you come to, “Then why don’t we just bolt holds on, because it’s fun.”  Why don’t we just bolt a slide on or something and you can slide down.  That would be fun, too.

I think there needs to be some kind of ethic…that’s why we need to have some kind of rule or ethic about what constitutes proper cleaning and all that kind of stuff.  I’ve never been to Rifle.  I’d like to go and experience as much of it as I could.  That’d be awesome.  And then I’d have a more informed opinion.

MB:  Who should decide and where should these ethics be kept?

JE:  I think if you have a very sound argument, then it doesn’t matter who decides, because the argument would be hard to argue against.  It’s not one person with a gigantic ego who says, “I was here first and this is the ethic that I determined.”  The argument is so flawless that it supersedes everything and you can always defer to the argument.

PB:  Except when you don’t.  You read the piece by Bill Ramsey justifying chipping?

JE:  I did.

PB:  I think that his argument was kind of forced and weak but it did actually point out some pragmatic aspects of rock climbing, where alteration of the rock is tolerated for reasons like there might be a huge, loose block on it, which all of a sudden reveals a massive hold.  Or, alternately, the block forms a massive hold that the first ascensionist doesn’t want, which was the case with Scarface at Smith Rocks.  And the list goes on and on.  So, there’re a lot of grey areas.  I think, on the whole, Jamie’s absolutely right, that you are always better off leaving it alone.  If you find yourself compelled, I guess, to make those kinds of alterations, you’re probably doing the wrong thing in the wrong place.

DM:  Since we’re talking of chipping, we [Jamie] sat here in this studio and talked about that for forty minutes.  It was really interesting…the 14^th time.  Let’s move past it and talk about something else that you wrote on your blog.  You wrote about private property, bouldering and climbing on private property…

MB:  What was your motivation for that piece, Jamie?

JE:  My motivation was that we were driving to a new climbing area in the vicinity of the Ripper Traverse, which is really private property. We drove by it to look at it.  It’s down in Pueblo, a John Gill classic problem.  I think it was on the cover of Climbing Magazine, a photo of John Long.  It was one of the first bouldering photos that was published and kind of became one of those iconic photos.  It was iconic for me, looking at bouldering and thinking this is something I don’t understand, but it embodied some vision of climbing that I appreciated.  The climb, in that sense, became important to me.

What if we went and did it?  We drove by and didn’t climb it…but what if we went and did it and posted about it?  There’s a video of Fred Nicole climbing on it, online.  Is it okay?  Is it okay if no one gets hurt?  All the questions that we talked about – all the questions that I brought up in my post – what are the ramifications for climbers and the acts that come about and our perception to the public, how does that play out?  If we just sneak on and do it, is it really that big of a deal or not?  I don’t know.

I’m in a different position, too, I think, because people are looking for something to get me.  They want to come at me.  So, if I did something like that they’d jump all over me and, “You hypocrite!”  But if I was no one, in terms of the public realm, then I could just sneak on and it’d be fine.

DM:  Am I a simpleton when I say that this issue is so cut and dry that it’s just ridiculous?  You just don’t trespass without talking to the landowner first.  Can’t you just boil it down to that?

PB:  It’s actually a much, much more compelling issue than just, say, the Ripper Traverse, way off down in Pueblo.  There are a lot of major bouldering areas in the northeast that are on private property and the negotiations between land owners in places like that are really complicated, and these are central areas.  It would be sort of like having Flagstaff or Horsetooth being owned essentially by a single place.  In fact, I was working with the Access Fund on some discussions about the boulders in the west side of Eldorado Canyon, exactly where things fit, property lines there.  So, it’s closer to home than you might think, but it’s not as cut and dry as you might think.

JE:  Right.  And I just argued we should have cut and dry rules about chipping.  And I agree; there should be cut and dry rules about private property.  But, if you look at a place like Horse Pens 40, it’s on private property.  The guy allows it.  There’s also the issue of, if you have private property and you ask…  Let’s say you and I go down to try the Ripper Traverse and we ask the land owner and the land owner says, “Yeah, it’s fine.”  And then I even write about it on the internet or go to the gym and say, “Hey, we went and did this cool traverse.  It’s historic; we went there and asked the land owner.”  Then it brings into the collective conscious that people are going and climbing on private property.  Then someone’s like, “Well, I don’t want to bother with the land owner.”

DM:  By the way, Peter, I fully understand the nuances of large areas.  I’m kind of talking about more:  you drive out to Sedalia, you see a group of boulders on a hillside a mile away from a house.  That’s a little bit more of what I’m talking about.

[Jamie], you were almost justifying someone saying “I don’t want to bother with [the landowner].”  Yeah, but…it’s just wrong.  You have to bother with it.  I think it’s so, so cut and dry when we’re talking about these little issues.

PB:  I think you got to be on a scale there.  One of the interesting things that other, more civilized countries than the United States, there’s what’s known as “the right to roam,” which is really popular in Scandinavia and in parts of the U.K., in fact most of the U.K., where you’re allowed essentially to traverse somebody’s land as long as you’re staying away from their – I forget what the specific numbers are – but away from their main place of habitation, you don’t put up any permanent structures, make any type of permanent alterations.  I think you’re actually even allowed one night’s stay on that land.  It’s a very different culture.  We’re coming from the United States culture, where you have this right, essentially, to run people off with a shotgun and that kind of thing.  I agree with you.  Technically – legally, anyway – the private property thing is significant.  And I say in my book you should always check around and make sure before you move in.  Like you said, you see boulders and you see a house.  There’s not necessarily a connection between that house but it’s probably good to do the right thing on that one.

The other thing that Jamie seemed to be pointing to, if you’re that property owner…and the classic example would be the Kingpin boulder in Poudre Canyon.  So, let’s just say you did give permission to one group and then the next weekend another group shows up.  And then another group shows up.  And then they are partying and they’re making a big racket and it’s just turning into a big, fat pain.

JE:  That is basically what happened.  Kingpin, people asked to climb on that problem and the landowner said, “Yeah, it’s fine, I don’t mind.”  Then a few people go and it’s fine.  Then Chris Sharma shows up and then it becomes Kingpin that was put up by Chris Sharma and then everyone wants to go do it.  All of sudden there are people driving up his driveway and it turns into a total mess.  I don’t think it’s been clearly defined whether or not he even owns the boulder.  The property line’s really close.  But, it just turns into chaos.  It might have been better had no one – it’s hard to say “better” – but it might have been less of an issue had no one asked.

DM:  The waters are getting muddy now…

JE:  Yes…[the flashing light of a studio telephone call makes us all lose our concentration]

DM:  Pick ‘er up, man! [to Mike]

PB:  Jamie’s done it now…

MB:  Hello, Radio 1190.  [Mike whispering ever so softly, which cracks the whole studio up]

DM:  The svelte baritone of Mike Brooks…

JE:  To continue on this Kingpin topic, it’s a good example because people did ask and it really opened the flood gates for more people to go and we know the result.  The boulder got destroyed by the landowner and it ruined the whole thing.  We can speculate as to what might have happened had no one said anything.  It’s possible that nothing could have happened and people could still sneak over and climb on it and the boulder would still be there.  I would prefer that the boulder would be there as opposed to being destroyed.  I would prefer the boulder to be there but I don’t know that I would prefer that people were trespassing, so that’s a really, really sticky issue.

DM:  I remember when the boulder did get closed down, Daniel Woods did sneak in and he sent it.  But…then there was a blog post about it.

PB:  That’s not cool.

JE:  That changes things.

PB:  Yeah, it really does.

JE:  It makes what happens in one small moment, in one person’s life, public to everyone.  That didn’t happen ten years ago, at all, ever.

DM:  I’m gonna write a blog post about that…

JE:  You should.

PB:  Emergency blog post.  [laughter]

JE:  I see a big list of questions there.  What else you got, McAllister?

DM:  Alright, let’s get down to brass tacks with Peter.

PB:  Nice.

DM:  Recently, Peter has…engendered…some feedback across the climbing spectrum for, I’d say, three blog posts in a row; the fourth was called, “Is There Hope After All.”  The first was “Sell, Sell, Sell:  Is There an Alternative?”  The second was, “Sell, Sell, Sell:  A Response to the Responses.”   The third was, “Ends and Means.”  This can be found on mountainsandwater.com and I think it really behooves you to check it out, and Rock and Ice’s retorts, as well.  So, “Sell, Sell, Sell:  Is There an Alternative?”, I’m sure a lot of people listening have not read it.  Those people in the caves who don’t know anything about the climbing world!  Tell us both about the genesis of the blog post and the content.

PB:  Well, I started off this year with a post that basically [talked about] the value of dissent.  I think there is, in the climbing community – somewhat, I think it’s admirable in some ways – a kind of repetitive, positive, kind of “we’re all in this together, we’re all doing the same thing, we’re all supporting each other.”  I’m just here to suggest that there are going to be some things on which we probably should have a serious discussion.  It’s a little bit like what Jamie’s trying to do when he puts these things out there, like how do we treat boulder problems on private property or what’s the deal with women, for instance, not, in a sense, fully participating…

DM:  We’re going to talk about that later.

PB:  Yeah, exactly.  That kind of thing.  I’m trying to reach a little bit out beyond the immediate circle or issues of bouldering and think in bigger terms about the ways in which the sport affects people from a social and political and economic standpoint.  News is no longer interesting, except for sort of being read in that frame of mind or viewed through that lens.

Basically, things started off in earnest with the “Sell, Sell, Sell” thing when I was reading way too many posts about people sending things in Spain and going on endless road trips and all this type of stuff.  It’s clearly pitched for creating some kind of image that was going to be more attractive to sponsors, more than anything else.  And so I said, “What’s up with this?”  Actually, [my] most popular post was the one about the CitiBank ad, where people were falling over themselves in praise of it.  I was like, “This is the most transparent effort to pitch climbing as something that had some kind of transcendent value,” that was being launched by one of the most notorious players in the recent bank failure.

Anyways, I started thinking a little bit about that and decided to write this because I was getting a little tired of climbing culture constantly being pitched in a commercial direction.  There should be an alternative to that.  What happened pretty quickly is that I got something like 50+ comments, which for me is pretty rare.  And then Rock and Ice jumped all over it.  In the end I never really saw anything that conclusively said, “No, no no…you’re wrong.”  I heard a lot of stuff, like this has always been happening or it’s not as bad as you think or whatever.  When I heard from actual editors in the industry, that was a different story.  I can’t share those conversations, but let’s just say there’s definitely some concern about these kinds of issues.  When I saw the Rock and Ice responses I replied to those and it went on and on and Duane Raleigh and I had a little bit of an exchange about this kind of thing – not in a caustic or critical way, but “Oh, this is interesting…”  I know a fair number of these people anyway; I was actually pretty psyched about that and the response that it got.  I got a fair amount of hate mail, too, but that comes with the territory. [laughter]

DM:  You gotta have thick skin if you’re going to write this stuff.

PB:  Exactly.  The people who were like, “This is capitalism, we live in a capitalist country, and we’re here to sell,” I still didn’t find those arguments very convincing in the end.  I never saw a conclusive, “Here’s what you got wrong.”

JE:  Do you have a problem, Peter, with someone like Joe Kinder, who makes a living climbing and works hard?

DM:  And producing content for sponsors.

JE:  Right.  Do you have a problem with that?

PB:  I wouldn’t say I have a problem with it, but it seems to me there are going to be more and more people looking at Joe as, “That’s what I have to be to be a climber.  I have to put myself out there.  I have to have a very public persona and I have to put myself in the public eye and not take it away in order to make it as a climber.”

JE:  And that stands in stark contrast to someone like John Bachar or John Gill who were out there…

PB:  Well, John Bachar was actually one of the first to actually publicize himself in the public eye.  John Gill, definitely.

JE:  But they weren’t making a living…

PB:  No, no, no.  They weren’t able to, that’s for sure.  John Bachar much more so.  John Gill was a math professor, so he didn’t have to worry about it.

To a certain extent, that’s the rule of the game.  That’s how the industry, in a sense, is pitching itself; you need that kind of public profile. I’m just not convinced that in the end that’s the right approach for everybody.  When you have a bunch of up-and-coming climbers who want to get themselves in the public eye and everybody’s trying to do that…

This is my bottom line, sort of like the chipping thing, but more important in my view.  It starts affecting the environment.  It starts affecting the way that the bouldering or climbing areas are treated.  It starts showing up in the attitudes that people have toward a climbing area as kind of an arena for display, for scoring points, for making impact as a kind of personality rather than respecting the environment that they’re operating in.  I think that is something we should have a discussion about.

MB:  You don’t think that’s inevitable?

PB:  No, I don’t think it’s inevitable.  I think it’s a deliberate choice.  It’s a choice that you make when you say that climbing is commodified or commodifiable.  In other words, you translate a rock, which is a unique – and to my mind – amazing product of heaven-knows-what infinitely complex forces, and you transform it into something, to take any number of problems in Hueco Tanks, with a vulgar name and a V grade attached to it.  And people will go onto 8a.nu or a video…  I mean, how many videos have you guys seen of all of the standard V11/V12/V13 problems at Hueco Tanks?

DM:  How many have you seen, Mike?

PB:  [to MB]  Yeah, you probably don’t watch these things…  [laughter and some random making fun of Mike, which to his great credit he shrugs off]  You know, Hueco Tanks is not just like a basketball court.  I think it’s starting to look a little bit more like that to the public.

JE:  Do you think that this is a generational thing or do you think someone of an older generation would look at the way you did things and think, “Oh man, he’s putting bolts on the Primo Wall!  It’s horrible.  He’s degrading.  He’s not respecting the environment,” and you’re just seeing the same thing happen again?  Or, do you think this is something different?

PB:  Well, I think there’s a quantitative difference in terms of these – we’ll just loosely call them – media productions.  There’s a quantitative difference.  It’s gotten to the point where it’s a qualitative difference.  There’s just a critical mass of video after video after video.

Take the example of Primo Wall.  Nobody paid the faintest bit of attention to the climbs that I did there until Joe Kinder came along and repeated Shine.  Now we not only have the first ascent, we have the first famous ascent.  And with the first famous ascent then people actually start climbing on the thing.  To me that’s actually pretty significant.  In other words, it takes a kind of media stamp of approval to make a route important.  And then with that, just like you said with Kingpin, Chris Sharma does it and all of a sudden the vultures come down and pluck the last aura out of the route.

DM:  I feel like that’s always been the way.  Like, John Gill’s standards…The Thimble was not famous after…

PB:  It was famous but nobody would get on it.  And it didn’t have video.

DM:  Yeah, of course.

PB:  It’s very, very different.

MB:  I got on The Thimble.  I thought it was kinda easy…

[Silence…and then…”WHOA-KAY!” and rabble-rabble-rabble and laughter from everyone in the studio]

PB:  I’ve heard that.  But, the main thing is that The Thimble is not a very commodifiable experience compared to a problem, say, in Rocky Mountain National Park or Hueco Tanks where you can get a group of seven or eight people and eight or nine pads and all of a sudden you’ve got something going on.  Whereas The Thimble…it’s going to take a lot more than the crowd to keep you going on that one, at some point.

I don’t think it’s the same-old, same-old.  I think that anybody who says it is – like I said in Rock and Ice’s response – I think that’s being disingenuous.

DM:  Duane Raleigh, the [Publisher/Editor-in-Chief] of Rock and Ice, kind of took a “Chicken Little” stance.  “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.”  The sport is crumbling apart at its roots.  We’re losing our heart.  It’s becoming commodified.  And he disagreed with [that], of course.

PB:  Right, exactly.  I didn’t find his response convincing and the reason why is that there’s a great deal of interest on the part of climbing media…

People have accused me of somehow generating hits, like I like the controversy.  And it’s true, I like arguing, but I don’t make a dime, basically, off that website.  I don’t have any advertising that I get any money from.  I tend not to take free gear from anybody or anything like that, especially at this point.  It’s totally non-commercial.  So, I didn’t find the response convincing.  I could not hear a single, clear, like, “Everything’s okay.”

DM:  He made one point, “Climbing doesn’t have a soul.  People do.”  I thought that was a nice line.

PB:  It didn’t make any sense to me at all.

DM:  To me it makes perfect sense.

PB:  It’s like Jeff Jackson, and I thought that he worded it very beautifully; he talked about the transcendent experience of climbing.  You know, you’re out there alone on the rock face.  Okay, fine.  We’ve all had that.  But, to get there…there’s a lot going on.  I just argue that we need to look under the hood of climbing.  In other words, see what’s actually happening.  To take an example of manufacturers trying to be responsible about that, Patagonia – really good – at least trying to get initiatives started in terms of looking at what they do and how they do it.  I’d like to see more on the part of the other manufacturers.

JE:  Do you feel like when you see this mass of videos and you’re assaulted by all these things…

PB:  I’m watching them freely.  No one’s holding a gun to my head.

JE:  …do you think that negatively affects your experience?

PB:  Honestly, no.  I don’t really have a problem with that.  I don’t feel, for instance, that it’s removing the mystery of these boulder problems.  The thing that does negatively affect, not just mine but other climbers’ experiences, is a horde of people that are attracted to one particular problem because they saw it last week in a video.  Sometimes, frankly, the problem isn’t really that good and it’ll be the boulder problem of the week on the Front Range or whatever.

JE:  Right, we’ve seen that before.

PB:  Totally.  Like every month.

JE:  Black Ice.

PB:  Yeah.

JE:  Black Ice was really one of the first.  I don’t know how much that was driven by the media, but it was driven by your [Mike] website, frontrangebouldering.com. [FRB, though now not a focus of Mike’s, was one of the original climbing websites that generated a ton of traffic in the new online climbing media of the early 2000s]

DM:  Mike, you’re a peddler of smut.  [To Peter]  Do you think the American zeitgeist of celebrity worship/brand worship in the mainstream culture…we know all about it, the Kardashians are famous…

PB:  I was tempted to say right there, “Who?”  But go ahead…

DM:  Yeah, right.

PB:  I don’t want to be that much of an old fogy.

DM:  The vibe I get from you is that younger climbers are going to be drawn to the most popular climbs, of course, that have gained notoriety on the interwebs – from a host of videos – and they want to become sponsored because it will get them a higher profile inside the sport.  Do you think that’s a function of the higher American zeitgeist right now?  Or, is it particular to climbing?

PB:  I don’t think it’s particular to climbing.  Climbing’s always been behind the curve for a long, long time with regard to other sports.  So, in a sense, climbers are waking up to the marketability, even though I would argue on many levels that that marketability is limited by a bunch of factors.  There is a degree to which a generation – we’ll say right now between about 15 and 25 – has latched onto that as a way of validating themselves.  Fine, so be it.  Honestly, I don’t care that much, especially in the gym.  It’s only when it starts to affect the outdoor environment and the outdoor experience that it really starts turning into a problem, in my view.

DM:  Hmm.  That’s a good point to make because I didn’t get that point as much, and I read your blogs numerous times.  I think that’s an important distinction to make, that you don’t have a problem with it so much as it’s happening, but rather when it’s affecting…

PB:  To me that’s the bottom line.  I don’t think that mode of climbing is going to yield much, ultimately, in the way of insights or any kind of real progress in the sport.  There might be “harder” climbs or something like that.  The real issue, to me, is when you start treating the outdoor environment and the surroundings as a kind of giant playroom, where what you write and what you do or however you act out in that playroom is the only thing that matters.  That’s not, to me, the way that we should look at the outside world.  We shouldn’t look at the environment that we live in in those kinds of terms.

DM:  As a conduit to your higher profile.

PB:  Right.  Which, in a sense, is doomed to ephemerality anyway.  I’ve lived in Boulder now – moved here in 1994 – close to two decades, and I’ve seen multiple phases of climbers come and go.  I can speak from personal experience: very few climbers have any kind of profile of any kind – even if you’re world-class – for more than a few years.  Dave Graham is exemplary in terms of sustaining that pace for so long.  It’s very, very rare to see people go more than 2-3 years as a “professional.”

DM:  Emerson, your time’s almost out.  Can I switch gears?  You guys, I’m sure, will both have plenty to say about this.  [To JE]  You recently broached a subject that you’ve talked about numerous times on your website.  Women and developing, of routes or boulder problems, and how there’s a stark difference between the number of women and the number of men developing.  Talk a little bit about your blog post.

MB:  Why did you tackle that, Jamie?

JE:  I think it’s interesting.  I want to challenge the way that people think.  I want people to question what they’re doing because I question what I’m doing and I think they can learn a lot from that.  If I can offer questions…  People have told me, “We read your post and we sat around the fire and talked about it for two hours.”  For me, that’s the highest compliment, that somewhere else out there, there was discussion generated and people were thinking about what’s going on.  That’s really important.

Peter alluded to this earlier where he said that climbing tends to be this super-supportive, we’re all friends, there’s no voice of dissent, there’s no voice of criticism…and it’s not that I’m coming from a negative standpoint – that I want to cut people down – but I just want to say, “Hey, let’s ask some questions about what we’re doing.”  For me, climbing is not just, “I am hanging out in the woods and climbing on rocks.”  It’s far, far more complex than that.  It is my life and it is the way that I’ve chosen to live my life and it’s not a separate thing.  It’s not [that] I live my life and there are social issues or environmental issues or gender issues going on and then I go climbing and those issues go away.  They still exist when I go climbing and I see how they exist.  I want to try to bring it up and say, “There’s more to it…”

Sometimes I feel like a girl does a hard route and we just pat her on the back.  I’m very critical of men.  A lot of times the girls get mad at me, “You just go after the girls!”  I have been extremely critical of men.  I think it’s okay that I’m critical of women, too.  I don’t think I shouldn’t be critical because there’s some stigma that I should hold the door open and hold their hand.  I’m willing to take the heat…I know people are going to say whatever.  I want to say, let’s look at it as objectively as possible.  I’m open to the idea of presenting a question.

DM:  And your question is, in the blog post, why aren’t more women developing and what are the precursors to this lack of development?

JE:  Right.  Certainly, some women think that I’m attacking them and I’m assigning blame to them.  That’s not the case, at all.  I’m interested and I want to know why and I want to understand.  There’s a pattern that I’ve noticed and I want to understand why.  It could be as simple as there’re just not as many women who climb.  When we see more women climbers we’ll see more development from them.  Or maybe it’s just some genetic thing – I don’t know the answer.

It’s like grades.  I don’t have the answer if it’s V10 or V9.  It’s subjective and it’s really hard to pinpoint, but we can try to talk about it.

DM:  You have the answer, Sherriff.

PB:  He has AN answer.

DM:  I’m not trying to be obsequious or deferential, at all, but if somebody gleans that you’re attacking women out of the most recent blog post, they’re seriously confused.  All you’re doing is trying to mine an answer or start a discussion.  But…I’m curious about what you believe causes those discordant numbers.

JE:  There’re so many different factors that go into that.  Sometimes I’m inclined to think that there’s a social expectation or something…I don’t know.  I talked to a good friend of mine and she said, “I just don’t want to get dirty and it’s a lot of work and I don’t want to do it.  I’d rather just do something else.”  And that’s fine.  A lot of guys think that, too.

DM:  I know plenty of guys who think the same way.

JE:  Oh, yeah.  I wrote that.  I think I said there’re thousands of men who do nothing in terms of developing.  But, I do think there’s an expectation that Chris Sharma and Adam Ondra and Daniel Woods and Dave Graham are putting up new…people want to see what’s the new thing that Dave’s doing.  What’s the new thing that Daniel’s doing?  What’s the new V15?  That expectation is not there for women.  I think it’d be awesome if it was there.  What if we heard about Alex Puccio going and doing a V13 first ascent?  That would be amazing.  I would be inspired by that.  I think what I’m speaking to is I want to feel inspired.  Not saying that you guys aren’t good climbers because you’re not doing it but there’s a way you could inspire me and I’d like to be inspired.  So, it’d be cool if you did it.  I think that it’d be interesting to see the differences.

DM:  You ask a question, so I got to quote this:  “Are men (because they are the majority in our sport) fostering this gap, by ‘oppressing’ women?”

JE:  Quote/unquote, “oppressing women,” because that’s kind of the cliché, that in general men are saying, “I’m going to do it and you are not.  I’m the developer.  I’m going to take charge.”  And then the women say, “Well, okay.  Go ahead, take charge.”  I was asking, do you guys think that’s what’s going on?  Do I think that’s what’s going on?

MB:  Honestly, Jamie… [laughter]

PB:  Get the spotlight.

JE:  I think that, yes.  If you’re going to make a generalization, I think that there are a lot of men that are saying, “I’m going to do this.  I’m going to take over.”  And in general, women say, “Okay, fine.  Be a man and do what you do.”

DM:  Really?

PB:  Yeah, I would agree.

DM:  Doesn’t development happen in the shadows a lot, though?  Aren’t people developing in areas that not many people know about and you got this cadre of dudes and they’re there…

PB:  That’s exactly it.

JE:  Yeah, that’s part of it.  I’m sorry…I don’t understand your question.

DM:  I don’t feel like men are beating their chests, like, “Women!  Go do the FFAs!  I will take care of the FAs!”  I definitely do not see that.

PB:  It’s never going to be that explicit.

DM:  Underlying currents?

PB:  The way that the information gets passed around, the way that these kinds of things are handled, it’s usually going to be a small cadre of people that find a certain place or have a hunch about a certain place and they actually spend time looking for places like that.  The deeper question that I think Jamie’s driving at…we don’t want to be essentialists, is there something basic about women that isn’t the case with men.  Although, as a father of a five-year-old girl, I can see some differences emerging really quickly between girls and boys.  But, there is a set of social practices.

Putting up a first ascent is not simply walking up to a boulder and saying, “Oh, I’m going to do that.”  Especially on the Front Range, where if there’s a really choice boulder with really good semi-hard lines, there are probably two dozen people within five minutes’ drive that could do that in a few tries.  Whereas, for women, there are hardly any women that would be able to do that within a few tries.  Quality new lines like that are kind of a scarce commodity.  If it got out, say a woman did find a boulder that was really, really good, she would have to keep it under very tight wraps or there would have to be a very strong “gentlemen’s agreement” to stay off it.

A classic example would be when Luke Parady was gunning for the No More Greener Grasses first ascent.  He knew that the window was closing in on that one, and he’s a very strong climber.  But would a woman, who’s just breaking into V12, and that was sitting there in one of the most spectacular alpine bouldering areas in Colorado, and she found it and she cleaned it, how many people would honor an agreement to stay off that thing for a year or two years?

JE:  I think one of the interesting things is that climbers align towards peer groups.  Women who climb V12 don’t climb with men who climb V12, generally.  They climb with the men who climb V14 or V15.  The strongest women climb with the strongest men.

Then you have this situation where if they all go out climbing together, then you have the V15 guys climbing with the V12 girls and the V15 guys are going to do the boulders, usually, before the V12 girls do.

So…  I don’t have the answer, I really don’t know what I think.  Which is uncommon because I usually know exactly what I think!  I don’t know enough about gender, I don’t know enough about social issues; it’s so complex.

DM:  This [conversation] would also greatly benefit from having a couple female climbers in this room right now.

JE:  I wrote on my blog, I said, “Please, I want to hear what you have to say.”  I talked to friends of mine, too.  That maybe isn’t seen on the website.  I go to the gym and [ask] girls who climb 5.14, “What do you think about this?  Why are you going to Rifle trying to do a 5.14 and not trying to put up a 5.14?”

MB:  And what do they say?

JE:  They said, “I don’t want to get dirty.”  I mean, that’s the answer that I hear.

DM:  Those are your friends?

JE:  That’s what I’ve heard, yes.

DM:  Alright.  Let’s take it back to “Sell, Sell, Sell.”  “Climbing as a counter-culture is healthy and thriving.” [I said “thriving,” but this is Rock and Ice editor Jeff Jackson’s quote and he said “growing.”]

JE:  It’s not a counter-culture for the vast majority of people.  If you go to places – Red River Gorge – you’re going to find the average income, if you talk to the people who know the demographics at climbing magazines, the demographic is white, male, with an income typically running between $50,000 and $125,000.  Somewhere in there.

MB:  Can you believe that, Dave?

DM:  Well, if that’s the culture, my bank account…I’m definitely counter-culture.  [laughter]

PB:  Right, but there are counter cultures within climbing, but the vast majority of practitioners are going to come from a white, middle to upper-middle-class background.  You can see it in the cars parked at Rifle, to take the sport climbing example.  Or the amount of gear that’s required to climb a big wall in Yosemite.  The people going up Everest, when it costs 10, 20, 30 thousand dollars just to get your foot in the door, so to speak.  Then you’ve got the gear and you’ve got to be able to take off a couple months without having to account for yourself.  It’s clearly a sport, and always pretty much has been a sport, for white males from a certain background.

I mean, the fact that we’re having a discussion in 2012 about women is kind of ridiculous when you consider the inroads that women made in professional sports in roughly the same period, whether it’s tennis, golf, etc.  I’m not saying they’re at a par, but there’s kind of an understood place for women in a way that I think climbing is still working its way around.

I also think that the counter-culture thing is less convincing in the way that so many places have been mapped out.  Indian Creek used to be a place for desert rats, but now it’s maybe not so much.  The Valley, clearly, has been massively changed.  Now we have people on supertopo.com quarreling about the placement of campgrounds or whether there should be so many pull-outs on the road…whether there should be certain trails in El Cap meadows.  Everything is spoken for.  I just feel like the counter-culture vibe, for instance, that I grew up with but never really was part of because I was too young, [is] not really viable anymore.  Basically, for the most part, it’s a much more mainstream activity and the activities of people outside of climbing tend to reflect that.  That’s just my take on it.

JE:  I went to Switzerland a few years ago and we stayed in an apartment and we had a really nice rental car and it was the antithesis of the dirtbag, living out of your truck…

PB:  The Swiss won’t let you do it anyway.

JE:  I loved it.  It was awesome.  That’s a much better climbing trip than wallowing in the dirt.

PB:  Yeah, I would agree.

JE:  It was amazing, going to Switzerland and having all the amenities.

MB:  What’s your opinion on that, Dave, I’m curious.

DM:  I was looking at you to voice an opinion on that!

PB:  Where did you stay in Bishop?

DM:  In the Pit, man.  I definitely am a dirtbag.

PB:  We were camped next to an RV that ran its generator 24/7, so we moved down to one of the other campgrounds.

DM:  Yeah, I’ve stayed at the Buttermilks before, I mean, I’ve been there ten times.  I’ve stayed everywhere you can stay, except for Mill Creek [meant to say Mill Pond].  I don’t feel like it’s counter-culture or I’m counter-culture at all, but I’m a dirtbag.  100 percent.

JE:  I go to Switzerland and I want to climb as hard as I possibly can and I’m not going to climb hard if I’m sleeping in a tent.

DM:  That is not true.

PB:  No, it’s totally true.

JE:  I’ve done both, so…  I’ve lived on the road; I’ve slept in my truck.  I could never say to myself that I sleep as well in a truck as I do…

DM:  So hard climbing is contingent upon…

JE:  A good night’s rest.

DM:  Well, of course a good night’s rest!  But having all the amenities is what you’re saying.

PB:  I think it really helps.

DM:  It helps.  It’s not contingent upon that, though.

PB:  The thing is, Bishop.  So, you’re going there in, say, mid-winter, when the conditions are prime.  The sun sets at 3:30, basically.  It doesn’t rise again until close to 8, and the temperature in the Pit goes down to pretty darn close to zero.  Good, strong wind and all of a sudden you’re like, “I’m outta here.”

DM:  That’s what happens, I totally agree with you.

PB:  So, you crawl out of the back of the truck or the tent or whatever, barely getting warm at 9:30, and you creak your way out of the camp and finally to the boulders, and all of a sudden it’s 2:30 and the sun’s setting again.  Much better to roll out of the hotel.  [laughter]

DM:  I can’t possibly argue that the hotel’s going to be more comfortable.  Of course it is.

JE:  Don’t get me wrong, if I know that it’s not going to rain out I’ll always sleep under the stars.  I love being outside.  Sometimes I like that experience.  But, if I’m going to be doing it for a month then I’m going to want a nice place to sleep because I think I’ll climb better.

DM:  Alright…  [laughter]

JE:  I think that’s why people climb harder, generally, in their home areas, because they’re sleeping in their comfortable bed.

DM:  Yeah, maybe.  If your whole goal is to climb as hard as you can and that’s the entire goal of your trip, then I would agree that you should get a hotel.  But if your goal is also to experience the lifestyle and meet the people in the campground…that’s my opinion.  I’m not a world-class climber, so I can’t really talk about climbing hard.

PB:  I was just going to say:  so, you’re hanging out in the Pit with a bunch of people who do pallet fires all night long and they’re playing hacky sack and they’re doing the bongos and they’re talking blah.

DM:  You’re describing my campsite…

PB:  I’m just saying, been there, done that.  That’s all I have to say.

DM:  Yeah, the Pit at Spring Break is a pretty rough place to be.  But, I choose the Pit because I like to observe the culture of the Pit.  It’s fascinating.

PB:  If you want real dirtbag climbing, try the pull-out by the Cedar Pocket on I-15, right down by the Virgin River Gorge.  It’s sketchy, the camp hangout by the Gorilla Cliffs, where we heard from one of the locals that somebody was gut-shot by the local mafia.

DM:  For the love of baby Jesus, you’re probably not going to get a very good night’s sleep…

PB:  If you want some counter-culture, check that out.

DM:  I just mean the culture.  I just feel like observing people and meeting new people, even if they’re these terrible, 20-year-old freaks who are playing the bongos and wearing their neon sunglasses and tight jeans.  That’s still really, really interesting and super-important to me.

JE:  I’m way above that.  [laughter and some ancillary bullshit talking]  Mike, how do you feel about how the internet’s affected everything?

PB:  Yeah, since you’re responsible for it!  You were the first one up.

JE:  You’ve been climbing longer than any of us.

DM:  And you were responsible for one of the first websites, solely based on bouldering, in the nation.

MB:  It’s a sticky wicket.  I think one of you gentlemen made the point earlier, it’s all about us addressing the issues and, maybe being the hundredth monkey, making a difference.  [silence]  How’d I do, Dave?

DM:  That can’t possibly be your thesis.  [laughter]  Mike’s cracking himself up over on his golden throne behind the microphone.

Peter, I definitely think that you called out climbing media a bit and climbing media came back and they were a bit snarky.  I don’t feel like it was contentious, but I feel like there were some good jabs going on.  You noted six different topics that you’d like to see covered, not necessarily controversial, but asking some questions that you deem important.

This is one of them, and it was number one on your list:  “I would argue that as climbing seeks to “explore” new areas of the earth that the ethics of exploration be given a serious look and the question be asked whether the resultant impacts on the local social and natural environment are worth the ephemeral and at this point mostly imaginary rewards of discovery.”  When I saw the “imaginary” I wanted to ask, why are the rewards of discovery imaginary?

PB:  One of the issues – and I don’t mean to get too academic about this, but I kind of can’t help it – is the way in which climbing has been set up to reflect a bunch of values that historically go back to the 18^th century.  There’s a mode, essentially, of looking at the world or knowledge of the world that is progressive in the sense of accumulating data points about it.  The summit of Mont Blanc is a data point and people would take the temperature up there, or barometric readings, and start naming and collecting a kind of history of these things which would then add up to more knowledge.  That sort of blended with a romantic sensibility about discovering individual potential.

There are a lot of stories grafted onto the experience of climbing.  That’s been pretty much effective, I think, for propelling climbing “forward.”  Probably, the first real crack in the façade is going to show up – I’m not sure enough work has been done on this – on the Dawn Wall, Escapade, around 1970, where Warren Harding puts in a bunch of bolts in El Cap and Royal Robbins comes along and says, “I’m going to erase this route.”  There were a lot of things happening right around 1970.  That’s when Cerro Torre is being done up and a lot of the standard discourses about climbing start to contradict themselves and start to not make sense anymore.

Another thing, ironically, to start sabotaging it is bouldering, because bouldering comes from exactly the opposite angle and goes on the micro level and says there are all kinds of ways of looking at this stuff that aren’t bound by all the conventional apparatus.  Fast forward to now and what you start thinking about is can you think of anything that can’t be climbed that matters?  I mean, ice climbing, it’s done.  We saw the thing that Will Gadd did at Helmcken Falls, like, overhanging ice blobs.  So, ice climbing’s done.  Mixed climbing is getting pretty close to being done – it will just be more of the same.  Hard free climbing; it’s just more of the same.  Bouldering…I hate to hold out something special for bouldering.  I think bouldering still has all kinds of interesting potential for exploration, but not necessarily in an objective sense.  Like, first ascents or all these kinds of things.

What I’m proposing is that as more and more people seek out the last preserves of unspoiled nature we should ask ourselves why are we doing that?  What are the motivations?  Is the damage that’s resultant – because a lot of these things cost a lot of money and they’re sponsored by companies [that] expect a return on their investment – is that commercial interest and the potential environmental damage worth what I would describe as imaginary reward of a first ascent?  That’s where I’m coming from.

JE:  I think there are benefits to commercializing things in some sense because you take an area like Horse Pens 40 that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t commercialized.  That area exists because it’s been commercialized and I wouldn’t have climbed there had it not been.  I’m fine paying money to go there and climb there and I think that’s great.  That’s an example of something that’s been commercialized for the better, I think.

PB:  Let me just interject.  It’s been commercialized at a very low-level way.  A proper American style of commercializing would have miniature golf and pony rides.  Climbers might not want that but somebody could have bought that who did want that and said, “I could triple my income.”  But, I agree.  I’m not saying that commercialization and what Jamie describes is completely counter-productive, at all.

DM:  I wonder if this would fit into what we’re talking about.  I remember, we had [on the show] Cory Richards who was speaking to this a little bit, about how The North Face and the money that they offer allows athletes to do some pretty amazing things in some pretty amazing places.  For him, specifically, it was the first American winter ascent of Gasherbrum II.

PB:  Let’s just take that really quickly as an example.  So, more and more ascents are contingent in that way, “It’s the first female, African American ascent of Everest” kind of thing.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, but we keep on looking – just the same way as people switch from doing peaks to ridges to doing faces – for ways to slice and repackage the experience.  I’m just arguing that it’s become a sort of simulacrum, a kind of appearance of something.  I’m not entirely convinced that there’s anything necessarily real at the back of a first ascent.

JE:  If you take a sport that’s been played for hundreds of years, or a game like chess…it’s the end.  Chess has reached its end.

PB:  Chess doesn’t have a history.  Climbing’s tried to create a history for itself.  What I’m saying is that history is kind of wrapping up unless there’s a very different mindset about how it’s practiced.

JE:  Well, there are other sports like running; people have been running for thousands and thousands of years, competitively.

PB:  Sure, and running has experienced some of the same issues in terms of world records.  There’s a sense of infinite effort to gain infinitely small gains, in terms of running.

JE:  So, you would prefer not to hear about those things?

PB:  I’m just saying that they don’t matter as much as people might imagine them to, that’s all.  Once you take the long view, you start seeing…

JE:  What does matter?

PB:  That’s a good question.  What I’m arguing, again, is from the point of view [of] local ecologies, local economies, local social practices and things like that, where climbers have spent a lot of time kind of moving into places.  Everest base camp is a classic place.  There’s a great little piece on Outside, a little oral history of Everest base camp.  It’s not clear to me that anything particularly positive has been brought about in the world through Everest base camp.  I think a lot of people have been there.  The gist of what I was getting from the oral history, it wasn’t so great.

DM:  What would you say to people who would say, “That is important to me”?  And frankly, I think everybody is sometimes sick of seeing the next great V-whatever ascent…

PB:  Honestly, I like that.  I’m just saying we should think about it differently.  That’s all.  Personally, I’m not saying, “We should all sit in the woods and gaze at our navels.”  Although, that probably wouldn’t hurt, a little bit more of that.

JE:  Can you post a video of that?

DM:  A bunch of emo boulderers gazing at our shoes…  Mike, do we gotta wrap this puppy up?

MB:  And that was ClimbTalk here on Radio 1190!

DM:  You can check out Peter Beal’s thoughts on what we discussed today on mountainsandwater.com.  I think it really behooves you to check it out.  He brings up some great discussions and topics that, if nothing else, get good conversation started in our community.  So, we thank him for that.  Jamie Emerson, he doesn’t have a blog, I’ve never heard of him before.

PB:  Who let him in?

DM:  I’m not sure.  The guy came in with a tie and was like, “Can I talk?”  Jamie, are you still setting at Movement [Climbing and Fitness], as well?

JE:  I’m still setting at Movement.

DM:  Okay.  You can check out his routes at Movement here in Boulder and you can check out his thoughts, most recently about trespassing on private property and women developing in the climbing world, at B3bouldering.com.

You can check out Mike Brooks at ILoveTubeSocks.com.  He’ll be blogging there about two times a day.  My name is Dave McAllister, you’ve been listening to ClimbTalk.

Most often, the shows are bad ass but I am crushingly lazy. We’ve had on nearly every big name you can think of in the climbing universe, from old school Royal Robbins and John Long to the newish school lads and lasses like Dave Graham and Thomasina Pidgeon. Filmmakers, BASE jumpers, guidebook authors, OH MY! This past Monday was no different, when we took ClimbTalk to the road. Mike, Jeff VonDungen, and Corey Fleagle all worked their asses off to produce the show at the Boulder Outlook Hotel, while I just dropped by and flop sweated and talked about masturbating.

The guests showed up in the biggest way, sharing stories thrilling, motivating, controversial and simply bad ass. Because that’s really what climbing is, in its simplest form. Just bad ass. Unless you’re top-roping a DWS line. Then that’s just stupid.

So, here is a link to the full video, which runs somewhere shy of two and a half hours. In order of appearance our guests were:

Chris Warner: A mountaineer (K2 and Everest and around 150 peaks over 19,000 ft.), alpine guide, and business owner (founder of Earth Treks climbing gyms).

Kelly Cordes: One of America’s finest alpinists of recent years and, I think, one of the most lucent, cogent, and hilarious voices in the climbing community. You can check out his blog on Patagonia’s “The Cleanest Line.”

Will Levandowski: Local Boulder climber and author of a new Guinness World Record, which saw him scale the same 10-foot boulder time and time again to gain just under 30,000 vertical feet in one 24-hour period. Thank God it was for charity; otherwise I’d assume he was simply bat-shit bananas.

Jason Kehl: Noted for his highball bouldering first ascents, funky and intriguing artwork, and ownership of Cryptochild. Also a talented hold shaper.

Chad Greedy: Local boulder climber spearheading much of the high country bouldering development of the last five years.

Dave Graham: A first ascensionist machine – for nearly two decades – and one of the most talented climbers to ever walk on American soil.

Enjoy the show!

The holy entrance to the Buttermilks...

This year marked my tenth anniversary climbing trip to Bishop, California. Whoop-dee friggin’ ding dong, eh? Indeed. It occurs to me, however, that the state of my travel has changed over the years, if in no way other than the nomenclature I use to verbally categorize my celebration amongst the boulders and crags around Bishop.

Let me begin with a fact. Young climbers call trips to climbing destinations, for a week or longer, “road trips”. They also label their travels “climbing trips”. Road trips and climbing trips, simple as that. I used to call everything I did outside an airplane a road trip. For better or worse, everything has always been a climbing trip, especially because I only travel for or because of climbing. This, as an aside, also proves I was young once.

Alas, we all grow older. We graduate or drop out of school. We dirtbag, some of us. I am still a dirtbag, although I fall into the most obvious adult category, that being a slightly less odiferous dirtbag with a job. A couple of jobs, truth be told and shame upon me.

A curious thing occurs when one grows older. Entering one’s thirties, for example. One begins referring to their road trips and climbing trips as…vacations! Old fogies like me don’t have spring breaks anymore. I have no university to run from, not counting university student loan payments. The parents haven’t “loaned” me any money since time forgotten. And, when I travel – or vacation – I must leave my jobs behind, the hours absent ticking off like water spattering into a dry well.

Yet, dirtbags must continue to escape, chasing the road to its logical end; that being a big old granite blob or sandstone cliff or endless defilade choked with volcanic juggernauts. But now, being older and obviously incredibly wise, I find myself referring to these jaunts from responsibility and the accumulation of scant money vacations. Because, that’s what they are now. I don’t have the liberty of road trips or climbing trips of a week or more, at the drop of a dime. I have to take calculated vacations.

Just because you get older doesn't mean you stop taking road trips...damnit...I mean vacationing.

One thing will always persist, however, especially if you’re a lifetime dirtbag and vagabond at heart. Strange shit happens on road trips…er…vacations. Seemingly, that never changes. Although the oddity of one’s experiences seems to wane and the manic blips become stretched a bit thinner when one ticks closer to 40, they nevertheless remain. Perhaps all the more pungent for the rarity. Young at heart, and all that. In the following particularity: spotted of liver, and all that.

Here’s an arresting vacation statistic for you. My climbing crew, consisting of a nucleus three which occasionally fluctuated a bit higher, polished off five bottles of Jameson (three in our first eight days) and one bottle of Maker’s Mark, along with a bottle of tequila and unfathomable beers of differing varieties and flavors, during the most recent three week trip to Bishop. We drank when the sun reached a certain height on rest days, we nipped from silver and green and scratched and dented flasks at the crag, we drank at night, around a campfire, in a Eurovan, playing cards, playing climbing Olympics, playing hacky sack, playing guitar. We drank under clouds and tucked from wind. Once in the morning, which I will get to in due time. What I’m trying to get at is that nothing could stop us. We were on vacation, after all.

Now, two of the three nucleic crew are not young men. One of those is me, and the other my good friend Kyler. I am more not young than Kyler. I note age to demonstrate that old people have nothing to prove and therefor there is no great joy in getting shit canned to “party” or “rage” or whatever people in tight jeans and neon sun glasses call drinking to belligerence. No, this was not the point at all. Slow, steady. Even keels and all that. I left Bishop this year all the better for only suffering one hang-over. Take note the startling wisdom of the spring chicken gumming gravel in the autumn of its life.

Kyler

The third fellow, another good friend named Trevor (Trevor and Kyler, names for Dawson Creek, you’ll have to agree), is fresh out of the papoose compared to Kyler and I. Mid-twenties. Very strong on the rock. He is, truth be told, tough to like. But that’s not my point. My point is that, for whatever reason, Trevor really doesn’t chase the dragon, either. I think during the entirety of our three week trip, each of us had one hang-over a piece. I remember Trevor’s hang over because the night in question saw him slurping from a Jameson bottle like a baby wolf at its mother’s teat. Violent, almost. Shameful to watch in its great lust. You have justly inferred Trevor’s affection for whiskey. If ribbon’s would have been awarded for most speckled trip liver, Trevor would have taken the blue, Kyler a close Red, and my ribbon…tan or something. Don’t get any ideas, though. I crushed more beer cans and clinked more bottles into the Pit’s dented recycling oil drums than either of those fairy-named mongoloids.

Trevor, working the Mandala. Strong bastard.

Somewhere in the third week of our trip Kyler, a new friend named Tim, and I found ourselves in Kyler’s white Eurovan – named Tortuga Blanca – the dinner table erected and topped with camera equipment, a wax topped bottle of Makers, and a bottle of tequila. The wind blustered outside, snapping Tortuga’s extended fabric top, zippers clanking like cymbals. We sat there in the van, tinkering with thoughts, staring into the middle distance. Open mouthed. It was early morning and the coffee hadn’t affected its magic just yet. Trevor had rightly escaped to town for some warm joe at the Black Sheep coffee shop.

I jumped when another friend along for the last two weeks of the trip, Shawn from just outside New York City, slooshed open the side door and leapt into a free seat. Bla bla bla, he said. We nodded and smiled politely.

Shawn...from NEW YORK CITY.

He threw down a pack of grape vines, which are like red vine licorice but chemically altered to taste ever-so vaguely like grapes, and colored purple, of course. Shawn always had grape vines, and we all greedily dove in. I hadn’t even known such a thing existed before this…vacation.

Shawn sat there in Kyler’s driver’s seat, which was spun around to face the table, wobbling a grape vine at his palm. Smack, smack, smack, it went. I sensed something gestating in that ginger head of his. Likely something awful.

Now, because I don’t remember how this conversation actually went, I would like to present a fictional retelling, based on true events. Not inspired by true events, which is a Hollywood way to say, “This one thing happened once that made me think of an entirely different thing, of which you are now paying money to see but really has nothing to do with that original thing, the inspiring one.” Based, mind you.

“Where’s that tequila?” asked Shawn, instantly spotting and nabbing it from the corner of the table. “Let’s take a shot.”

“Dude,” I said.

“Okay, let’s each take a shot through these grape vines.” He tapped the cellophane packet, insistently, with his pointer finger.

“That’s fucking disgusting, man,” retorted I.

“I think I’ll take the whiskey,” said Kyler, reaching for the shot glasses.

“Me, too,” said Tim, quietly masticating a grape vine. I distinctly recall raising my eyebrows.

“Old man?” Shawn asked.

“That’s fucking disgusting,” I said, again, assuming the question had been meant for me.

“Pussy.” That’s what Shawn said.

“Probably,” I responded, shrugging my shoulders.

And that’s how I remember it. Shawn passing grape vine straws to Tim and Kyler. Shawn daring any of us to shoot the tequila. Kyler pouring two Maker’s Mark and one Cuervo 1800. Shawn daring any of us to shoot the tequila. Sliding drinks across the table. Shawn daring any of us to shoot the tequila. Me grabbing my camera. Shawn calling me a pussy again.

There was some sort of countdown, if I remember correctly. And then, as if possessed by some Bukowskian wraith, the three lunatics brought the drink to their chins, inserted the grape vines to their puckered lips, and sucked. Honestly, I almost puked. I lurched a bit, saliva storming into my mouth, and I moan-chuckled to drown out the slurping.

Sweet Baby Jesus, the faces. The moment the tainted spirits exited the grape vines and splashed upon tongue and throat Kyler and Shawn’s faces folded upon themselves like broken lawn chairs. Wrinkles I did not know existed creased from forehead to chin, making a tortured graph paper out of their noses, cheeks, and brows. Their heads were thrown before hunched shoulders. Necks were strung taut, muscles equipped solely for dismay and tribulation thrown into instant aggravation. Vowel sounds were uttered. Guttural. Awful.

Except, curiously, for our new friend, Tim. Although he slammed his Maker’s through its grape escape chute the same as Kyler or Shawn, he remained entirely composed. As a matter of fact, in those split seconds as I took in the ugly mess, I sneaked a peak at him, this noiseless champion. And do you know what Tim did? He raised his eyebrows and shrugged, the vaguest curl of his lips into a smile, the grape vine lodged right there in the middle. As if to say, “This really is surprisingly fantastic!” I shuddered to glimpse this strange fellow’s curious powers.

Kyler and Shawn drained their elixirs with synchronized exhalations of EGH! and UGH! and SHIT! and FUCKING SHIT! Their heads began wagging back and forth as if to rid their hair of water, eyes squeezed tight and their mouths a duo of holes through which their tongues were trying to escape the formerly pleasant palates that now stood – smote to shit and back – as candy-whiskey-sugar-tequila torture chambers. I cringed at the very thought of what was happening from tip of tongue to bottom of gut, the saliva cresting and breaking in great tsunami waves in my mouth. I stemmed a pre-vomit belch. It was so early in the morning. Too early.

Tim gently set his shot glass down and began munching on his grape vine straw.

“Not too bad,” he said. That’s verbatim.

Shock in the aftermath...

Herein lies the wonder of vacation, you see. This horror show serves as a fine little parable to wrap up the state of what we used to lovingly call road trips and climbing trips. And now what the more wizened of us call vacations. The parable’s singular question: What really changes other than the verbiage (and time away from the job and who will water the plants and where exactly did all my fucking hair go)?

We all love licorice. Who doesn’t? We all love whiskey and some freak shows love tequila. And you see, on vacation, you put all your loves together and enjoy them as one, squeezing them adoringly and sometimes forcefully into the tightest frame of time and enjoyment you can muster. It’s the vacation mash up, and that never, ever changes. And sometimes it’s better to watch from the sidelines. But not usually.

A procession of elk saddles.

There are so many alternative names for bouldering pads, all fantastic. Sketch pad, crash pad, elk saddle, backcountry massage mattress, volcano cork, marmot holster, rock toboggan, tree band aid. Surely, you’ve rejoindered some wheezing tourist with your own variation after being asked:

“Say, now, what’s that there on yer back?”

“It’s a parachute! See ya on the way down!”

“Now, I don’t mean to be stupid, but ain’t those pretty big packs?”

“That’s not stupid, and these aren’t packs. We’re in an all-male university massage club and we prefer to practice in the mountains, up there in those boulders. Well, behind those boulders. On these pads. See ya later!”

“Ya’ll camping out over night?”

“Oh, ho ho. No, not at all. You see, there’s been a gang of bears sharpening their claws on trees up and down the gully and we’re headed up to place these band aids over the trees’ wounds. Be careful for that crew. Make a lot of noise; you don’t want any nasty surprises, do you? They seem really intent on sharpening those claws, and that can mean only one thing… Cheers!”

Tree band aids as restaurant accoutrement.

Crash pads are – or, at least used to be – an uncommon sight in South Korea. Climbers on the peninsula used to spend a lot more time in the gym or at the crags, but with the last decade’s FA explosion, bouldering areas have sprung up from Seoul to Busan, Sokch’o to Mopk’o. Those big black squares bobbing from shabbily dressed foreigners elicit at the very least a couple comments on every hike in or out.

Wallach

I’m not brave enough to pepper hikers with the aforementioned nonsense, but the same can’t be said for my friend Wallach. One Sunday afternoon just outside of Seoul, while I was still on the peninsula, a group of expatriate climbers had met up at the Riverbeds (RBs) in Bukhansan National Park to crush the snot out of some problems. Wallach, a tall, strong, funny Californian on his first tour of South Korean teaching, met us amongst the boulders, many of which cut the river’s current. We crushed snot, chatted, took pictures, chilled out on the stone steps of the local monastery, drank cooling coffee and ate fresh kimbap.

Climbing at the upper RBs.

On the walk out of the RBs we met up with some super freak expats, a couple “southern girls from Tennessee,” as they later admitted. Obviously aching for us to turn around, they chattered at squeaky, twangy decibels. Our crash pads, as always, took center stage.

Number One: That’s for rock climbing, for bouldering, so when they fall they don’t land on the ground. They put it below their rock climb and that’s where they land.

Number Two: That’s crazy. That’s all that helps them land?

Number One: That’s all they use because they’re bouldering and they don’t have any ropes. They just climb without ropes…I’m not like 100 percent sure or anything, but I think that’s all they use.

Number Two: Wow…

Number One: But, I’m not sure. If that is all they use, though, that is totally crazy.

Just two steps behind us, their voices rising higher and higher, yearning for a glance, an acknowledgment, a chat. An engagement.

“You guys got it,” I said, looking over my Asian Mad Rock. “They’re climbing pads.”

“That’s crazy,” Number One said.

“So I’ve heard,” I answered, tapping a finger to my ear.

Crash pad as scooter safety gear, Koh Tao, Thailand. Photo by Kyler Deutmeyer.

Wallach, taking the bait whilst clandestinely tip-toeing in for a chance to rattle these girls’ brains, slowed his pace so we could all share the conversation together, shoulder to shoulder. Number One, the gal with all that innate knowledge of our sport, had wrapped herself in hippie accoutrement before leaving her apartment that morning; flowing cotton and discordant colors and knitted mittens. Her face had that doughy sort of geography that never quite settles but rather ticks and stumbles through expressions as though it wasn’t quite sure of what was happening in the brain’s command center. A rogue face, prancing about of its own accord. These things are usually attached to loopy sorts of folks. Number One obviously suffered from some sort of mental dissonance. She spoke in a shuffling cadence, all southern inflection and stretched vowels. Her face ticking away and her voice lazing about in some verbal expanse of cotton candy grass and strawberry-scented wind, she leapt across great chasms from one catch of random dialogue to the next.

“I have best friends in San Francisco who live on an Eco Farm,” Number One said. “They’re really rich, but they want me to stop by their Eco Farm. Oh my god, they are so rich. You know what an Eco Farm is?”

“Oh yes,” said Wallach. “In San Francisco, right?” Wallach is from San Francisco.

“Yeaaaaaah. They are so rich. I’m really excited to go live on their Eco Farm.”

“Oh, yes,” and Wallach glanced at me with great urgency. “Dave, did you bring your knife?”

“My 14” Bowie knife with the serrated edge and compass and the fishing line in the handle?” I asked, casually, rattling off nonsense I’d half remembered from John Rambo and late night infomercials in Iowa.

“Yes. That one.”

“No, damn it. I left it at home today. Sorry.”

The girls uneasily glanced at one another. “Why do you guys need a knife?” asked Number Two, a gal much more sensibly dressed in jeans and sweatshirt, green bandana over blonde pig tails.

Wallach glared at her as though she’d just looked at herself in a mirror and asked, Who is that? “Oh, you always need a knife in Bukhansan. We were attacked by a bear a couple weeks ago.” I’m here to tell you that the Korean War incinerated, blew up, or hunted out all indigenous Korean animals, save squirrels and pigeons. Plenty of those left.

Number Two tilted her head a bit, narrowed her eyes, smiled, and said, “No, you weren’t.”

“Oh yes we were!” I demanded.

Number Two titled her head a bit more, narrowed her eyes to slits, ratcheted tight her smile a couple more screw turns, and said, “Really?”

“Damn right,” said Wallach. “That’s why we need the knife every time we go climbing. I don’t want to be caught in that situation again.”

Number One stared through saucer eyes. I’ll wager she was wondering if bears roamed that Eco Farm in the Bay Area. I have no doubt that those perceptive bears in San Fran would have steered well clear of this one, as if snorting at a poison berry, a deadly mushroom, a naked person wrapped only in a straight-jacket and sprinting across an asylum lawn screaming “Skittles!”

“Come on,” Number Two said, elbowing my pad.

“Do you really think I’m joking?” Wallach asked.

“Really…wow.”

“No,” Dave said, looking back up trail, quite seriously. “I’m joking. There aren’t any bears in Bukhansan.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“We saw a bear skull on the trail, I think,” offered Number One, helpfully.

We nodded silently and continued walking down the trail, the ghostly Bukhansan bears foraging our thoughts. Number One and Number Two left on an early bus. We leaned on our crash pads, waiting for our own bus back to Seoul’s suburbs. Elbows on foam, I ruminated over my pad, a light-bulb delicately flickering to life in my brain. Wait a minute, I thought. This isn’t a tree band aid, a rock toboggan, or an elk saddle.

A crash pad would come in awful handy here.

Genius.

Marcel Proust is a tough read, no doubt about it. That’s why I only read his quotes.

“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”

I so vividly recall tectonic moments in my life, shifting my perspective so radically that I truly grew new mental parts. These rearrangements have revolved around the satisfying sigh of a book closing for the final time. The conclusive words uttered, that crowning period. I finished George Orwell’s 1984 in a corn field on my lunch break at Northrup King in Washington, Iowa, the summer before my freshman year of college, and stepped out of that patch of green and brown an expanded human. Granted, my mind had been blown hither and thither and the attendant void carried nothing but a confused clicking and twittering, but that novel created a space for society’s hidden reeds to hatch in my head and heart.

Danny Sugarman’s Doors expose, No One Here Gets Out Alive, was finished at the Iowa State Wrestling Tournament, which I had traveled back to from college. I didn’t know the taste of beer and couldn’t fathom a roach being anything you’d stick in your mouth. That book raised a black velour curtain on a whole counter culture I would tromp through for some number of years. And isn’t it just fantastic that I first yearned for LSD (whatever that was) while watching my old underclassmen teammates execute crisp single legs and Japanese whizzers?

Lessons, like rifts in my head swallowing up all the bullshit I thought I knew, have rent my life, books as combustion. To Kill a Mockingbird taught me, as a writer, what a true narrator sounds like, and what it is to love that narrator. All Quiet on the Western Front had me staring at my Doc Martins in college and wondering if I could infuse them with the significance of Remarque. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye and The World According to Garp drove me crazy with dreams of adventure, that I had better get to it, that Huck and Holden and Garp had lived more before 18 than I may in my whole life. The Metamorphosis taught me that a roach can also be a human, your neighbor, your lover struggling with a demotion at work. Though I owned a number of Coltrane albums, I heard jazz music for the first time in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. It remains the only book I can reliably snap my fingers to, rhythmically. Notes from the Underground sent me to counseling in college, such was my mind rattled (true story). A Clockwork Orange, The Fall, The Roominghouse Madrigals, The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, The Road, The Stranger, Blood Meridian, Animal Farm, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Siddhartha, Journey to the End of the Night, American Pastoral, Native Son…on and on it went, challenging everything I knew, everything television would never offer. These books wrote the script for so many late night chats around a table with friends, became the inspiration for songs when I had hair and clubbed around Iowa City in a band, drove my fingers to massaging my temples in my bedroom, a bedside lamp warm and wonderful and a friend for lighting the word.

And that’s just the fiction! Non-fiction, which I switch to on a bi-bookly basis now, has crushed my ignorance and naivety so often that I wonder how deep that dank well runs. Seemingly, I have a never-ending supply of the stuff. Just a quick story, if you’ll allow me.

I was not a climber while enrolled at the University of Iowa. Indeed, if a sport didn’t involve a ball, I was totally unaware that it existed. Somehow, I had picked up Krakauer’s Into Thin Air while thumbing through the non-fiction section at the student union book store, ready to part with some more loan money I wish I would have saved. Except for that purchase.

One Saturday afternoon I was wrapped, the flu raging, in a gaggle of comforters in my college slum house, shivering on the Goodwill couch and reading Into Thin Air. Outside, sirens howled through the open screen door and fire engines and cop cars zipped by, one after the other. The screech rattled the windows. I coughed, licked my thumb, and flicked past another page. The sirens seemed to congregate just down the block, but I was just too sick to get up and gawk.

A couple moments later I heard a clopping up the wooden stairs and a pounding on the screen door. My friend Brian stood there, shirtless, hair in standing chaos, wearing only green slacks and combat boots, shouting for entrance.

“Come in, fer chrissakes,” I wheezed. His unlaced boots clapped the floor as he sprinted through the living room, halting directly over my cocoon.

“Dude,” he said, his chest heaving, “can I use your phone? My house is on fire.”

To this day, every fantastic Krakauer book I read, I think of combat boots, fire engines, and the flu.

Even the pop stuff is fun to read. I’ll take this opportunity to say NEVER trust a friend who only reads the classics. Especially when they let you know about it. Or harangue you for reading something not published early in the 20th century or before. Yes, I get it. You’re super smart and really, really hip and your mind an acute instrument of social dissection. I can’t quite string words together into an effective sentence displaying how nauseated this rare bird makes me.

You didn’t like The Da Vinci Code? Fuck you. You didn’t enjoy The Stand? You’re a mirthless prick. You can’t possibly deal with Bill Bryson’s cheekiness? Screw off. You haven’t even given Harry Potter a chance? Get…the fuck…out of my house.

Perhaps writers, those most discerning page turners, have the most to say about the importance of a good book. Here are some undeniably good reasons to pick up a book – right after you finish reading this little blog and peppering it with loving and fawning comments that will leave its author blushing and muttering, “Why, you shouldn’t have.”

Robert Byrne said, “Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have while trying to write one.” You see? Reading as suicide prevention, writing as taunting suicide. Read more, write at your own caution.

The great education reformer Horace Mann noted, “A house without books is like a room without windows.” This reminds me of another quote, admittedly by the less roundly esteemed director, John Waters. He said, “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have any books, don’t fuck ‘em!” If truer words were never spoken… By the way, I have TONS of books in my house, so…ladies…

So many people I meet, when I ask them what books they’ve recently enjoyed, invariably riff on how busy they are, how they don’t have time, how they used to love reading. Perhaps they should read this quote from Confucius, “No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.” Were he leaning over my shoulder right now he’d nudge my side and say, “Hey, add this…’Fox News is a cesspool of ignorance, MSNBC is a charlatan, and one of the History Channel’s most popular shows espouses the legacy of ancient aliens. Gently strangle your television with its own rubbery power cable. It won’t teach you as tenderly or reliably as a book.’”

And if that isn’t enough to shame the non-reader, perhaps this will. “I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.” You know who said that? Coolio. Coolio said just those words. If Coolio can do it… Well, you get it.

I could go on and on, but let’s get to the heart of the matter here. A couple days ago, my friend Kyler asked if I was going to write up a “Best Of” blog of the books I’d read in 2011. It was like I’d been socked in the face.

“You read my last ‘best of’?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He didn’t say it was good. He didn’t say it changed his life. He said, “Yeah.”

Proof that one person reads this blog is all the fuel I need, baby! And with that, I present to you a wee list of the best and worst books I read in 2010 and 2011, seeing as my last list appeared in 2009. They weren’t banner years, but I did put down exactly 65 books over the last two years. Some were stinkers, some I think about almost every day. I was introduced to authors I wish were still alive, and others I wish to be quickly exiled to an island – sunny, comfortable, that’s all fine; I don’t care – without any means of outside communication. I hope you’ll be inspired to pick up one of these books, and maybe we’ll chat about it in the coming year, sharing impressions, getting caught up in the greatest debates in the history of the world – the ones about books. Maybe you’ll just be inspired to read more this year, as would be my New Year’s wish for everyone, including myself.

As Mark Twain once grumbled through that nasty white broom pasted to his upper lip, “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” So true. Perhaps this should be the year, though, eh? Infinite Jest? Finish it. War and Peace? Tackle it. The Brothers Karamazov? Tear it asunder! And then, just think of how you can brag about it to all your philistine friends…constantly.

Top 15 Best Books Read of 2010/2011

• City of Thieves, David Benioff (F)
• Matterhorn, Carl Marlantes (F)
• Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace (NF)
• True Grit, Charles Portis (F)
• Born to Run, Christopher McDougall (NF)
• The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, David Grann (NF)
• Zeitoun, Dave Eggers (NF)
• Alas, Babylon, Pat Frank (F)
• The Good Soldiers, David Finkel (NF)
• Warlock, Oakley Hall (F)
• Zone One, Colson Whitehead (F)
• The New Kings of Non-Fiction, edited by Ira Glass (NF)
• Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Lipsky (NF)
• War, Sebastian Junger (NF)
• The Great American Derangement, Matt Taibbi (NF)

Top 10 Honorable Mentions

• The Lost City of Z, David Grann (NF)
• Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane (F)
• The Third Man Factor, John Geiger (NF)
• A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo (NF)
• The Devil’s Highway, Luis Alberto Urrea (NF)
• Point Omega, Don Delillo (F)
• In Search of Captain Zero, Allan Weisbecker (NF)
• Good Omens, Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman (F)
• Strange Piece of Paradise, Terri Jentz (NF)
• Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer (NF)

Top 10 Gross Pukes and Bummers

• Regulators, Stephen King (F)
• The Army of the Republic, Stuart Archer Cohen (F)
• The Accidental Billionaires, Ben Mezrich (NF)
• Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk (F)
• Under the Dome, Stephen King (F)
• The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch (NF)
• Ultramarathon Man, Dean Karnazes (NF)
• The Wall, Jeff Long (F)
• The Man from Beijing, Henning Mankell (F)
• Copper Canyon, Dick Fischer (NF)

Alphabetical Order
F=Fiction, NF=Non-Fiction

Best wishes, my friends, for the New Year. But know this: If you don’t read more books, I will find you. I will break into your home, perhaps with a crowbar. And then I’ll tie you up to a chair in itchy manila rope and read Stephen King’s Under the Dome to you, out loud, with dramatic pauses and great flourishes. Trust me, you don’t want this to happen…